Cattle-star gallactica: A brief look at ‘hucow’ fetishism

According to the online Urban Dictionary, a ‘hucow’ (a portmanteau of ‘human cow’) is “a woman who chooses to be objectified for her large mammaries and ability to lactate constantly”. It also features ‘human cow’ separately and defines it as “a lactating female who allows herself to have her jugs [breasts] hooked up to a cow milking machine, usually wearing a cow mask and cow print leather chaps”. In the writing of my previous blogs on lactation fetishes and furries, I had come across ‘hucow’ fetishism but at the time there was little on which to write about. A few weeks ago, I was interviewed by Mark Hay of Vice magazine who wanted my views about the behaviour so this provided a spur for me to write this article. There is obviously nothing in the academic literature concerning the phenomenon (and to be honest, little anywhere else). A small article on the Kinkly website makes the following observations:

“A hucow is a submissive person, usually a woman, who enjoys participating in forced lactation. A hucow’s breasts are milked by a dominant partner, usually a man, as a real cow is milked by a farmer. Milking techniques can vary…A dominant partner may use a variety of techniques to milk a hucow. They may milk her by hand, by suckling her breasts with their mouth, or by using a breast pump. Some hucows and their partners stick to one preferred technique while others like to mix things up. Some people become hucows following childbirth, when they are lactating naturally. Others bring on lactation using a variety of techniques including using a breast pump, manual stimulation, suckling, and taking supplements including fenugreek powder”.

It’s hard to know where the person writing this article got their information although my own viewing of online hucow videos confirm much of what is claimed above although it’s questionable whether the women in such videos “enjoy” what they are doing because they may just be doing it for money. The article goes on to say:

“Hucows enjoy being cared for like a pet because it takes them away from their regular lives with adult responsibilities. The breast stimulation that comes with lactating is also very sensual. Men with hucows enjoy the dominance and power that comes from their role in the forced lactation. When women lactate, their breasts increase in size, which is also a real perk for many men. Some men also have breastfeeding fetishes and lactation fetishes that their hucows can satisfy. As with many alternative lifestyles, there are communities for hucows and erotic fiction and videos focused on their activities. Several erotic writers and bloggers focus their works on hucows. Their writing might include fictional accounts and scenarios or non-fiction posts about their own experiences as a hucow. Hucows are also represented on niche dating websites, including Fetlife, and social media platforms like Reddit and Tumblr”.

Again, some of this I’ve confirmed for myself as I found many examples of hucow fan fiction online as well as many porn sites catering for hucow fetishism. Another short article on the Manic Love website was written after its anonymous author was reading through the personal ads on Craig’s List and came across a personal ad that “depicted a cow milking machine on a woman and turned into someone’s personal hucow”. They wrote that:

“As you can imagine, a hucow is a woman pantomiming the experiences of a dairy cow. These particular women’s vaginas gush at the thought of having a slave collar put on their neck and having a milking machine hooked up to their nipples for hours at a time. Another facet of this fetish is the concept of breeding the hucows by the hucow milker. This is when the hucows partner (the Bull) mounts her and begins to [have sex with her]. All the while this lovely faux bovine is attached to an industrial device that is collecting her milk from the opened faucets of her [breasts]. The hucow fetish is a marvellous fusion of BDSM and lactation kinks”.

Again, how the writer knows the women involved like such activity is unknown. The author found a personal testimony from a hucow (a “baby-faced blonde with a curvy figure” called ‘Kate’) who described her hucow experiences:

“Once lactation had been induced on Katie the milking began. At first she used a simple breast pump to wring her mammary glands dry, but once Katie was used to the sensation of the pump she graduated to a milking machine that would be at home on a dairy farm. Katie related the sensation she felt while being milked…At first it was uncomfortable but the feeling grew on our dear Katie and before long she loved being a hucow. With the machine being attached to Katie’s nipples for hours she described how her nipples were becoming elongated – all the better for suckling… not only was her milking erotic but it also gave her a sensation of relief. Whenever a milking session was occurring Katie was always restrained; whether handcuffed to a rack or wearing a slave collar…Once the Bull [has sex with] Katie they begin to treat each other like true animals. They begin to rut like they belong on a farm”.

I was contacted by Mark Hay (with whom I’ve done various interviews in the past including ones on sea monster pornography, giantess pornography) who knew I’d written about lactation fetishes in my blog in the past. He asked me if I had ever come across hucow fetishes where “individuals fantasize about or play out scenes in which (usually) men treat (usually) women as livestock, forcibly milking them. Sometimes the women dress up like cows”. I told him that I had but that I’d never written about it. I told him that from a definitional perspective, ‘hucow’ fetishes were originally was the same thing as lactation fetishes. However, I told him that hucow fetishes now appeared to have expanded to include women dressing and/or acting like cows in which the milking was at the core of the fetish. I went on to say that this was not a type of furryism (where individuals dress up as animals and often have sex with other as animals) but was more akin to ‘pony play‘ because both ‘ponyplay’ and ‘hucow’ tend to have women in submissive modes and both have the animals’ most well-known type of behaviour at the heart of the fetish (i.e., milking in cows and riding/equestrianism in horses).

I was aware that there is a big niche market for this type of porn (even on mainstream porn sites like Pornhub). He was interested to hear that I thought the fetish had evolved and asked me (i) when, how, or why that might have happened, and (ii) whether I thought the fetish was especially visible, accessible, or common, and what that might say about the audience for it and the scale of its appeal. I have to admit I hadn’t many answers for these questions. I also had to clarify that I didn’t say the fetish had evolved but the definition of hucow had evolved (in my view, a subtle but important distinction). I believe the internet itself has played a major role in the dispersal of material that individuals can fetishise and hucow appears to be one of them. Most fetishes appear to have sub-divisions and at the edges they sometimes cross over into completely different fetishes. Hucow fetishism clearly has crossovers with lactation fetishism, pregnancy fetishism, infantilism/diaper fetishism (adults dressing up as a baby), transformation fetishism, and sadomasochism/BDSM, as well as having similarities with furries and ponyplay. Personally, I don’t believe it’s a common fetish because individuals have to go looking for it (as I did in researching this article).

