Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Male Lactation


This post is Anonymous Cowards fault. He mentioned that it existed in the podcast and therefore I HAD to look it up. There is a Wikipedia entry on male lactation, however to me much of it sounds pretty sketchy. While maybe it's possible while men are on hormone treatment or something I'm sure that it is not possible in most men. Articles like this on male lactation add to my skepticism because the author suggests that the male started to lactate using the power of his mind. The power of my mind tells me it's pretty gross and there will be some serious psychological damage to a baby who is forced to feed from a hairy man boob. This link, about halfway down, has another account of male breast feeding, from the Talmud, where it is suggested it was a miracle. I wonder if the infant would agree that it was a miracle.


14 comments:

Bayman said...

That has got to be the ugliest picture I have ever seen. With an image like that, no wonder male lactation gets such a bad rap.

Interestingly, supporting the idea of male lactation, I would cite Robert DeNiro in Meet the Parents -
"I have breasts Fokker! Could you milk me?" Perhaps his character knew something we don't...

Anonymous Coward said...

While I'll have to agree it's not a very appealing idea, I think male lactation is not that suprising, not anymore than the fact that we have nipples. All the structures are there, just atrophied. That's just how evolution works. And if a suckling stimulus can induce it in woman, why not in men? I had a friend in high school who started growing breast just because his hormones were wonky, so there are weirder things out there.

now this is gross (wikipedia): "Newborn baby boys (and girls) can occasionally produce milk because of the intense hormones involved in their mother's pregnancy and the hours of childbirth; this is called witches' milk."

Anonymous Coward said...

peter breastfeeding stewie on familly guy

Bayman said...

Big breasts are one thing, functional mammary glands are quite another. What's next coward, are you gonna tell us that you ovulate every month? Maybe those male eggs could be used as an ethical receipient for human cloning...

Bayman said...

Do we have breast envy?

Anonymous Coward said...

Flame war! Well actually man do have mammary glands, that's why they can also get breast cancer...

Anonymous Coward said...

Also there has been males ovulating, just check out this nature paper . from the abstract: "Very occasionally growing oocytes have been observed within seminiferous tubules, for example in a 16-yr-old hermaphrodite who was brought up as a girl and only came to medical attention because he wished to be recognised as a boy3. Such tubules usually form part of an ovotestis (refs 3−5 and P. S. Burgoyne, personal communication), though large numbers of primary and growing oocytes have also been observed in apparently normal testes of two mouse chimaeras, one an 8-d-old bilateral hermaphrodite (M. Spiegelman, personal communication) and the other a 5-d-old male6."

Anonymous said...

O vile messengers of Satan I await with great fervor the day you and your twisted demented pervsions of the male body roast in the fires of hell. I've been wrestling bears to death and leading Crusades since the 11th century and now I'm coming for YOU bayblab. Once your beloved Dawkins falls where will you hide??

Bayman said...

Come on. Hermaphrodites don't count. Then we'd have to come with a biological explanation for Rob and his unicorn loving ways, and I really just don't want to go there.

Bayman said...

By the way the breast-feeder in the picutre has a pony tail. Are you sure that's not a woman with small breasts? Or maybe it's the pony tail the confers the ability to lactate and its got nothing to do with gender or hormones at all...

Anonymous Coward said...

Then that is one ugly woman. maybe he/she has ovotestes.

Anonymous said...

My son is 15 yrs old, and unfortuniatly is have male latation problems. he is very althelic, loves girls, isn't gay and has no other problems. It is possible for a male to lacate. Sure its strange, and we will have to see a specialist to get it to stop. anyone know of any treatments they use to do this? It most likely has to do with the level of Prolatic in his body.

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