Sex and breastfeeding.
As I’ve said a lot (here, here and here) I get quite a bit of traffic finding its way to my blog looking for sexy breastfeeding stories and I’m not sure how I come up in that search because I don’t post on that topic. When I first started noticing these search stats I was a bit put out. I had my own bit of space on the internet to explore the incredible experience of becoming a mother and someone was peering over my shoulder to see if they could catch sight of a nipple. But a feminist mother friend of mine had a completely different reaction. Good on them, she said only partly tongue in cheek. Good on these men (and women?) for having sexual fantasies about real breasts, including lactating breasts. In this increasingly rigid raunch culture we find ourselves in fantasies about lactating breasts border on the transgressive. We might think we sexualise mothers but just how ‘mummy’ is a yummy mummy really? According to our culture sexy breasts don’t feed babies; they’re gravity-defying, perfectly round, symmetrically shaped, and at the very least perky. They’re not pendulous like real breasts and especially lactating breasts can be. (In truth some of the men fantasizing about breastfeeding are probably picturing perky, silicon-enhanced breasts rather than real lactating breasts too.)
So, I’m admitting that I should talk about sex and breastfeeding because actually there is quite a bit to be said about the two, though in my experience the relationship is not altogether positive. (Sorry sexy breastfeeding story lurkers). Quite a few other mothers, including author Heidi Raykeil (Confessions of a Naughty Mommy: How I Found My Lost Libido) have agreed that breastfeeding can dampen your libido. There seems to be a strong inverse relationship for lots of mothers, the more you are breastfeeding, the less you’re in the mood. Of course there are many factors at play here.
I’m guessing the more you’re breastfeeding the more likely it is that you’re not getting a good night’s sleep and that you’re too tied up with baby-care tasks to be thinking sexy thoughts. I think you need some time out, some time to yourself, and some privacy to re-connect with yourself as a sexual person and all these things are lacking in that first year of motherhood. Plus the more you’re breastfeeding the more you’re holding, patting, carrying, and generally touching a baby until… ohmygod you can feel like you are being suffocated in tactile stimulation. Maybe, the more you’re breastfeeding the more likely it is that you’re also in a very demanding stage of parenting; one that might have you and your partner stressed out, one that might have you two arguing a whole lot, one that might make you feel like you’d rather have sex with just about anybody else other than the father of your baby, who also happens to be the man who didn’t do the washing.
But there is something else going on here too with breastfeeding and libido. Two hormones that help with breastfeeding are not all that great for sex-drive – prolactin and progesterone. Breastfeeding reconfigures the hormonal balance in order to allow milk production and libido is often suppressed in the process. I wish I’d known this at the time. You’d think while attending my breastfeeding support group for 8 months that at some point this important and relevant topic would have come up, that the leaders would have shared this tid bit with the group but nooooo we had to talk about handbags instead. I think breastfeeding is fabulous, I’m glad I did it, I wouldn’t change it, but I think it’d be better if breastfeeding advocates were up front about the disadvantages of breastfeeding too so women can deal with them.
I was fortunate, despite breastfeeding my daughter for almost two years my hormones re-aligned themselves relatively quickly within that first year. The downside was that I had to guard against getting pregnant again. Just when I got around to thinking what in the hell happened to sex, it was back. I imagine it can be a much longer, lonelier time for some other mothers (particularly extended breastfeeders) whose hormones don’t return to libido-inducing wonder for years. Its a long haul.
Being sexy is such a big part of the modern woman’s identity that I’m sure a drop in libido undermines your self-esteem pretty quickly and just when you could do with some reassurance from other women about what you’re going through… well, I don’t see much honesty among mothers about this. I’m guessing mothers don’t want to risk losing such an important aspect of their image. Yes, everyone is pretty frank about how there wasn’t much great sex in the first six months but not too many are willing to share if there wasn’t much great sex in the first few years.