Within five minutes of searching on the internet I located dedicated hucow porn (including material at sites including Pornhub, Heavy-R, Xvideos) as well as bespoke hucow fiction (Kobo, Literotica, and Amazon) and fantasy art (on Deviant Art). Hay’s article in Vice reported that the hucow Tumblr site has over 10,000 followers and that the hucow Reddit site has over 23,000 subscribers. Hay interviewed ‘Ed’, the person that runs the hucows.com website. According to Hay:

“[Ed] says his fans seem most excited by women being milked than anything else in his clips. Ditto Sally Anon, an amateur lactation fetish producer, who first encountered HuCow fetishists on lactophilia Reddit communities, who asked her to cross-post to their groups even though she didn’t dress up or act like a cow in the content she produced”.

In addition to interviewing me for the article. Hay also interviewed the ethicist Rebecca Kukla who has written about cultural perceptions of breastfeeding and made some interesting observations. She was quoted as saying:

“Lactation, of course, leads to increased breast size, which explains its appeal to some. Some women enjoy the breast stimulation of milking, so such fetishes are likely to be more about reciprocal pleasure than many others. Consuming breast milk plays into a common kinky urge to be infantilized. Perhaps most importantly, sexualizing something culturally asexual is an appealing form of transgression and re-appropriation. Many kinksters get erotic pleasure from playing at what they fear most, or find most violating of the proper order…[However] cows aren’t only good for milk production. They are the ultimate animals produced specifically for consumption, bred into highly artificial-looking consumer products. In HuCow, the cow-woman is simulating an object produced specifically to be consumed by her partner”.

This concurs with what I have written myself about why dominant and submissive types may enjoy hucow fetishism. As noted in my previous blogs, animal play in general often toys with transforming a complex human into a wholly service-oriented beast. Hay then goes on to say:

“As with many hard submissive fetishes, this may sound terrifying to those looking in from the outside. But even on their own fetishist-facing blogs, HuCow practitioners often acknowledge this is a well-negotiated fantasy, ideally built on mutual respect and desire in participants’ wider lives”.

Hay also quotes Sunny Megatron, an “adult sexuality educator and pleasure advocate” who asserts:

“Remember this is just fantasy role play where turning humans into fantasy cattle is fetishized. And just like any other kind of BDSM or fetish play, this is carefully negotiated by all participants and done consensually. Treating a woman – or anybody – as just a mere object is very wrong if it’s done without their consent. But if objectification is mutually desired by both partners, they’ve thoroughly and clearly talked about it ahead of time and then they play it out in a healthy fun fantasy sense, then that’s different…When BDSM scenes are negotiated they are done so according to the desires and limits of the submissive. The submissive calls the shots”.

As I know from my own empirical studies on eproctophilia (sexual arousal from flatulence) and dacryphilia (sexual arousal from crying), even within very niche fetishes, many sub-types start to develop and cross-fertilise with other more established fetishes and paraphilias, and hucow fetishism appears to be another niche sexual behaviour that (with the help of the internet) is continuing to evolve.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Good Reads (2014). Definition of a Hucow. Goodreads.com, October 3. Located at: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/7114274-definition-of-a-hucow

Greenhill, R. & Griffiths, M.D. (2015). Compassion, dominance/submission, and curled lips: A thematic analysis of dacryphilic experience. International Journal of Sexual Health, 27, 337-350.

Greenhill, R. & Griffiths, M.D. (2016). Sexual interest as performance, intellect and pathological dilemma: A critical discursive case study of dacryphilia. Psychology and Sexuality, 7, 265-278.

Griffiths, M.D. (2012). The use of online methodologies in studying paraphilias: A review. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 1, 143-150.

Griffiths, M.D. (2013). Eproctophilia in a young adult male: A case study. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 42, 1383-1386.

Hay, M. (2018). Inside HuCow, the fetish that imagines women as cows. Vice, April 24. Located at: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3599y/inside-hucow-the-fetish-that-imagines-women-as-cows

Kinkly (2018). Kinkly explains Hucow. Kinkly.com. Located at: https://www.kinkly.com/definition/15836/hucow

Manic Love (2017). Learn about hucows. October 12. Located at: https://maniclove.com/free-blog/hucows

Sowing the seeds of love: A brief look at impregnation fetishes

In a previous blog I examined maieusiophilia that according to Dr. Anil Aggrawal’s 2009 book Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices, is defined as gaining sexual arousal from pregnant women and /or female childbirth. However, other sources define maieusiophilia more broadly to include sexual attraction to women who also appear pregnant, attraction to lactation and/or attraction to particular stages of pregnancy from impregnation through to childbirth. This blog briefly examines impregnation fetishes that may or may not (depending upon the definition used) be a sub-type of maieusiophilia.

