alt.sex.column

Father's milk

by andrea nemerson

DEAR READERS: You're not the only ones who have questions, you know. My friends have questions, with which they pester me over e-mail and lunch. A longtime friend, for instance, has been peppering me with questions about male lactation, and not for the usual reasons. Since I live in Pervertville, population: perverts, the usual reasons would have something to do with snakebite kits and nipple clamps and maybe taking the hormones usually produced in larger quantities by whichever sex happens to be the opposite one. Who ever thinks about using their sex parts for reproduction around here? Well, me, for one, and this friend, for two, although, upon announcing the happy news he took pains to differentiate himself from the "We're pregnant!" people, who need to shut up. Sorry, dudes. You can get as involved as any nongestating partner could possibly be, but you can't go claiming it's actually happening to you. That is a privilege earned by the partner doing the retching, stretching, and weight-gaining. Back off, buddy.

"But what about male lactation?" asks my friend. "Have you heard of it? Why do men have nipples, anyway?" That last one, by the way, is such a common question that Google yields millions of results on the topic. Many links are to a book called, unsurprisingly, Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini, which sounds pretty fun to me, but most links jump to articles making a serious attempt at answering the question.

My own answer starts with the usual corrective: You have to stop thinking about evolution in terms of "Why?" and start asking "How?" Wondering why things are "designed" a certain way will quickly lead you astray. Nobody really knows, I told my friend, but if you ask me, male nipples exist because female nipples exist, and it's often easier to leave an unused organ or function in place, in rudimentary form, than it is to cleanse the developing organism of any vestiges of the extra or obsolete part. Hence, the appendix, the coccyx, and assorted oddball mammalian talents like erectable body hair and wiggle-able ears that are put to far better use by, say, my cat than by, say, me, but I have them anyway.

Embryos (we are speaking here of standard-issue babies, not the zillion varieties of intersexed or genital-atypical kids who complicate these discussions by insisting on existing) start off with all the equipment they will need to develop a male or a female reproductive system. It's tempting (and earlier feminists were tempted) to say that all babies start off female – "the default sex" – but it's really not true. The baby's genetic sex is set as soon as it picks up that X or Y from Dad; it just doesn't do anything about it until seven weeks in or so, when boy babies start pumping out the testosterone and making bulgy bits and girl babies don't and start folding in on themselves like a pretty, pretty flower. Of interest here are the mammary ridges, or milk lines, which will become milk glands and ducts, nipples and areolas. These structures don't wait to develop until after the embryo's sex organs have begun to assert themselves; they're already in place by six weeks, although they'll continue to develop along with the rest of the baby. Why should the embryo exert itself to reabsorb this thing that's not bothering anybody? Leave it alone. It will either develop further later on, under the influence of adolescent estrogen surges, or it won't. Meanwhile, with the laziness and laissez-faire attitude exhibited by organisms under the influence of evolution everywhere, the milk lines/proto-nipples just hang out. This isn't some human innovation either. Most (although, oddly, not all) male mammals have something recognizable as nipples. Dogs and cats you've seen. Male gorillas may not let you get that close, but they, along with the rest of the primates, have plenty nipples. And the male Dayak bat, bless him, uses his.

So enough of this. I know what my friend really wanted to know, same as what you, weary reader, probably want to know: Can he use his? For anything other than fun, I mean? Would you be surprised to hear a "maybe" from me? You shouldn't. Men, it turns out, have the capability, under various extreme circumstances, to produce small amounts of milk. Nobody, to my knowledge, has succeeded thus far in actually nourishing a baby this way (ironically, men who are ill, starved, or otherwise in extremis often lactate), but the estimable Jared Diamond, in a fun Discover article (www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_n2_v16/ai_16051177), not only thinks men can; he thinks men will. This seems like sorta bad news for those of us who mildly fetishize sexual dimorphism, but I can't see it being bad for the species, or for exhausted new moms, so I'm all for seeing where it goes. Evolution, it's like father's milk to me.

Love, Andrea

E-mail Andrea Nemerson at andrea@altsexcolumn.com.