I was also very fortunate that libido wasn’t a point of tension between my partner and I because I would have found that very undermining. There are enough strains adjusting to parenthood to contend with without fighting about this. One of the benefits of trying to share parenting (especially night-time parenting) equally, apart from being feminist is that it puts you both more or less on the same wave length. Neither of us was skipping along thinking about hours of leisurely sex in that first year because both of us were out of our minds with exhaustion. We knew that sex had to fit in around sleep, tending to the baby, and um, cleaning up all the shit around our house. We were both realistic. I’m not going to blow our trumpet about too many things because we made/make plenty of mistakes but this is one thing we got right. Somehow we managed to feel connected by our mutual longing. We didn’t blame each other, instead we gazed fondly at each other across the bed. I wish I had the energy to have sex with you right now, one would say. I’d nod in agreement if I could lift my head off the pillow, the other would reply.
I think we did experience a sense of loss though for a while. The reliable old way of renewing our coupledom just wasn’t there as much in that first year and it meant we had to put the effort into connecting in other ways. You know, boring things like talking to each other. The trouble is, you’re tired in that first year and you don’t have the energy and thought-space to realise all this then. Anyway, we made it.
Now, back to breastfeeding and sex.
I’m in the process of preparing for a conference that I and my co-conspirator in feminist motherhood are going to be speaking at, and I’ve been reading the abstracts from all the other speakers when I came across this paper by Alison Bartlett comparing maternal advice manuals from the 1970s and the present –
In the 1970s textual archives, breastfeeding is understood to include turn-ons as well as let downs. While largely the domain of heterosexuality and marriage, breastmilk is discusses as a novely bonus for sexual practice in terms that are rarely encountered today. It is a discourse supported by medical narratives of hormonal and brain function; thus sexuality emerges as a form of breastfeed intelligence, but not for long. The difference between these narratives of eroticised breastmilk and today’s circulation of stories of fear and loathing, failure and despair, are vast and suggestive. A different set of ethical relations between sexuality and babies may impinge on such discources today, however the seventies archives are notable for the pleasure and agency imbued in the maternal subject and her generative and generous body.
So, basically I am a product of my times. I have written here about breastfeeding problems and anxieties (and a bit about the enjoyment of breastfeeding too) because I am a highly-strung neurotic of the 2000s. For all the people still arriving at my site looking for sexy breastfeeding stories, you’re 30 years too late.
i get people looking for sexy breast milk stories too. interesting how our hormones from breastfeeding effect our libido, I wasn’t aware. You failed to mention how fun it is to be having sex and then start leaking all over your partner, that’s always fun (not really).
My counter to the 1970s ‘breastfeeding is sexy’ stories is that in Australia in the 1970s I believe breastfeeding rates were at an all-time low. There may well have been lots of books around talking the sexy talk, but out in the burbs, most mothers got their kid on the formula pretty quickly. That way of talking about breastfeeding can’t actually have resonated with the populace at large.
I found (and still find at 6 months in to this mothering lark) that the problem is not a lack of libido or desire, which is what I was expecting, but a lack of energy to put it into practice. I think for the bloke, as well as the exhaustion, there was also a terror of getting me pregnant again for the first few months. Because all the care in the world didn’t prevent it from happening once.
There’s also something distinctly unsexy about having baby chuck, breastpads, toys (in the sense of rattles and books with crinkly pages) and milk leaks all over the place.
When I saw the title of your post, I expected it to be about the erotic feelings that can arise during and as a result of breastfeeding. I didn’t breastfeed my babies, to my everlasting regret, but I did experience a rush of erotic feeling once or twice while holding them close and feeding them by bottle. And I’ve heard many women say breastfeeding turned them on. I raced through your post looking for something about this, but found nothing. Have you never even thought of breastfeeding in this way? Or is the very idea of it anathema to you? I would imagine a lot of women who do experience eroticism while breastfeeding have feelings of shame about it, and need to know it’s a common reaction.