In researching this article I was unable to locate a single academic paper that had examined impregnation fetishes (not even a passing reference) so all of this blog is based on non-academic (and mainly online) sources. The following three definitions – not identical but all having overlaps – were found on the Kinkipedia website, the online Free Dictionary, and the Psychology Wiki website:

• “Impregnation fetish is where an individual (generally a male) has a fetish for impregnating someone, with this end result being all they think of during the act of sex. Similarly related fetishes would involve an individual having a sexual interest in pregnant women, or in some cases even having a fetish for being pregnant themselves” (Kinkopedia)
• “Impregnation fantasies are characterized by the arousal or gratification from the possibility, consequences or risk of impregnation through unprotected vaginal sex. Impregnation fantasies are often indulged by reading erotic literature and role playing with a partner” (Free Dictionary)
• “An impregnation fetish is a paraphilia characterized by arousal or gratification from the possibility or risk of impregnation through unprotected vaginal sex. Those with an impregnation fetish may indulge in their fantasy through erotic stories, chat with like-minded persons or actually act out the fantasy with a partner. Role-playing is often a large part of this sexual fetish, as many do not actually wish to have a child but rather are aroused by the possibility during intercourse. Responsibility for birth control in this case is usually accepted by the female, as condom use destroys the impregnation fantasy” (Psychology Wiki)

The Psychology Wiki also claims that impregnation fetish should not be confused with maiesiophilia because people that have a “pure” impregnation fetish are only interested in conception, and “have no interest in a woman who is already pregnant, as there is no possibility of impregnating her”. However, the article does go on to say that “a number of impregnation fetishists are aroused by pregnant women as well, and indulge in pregnant sex or pregnant sex fantasy as part of their gratification” (although I have no idea on what evidence such an assertion is made, even though it appears to have good face validity). In a short article on pregnancy fetishism at the Heart and Soul Midwifery website, it argues that “there are no particular or preferred elements within maiesiophilia that are common to all maiesiophiliacs”. This would at least suggest that the thought of impregnation alone might be enough for impregnation fetishes to be a sub-type of maiesiophilia.

Having spent an idle Sunday afternoon scouring lots of ‘adult’ websites in the name of research for this article, I am in no doubt that there is a niche market for impregnation fetishes. There are a number of dedicated websites that cater specifically for such fetishists, the most popular (at least in terms of number of visitors) appears to be the ImpregNation website. There are also general fetish sites (such as the Dark Fetish website) that contain dedicated groups such as the ‘Breeding and Forced Impregnation’ group. There are also a number of dedicated erotic fiction websites and blogs that have dedicated impregnation fetish stories such as the Kristen Archives and Breeder’s Erotica (please be warned that if you click on the hyperlinks they feature words and pictures of sexual activity). For instance:

“Breeder’s Erotica is a blog which has a high-focus on the idea of ‘Breeders’, dominant men inseminating breedee women. The webmistress Kitty has compiled tons of high-end pictures, videos, articles, and has her story universes ‘The Farm’ and ‘The Colony” posted for your viewing pleasure”.

I also visited lots of online forums and found dozens of people admitting that they had an impregnation fetish. While I can’t guarantee the veracity of the claims, they appeared genuine and heartfelt to me. Here is a selection:

• Extract 1: “Lately I have been thinking about getting impregnated more and more and it turned into a deep obsession for me. It appeals to me on so many different levels. For one I’d love to have a family and kids but I also find pregnancy highly erotic and I want to make the experience but I also want to get used by a strong man who would take me and fill me with his seed”
• Extract 2: “I am 24 [years of age and female] and I know my biological clock is ticking but for four or so years now I have had an extreme interest in sex that would get me pregnant. I DONT actually want to GET pregnant, I just like thinking about it when I’m having sex with my [boyfriend]. Do any other girls think like this??”
• Extract 3: “One of my first [role-playing] experiences was part of a ‘knocked up’ fetish. I was role-playing with a guy that I thought just had a pregnancy fetish but turns out he was more interested in the actual aspect of making me pregnant, which was fine. We role-played a fantasy where he got me pregnant, but sadly it ended there. His fantasy was just the knocking up part, after all – mine was the actual being pregnant part. Oh well… still an interesting experience”
• Extract 4: “Pregnancy/impregnation role-play. Any takers? Please be 18-26 years old…. Looking for a MAN to do this with…maybe girls”.
• Extract 5: “I’m 19 and have thoughts about [impregnation] a lot. It makes me feel like a mindless animal but at the same time entices me. Am I too young to be thinking like this? I’m a guy”.
• Extract 6: “I’m 22 and very passionate. I’d love to impregnate someone. The thought drives me insane, I just want your legs wrapped around me pulling me in. I want to feel that wanted and desired to make someone a mommy. I’d do anything for that, even if it’s role play”
• Extract 7: “Well I’m a girl who has this weird [impregnation] fetish that I have only met a few other guys who have it, but never any women. I wish to know how common it is for both women and men, what the reasons are for developing such a fetish, and how to help with how ashamed I feel”
• Extract 8: “I’m 21 and live in Sydney but I’ve had these irrepressible [impregnation] desires and fantasies probably since when I was around 17…I love sex and intimacy, the feeling of touching and exploring each other’s body and my ultimate desire of laying with a young, fertile woman who can conceive my children. I’ve got an extreme desire when I am and not sleeping with a woman to impregnate them, to breed them and just deposit as much semen as possible inside her to guarantee probability of conception…I have no child yet but I want to see a woman carrying my baby and seeing it grow inside her”.
• Extract 9: “I got a bad fetish for impregnation [seriously]. It first started almost seven years when I read this story on Kristin’s Impregnation Forum about impregnating women and I ended up making a Yahoo name and contacting women with a fake name. This led to meeting several women and I impregnated one of them…This only emboldened me and led me to knocking up three more women…I am currently seeing a girl who is about to move back home and I feel like I should knock her up. Is this insane?”
• Extract 10: “I love the animalistic nature of thinking of getting pregnant, like being told ‘I’m filling you with my seed’ or ‘I want to breed with you’ really gets me excited. I don’t want children in the slightest, but sperm and egg diagrams in doctor’s offices will turn me on. I’m embarrassed to be like this especially as a woman and having no desire to have a child, like I’m unworthy of liking the thought of pregnancy because I don’t actually want to be pregnant. I only feel excited when I believe the guy actually wants to breed with me…The intense need I feel for having no contraceptives is a big part of what worries me because I’ve developed a hatred for condoms and an aversion to birth control. Most guys I tell this to think I’m weird or a needy baby-crazed lady, though my fetish has nothing to do with having a living being inside me”
• Extract 11: “I’m a 20 year-old woman and I think I’m crazy. I have a fetish that revolves around pregnancy. I get massively turned on by the idea of getting pregnant. I also get turned on by the idea of my sexual partner sucking on my breasts and drinking my milk. In my deepest fantasies I am a perpetually pregnant woman who exists for no other purpose than to be knocked up and milked by anyone who cares to breed me. Basically, a broodmare. This fantasy is beyond degrading to women and I hate that I have it. I also should point out that I am totally infertile (I had a hysterectomy when I was in my very early teens), so I will never actually be pregnant in my life. What should I do? Am I insane?”

