Premium: "Men Should Not Be Induced to Produce Something from Their Nipples, That Some People Want to Call Milk"
Gender: A Wider Lens
Sasha Ayad and Stella O'Malley
4.6 • 961 Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2024
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
“Chestfeeding”. A controversial term recently adopted from inside the critical social justice movement as inclusive language for discussing breastfeeding. But is it biologically plausible for men to induce lactation? Is it even milk? Is it safe? Natural mammalian lactation possesses evolutionary significance beyond basic sustenance and often provides broader biological functions in human development.
In this bonus episode for premium subscribers, Heather Heying offers up an evolutionary perspective on breastfeeding and the value of breast milk, discussing the broader implications and functions of breast milk beyond just nutrition. The conversation also explores the parenting practices observed in hunter-gatherer cultures in comparison to the trend of over-parenting in more modern American households.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Gender A Wider Lens exclusive content. If you're a free listener, what you're about to hear is a preview of a bonus episode for our paid sub-stack subscribers. |
| 0:11.0 | If you'd like to hear the rest, go to widerlands pod.com and sign up for any of our paid membership |
| 0:16.8 | options. |
| 0:17.8 | And to all of our premium and founding member subscribers, thank you for the support. And here's the bonus conversation. |
| 0:24.0 | So we're back here with Heather Hying |
| 0:29.0 | and in our full episode we kind of ended on the fill Ili question and it is really tricky to |
| 0:36.7 | figure out how to navigate that situation as as Stella pointed out as you both pointed out and you talked about this |
| 0:45.2 | Experience where you were in the Amazon with a group of students and you |
| 0:49.7 | Reluctantly had to tell a young woman that was part of your group to put on more clothes because all of the local men were staring at her |
| 0:57.6 | And I I just think that's really interesting too because you are also woman to woman. |
| 1:04.7 | So there is a kind of connection and camaraderie, so it's even trickier if as a woman you would like |
| 1:10.0 | to tell a male not to be wearing something in public. So I just wanted to throw that aspect into. It's very tricky. |
| 1:17.0 | I wanted to ask you a question about parenting because I've read a couple of articles. I haven't done much |
| 1:24.4 | research about this of course, but I've read a few articles about the way hunter-gatherer parents |
| 1:31.1 | operate in the context of their children. |
| 1:34.0 | And I've thought a lot about the way a certain demographic of liberal, educated, very |
| 1:40.0 | empathic, American parent seems to believe that it's her job, it's often the mom, to be a full-time |
| 1:49.1 | entertainer, be the court jester, be a full-time teacher and to like constantly be enriching her child and also |
| 1:56.7 | therapistsing her child and when I I mean I come from a culture of Egyptians and we have our own kind of over parenting tendencies but there is definitely not that sense that every single thing that a child does has to be somehow engaged with by the parents. |
| 2:16.4 | So what can we learn about parenting from maybe studying primates or other cultures, |
| 2:24.0 | more hunter-gatherer cultures, |
| 2:25.0 | like what do you think of this tendency for American moms |
... |
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