A breast by any other claim
…does not taste as sweet (for JS)
Breastfeeding doesn’t often make the news. It is not really considered a sexy topic. It is women-and-baby business, and so in the greater scheme of Things That Men Consider Important, it does not usually get media traction.
Except…
Except when men want to do it. Yes, dear readers, there are some males in this world who think they can breastfeed. Delusional, I hear you say? Fetishistic, perhaps? Wanting to appropriate anything and everything women are and anything and everything we do?
Yes. All of the above.
One does not need a degree in a medical discipline to know that breastfeeding is something women are equipped to do and men are not. One does not even need a high school diploma. One simply needs a basic grasp on reality along with what we used to call Common Sense. Remember Common Sense?
Well, dear readers, Common Sense appears to have flown out the window in the claws of a rukk,1 taken off to some dark land to be devoured there. Leaving us with non-sense.
So, today’s non-sense is the fallacy that males can breastfeed. It suffices for them to grow their hair, put on a frock, don some makeup, take some hormones and “lactation”-inducing drugs, and hey presto! Daddy becomes Mummy with dribbles of pseudo-milk to “prove” it.
Now, that, apparently, is dead sexy. At least for the males who “kind of get off on it” as one “breastfeeding” male put it (cited in this excellent chapter of Isidora Sanger’s excellent book).
Not so much for the infant though, who is ingesting at best a wee bit of fluid and at worst some transmitted chemicals that are dangerous to said infant’s health. In no case is said infant being nourished. As in, fed the easily digested fat, carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, minerals, water and various other bioactive factors that help the wee babe absorb nutrients and develop a strong immune system. All that good natural organic stuff that maternal breast milk provides. Moreover, a wee babe who was only fed Daddymummy pseudo-milk would quickly starve to death, due to the woefully inadequate quantity of fluid produced.
For Daddymummy “breastmilk” is sort of like one of those sports drinks but for neonates: aggressively marketed synthetic gunk with little nutritive value. The pseudo-lactation is produced by what is called a synthetic galactagogue. Sounds like a monster straight out of a sci-fi movie, does it not? As in: Help me get away before the Galactagogue devours us all!2
I’ve had to do some delving into what galactagogues are and what is good or bad about them. As a non-specialist, I’ve double checked most of what follows from a range of sources but make no claim to authority in the area. Rather, I’m passing on what I have learned because probably half of you, dear readers, know little to nothing about this either. Because until recently we’ve never had to find out about it, as it was presumed to be a given that males don’t breastfeed.
The word galactagogue is derived from Greek gala(kt) : milk(-), and agogos: leading. There are apparently plenty of naturally occurring galactagogues around (so women who have breastfed are quite possibly familiar with the term). The ones that Daddymummies imbibe, however, are synthetic, and carry names like domperidone and metoclopramide, which are dopamine antagonists. That is, they block the receptors of dopamine, popularly known as the “feelgood” hormone, and are commonly used in treatment of some mental illnesses and as an anti-emetic (treatment of nausea and vomiting). There are also other agents such as metformin, primarily used in lowering blood sugar in type 2 diabetes, but metformin is a far riskier drug to take (one major risk being buildup of lactic acid).
The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) classes metformin as C (risky) domperidone as B2 (a little risky) and metoclopramide as A (not particularly risky), for pregnant and lactating women. We know that the meaning of the word “woman” has now been robbed of intelligibility in Australian law and institutions, given that males can now identify into the category. Still, one may perhaps safely assume that the TGA has not quite yet caught up with the postmodern lingo in its extensive catalogue of 1, 669 drugs that pregnant women may or may not take. After all, there is no mention of “pregnant people” on its exhaustively informative site, nor did I discover any reference to “chestfeeding”.
Ah… chestfeeding. Now we come up against another set of issues. While some trans-identified males think they can breastfeed (including babies they have themselves fathered, now there’s a mindf**k for you), trans-identified females who become “pregnant people” and give birth just like any other female of the species dislike using the term “breast” (and have often, sadly, had their own lopped off). So, ta-da! Enter the anatomically inaccurate neologism “chestfeeding”. I say anatomically inaccurate because the “chest” means the entire upper front part of the body, of which breasts are merely a part. “Chests” don’t produce milk, female breasts do. But there you go, this is the through-the-looking-glass terminology that we are now grappling with: female breasts become “chests” and male chests become synthetically-created “breasts”.
One other issue that can arise with both male “breastfeeding” and female “chestfeeding” is the passing on of unusually high testosterone levels to the infant. There is to date little research on this phenomenon, and that which exists shows gaps in the data, but we do know that elevated testosterone levels in women during pregnancy can adversely affect the fœtus and consequently the neonate, especially the female ones.
In today’s sociocultural and medical context, pregnant and breastfeeding women (the actual female ones, that is) are constantly warned about the deleterious impacts of this, that or the other drug or lifestyle on their baby, thus exacerbating the “Guilty Mum” syndrome that is socially rather than chemically induced. We are told, over and over and over again, that breastfeeding gives our children their best, their healthiest, their strongest start in life. Why is it, then, that the same medical establishment, or part of it, and the same social institutions, are blithely encouraging the use of synthetic galactagogues by males with nary a second thought about infant welfare. Worse, they are celebrating this practice as something wonderfully progressive.
I can only echo Lucy Leader’s comment that “prioritising the desires of adults over the needs of babies is not showing kindness, but complicity” and, with her, “refuse to be complicit in following an ideology that is so damaging to so many”.
Fortunately, I am able to write all this. So far. Because I continue in the fond belief that as a citizen of a nation that likes to think of itself as a robust democracy, I benefit from freedom of opinion and expression. So far.
I can write all this, so far, because I have not referred to any individual male who engages in these delusional and infant-harming practices nor to any individual female who wishes to think of herself as a pregnant or chestfeeding man.
Yet now, in this time and place, in our robust democracy where last time I looked, science was treated with a certain amount of respect, males are bringing lawsuits against women who state what to the majority of the populace are obvious facts. They are using the law as a tool to punish women who call out their bullshit. In the case of individual Daddymummmies, we are not allowed to condemn their “breastfeeding” practice as fetishistic or suggest that it is potentially harmful to infants.
When it is a matter of specific individuals, are not allowed to oppose delusion with rationality. We are not allowed to even suggest that the Emperor may in fact be naked (and that his “breastmilk” is in fact no such thing). And we are most certainly not allowed to mock, analyse or get angry about it.
Because when we do, the Greater Gavel of the Law (a particularly massive and threatening creature) is likely to come down on our heads. Because what The Man wants, The Man gets, and women and children are the sacrifice he exacts.
Dead sexy, eh? Well, just dead really.
Mythical bird of prey, also often transliterated as roc.
The name of the monster in the Fantastic Four is Galactus
Thanks Bronwyn for this excellent piece of writing on a ghastly subject matter. The links you provided are very helpful too. What a time to be alive! This non-sense will never make sense to me.