Based on the many accounts that I read, it would appear that both young men and women can have impregnation fetishes but there was little to explain the etiology. On the Is It Normal? website, 15 out of 16 people that participated in a discussion thread on impregnation fetishes said that such fetishes are ‘normal’. In fact one discussion participant went as far as to claim “If you look like it from an evolutionary point of view, it’s probably the most normal fetish thinkable” that certainly has some face validity. Unfortunately, we can only speculate as to how such fetishes develop. Most fetishistic behaviour begins in childhood or adolescence and many appear to be rooted in early associative pairings (e.g., classical conditioning). There is no reason to suggest that is not the case here, but few of the accounts I came across mentioned early formative experiences. The jury is still out on whether impregnation fetishes are a sub-type of pregnancy fetishism but my own reading is that they may overlap within individuals but are two separate phenomena.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Aggrawal A. (2009). Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Bastion Works (2012). Maieusiophilia. Located at: http://bastionworks.com/Mikipedia/index.php?title=Maieusiophilia

Gates, K. (1999). Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex. Juno Books.

Kinkipedia (2013). Impregnation fetishes. January 21. Located at: http://kinkipedia.wikidot.com/wiki:impregnation-fetish

Psychology Wiki Impregnation fetish. Located at: http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Impregnation_fetish

Wikipedia (2012). Pregnancy fetishism. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy_fetishism

Bosom buddies: A brief look at breast fetishism

Over the last year, I have received more than a dozen emails (all male) asking why I have not written a blog on ‘breast fetishism’. The main reason I have resisted writing such a blog is that it’s hard to determine where normal love of breasts ends and abnormal love of breasts begins. It won’t surprise anyone reading this that when it comes to male sexual arousal, female breasts are at the top of many men’s lists as the body part they find most sexually attractive. According to Dr. Anil Aggrawal in his book Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices, the sexual paraphilia of being aroused by female breasts is mammagymnophilia or mazophilia and comprises “a pronounced fetishistic sexual interest in the female breasts, their shape, movement, and especially their size”. He goes on to write that:

“[Breast fetishism is] also known as mastofact or breast partialism, it refers to an exclusive or almost exclusive reliance on breasts as a stimulus for sexual arousal. It is such a predominant feature of sexuality in the U.S., that Molly Haskell, a feminist and author from the USA, went as far as to say that ‘the mammary fixation is the most infantile and the most American of the sex fetishes’. British zoologist and ethologist Desmond Morris sees breast fetishism as a prime example of biosemiotics, by which human sexuality is influenced through signaling”.

While doing my undergraduate degree I did a project on the psychology of female orgasm and read almost every paper and book that I could on sexuality and female sexuality. I read Desmond Morris’ book The Naked Ape and was very interested in Morris’ theories on sexual signalling. If memory serves me, Morris argued that women’s breasts had evolved to look like female buttocks as humans had slowly changed the way they had sex from males mounting females from the rear to face-to-face sex. In the 1998 book Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology: Ideas, Issues, and Applications by Charles Crawford and Dennis Krebs (1998) it was theorized that humans’ permanently enlarged breasts allows females to “solicit male attention and investment even when they are not really fertile”. These hypotheses was also mentioned in the 2012 book The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction but rejected by the authors. Young and Alexander wrote:

“Biologically speaking the human male’s obsession with breasts is pretty weird. Men are the only male mammals fascinated by breasts in a sexual context. And women are the only female mammals whose breasts become enlarged at puberty, independent of pregnancy. We are also the only species in which males caress, massage and even orally stimulate the female breasts during foreplay and sex. Boys don’t learn on the playground that breasts are something that they should be interested in. It’s biological and deeply engrained in our brain. Man’s obsession with breasts is an unconscious evolutionary drive that helps humans forge loving, nurturing bonds”.

In fact, Young and Alexander forward a more biological explanation and went on to claim that it was oxytocin that best explained why women had developed breasts:

“When a woman gives birth, her newborn will engage in some pretty elaborate manipulations of its mother’s breasts. This stimulation sends signals along nerves and into the brain. There, the signals trigger the release of a neurochemical called oxytocin from the brain’s hypothalamus. This oxytocin release eventually stimulates smooth muscles in a woman’s breasts to eject milk, making it available to her nursing baby. But oxytocin release has other effects, too. When released at the baby’s instigation, the attention of the mother focuses on her baby. The infant becomes the most important thing in the world. Oxytocin and dopamine act together to help ‘imprint’ the newborn’s face, smell and sounds into the mother’s reward circuitry, making breastfeeding and nurturing a pleasurable experience that will motivate her to keep doing those activities to strengthen the mother-infant bond. This bond is not only the most beautiful of all social bonds, it can also be the most enduring, lasting a lifetime. When a lover touches, massages or nibbles a woman’s breasts, it sparks the same process of brain events as nursing.  Humans are also among the very few animals that have sexual intercourse face-to-face, looking into each other’s eyes. This quirk in human sexuality has evolved to exploit the ancient mother-infant bonding brain circuitry as a way to help form bonds between lovers. Because the release of oxytocin forces the brain’s attention to a partner’s face, smell and voice, the combination of oxytocin release during breast stimulation, and the increase of dopamine from the pleasure of foreplay and face-to-face sex, helps to forge an association of the lover’s face and eyes with the pleasurable feelings, building a bond in the women’s brain”

