I put my breast milk up for sale - and found the majority of interested buyers were men

I know this is an older thread but it's a question worth asking..

I think it's to do with the fact that men on average have higher sex drives and are more visually sexually stimulated, so the visual element has more potential to go wrong and become obsessive than with women.

Yes! When you put it like that it doesn't make sense. I didn't articulate what I was trying to say very well.

(Sorry, I haven't read the comments or even much beyond the title. I just have to say:)

WHAT IS WRONG WITH MEN? ????????????????????????

"Fed is best" only makes sense as the opposite of "starved is best". It says nothing about what the baby is fed. If you want to be pedantic about it, "Mother's breast is best" would work.

This is why breast is best is a bad slogan. It should be fed is best. Buying milk from randos off the internet is more risky than give your baby formula in my opinion.

Honestly if I found out someone I knew was buying breast milk off the internet and feeding to their infant I’d phone social services. If weird festishy men want to drink it, well that’s at their own risk, but I can’t help thinking why can’t they just make do with a wank like a normal person.

Scott says, “the majority of customers for breast milk are men… I did not expect that” and I have to wonder, is she terminally stupid? Incurably naive? Has she never met a man, gone on the internet, or read the news? Of course it's bloody men. Most women who can't breastfeed will generally either go through milk donation services, or just use formula.

Breastmilk consumption is a well known fetish – just look at Homelander in The Boys for a very recent media representation. I have to think that she's pretending at surprise for the sake of her book, which really puts me off.

Pretty much anything that could possibly be a fetish is one. It’s not really surprising

I'm just reading Cash Cow by Alev Scott. I have to say I'm not enjoying her flippant and casual manners to the commodification of women's bodies by men. She casually refers to her male gay friends who used a surrogate or an older female friend who 'needed' a surrogate.

The book is a tale of her middle class journey as a anxious mother. She was concerned during pregnancy she wouldn't produce enough milk so went mad with pumping when her baby was born and produced masses of excess hence her going down this rabbit hole, whilst pumping and bringing online (not sure where baby was!).

She isn't critical of female commodification so it makes me uncomfortable as she can't see the big picture and she doesn't consider the class differences. Quite disappointing and it wasn't a cheap book.

I've only read the chapter on Milk. I'll have to report back on Eggs and Placenta, strange order in the book, you would think it would start with Eggs and end with milk.

She also talks about women who are wet nurse for adults men. To me this is an extreme form of sex exploitation and the women are being prostituted, again poor women.

I hadn’t heard of this fetish and it is vile. Why must men sexualise everything??? Something so special that women are able to do to keep their babies alive and healthy and it has to be reduced to something that makes men hard??

absolutely, and I’m sure the author of the article knew this when she decided to list her milk for sale online

God some people are fucking vile.

Well online community donation groups ARE an unregulated online site.

I don’t see how making the sale of it illegal would interfere with community donation groups. I don’t think it’s a major issue so it’s not something that should be prioritised. I imagine most mothers would go through community groups or hospitals to get donated breast milk rather than buy off some unregulated online site!

Hospitals and milk banks have very stringent criteria for who gets breast milk (because they have limited supplies) and so most people don't qualify which is why mothers turn to breast milk sharing services like eats on feets and others. Unfortunately because most milk banks are either NHS funded or charities, they won't extend their services.

In an ideal world I'd love to set up a milk bank which was more inclusive of donations it revived and therefore able to give to more babies.

As a mother I’d never buy breastmilk for my baby from anywhere other than a hospital, a breastmilk donation centre (or someone I know extremely well).

Of course the balance of risk changes. Similar to how it changed in the 1960s when "proper" formula became readily available. The fact that formula companies also did a huge amount to dissuade breastfeeding is another topic entirely (for the record I am not anti formula but I am anti misinformation sharing which formula companies of yore had a large history of doing to the extent much of their misinformation pervades today).

This is all interesting. I'm sure I read somewhere that one of the reasons why breastfeeding rates are so high in Japan is because it increases a baby's survival because sharing BM in a survival situation is easier than getting access to clean bottles for formula. Not sure how true that is and (from my viewpoint) the balance of risk of not feeding a baby at all vs them catching a BBV obviously changes.

Breast milk has virtually no market, especially as plenty of milk sharing sites and groups exist for free donations. Id be very worried that any legal involvement would prevent those groups from continuing. The reality is that breast milk carries far fewer risks than blood and semen.

I could write pages and pages on the reduction of social acceptance of milk sharing but it boils down to;

• early formula companies significantly over played the risks of milk sharing to increase formula usage.

• the huge reduction in milk sharing removed the normalcy of it, making it something people didn't encounter much which generally makes things "weird".

• the increased fetishization of breasts by the media have made breasts a primarily sexual object makes people view milk sharing differently these days.

• my personal experience of milk sharing has been responses of disgust more so than concern.

wet nursing isn't as uncommon as we think! I think that people don't talk about it because people judge it was disgusting.

It used to be routine on maternity wards when some women had excess milk and others had too little.

I am intrigued: when did people start to judge this as "disgusting"? As opposed to a potential health risk to babies.

I'm not sure of the going rate of either but I'd assume breast milk would fetch a higher price than semen. I'm guessing there are much more men willing to sell semen than women selling milk. Sorry if I've misunderstood you.

I agree that it should be illegal like other fluids. In the rare case that it's being bought for a baby there could be issues of quality.

But it's only illegal to sell semen for profit. It would be very difficult to sell breast milk for profit - it's a labour intensive product!

To add, I think the sale of breastmilk should absolutely be made illegal, as is semen, blood and organs.

Many years ago I attended a physiology course. At the start of the lecture that covered lactation the male lecturer displayed an enormous classical painting of some goddess or other squirting breast milk across the sky and went on for a few minutes about what an amazing natural process breastfeeding is. He never showed us any artworks in any other lecture and I remember in my naivety thinking it was a bit weird 🧐