Love and Lactation: Sex and the Sopping Wet Shirt

A few months after my daughter was born, I took a necessary overnight business trip to a city about four hours away from my home. It would be my first night away from baby. I expressed and stocked up more bags of breast milk than my baby would be able to drink in a month. Leaving my daughter with her father, I was off down the highway.

Dinner and drinks later, I found myself receiving a totally unexpected, mind-blowing kiss from a handsome business colleague who had never previously expressed sexual vibes in my direction. It was one of those rare kisses that literally turned my knees to Jello. For a moment, I surrendered to the joy of it, revelling in the sensation of my friend’s desire, the taste of his lips, the stubble emerging on his chin at then end of a long day. My handbag and briefcase dropped to the sidewalk. As our arms went around each other I could feel his hardness, straining in his blue wool trousers.

Then I realized that my shirt was sopping wet. The mammary glands of a lactating woman response copiously to all sensual stimulation – the tugging mouth and patting hands of her sweet infant, as well as the sexual tug of a hot body offering up an unmistakable invitation to a wickedly pleasant one-night-stand. But how could I explain to this dreamy, hard-bodied, marathon-running, high-powered-suit guy that my boobs leaked?

It is one thing to think about revealing a nursing bra with all the aesthetic charm of a Russian submarine to a guy who has been to birthing classes and LaLeche League meetings and watched a baby be born. Many men with children understand the importance of breastfeeding: breastfed kids are healthier not only in infancy but throughout their lives, less inclined to ailments from ear infections to diabetes, usually don’t need braces, and on average demonstrate significantly higher I.Q.’s than formula-fed kids. And the advantages are not just one-way; maternal health including returning to pre-partum weigh faster, and lower incidences of breast cancer, have been associated with breastfeeding.

But a sexy guy looking for a wild fling would, I assumed, be grossed out by the thick beige fabric encasing my breasts, their huge dark nipples and warm sweet white milk that would likely spray like a garden hose during sex. Against the single-minded craving of physical desire infusing my body, I said no. I left him standing in the lobby of the five-star hotel as the elevator doors closed, looking like Humphrey Bogart on that railway platform in Paris in the movie Casablanca. I got to my room around two a.m., and despite the hour, called my best friend from college to tell her I’d just turned down the dreamiest hunk who was begging me for it, all because of breast milk. My friend, not yet a mother herself, thought it the most hysterical thing she’d ever heard.

Just before I drifted off to sleep, I came to peace with the thought that turning this man down was the right choice, not just because I did not want to face his dealing with my condition as a lactating mamma, but because it gave me the chance to experience a new mother’s rarest luxury: one uninterrupted night all to myself, enveloped in the complete stillness of bodily privacy. I returned to my baby the next day with renewed energy, fuelled by a peaceful night of solitude, and the memory of one fabulous kiss.

After the first flush of copious milk production which threatens to drown an infant in maternal ministrations, a lactating mother’s body adapts to her baby’s demands. Milk production rises and falls to match her growing child’s needs, and even the chemical composition of the breast milk changes over time, with antibodies and substances that support neural development giving way to proteins better designed to grow strong bones and muscles. This means that after a few months, a nursing mother’s breasts are usually no longer constantly dripping, and may even be fairly well-behaved during sex, if she has the energy and inclination to engage in it at all.

Years after my daughter weaned, I would still squeeze a few drops of milk from my breasts, just to remind myself of that warm, womanly feeling of nursing my child. I liked the way the shining drops would emerge from the crevices of my nipples. I liked knowing that if somehow, some way, I were to bear another child or adopt one, I could bring my milk back in. Once a woman’s body has been in milk production, it can usually be returned to the lactation state with regular physical manipulation of the breast: hand massage and insistent sucking. But after eight years had passed, I began to let go of this image and mentally made the shift to perceiving of myself as a dry cow.

Then into my life there came a lover. No fly-by-night coupling with a stranger, this one, but a long-term dedicated friend and sexual partner. It was instantly clear in our first intimate encounter that my womanly form and heavy breasts pleased him, though in those first few crazy sessions of frantic heaving to relieve what had been years of pent-up sexual desire between us, it was not something we dwelled on. A few weeks later, though, as we began to slow down and explore each other, he was seated on the couch, and I was kneeling over his lap, facing him, his mouth at my bare breast as I unbuttoned his shirt. He sucked my nipple deep into his mouth, a look of utter contentment on his face, then pulled back and muttered with his mouth full, "Ohhh, I can taste you." His tone, his expression, left no doubt about it: he found this a very good thing, though I’m not sure which one of us was more surprised.

The thrill that raced through my body was indescribable. I urged him on, at one breast and then the other, to drink from me, taste me, take comfort from my breasts. Nourish me, he’ll whisper now, feed me, your milk is so sweet and creamy. We can sit there for hours with his mouth hungrily nuzzling at my breasts, my milk returning in quantity now in response to his passionate suckling. When his cock slips inside of me and I ride him with my hips while he sucks from me, my body explodes in the deepest, most powerfully rocking and all-consuming orgasms I have ever known; an experience made all the more richer, physically and emotionally, by the fact that they arise from those aspects of my life and body that make me the mature woman and mother than I am.

He takes in the milk of my body as I take in his seed; we are sharing of the life-giving forces of each other, the sacred core of a mutual sexual union. For a lactating mother, few things are closer to the heart of her self-identity than the milk which flows from her breast and creates the healthy growing body of her child. When her lover also honors and recognizes this part of her being as sexually desirable, the intimacy and sexual pleasures and fulfilment that can be reached with the whole essence of her womanhood are beyond description.