I was surprised to find there had been little empirical research on the role of breast and nipple stimulation in influencing sexual arousal during sex. In 2006, Dr. Roy Levin and Dr. Cindy Meston published a paper in the Journal of Sexual Medicine and claimed that there had never been a study that questioned people about breasts and sexual arousal. Consequently, Levin and Meston surveyed 301 “sexually experienced undergraduates” (148 males and 153 females mostly between the ages of 18 and 22). The authors reported:

“81.5% [of women] reported that stimulation of their nipples/ breasts caused or enhanced their sexual arousal, 78.2% agreed that when sexually aroused such manipulation increased their arousal, 59.1% had asked to have their nipples stimulated during lovemaking, and only 7.2% found that the manipulation decreased their arousal. In regard to the men, 51.7% reported that nipple stimulation caused or enhanced their sexual arousal, 39% agreed that when sexually aroused such manipulation increased their arousal, only 17.1% had asked to have their nipples stimulated, and only 7.5% found that such stimulation decreased their arousal”.

When it comes to breast fetishism, it could be argued that there are many different sub-types. Reading Dr. Aggrawal’s book alone there are many other types of sexual activity surrounding the fetishizing of the breast. This includes lactophilia (arousal from lactating breasts), oenosugia (pouring wine over female breasts and licking it off), mazophallating (the rubbing of the penis between breasts, and also know as coitus a mammilla), mazoperosis (sexual gratification from mutilating of female breasts – arguably the most extreme form of what Dr. Aggrawal describes as “tit torture, the sexual gratification from any of several erotic BDSM activities focusing solely on inflicting pain on the breast, nipples, and areola”), and ‘downblousing’:

“[Downblousing] is a variant of voyeurism where the voyeur is attracted to women bending downward so he can view their breasts down their shirt or blouse. Viewing a woman’s breast while sitting on a. higher level than the woman is also downblousing. A good example is a person sitting on first floor of a restaurant, viewing the breasts of an unsuspecting woman sitting on the ground floor taking surreptitious photographs, especially with camera-enabled cell phones, is also common among voyeurs. Many times, these photographs are then posted on the Internet for all to see. Many nations and jurisdictions have now outlawed downblousing”.

There are also other sexual behaviours that may (or may not) involve breasts as the focus of sexual arousal. For instance, anaclitism refers to “the sexual enjoyment arising from activities, or being exposed to objects normally associated with childhood (e.g., toilet training, breast sucking, playing with dolls)”. One breast-focused sexual fetish not mentioned by Dr. Aggrawal at all is ‘breast expansion fetishism’. According to the Nation Master website:

“Breast expansion fetishism is a sexual fetish characterized by pronounced sexual fantasies involving a woman whose breasts enlarge, either gradually or suddenly, sometimes to gargantuan proportions. Breast expansion fetishism may manifest as a form of inflation fetishism. Many breast expansion fetishists are fascinated by the processes by which women’s breasts can become larger, whether from age progression, pregnancy, weight gain or surgery. It is not uncommon for them to examine closely the careers of adult and mainstream entertainers and their increasing, or decreasing, bust sizes…Many breast-expansion fetishists are morphers. A morph is a photograph, an artwork, an animation which uses morphing techniques to expand a woman’s breasts”.

In the name of research I went onto Google Scholar and unsurprisingly turned up little academic. However, I was surprised to find many breast expansion sites including websites like the Big Breast Expansion, Overflowing Bra, Breast Expansion Grove (with lots of links to other breast expansion websites) and Boob Growth (please be warned these sites are sexually explicit if you click on the links) as well as sites like Literotica with a dedicated breast expansion page of fan fiction. Breast expansion is also very popular in both Manga and Anime cartoons.

I also found various first-person accounts of young adult males admitting to having such fetishes:

“I have a breast expansion fetish. No matter what, I always find myself coming back to this. In so many ways it’s amazing. Slowly, suddenly, sporadically, I like to see them grow. But I have my limits of when it gets stupidly huge (bigger than their body size). But I also have a thing of [breast expansion] on myself, like to be gender changed, then added in bigger boobs. I have been off and on with this stuff for years” (MD12, The Experience Project).

“I am searching for help and I hope I could find it here. My problem is…I have a breast expansion fetish. I [get an] erection when I [see] female breasts are growing. It started when I had seen [the] film ‘The Adventures of Pluto Nash’ in hospital. Since [then I am] always looking [for] comics, videos and pictures with growing breasts. Now I am 18 years old, I have marvelous girlfriend and we love each other. I told her about my problem and understand it, but she has forbidden me to masturbate on growing breasts…We have awesome sex but I still want to watch growing breasts. And don’t know what to do now. I don’t wont to lie, and masturbate when I [am] alone, and I don’t know how to beat this fetish. Often I am imagining [my girlfriend] with growing breasts…I hope you can help me”. (Joishi, PsychForums)

I also found what I thought was an article on the psychology of breast expansion but it was a male on the Overflowing Forum trying to analyse his own behaviour (but I found it of interest). Unfortunately, the original post has disappeared but I managed to cut and paste the self-analysis before it disappeared:

“I´m very interested in the psychology of breast expansion fetish – my obsession. I think the expansion aspect is one of many others. I like expansion stuff, but as a category it does not seem meaningful. To me, these aspects are of relevance (i) deviance [standing out from the norm], sensuality [a focus on the physical body], and emotional sensitivity [for symbolic power and interpersonal processes]. First, I´m generally attracted to stuff that defies the norm, like Lady Gaga and Beth Ditto or Slayer, the Marquis de Sade, monster movies. Second: I am fascinated by the body/mind duality of the human existence…Prominent flesh puts the focus on the body, the animal aspect of our being. And prominent breasts especially have sexual and/or nurturing connotations. Third, body parts can be seen [as] anatomical, but also on a symbolic level, they can be a means to express and execute power over others, or they can be presented as a gift – craving, desire, attention, power…a certain tension, an emotional disbalance is important for me. Big breasts can be just a nuisance for a girl or woman – for good reasons – or something they hardly care about, and then they lose most of their erotic power they could have on me”.

