“Beware! Beware of the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep. He eats little boys… Puppy dog tails, and big fat snails… Beware… Take care… Beware!”
Such was the admonishment of Bela Lugosi-as-God in Ed Wood’s gender-bending Glen or Glenda?, a typically Woodian proclamation about perilous gender borders from the notorious angora fetishist.
Yes, defying your biology and/or sexual role in just about any way is bound to draw flak and threaten the status quo. We may love our mother/father, butch/femme, and top/bottom dichotomies — really, just grown up versions of the snips and snails/sugar and spice cliche — but just how etched in stone and “natural” they indeed are is debatable.
The latest physiological quirk likely to make gender reductivists clutch pearl: Male Lactation.
The nurture instinct has always been associated exclusively with the feminine; Nature — who it’s not nice to fool with — is anthropomorphosized as Mother, while mountain-eroding, empire-obliterating Time is the indifferent Father. Men are traditionally distanced from the mother/child union with the protector/provider mantle, but the reality is that every male has the potential to produce breast milk.
There’s an as-yet-unexplored gay porn subgenre in there somewhere.
Though the sole mammalian species (thus far) posited to achieve spontaneous male lactation is the Dayak fruit bat of Southeast Asia (a known flamer), the human male can and has done the same. Common scientific knowledge has until recently concluded that the phenomenon can only be achieved by means spurred from pathological or synthetic origin such as steroid abuse, starvation, pituitary tumors, and select antipsychotic and heart medications that stimulate the production of the hormone prolactin.
The tide may be turning on commonly held medical certainties. Reports of fathers not only experiencing an intense need to breastfeed — testosterone is just as potent as estrogen, the male cycle being circadian and repeating itself every 24 hours instead of monthly — but actually stepping in for an incapacitated or bedridden mother. A recent report of a Sri Lankan father nursing his children after his wife’s death through sheer empathic resolve has fomented new deductions that now call into question whether nipple stimulation combined with the overarching power of the will may themselves be enough to produce the effect. You just know Angelina has made Brad try it at least once.
At stake is here the much-contested war of words regarding of just how defined life actually is within the confines of the womb. The sexes are for a period indistinct during the early stages of development. As adults, we retain these pre-natal vestiges, which would account for such peculiarities as the universal presence of two male areola (and rarely, even a third), along with phenomena like Gynecomastia, chimera zygotes with multiple DNA strains, intersex births, and Gender Dysphoria. Het men are the butt of many a joke for their mommy-inspired fixation with huge tits, but how many of us go all slack-jawed at the sight of a set of massive pecs in perhaps our own displaced take on jug obsession? Foetal gender neutrality even lends credence to the theory of homosexuality as a simple biological variant rather than a fault in our gender socialization.
Between Thomas “The Pregant Man” Beatie, gay animal couples adopting progeny, Dan Savage making the daring move not to whore out his son on reality TV like all those fit straight couples, and the milkmen phenomenon, the clinging, hand-wringing Earth Mothers of the world may have to step up their game in order to keep up with the guys.
About 6 months after I got my right nip pierced I thought it got mildly infected. After a couple months of over-the-counter treatments it was no better; so I was off to see my doc. Breast milk was his conclusion. Seems my seat belt was adjusted to rub the nip and ring when I drove. Regular stimulation got things flowing. Adjusted the belt lower and no more sweet, sticky flow.
can you force yourself to lactate in order to lose weight?
I mean think about how many calories you blow on milk production.
should it be possible, there’s no way you will ellicit man milk if you timidly lick tit the way the men in the pix do. You gotta suck on ‘em hard man!
Interesting article and I’m sure the Srilankan father is not the first one to have experienced this phenomenon.
witch’s milk…can be seen in both new born girls or boys
The prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps, were so starved that when they were saved and feed, the men lactated. All the extra food was such a shock to their system.
I’m sure Michael Lucas is working on the porn as I write this. The human body is just an amazing piece of biology.
We are all obsessed with chests, whether female breasts or male breasts. It just seems part of our biology to love them one form or another, or both.
I don’t know why exactly, but this whole topic is totally freaking me out.
how pecs-olutely fascinating!
^^^^@Bearlextin…
I love it when commenters pull information off Wikipedia almost verbatim to add thoughts to an article which, itself, took advantage of Wikipedia along with other sources.
Wikipedia: “Newborn baby boys (and girls) can occasionally produce milk because of the intense hormones involved in their mother’s pregnancy and the hours of childbirth; this is called witch’s milk….. Extreme stress combined with demanding physical activity and a shortage of food has also been known to cause male lactation. The phenomenon occurred in survivors of the liberated Nazi concentration camps after World War II.”
