-
Introduction: Men With Breasts, Women Without
- University of Washington Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction Men With Breasts, Women Without A 1995 issue of the science magazine Discover features an article titled “MenWho Give Milk.” Based on the incidence of spontaneous male lactation in a species of bat in Malaysia as well as on experiments with hormones in other species, including humans, the article addresses men directly, using the first- and second-person plural—“we men” and “brace yourself, guys”—and frankly challenges their manhood.1 Arguing loosely from the principles of evolution, the author, Jared Diamond, concludes that the human species is a leading candidate for male lactation. Soon, some combination of manual nipple stimulation and hormone injections may develop the confident expectant father’s latent potential to make milk. While I missed the boat myself, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of my younger male colleagues, and surely men of my sons’ generation, exploit their opportunity to nurse their children. The remaining obstacle will then no longer be physiological but psychological: Will all you guys be able to get over your hang-up that breast-feeding is a woman’s job?2 3 This rather crude formulation nonetheless gets at the deeper issue that underlies his speculations on male lactation.What he calls men’s “hangup that breast-feeding is a woman’s job” resonates with a long cultural and medical history of sex and gender assignment and lets us know that it is indeed the principle of sex diªerentiation that is at stake here. The accompanying cartoons of stags, bucks, and bulls underscore the issue. Only one of the sketches shows a nursing bull, while the four other manly representatives merely wear bras. The article should have been called, in true talk-show fashion, “Men Who Have Breasts.” By the same token, the 1984 documentary film Pumping Iron II: The Women, which investigates the world of women’s bodybuilding, could have been called “Women Who Don’t.” As a sequel to Pumping Iron, the film that launched Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career, Pumping Iron II shows the preparations leading up to a competition in Las Vegas, focusing particularly on Rachel McLish, “the reigning champion and author of women’s ‘fitness books,’ a woman [ . . . ] who clearly exploits the soft porn, titillating potential of women in body building,” and on Bev Francis, “a former power-lifter from Australia who (to put it in an 4 Bev Francis as Amazon from Pumping Iron II: The Women understated way) looks like no other woman in the world. She wants to look ‘like a Greek statue,’ and, seriously following the internal logic of body building, she takes muscularity to another kind of provocative extreme.”3 For both women, despite their opposite approaches, the appearance or disappearance of the breast is at stake. As Barbara Correll puts it: They must show themselves su‹ciently feminine through the organ that signifies femininity (and serves culturally as its regulative metonym ) and through their relationships with the men who serve to legitimize them as both feminine and heterosexual (= ready to give the breast, destined, or at least accoutered, for a compulsory maternal role). Since women body builders tend to reduce (fatty) breast tissue mass as they increase (pectoral) muscle size, however, the issue of breast-giving in body building is laden with anxiety.4 When Bev strikes a pose, her breasts completely dissolve in the flexed muscular mass. Her incongruous yellow string bikini top is a parodic, if haunting, sign of absence. Rachel, for her part, is penalized for wearing a padded top. The bodies of both women speak in articulate, if opposite , codes. Rachel dresses her poses with feminine gestures, flirtatious glances, and pouting lips. Bev descends the stairs onto the stage to the theme music of 2001: A Space Odyssey (in other words, Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra) and announces a new era. Her poses are those of classic male Greek Olympic statuary, interspersed with studied and awkward attempts to walk seductively, the latter pasted on like her incongruous string bikini. Most telling, perhaps, is her pose as an ancient archer: Bev is a modern-day Amazon. If Jared Diamond looks forward to a day when confident fathers will breast-feed their children as readily as women have for millennia, Bev Francis longs for a time when she will not be constrained by the cultural meaning of the breast. “Despite the eªorts of a ‘pioneer’ like Bev Francis, the standard of femininity, while expanded and ‘liberalized,’ remains tied to the breast function and...