Men Can Breastfeed Too!
Or You're a Kink-Shaming Bigot
The difficulties I’ve had breastfeeding represent some of the most significant heartbreaks of my life.
And yet not once, while I sat weeping with my fussy hungry baby, weighing the decision as to whether or not this was the right time to start supplementing his feeding with a bottle, did I, or (thankfully) my husband even consider the possibility that as our child’s father, he might just decide to “breastfeed” instead of me. Why?
Because men can’t breastfeed, and because my husband, for all his flaws, is not a narcissistic pedophilic psycho.
So when a former contact of mine informed me that she “would prefer to see fathers breastfeed their children than resort to formula,” I was truly shocked. This was in response to a public service announcement I had recently shared, stating that “any man pretending to breastfeed an infant is abusing the child.”
I was primed for this, I’ll admit. A few days earlier, I had come across a Facebook post by “Southern Trans Pride”, that featured the image of an individual with a messy bun wearing a flowered shawl, head bent towards the newborn at their “breast”—a woman, by all the signifiers of the image…yet the caption the reads “a trans woman breastfeeding her child using the well-established Newman-Goldfarb protocol. Not pictured, TERF heads exploding as they fail to understand biology”.
I actually understand biology very well thank you very much, but I will admit to failing to be appropriately captured by today’s dominant ideology of deviant mind-f*ckery, and absurd twistedness, and while I have been somewhat aware of the trend among some AMABs (“assigned male at birth”, naturally) to engage in “nursing-play” [shudder] as a way to nurture their fantasies and to derive sexual gratification, the fact that this fetish is being embraced as a “right” on the part of the medical community, and that the behaviour is being not only condoned but encouraged is relatively new to me.
This is wrong, it’s disgusting, and it is a form of child abuse, whether overt or circumstantial.
In the exchange that ensued with my long-time contact, she (in an attempt to “prove” that men *do actually breastfeed*) shared an article published by the “Colorado Surrogacy” organization (of course) titled “Inducing Lactation—Men *Can* Breastfeed!”
The article argues brightly that there is “anthropological evidence documented” of fathers “breastfeeding, especially after the mother fell ill or died,” although the only “evidence” provided is a poorly-researched article published in Scientific American . The piece features a few stories of men “suckling” babies, including one specific anecdotal example of “a 38-year-old Sri Lankan father [who supposedly] nursed his two daughters after his wife died during the birth of their second child”. This also happens to be the same example proffered in every reddit thread on the topic as well, and is referenced in the Colorado Surrogacy article, although a concession is made to the astonishing fact that “modern-day doctors argue that this isn’t possible with most men and these documented cases must have been men with pituitary tumors causing them to have a spike in hormones after the baby starts suckling and therefore inducing lactation.”
The author of “Men *Can* Breastfeed” goes on to announce, gleefully (unless I’m reading too much into the proliferation of exclamation marks), “I have a tumor on my pituitary gland that has caused me to lactate since I was 10 years old. Now that I have had children and breastfed for several years, I have seen how drastically a pituitary tumor can affect lactation. I produce enough milk each day to feed 3-4 babies and that’s without hardly trying. It’s crazy what a little benign tumor can do! Lactation has fascinated me ever since I was young! [weirdo] I have even gone so far as to get certified as a lactation educator. The irony is, I never received a drop of breastmilk, I was exclusively formula fed” [not ironic buddy, very self-evident].
The story continues in a similarly ingratiating tone, regaling the reader with fun facts about how men can induce lactation via a “combo of hormone therapy or medication and nipple stimulation” (which is effectively what the “Newman Goldfarb-Protocol consists of). Oblique mention is made about the author’s prior history volunteering at a “breastfeeding support group”, and how they “went through six paediatricians after [their] son was born before [they] found one trained in lactation. This paediatrician was from Europe and had breastfeeding training in medial school there. He was ultimately diagnosed with a tongue tie.”
I’m assuming the author means the child was diagnosed with a tongue-tie, not the paediatrician in this case, but I wouldn’t want to assume, as there are so many holes and vagaries in the essays, not least of which is the question as to whether or not the author zirself is male or female, although I also recognize that it’s written in a way that deliberately obscures that fact, in order to support its central argument which is that there really isn’t much difference between a man or a woman, or in the capacity that a woman might have to lactate over and above that of a man’s.
All a man might need is just some pills and some good old fashioned “nipple stimulation”, and “a little benign tumor”, and you’re off to the races! “This way”, writes the unnamed androgynous people-folk who authored the enlightening dissertation, “men and women can ‘breastfeed’ without producing milk or while not producing a full supply. It’s a great bonding tool!… I hope to see more research being done in the future and more talk of men inducing lactation!”
Wheeee!!
And why not?
What kind of bigoted misandrist would have a problem with men “breastfeeding” ?
Well, I do. Men cannot “breastfeed”, and they should not be attempting to. The fact that it is possible for a man to roid himself up on a chemical cocktail that results in his being able to excrete a Pharma-laced pus from his diminutive nipples which he might then shove into a hungry baby’s face, encouraging them to “nurse” is not “breastfeeding”, and it is, in my opinion, child abuse. This is such an obvious, fundamental truth, that it truly pains me to have to be explaining it, but such is the perverted insanity of life in the 21st century, on the cusp of full-on cyborgicity, and here we are.
The practice of men attempting to “breastfeed” babies is frankly degenerate and demonic, and my strong suspicion is that the only men truly interested in doing such a thing are those with a sordid pedophilic sexual fetish to validate.
