In Which A Woman Lets Her Date Drink Her Milk

“I was an unseasoned single mom… I was curious… I wanted to know what it felt like to have a man drink my milk.” -From a piece in which a new mother breast-feeds her date.

Specifically, it’s a excerpt from Unbuttoned: Women Open Up About the Pleasures, Pains, and Politics of Breastfeeding, and Rachel Sarah
explains how she went from nursing her daughter to letting her blind date suckle. She writes:

My breasts had always been one of the most sensual parts of me. Before motherhood, when a man put his lips around my nipple, it made my body rain — not a light sprinkle, either. If I slept with a man as a nursing mom, my breasts would rain on him.

And yet, at the urging of a friend, Sarah went on a blind date with a lawyer. She was late, and explained that it was because she’d been nursing. Her date found this exciting:

“A woman who’s lactating!” he said, way too loudly. “What a turn-on!”

Instead of running away, Sarah took the guy 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.

While men drinking breast milk is certainly not new — surely it must have been attempted since the dawn of time — the idea of it does seem to fall squarely on the line between appealing and unappealing. It’s easy to be squicked out by thinking about a man being “babied.” Infantilization and sex are an odd combination, to many. On the other hand, should nipples be off-limits during sex just because a woman is nursing? And what about the new mother’s feelings? Perhaps it seems more strange because the man in this story was a blind date and not Sarah’s boyfriend, husband, or father of her child. But people who barely know each other have sex and exchange bodily fluids all the time. As for Sarah, she concludes:

But this is what mattered most: He wanted me as I was, and I didn’t have to hide any of it.