Let’s Talk About SEX!
S is for substantial – no porn
E is for experimental, explorative and hopefully entertaining
X is for [insert sexual fantasy or tabu]
If you’re not a parent or haven’t spent much time around young parents in your teenage or after, chances you know (actually know) anything about breastmilk are small. I myself only realized this after I started working as an au pair (a live-in nanny) for a year. Two months after I arrived, the family’s third child was born and I started learning things that I had never thought or even known about. Nipple pads, anyone? When I recently stumbled upon the documentary Breastmilk on Netflix, I was immediately intrigued by the title and description – basically, my new knowledge had made me thirsty (ha!) for even more.
The first third of the documentary is not all that compelling; filmed in a low-budget style reminiscent of a better reality show, the narrative focusses on different women before and after the birth of their first child. We follow their individual issues or conflicts with breastfeeding and get to know their significant others. After a while, the film introduces more experts, other couples with young babies and bit after bit addresses some of the tabus and concerns around breastfeeding, which is when it gets really interesting. For example, a lesbian couple explains how both of them are breastfeeding their baby. Having seen and read many stories that take place in the middle ages, the job of a wet nurse had always confused me – but I had never researched it. I guess I had just assumed that these were women that had babies and then continued to stimulate their breasts. However, the film explains how women can lactate under certain circumstances even if they’re not new parents and have never been.
Apparently, there are so many themes connected to breastfeeding that sometimes, it feels like the film can’t even dig deep enough into any of them. This is something I definitely didn’t expect. I like to think that I didn’t live under a rock for the past 20 years but nevertheless, I had never heard about lactation fetish and porn. I also didn’t know that lactating women can involuntarily spray milk during sex, especially when orgasming. These and many other tabus and themes are addressed by the people that are interviewed in the film. Director Dana Ben-Ari has a good intuition for pacing and editing and knows just how to surprise her audience both subtly and blatantly. Interestingly, some non-interview sequences are completely stylized; well-filmed and scored by opera music, they made me wish that the rest of the film was just half as aesthetic.
Despite some of the visual flaws, Breastmilk is a controversial and thought-provoking documentary on a topic that has remained mystical for too long. It doesn’t judge any of the people in it or any of their opinions and simply lets its audience observe and think for themselves. In the end, it will trigger at least a handful of google searches on your part, which is what a good documentary should. Disclaimer: Put your browser into incognito mode if you plan on googling lactation porn.