Like many other sexual paraphilias I have written about (such as macrophilia, microphilia, exophilia, and vorarephilia), much of the breast expansion community appears to base a lot of the online activity around fan fiction and fan art. As the Nation Master article on breast expansion notes:

“Breast expansion stories are often fantastical tales of women’s busts being enlarged by air, food, magic, medicine, alien technology or some other unseen force. Generally, the amount of enlargement is limited only by the imagination of the author, from as little as a cup size to as big as room-filling and beyond. Occasionally, there are other types of fetishes included in these stories, such as lactation, anthropomorphism, giantess, transgender, body inflation, penis expansion, or any of the processes under the umbrella term transformation fetish. Stories and pictures associated with breast expansion sometimes contain vivid depictions of sexual activity, but it is not a necessity of the fetish” 

This brief overview has highlighted that when it comes to breast fetishism and its many variants, that there is surprisingly little scientific research.

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Aggrawal A. (2009). Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Crawford, C. & Krebs, D, (1998). How Mate Choice Shaped Human Nature. Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology: Ideas, Issues, and Applications. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,

Levin, R. J. (2006). The breast/nipple/areola complex and human sexuality. Sexual and Relationship Therapy, 21, 237-249

Levin, R., & Meston, C. (2006). Nipple/breast stimulation and sexual arousal in young men and women. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 3(3), 450-454.

Nation Master (2014). Breast expansion fetish. Located at: http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Breast-expansion-fetish

Wikipedia (2014). Breast fetishism. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_fetishism

Young, L. & Alexander, B. (2012). The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction. London: Penguin.

When push comes to love: A brief look at childbirth fetishism

In a previous blog, I examined maieusiophilia a sexual paraphilia and/or fetish in which an individual derives sexual pleasure and sexual arousal from particular aspects of human female pregnancy. In his book Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices, Dr. Anil Aggrawal defines maieusiophilia as gaining sexual arousal from pregnant women and/or female childbirth. However, other sources define maieusiophilia more broadly to include sexual attraction to women who also appear pregnant, attraction to lactation and/or attraction to particular stages of pregnancy from impregnation through to childbirth. It is this latter aspect (i.e., childbirth) that today’s blog briefly examines. It was while I was researching that previous blog that I came across various online admissions like the following:

Extract 1: “I don’t know why but I find myself turned on by women giving birth. I am sure I am not a maieusophile (i.e. those who have a fetish for pregnant women), but I have a fetish for the childbirth process itself. I enjoy watching births and the more uncomfortable it is for the mothers, I like it more…I am also a female and straight. I have a boyfriend, and I am looking forward to marrying him and having kids with him in the future. I am excited to experience childbirth also”

Extract 2: “I do have one fetish I have that I guess you could consider sort-of sexual, and I don’t normally tell people about that one, but I have a pregnancy/childbirth fetish.  I feel aroused, I guess you could say, when one of those two topics are brought into play, but I would never, ever want to have sex with a pregnant woman or be pregnant myself. I don’t want kids and I have no desire to even be touched by anybody, much less have sex”

Extract 3: “Do some guys get sexually turned on by watching childbirth (of their wife)? Is it much different than just watching a video of it? I’ve heard it can be the woman’s biggest orgasm”.

There are also dedicated websites that provide links to fetish pictures and stories of childbirth. I included the third extract because in my research for this article, I did keep coming across stories where women were claiming that childbirth was the ‘strongest’ orgasm that they had ever had. There was even a television documentary on the topic simply called Orgasmic Birth that was first transmitted in January 2008 and reported in the New York Times. The documentary was made by Debra Pasacli-Bonaro – a childbirth educator – who poses the question: ‘What would happen if women were taught to enjoy birth rather than endure it?’ She says the primary message of her film is that women can “journey through labor and birth” in a variety of different ways and that giving birth can be a positive and pleasurable experience rather than a painful one. Pascal-Brown was quoted as saying:

“I hope women watching and men watching don’t feel that what we’re saying is every woman should have an orgasmic birth. [The film reveals] the best kept secret [of child birth] – that some women report having an orgasm as the baby exits the birth canal”

The film also features Dr. Christine Northrup author of the 2010 book Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom who claims that orgasms during childbirth are the results of chemistry and anatomy. More specifically, she claims that:

“When the baby’s coming down the birth canal, remember, it’s going through the exact same positions as something going in, the penis going into the vagina, to cause an orgasm. And labor itself is associated with a huge hormonal change in the body, way more prolactin, way more oxytocin, way more beta-endorphins — these are the molecules of ecstasy”.

As far as I am aware, there is no empirical research on the fetishized aspects of childbirth but I did come across an interesting paper on the pornography of childbirth by Dr. Robyn Longhurst in the journal ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies. The paper focused on the moral issues surrounding the case of New Zealand ‘adult actress’ and former stripper Nikki Devi’s desire to give birth as part of a pornographic film called Ripe. In New Zealand, the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services wanted to separate the mother and child if the film was completed, but the New Zealand laws were not clear on whether the act of giving birth in a pornographic film was a form of child abuse. Longhurst noted that the aim of her paper was:

“…to draw on the story of Nikki and pornographic film maker Steve Crow’s quest to have a birth filmed for a pornographic movie to illustrate that certain sexual acts rouse anxieties and even disgust…The moral boundary between what is considered ‘normal’ and what is considered ‘perverse’ is constantly struggled over and is temporally and spatially specific. This pornography of birth shows that what counts as moral is tied up with issues of gender, sexuality, class, race and so on, but also with ‘geographical objects of space, place, landscape, territory, boundary and movement’ (Cresswell, 2005)…This article shows how Nikki, through media discourse, was constructed as a person who belonged in certain places and spaces (brothels, strip clubs) but not in others (hospital birthing wards). The media represented Nikki as immoral but this morality turns out to be based on a very contingent set of societal rules and expectations…There are societal expectations that birthing will be enacted in particular ways. Regardless of whether it be a ‘natural’ birth, a pain-assisted birth, a forceps delivery or a caesarean section the expectation is still that birthing women ought to behave in culturally and gendered ‘appropriate’ ways. Nikki’s plan to be filmed giving birth for a pornographic movie was not seen by most as an ‘appropriate’ way to birth”

Longhurst followed all the media coverage surrounding the case including two dedicated 60 Minutes television documentaries and reports in a wide variety of NZ newspapers to critically examine how the story was reported and portrayed. She also followed all the media interviews with the two main protagonists (i.e. Nikki Devi and the film’s director Steve Crow). She then went on to argue that that the coverage showed there were “unwritten rules and regulations govern what is deemed (in)appropriate behavior for particular bodies in particular spaces producing ‘a changing sexual landscape’”.

After the first documentary (entitled ‘Naked Ambition’) had been aired, Longhurst reported that the NZ media immediately began to debate the issue as well as the rights of unborn children. From the media coverage I read myself, Devi appeared to be vilified by the NZ press (and dubbed the ‘porn mum’). Politicians and the public alike wanted to know whether it was lawful to film the childbirth for a pornographic film. Longhurst made some really interesting observations:

“‘Coupling’ pregnancy and especially birth with sexual gratification challenges mainstream notions of pregnant and birthing women as modest, ‘motherly’, and focused completely on their infant. Becoming mothers’ must not ‘flaunt’ their sexuality even though (or maybe, because) the pregnant, and especially the birthing body is a body that is [assumed to be] clearly marked as having participated in sexual intercourse (Longhurst, 2000). Nikki’s transgression, therefore, prompted something of a moral panic…In examining moral judgments as to whether birthing women ought to be engaged in invoking sexual feelings for commercial gain it is imperative to consider the relationship between bodies and spaces, in this case, a delivery suite in a public hospital. Seeking a court order to stop the filming of the birth of Nikki’s baby could be read as an attempt to reinstate the purity of the delivery suite – a space where mother and child meet, bond, and establish a positive and loving relationship. When it was proposed that the delivery suite would become the site of a pornographic movie, lines between purity and perversity…became blurred. While viewing and shooting pornography might be ‘tolerated’ at sites that are seen to be deviant such as sex shops, clubs, strip joints, warehouses, porn studios, private homes, it was not ‘tolerated’ in a hospital birthing ward”

It does appear that the film was finally made and got a distribution deal as I went online and saw it advertised on various websites. As one website said:

“The controversial new movie they tried to ban. Filmed completely in New Zealand and starring an all-kiwi cast. Nikki, a pregnant wife with time on her hands and a passion for sex, indulges herself behind the back of her workaholic husband. 

A complex web of affairs, desires and obsessions…Follow Nikki through her term of pregnancy as she and her naughty neighbours show you what being neighbourly is all about”.

Similar moral questions about ‘appropriateness’ of giving childbirth outside of ‘traditional’ settings have been raised in the more recent case of the artist Marni Kotak who gave birth in front of a live audience as part of her art installation The Birth of Baby X in Brooklyn’s Microscope Gallery’s ‘birthing room’ (New York). In an interview with New York’s Village Voice newspaper, Kotak said that:

“I hope that people will see that human life itself is the most profound work of art, and that therefore giving birth, the greatest expression of life, is the highest form of art. Real life is the best performance art”.

A Daily Mail article after the birth of her son Ajax reported that a video of the birth has now been added to Kotak’s proposed 18-year project (Raising Baby X) in which Kotak will document her child’s upbringing until college with weekly video podcasts.

From everything that I’ve read, sexual arousal from either experiencing and/or watching childbirth appears to be very rare but does seem to be prevalent in a minority of individuals. Whether it ever becomes the topic of scientific research remains to be seen, although I’m sure more academic articles about the morality issues may appear in philosophy-minded journals in the years to come.

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Aggrawal A. (2009). Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Bastion Works (2012). Maieusiophilia. Located at: http://bastionworks.com/Mikipedia/index.php?title=Maieusiophilia

Cresswell, T. (2005). Moral geographies. In, David Atkinson, Peter Jackson, David Sibley & Neil Washbourne (Eds.) Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts. (pp.128-134). New York: Taurus.

Longhurst, R. (2000). ‘Corporeographies’ of pregnancy: ‘bikini babes’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, 453-472.

Longhurst, R. (2006). A pornography of birth: crossing moral boundaries. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 5(2), 209-229.

Northrup, C. (2010). Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom: Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing. London: Bantam.

Wikipedia (2012). Pregnancy fetishism. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy_fetishism

Belly up: A beginner’s guide to pregnancy fetishism

In a previous blog on lactophilia (i.e., sexual arousal from lactating women), I briefly mentioned maieusiophilia (sometimes known as cyesolagnia), a sexual paraphilia and/or fetish in which an individual derives sexual pleasure and sexual arousal from particular aspects of human female pregnancy. In the 2009 book Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices, Dr.Anil Aggrawal (Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi, India) specifically defines maieusiophilia as gaining sexual arousal from pregnant women and /or female childbirth. However, other sources define maieusiophilia more broadly to include sexual attraction to women who also appear pregnant, attraction to lactation and/or attraction to particular stages of pregnancy from impregnation through to childbirth. For instance, in relation to impregnation, Wikipedia’s article on pregnancy fetishism alleges:

“Impregnation fantasies are characterized by the arousal or gratification from the possibility, consequences or risk of impregnation through unprotected vaginal sex. Impregnation fantasies are often indulged by reading erotic literature and role playing with a partner”.

