Monday, March 2, 2009

Lusty and Lactating?

One of the great pleasures of my semester abroad in London was watching  many odd yet riveting  documentaries on Channel 4, my favorite of which was extraordinary breast feeding. The documentary, initially intended to erase the stigma of  breast-feeding and encourage British women to go the natural route, actually had the opposite affect. In fact, a particularly "extraordinary " vignette about a women happily feeding her daughters up till the age of 8, daughters then large enough to take up the entire length of the couch during this feeding , fostered criticism across the board. These girls were so obsessed with the breast, that one of the girls proclaimed I can't wait to grow my own. For self-feeding purposes, of course.

But, for me, the strangest part, had to be the women's husband. Rather then discouraging the mother's strange and clingy relationship with these children, he would just hop on the other breast, for a drink of his own.   All this time, I thought perhaps this was a British oddity, but apparently it has recently hit the states. In a salon article today, a women discusses her experiences of dating while lactating, and the men who seemed far too into it ( in my opinion). Here's a little tidbit from the salon story:

" I brought him home. As my daughter slept in the other room, I let him unbutton my blouse and run his mouth across the edge of my bra. I let him touch me. When I started to leak, he was ecstatic. He told me that he'd never tasted anything so sweet in his life. ( Yes, I wondered if, maybe, his mother had never breastfed him.)"

I'm glad the pregnant woman out there can date happily. But as for the man, something just screams mommy issues to me.  But, to each their own, I guess.



4 comments:

  1. There are always the guys with the mommy/baby fetish. Always a fantastically odd but convenient need for fresh milk.

    It does raise the question of when is it the right time to cut them off? (The children, not the breasts)

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  2. Channel 4 always have weird documentaries.. lol!

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  3. I breastfed. But this story is gross!
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  4. I have seen both the British story about the girls as well as a "lactation fetish" website for men who like their women to continue lactating in the bedroom long after giving birth. I guess late(ish) breastfeeding is fine but when it becomes an obsession (like the daughters are drawing pictures of and/or naming their mother's breasts), it needs to be phased out.

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