Breastfeeding is solely a female occupation, privilege, right, and duty. It is the purview only of mothers—and mothers are women. Breastfeeding derives from pregnancy and birth on a biological level, and is made possible thanks to the spontaneous changes that occur in a woman’s entire being, as a result of pregnancy and birth; as a result of motherhood itself.
Mothers and babies are profoundly attuned to each other on the level of biology, frequency, pheromone, and the very structure of our cells. Mothers need their babies in order to regulate their nervous systems, and babies need their mothers for the same reason, but more than that, mothers and babies are destined to know and love each other, to nourish each other. Not just any mother, but *their* mother, the woman in whose body their entire existence was made manifest, and to whose heartbeat the thrum of their own heart has calibrated since the beginning. Every cell in a woman’s body is preparing her for breastfeeding her unique child, and a mother’s milk shifts and changes in chemistry and makeup based on her and her baby’s continued symbiotic relationship postpartum.
Speaking of the chemistry of breastmilk, what, precisely, is the discharge that a man might produce after weeks or months of taking Domperidone, the foremost drug used to provoke lactation in women who have problems breastfeeding (or in men who just want to)? “Sold under the brand name Motilium among others, Domperidone is” according to wikipedia, “a dopamine antagonist medication which is used to treat nausea and vomiting, certain gastrointestinal problems like gastroparesis, and to induce and promote breast milk production. It may be taken by mouth or rectally.” (I’ve been told that Domperidone can also cause heart problems. Shocker.) What constitutes, exactly the “milk” that such a chemical might generate in a man?
I suppose the results of having been raised on such a fluid will be ours to discover in the coming decades.
Not only is it gross and wrong for a man to presume to attempt to breastfeed, it also means, obviously, that the baby has been removed from its rightful place: its mother’s arms and at her breast. Being displaced from the body of one’s birth mother on a regular basis or long-term is a trauma from which no child ever full recovers. Healing is possible in every instance, yes, but healing doesn’t mean an erasure of harm, and the harm of separation from one’s mother persists throughout a lifetime and beyond, into generations.
When a separation is inevitable—in the case of a mother dying—accommodations obviously have to be made to support and nurture that baby in as optimal a manner as possible given the circumstances, and if there is no female family member who is able to breastfeed the child, some kind of alternative food source must be provided.
I am in no way a fan of “formula” as it is understood in contemporary terms—an industrial chemical powder, full of synthetic “vitamins”, and denatured sweeteners—but there are many whole-food options for baby “formulas” that have been used throughout history successfully.
Babies (and mothers) also experience a kind of trauma when their mothers are simply not able to breastfeed and I know very well (from personal experience) that the difficulties some women have breastfeeding are very real.
But to use the fact that occasionally mothers cannot feed their children for whatever reason, whether due to absence or death or as a result of a physical barrier to actually producing milk as a way of justifying the normalization of men deciding to drug themselves and “stimulate” their nipples in order to produce a pseudo “milk” substance from their chest lumps is disturbing and disingenuous on so many levels. To suggest that this practice has anything to do with the well-being of infants is grotesque.
Lucky for the dudes who yearn to have a baby sucking their nipples however, because the academics, the gender identitarians, and the medico-pharma gender profiteers are lining up, ready and willing to validate them all the way. Outlying Sri Lankan men saddled with starving infants and no lactating women in sight who just happen to have pituitary tumours aside, none of this is reasonable, rational, or tolerable. (And Yes, I do doubt that particular detail-free story, and I’m also feeling quite a bit done with “indigenous cultures and practices” constantly being used as a foil to justify abuse and sexual deviance, or just the naturalization of behaviours that in most clans from time immemorial would have been, at the very least, dismissed as freakish and unpleasant.)
This phenomenon, as it’s being promoted by leftist mainstream “woke” culture is entirely manufactured for immediate gain and long-term profit. This is as far away from the wholesome purity that breastfeeding is, and represents, than almost anything I can imagine.
Anyone advocating that men should be tolerated in their attempt to breastfeed babies must also be ignorant of the innate intelligence of newborns—babies recognize their mothers by scent, and like all mammals, our capacity to immediately discern a person’s sex is a matter of literal survival in several ways. Only a very hungry baby would deign to suckle a man’s nipple for even a moment before screaming for its mother.
My own babies have never even been terribly interested in nursing from other women. I myself was asked to nurse a friend’s baby a few years ago, and the baby refused, clearly recognizing that I was not hers. There is much romanticizing in “crunchy” circles of the notion of communal nursing, but outside of kin-based relationships with other mother-babies that are truly integral, I think most infants and most mothers, want and need each other, fairly exclusively.
Breastfeeding is not “sexual”, but it is the most intimate, visceral, primal, devotional, and sensual form of communion available. It is closer, in some ways, than sex can ever be. If one claims to care for babies, or to understand to any extent how sacred babies are—let alone motherhood—it would be immediately obvious what a debased violation it is to suggest that fathers might just as well drug themselves with hormones to “induce lactation”.
No sane, righteous, loving father would feel anything but repugnance at the thought. This is a desecration not just of the partners in creation we are with our babies as women, but as my friend Anjelica O’Ryan of @nymphprayer on Instagram writes so eloquently, the holy trinity of mother, child, and father.
I am all for individuals engaging in whatever eccentric, odd, and even warped behaviour they like in the privacy of their own homes, or with other equally peculiar adults, but it should be widely socially unacceptable to use newborn babies as a prop to sanctify your kink.
Join The Bauhauswife Birth Circle, my private online community for birth-workers, mothers, and women at every stage of life, where I show up to offer direct support and weekly live conversations as you move through pre-conception, pregnancy, birth, motherhood and beyond—HERE.