I had to laugh when I read Marcy’s thoughtful but disappointed comment in response to my post on sex and breastfeeding – Finally, the post you’ve been waiting for, it reminded me of my partner’s response when he saw my freshly finished post – “those readers looking for sex and breastfeeding posts, this so isn’t the post they’re looking for”.
Marcy and my partner are right, some people will be looking for something else. I know, my post was false advertising in a way. I don’t have much to offer in the way of sexual breastfeeding stories because my partner and I didn’t use it as part of our sex lives. Some couples do and more power to them. I can’t even borrow someone else’s stories because no mothers have ever revealed this sexual activity to me and we have some pretty frank discussions at times, but I’ve never asked anyone directly either (watch out anyone I know who reads this blog, you know what topic could be coming up next). My partner was breastfed until he was about 2 and grew up watching his siblings being breastfed so maybe that’s got something to do with us never trying it, maybe he’s just not curious about breastfeeding. And then again I wasn’t offering either. I felt pretty drained by breastfeeding, particularly in the early days. In those first six months my baby fed a lot. The kindest thing my partner could offer my breasts was a break from being touched.
Now this is the closest I can provide on the topic….
When my child began to eat more solids and the breastfeeding slowed and became more manageable and less tiring, my libido returned properly (as I’ve discussed at more length here) and I noticed something. I will preface this revelation with the background information that breastfeeding leaves you alone with your thoughts a lot! 60 minutes, 40 minutes, 20 minutes, 10 minutes a feed can be a long time sitting/lying there alone with a baby. Some breastfeeds co-ordinated well with a book, or a TV programe, or a good conversation, but many breastfeeds were spent in a dark room hoping the baby would go to sleep. I recall during these later breastfeeds drifting off in thought and because hormonally breastfeeding can make you sleepy and contented my thoughts could become quite dream-like. And during all this drifting off I sometimes fell asleep.. but I sometimes drifted off into thoughts of fancy, like sex instead.
Before you get too excited, sadly for the topic I don’t think these experiences had much to do with the breastfeeding … I think its just that you don’t get much time to sit and daydream as a mother and sooner or later if you’re feeling relaxed, daydreaming turns to thoughts of sex so these two things happened to coincide. I also recall a sudden jarring interruption to those thoughts – where am I again, oh yeah, here breastfeeding my baby, who won’t quite fall asleep – and that very unsexy thought abruptly halted my daydreams. Call me a prude, but that’s what happened. This is the closest I got to an erotic breastfeeding experience. If anyone else has something better to offer, please comment. There is something very intimate and sensual about breastfeeding and it can feel very empowering and I can see that those ingredients could easily add up to a sexual experience. It didn’t for me but maybe it did for you.
In a way my previous post wasn’t false advertising because I was honestly talking about the topic – I had a lot to say about sex and breastfeeding, its just that in my experience the relationship between the two was primarily about lowering libido. Fantasies don’t relish reality, but in thinking about translating fantasies into reality it is worth knowing something about the reality. Male reader, if you’re thinking of trying this at home – bear this in mind.
blue milk 
A friend of mine at work told me that she found breastfeeding a little bit arousing (she frequently overshares). I’m glad you reached out to the hordes of one hand web surfers out there anyway – maybe their consciousness was raised slightly before they clicked away.
I don’t think breastfeeding is a sexual experience at all. The thought of that kind of weirds me out. It’s incredibly intimate and one might take that as sexual…I guess. I think it’s the most intimate and close you can get with someone without it being sexual. Yes it feels good and yes it’s close…not sexual though, nope.
djfoobarmatt – hahaha, should I send these one handers over your way for some Wiggles talk maybe?
pluckymama – Finding the experience sexual doesn’t mean you’re sexualising your baby, but there is certainly a taboo around this all the same and its hard to know, isn’t it, if more women don’t talk about breastfeeding as sexual because of the taboo or because less of us are wired that way. I mean if you had an orgasm with your milk led-down like the mother on the previous post, well.. talk about being made for breastfeeding.
[…] hardly dare mention this here because I am of course the world’s leading erotic breastfeeding blogger and who knows what lurkers I am unleashing on League of Maternal Justice by linking to them. But […]
[…] here from time to time looking for something apart from feminist discussion, who are instead seeking ‘sexy breastfeeding’ stories and images. (And what a crushing bore they must find it all, once […]
The only thing sexual about breastfeeding in my experience was that the engorgement–particularly at times when baby would nurse just long enough to trigger letdown and then conk out–vastly increased my empathy for men with erections. Now I know how it feels to have my skin stretch tight over sensitive tissue so filled with fluid that it’s rigid, and I know that when that feeling isn’t released as it should be I get very impatient, desperate, irrational, even angry. I wouldn’t call that “a sexual experience,” more like experience that informed my thinking about sex.
[…] here from time to time looking for something apart from feminist discussion, who are instead seeking ‘sexy breastfeeding’ stories and images. (And what a crushing bore they must find it all, once […]