Mostly I’m just concentrating on getting the kid fed without a bad attachment that’ll hurt, or getting bitten, which will hurt. On the good days, it’s relaxed (but not relaxing), it’s never been erotic. On the first day my partner was in the bathroom of our room at the birth centre and heard ‘argh getoffgetoffgetoff’. Then there was three months of keeping the nipple sheilds in the right spot.
you’ve been tagged…sorry.
[…] Bluemilk takes on Sex and Breastfeeding. […]
For those who felt ripped off by the lack of sexy breastfeeding experiences in this post… I went back and tackled that more directly in this follow-up post.
I LOVED breastfeeding. My milk didnt let down properly till I got home from hospital and began to relax. The first two or three let downs gave me orgasms – (too much information?)and even after that the let down remained hugely pleasureable. – I loved the feeling as the baby latched on – the little tug, then the feeling of the milk starting to flow. I still remember the marvel of her tiny mouth, and those little fingers on my breast when I was feeding her – then her milk drunk face as she finished her feed… fifteen years ago, and the memory of it makes me shiver with pleasure.
My partner was pretty much excluded at this time. Long story, but whenever he made me feel bad, I had this astonishing little person to hold – so I let myself disappear into sensuous baby twilight zone.
strange, about eight years after my first, I held a friends newborn, and let him go to sleep held up against my breast. We stayed like that for over an hour. I was thinking about the baby while I was under the shower, and the let down kicked off. Five years of no baby.. and there were beads of milk forming on my nipple.
Dating while i was breastfeeding my third child (!) I found one man was insistant I wean the baby (he told me he only knew one woman who had breastfed longer than six months – and her husband left her. He went because I find oblique threats insulting.) the other man I dated was turned on by it.
Thanks for the fascinating responses to this post. Rose – I hoped someone would come through for us and you did. Talk about wired differently – let-downs felt like a dull ache to me. The first many times my baby latched on the “little tug” was a toe-curling pain. Your experience teaches me a big lesson about generalization, I really mustn’t do it. I can relate to your love of breastfeeding in the end though.
Pluckymama – thanks for reminding me about the leaking breasts during sex side of it all too, I should have mentioned that in the post. (Thanks for the tagging, I will get around to responding).
Kate – re. your first comment, I will certainly raise this question if I get a chance to see this academic’s presentation. I agree with you about the unsexiness of the house of a newborn, not the environment to bombard you with sex vibes.
Marcy – thanks for the encouragement to go back and face the topic more head on and thanks for possibly providing the groundwork for people like rose to come forward and illuminate us.
Thanks all for your incredible honesty in response to the topic.
It’s amazing how Rose is describing the same event as mine, with such a totally different experience of it. The let down hurt, not all the time, but enough to make me tense up before feeding for the first few months.
I was never in the same zone of what rose describes but definitely moments of ecstatic pleasure – orgasmic, almost but not quite? Too hard to describe, but immensely pleasurable and wound up in the whole bonding experience but I was lucky in that I had a pretty easy time of it (save for mastistis once – ouch.) I think Kristeva writes about this — and would be worth looking at… It’s interesting the disjuncture that Kate mentions between the hippy-sexy 70s breastfeeding mother imageand the reality here about the low rates of breastfeeding . What’s going on there?
That was a great post. My head has fairly popped off from nodding hard when you said people need to make women more aware of the costs associated with breastfeeding.
I posted on this subject a while ago, the first time I tried to wean my son – here. It’s formatted as a record of my experience with breastfeeding, and I think the message comes across loud and clear even before I state it outright at the end: this isn’t light and airy and easy, it’s a huge commitment that takes a lot out of you, even though it’s a great thing a mom can do for her baby.
[…] into our responsibilities as mothers? Does it prevent us from good mothering? Because incidentally, I also attract readers here from time to time looking for something apart from feminist discussion, who are instead seeking […]
[…] into our responsibilities as mothers? Does it prevent us from good mothering? Because incidentally, I also attract readers here from time to time looking for something apart from feminist discussion, who are instead seeking […]