There’s a lot that confuses and fascinates me about nipples.

Foremost: Genesis. If it’s true that God made man in his, or His, image, why the nipples? And, as far as I can glean, God made woman second from Adam’s rib, and, presumably, made her in Adam’s image, apparently because Adam was bored. Bored in paradise? Not a very good paradise, was it? Now it makes at least a little bit of sense if God created woman first. I could understand giving Adam nipples, if Adam came after Eve. But that’s not the way Genesis would have it. Genesis says she will be called Woman because Woman came out of Man. Who thinks this way?

Scientifically, it also makes more sense the other way around. We are all females first. That is, as embryos, each of us is female. Not quite half of us are assailed by the Y chromosome but we were female first. A chromosome, like a telephone, is one of those things where I know quite well what it does but I have no idea how it does it. It always seemed to me that women with the XX were more perfect, or at least purer, than the male m駘ange of XY.

Ok. This is something I’ve just learned and it horrifies me. Perhaps everybody knew this already or perhaps people, other people, are far more mature than I am. Men can lactate. Insert shudder here. I had no idea. And it freaks me out. Evidently men have all the necessary parts to lactate we just don’t. But that we don’t doesn’t mean that we can’t. We can. The male nipple has fully functional breast tissue.

Now I don’t know how women feel about this and I don’t know how other men feel about this but I’ve lived my life in the peaceful ignorance of thinking that my nipples were mostly decoration. Sure, they’re erogenous but that doesn’t disturb me. All sorts of parts of my body are hard wired to my libido. But I was happy in the thought that my tits were decoration, as innocuous as ribbons on a present. But now that I know that they are fully functional lactating machines, I’m freaked out. I keep waking up in the night to check to make sure they’re dry.

In cases of prolonged hormonal upset there have been instances of male lactation. Steroid abusers are the most likely to, um, leak. There is evidence that starvation activates a hormone called prolactin which can cause men to lactate. This might be useful to know. If I’m ever trapped somewhere and dying I can sustain myself by expressing my own milk. But I think I’d rather just die. Insert another shudder. This one longer and complete with tortured grimace.

There is also some anecdotal evidence that men can lactate by a combination of prolonged stimulation (another shudder) and, evidently, positive thinking. I don’t want to offend anybody’s choices here, and, yes, it might be that I just need to grow up, but Jesus. Yikes. I have a face as if I’ve just stubbed my toe. To read about one person’s experience, visit milkmen. (Shudder.)

Triple Nipples. Finding information about triple nipples is very tricky. There seems to be no consensus of information. I found four different stats: 20%, 10%, 2% and 1%. It seems to be agreed that triple nipples occur more often in men. Odd that the gender that doesn’t use its nipples (but could, shudder), should get more more often. Having more than two nipples is also called superfluous nipples, supernumerary nipples, and polythelia. It became an obsession to find out if there is a word for the condition of having only one nipple but I could find no such word. If anybody knows what the word is, please let me know. I took a guess at monothelia but there seems to be no such word. A monothelite is a member of a religious sect which has, as far as I could discover, nothing to do with nipples. It also became an obsession to find out if there is a word for the surgery that removes a third nipple, but again no luck. The internet is a wealth of knowledge and porn but I can’t find very much about nipple aberrations. Could it be that no one else cares about nipple aberrations? A trio of famous polythelites (not the religious sect): Marky Mark, Krusty the Klown, and Bill Paxton.

Can men lactate?
Female embryos
So You Want to Lactate?
The Third Nipple

SS