I do not mean that sarcastically; I do love it. The first thing I did when I saw this article was Wikipedia that shit. And it’s funny to fing the facts listed, in the right order, on a comment in the comments section on the Nightcharm original article.
Just tell us where you got the damn information, boys! It’s not like anyone is going to give you shit for not already having memorized the intricasies of male lactation. It’s OK to say “according to Wikipedia…I thought this was amusing.”
@ anonymous:
Firstly, I rarely if ever use Wikipedia as a source material because I find its veracity a tad too dodgy. I also fail to see the supposed similarity between this piece and the Wikipedia entry you’re claiming I purloined from verbatim.
Since you want sources sited, these are the ones I drew from. Again, outside of the empirical facts — the exact reason I would seek them out — there’s near nil in the way of stylistic similarity or chronology:
Strange But True: Males Can Lactate
Milkmen: Fathers Who Breastfeed
Fact: Men Can Breastfeed
The references to the male hormone cycle (which I’ve long contended is a highly potent roller coaster that many men are uncomfortable talking about), the feminizing of Nature, gay chest fixation (I’m an inveterate tit man), the gender politics of it all, and the benign curios of genetics (the accounting for everything from dual zygotes to homosexuality is admittedly theorization on my part)are all elements I brought to the table, and that along with the humorous spin distinguish the piece rather obviously from the others.
Since the writers at Nightcharm are forever having their pieces lifted wholesale by other sites, plagiarism is an issue we take very seriously. I’ll counter your accusation in the same way I did when one of my dickbag college professors too-casually made the same claim some years back:
If you’re going to impugn someone, you’d better make sure you have an air-tight case, not some half-baked supposition made off-the-cuff.
^@Shawn Baker
The comment was clearly directed at one of the comments to the article, not the article itself. “@Bearlextn” indicates I was referencing the comment made by “Bearlextn” and the “^^^^” ticks indicate how many comments you scroll up to see the post by Bearlextn, which I was addressing.
Perhaps I left my comment a little ambiguous as to who I was teasing, since I said the writer probably elicited the help of Wikipedia. Which you did, because every writer checks wikipedia for the gist of a story before they do their research, even if they do not draw on it as their primary sources, which I wouldn’t accuse you of doing. Every writer should do that to be aware of the body of knowledge out there. Apologies if you took that personally, there was no criticism directed at you.
Now look back at the comment I directed my comment at, and see if you can’t tell it has much more to do with what I was talking about when I say people pull stuff off Wikipedia to add to the comments. And see if it isn’t painfully obvious that the comment addressed was pulled straight off Wikipedia.
…To be a little more clear, when I said the author “took advantage of wikipedia” I meant wikipedia was clearly accessible to the author before he wrote the article.
OMG, why are Nazis showing up in these commentaries?
I dont see anything wrong with male breast ? feeding its kinda weird ? but oh well but alot of things r weird lol
Sylvia
maybe you should read Bearlextin’s comment instead of skimming over it.
Decades ago on a Phil Donahue show where Ashley Montague, author of “Touching” was extolling the benefits of breast feeding, a woman in the audience said she had not been able to breast-feed as she had not had the milk. Montague told her that milk would have come if she had tried a little longer. He insisted that milk would come from men, too, if they tried long enough. Donahue said, ” You would bring this up at the close of the show.” Now with loving gay male couples adopting babies male breast-feeding sound like a very healthy and rewarding pursuit for the dads and the babies.
I would love to hear about more males who have tried such bonding, and I congratulate Dustin Hoffmann, as one.
Decades ago Ashley Montague author of “Touching” on the Phil Donahue show strongly recommended breast-feeding. A woman said she had not been able to breast-feed because she.could provide no milk. The author told her that she would have been able to if she had tried longer. Montague insisted that a man would be able to, also. Donahue said, “You would bring this up at the close of the show.” I have been curious ever since. What a beautiful idea! it would seem ideal for pairs of gay daddies adopting babies–a beautiful way to bond, a priceless experience for the fathers and the children.
Let’s hear more about men lactating. And congratulations to Dustin Hoffmann for trying it with a grandchild.
Women who want to lose the “baby fat” of pregnancy really need to consider breast-feeding. Like Anonymous mentioned (maybe facetiously), a LOT of calories are expended in the process of lactation, far more than there are for pregnancy.
While I’m seriously lacking a “broodiness” gene — I never felt the need to have kids (maybe it was babysitting through high school for a family with four children under the age of nine that did it!) — I’ve always been interested in lactation and breast-feeding. And maybe that was because I was a pre-vet major and took boatloads of classes in animal and human sciences.
I think I missed my calling as a wet-nurse…