The radically subversive utilitarian bioethicist, Joseph Fletcher, pined for a future in which men would be able to give birth and nurse their child. Transhumanists sometimes bring that desire up, too. Why should we be limited by natural biology? Why should we be expected to adhere to cultural norms? Indeed, why shouldn’t the very idea of “normal” be obliterated altogether? Then, and only then, will we be truly free.
This “no behavioral barriers” meme is picking up steam across a wide subversive front. Small case in point: A male Slate writer named Michael Thomsen wanted to lactate, which can occur in men, usually under certain disease conditions or when taking medications. Thomsen even went so far as to buy a breast pump and take herbal supplements. No go. What’s a would-be male nurser to do? From “Man Milk: My Curious Quest to Breast Feed:”
The walls of gender could be broken down, but without a child to benefit, what was the point? I’d read with great interest the anthropologist Barry Hewlett’s account of his time with the Aka Pygmy tribe in central Africa, where fathers suckle their children when the mothers are away. Not all of the men lactated, but they seemed to understand the gesture is as important emotionally as it is physiologically. Aka men are within reach of their children 47 percent of the time—more than for any other group in the world, according to Hewlett. That sounded beautiful to me. But without a child of my own, I couldn’t compare myself to the Aka. Good reader, I lost heart.
Maybe one day I’ll try again to climb over the gender wall, this time risking the mortification of a swollen breast and the ominous side effects of hormone-boosting pharmaceuticals. It would be nice to have a better reason than curiosity, I think. Perhaps a little baby—someone in need of sustenance and intimacy, searching for a breast to nuzzle. Yours or mine could do.
I almost didn’t post this—too much weirdness and compulsions being discussed around here lately. And perhaps I shouldn’t have. Please forgive me if I made a mistake. But this minor story epitomizes something that I find very disturbing, if hard to pin down. In fact, I am having difficulty finding the right words, for it would be easy to misconstrue or twist what I am trying to express.
This story is a miniscule part of the coup de culture, the hedonism part that conflates liberty with license, that says my only real loyalty is to me, the part that says I should indulge every impulse, feed every desire, pursue any sensual impulse, satisfy any bizarre curiosity, undermine any cultural norm—unless and until my proverbial fist hits your proverbial nose.
And here’s where that fits into the many ongoing challenges facing human exceptionalism. HE requires that we fulfill duties to each other, to animals, and to proper environmental practices. But we also have a duty I think—please forgive my inarticulateness—to honor our individual personal dignitas by abiding to a minimal level of personal decorum, even when we are alone.
It is like the old Mondo Cane movies that caused a sensation when I was in high school for depicting macabre and bizarre human behaviors (to the Western mindset) from other cultures. That was a form of Western-centrism that wouldn’t fly today, and that is good. There has been too much of our looking down our cultural noses at others. But we are devolving into a culture that encourages us to liberate our own individual Mondo Canes. And that isn’t good.
The only real point of Thomsen’s pursuit of “man milk” was to chisel another “crack” in the foundation of societal “normal.” For unlike the author, the pygmy men were not pursuing a fetish or seeking to indulge a strange curiosity. They are merely comforting their babies in a society in which there are no binkies. Thomsen, on the other hand, wanted to break down another barrier to naked individual self indulgence.
But “normal” serves a useful purpose. At some level, commonality of personal behavioral limits is necessary for societal cohesion and proper cultural functioning. (Sometimes, they serve as oppression too, which is why this is hard to write.) Atomized radical individualism will not lead to freedom, but its opposite, because that is the road to collapse, and nature abhors a vacuum. Law is of no use here. Voluntary self restraint is essential to human freedom and, indeed, is a weight bearing structure of human exceptionalism.
