Men Breastfeeding Their Children

My friend Amy King posted this video on Facebook. I am not sure why the breastfeeding expert is sitting naked in a bathtub in a candlelit room, and I have to admit that image does make it difficult to take the video seriously at first, but you should not allow that to detract from what the video has to say, which is interesting if only because it points out yet one more supposedly essential and absolute difference between men and women that is, in reality, neither absolute nor essential. (To be on the safe side, you probably should consider the video NSFW.)

Some other relevant links:

Cross posted on The Poetry in The Politics and The Politics in The Poetry.

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2 Responses to Men Breastfeeding Their Children

  1. 1
    Adrian says:

    I also find it hard to take an expert seriously when she is always shown speaking from a bathtub in a candlelit room. I did try to listen to what the video had to say, but the conclusion seemed very off-putting. “Maybe men are really better at breastfeeding.” Yeah, right. Because nobody really knows how men’s breastmilk is different from women’s, but she’s “heard it has more protein.” (Is that necessarily even good for babies?) And her focus on how breastfeeding made a man feel powerful, because he didn’t need anyone else, it could be just him and the baby…that felt kind of creepy to me. (Not creepy because of gender essentialism. Just creepy because it’s wrong to deny that humans need one another to do big jobs well.)

    The other expert was also very hard to take seriously, as he talked seriously about hairballs. WTF. I don’t know what kind of science or medicine he’s expert in, such that he thinks women never grow hair around their nipples. And that a man willing to spend hours with a breastpump would not spend a few minutes with tweezers if it seemed likely to make the project even a little easier or more successful.

    All that silliness doesn’t completely undermine the sweet image of the loving father learning to nurture his child. The video shows an apparently happy, healthy, child bonding with a caring father. That’s good, and I wish them well. It’s not newsworthy these days, though it was, when I was a child.

  2. Pingback: Happy Monday, here’s a video about men who breastfeed. « pukingponies