Like lactophilia (i.e., breast milk fetishism), there are other paraphilias that have very specific sexual referents, such as gravidophilia (which simply refers to a fetish for actually being pregnant oneself). There appears to be a widely held belief that the overwhelming majority of gravidophiles are lesbian but those in the maieusiophile community claim this is simply untrue. As with most types of paraphilia and fetishes, most maieusiophiles are male (typically heterosexual) although there are females of all sexual orientation (heterosexual, bisexual and lesbian).

It has been alleged in various online articles (although I have yet to see the empirical evidence for this) that there are no specific and/or preferred elements within pregnancy fetishism that are common to all maieusiophiles. For instance, it is claimed that some are sexually aroused by pregnant women’s mobility, and/or how they walk or sleep. Others may be sexually aroused by the bodily changes that pregnant women experience. Like many paraphilias and fetishes, conventional sex and/or nudity are often not required for the maiesiophile to become sexually aroused.

Other human conditions that remind the maieusiophiles of pregnancy aspects may also be a turn on (e.g., a woman with a protruding navel, or a fat women with a large abdomen). It is not know if there is any fetishistic crossover between maieusiophilia and those individuals into fat admiration and fat fetishes. One practice that appears to be liked by both maieusiophiles and fat admirers is the act of belly expansion. This refers to the practice of inflating the belly (typically with air or liquid), until the abdomen is distended. For maieusiophiles, this means that non-pregnant females can be made to appear pregnant and serve as a visual focus for individual fetishistic episodes to occur.

Despite the fact that pregnancy is as old as humanity itself, the glamorizing and sexualizing of pregnancy appears to be a more modern day fetish (at least in terms of being talked about). The popularity of maieusiophilia appears to be linked to the rise of the internet and the mass media. One such ‘tipping point’ appears to be when heavily pregnant Hollywood actress Demi Moore appeared naked on the front of Vanity Fare magazine in 1991. The generally positive reaction to the photograph kick-started a market for mothers wanting to be photographed in a pregnant and stylized naked state. As one more recent news story noted:

“Pregnancy, in short, has become hipper, more glamorous – sexy even. It sure feels odd to think that way about something as basic as, well, the propagation of the human race. And yet, fueled by an ever-spiraling interest in the lives of our celebrities and a consumer culture always coming up with new luxuries, the very act of reproduction appears to have reinvented itself”.

The most well known online resource for maieusiophilia is the Bastion Works (BW) website run by self-confessed maieusiophile Darren Shields. The remainder of this article uses information from the BW website. All information on BW appears to be written by maieusiophiles for other maieusiophiles, but I have no idea how representative the views on the website are.

The site acknowledges that: “most maieusiophiles find their attraction to be completely inexplicable, making it especially difficult to explain it to outsiders”. However, the types of erotic focus for maieusiophiles is said to include one or more of the following: (i) the shape of the pregnant woman, (ii) the concept of creating life, (iii) pregnancy as a result of a loving relationship, (iv) increased libido during pregnancy, (v) the urge to create offspring, and (vi) the transformation of the body. This latter focus is a sub-set of more general transformation fetishes that have also been psychologically linked to other types of fetishistic communities such as the Furry Fandom and technosexuals. The BW site also makes reference to birth fetishism and argues that it is a ‘sub-fetish’ of maieusiophilia. More specifically:

“Birth fetishists are attracted, usually sexually, to women giving birth. Some enjoy the woman giving birth vaginally, while others enjoy belly bursting or anal birth”

BW notes that the most varied aspect of maieusiophilia is the attraction to different sizes during pregnancy (i.e., some prefer an abdominal bump that is “just showing” whereas others – seemingly the majority of maieusiophiles – prefer “the bigger the better”). For a small minority, the belly is so big that all thoughts are fantasy-based as the source of sexual arousal can become “a belly with a girl attached”. In fact, the BW site claims that some maieusiophiles “have been known to enjoy the concept of stomachs grown to the size of vehicles, buildings, or even planets”. This would seem to indicate that there is a crossover with macrophilia (which I examined in a previous blog).

Despite the increasing awareness of maieusiophilia (and an apparent increase in the number of people who are into it), little is known on the etiology and cause for developing such a fetish. Even among the online maieusiophilia community there appear to be few commonalities between such people. The BW site claims:

“Generally, maieusiophiles found themselves naturally attracted to pregnancy when they became sexually aware during their teens, and did not initially perceive any difference in their own attraction from the norm. It is safe to assume that the cause is not genetic, due to the unlikelihood of the human genome having enough ‘space’ for such a level of detail. Also, most maieusiophiles do not find that they share the fetish with anyone else in their family”

Based on what I have read, I have no idea how prevalent the activity is and nothing is known empirically about the condition. As with many paraphilic behaviours that I examined, this appears to be an another area where academics and/or clinicians should be doing some research.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Aggrawal A. (2009). Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Bastion Works (2012). Maieusiophilia. Located at: http://bastionworks.com/Mikipedia/index.php?title=Maieusiophilia

Gates, K. (1999). Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex. Juno Books.

MSNBC (2006). Celebrities make pregnancy seem glamorous. April 26. Located at: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/12466527

Savage, D. (2000). Sexy mamas, kiddie porn. The Stranger, June 29. Located at: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=4285

Wikipedia (2012). Pregnancy fetishism. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy_fetishism

Bump start: An overview of delusions of pregnancy

Delusions of pregnancy are relatively rare and have been reported in both males and females (although it is more common in men). The first documented case of delusional pregnancy was reported by Esquirol at the turn of the nineteenth century. Among women it can occur right across the age range including virginal young women and post-menopausal women. It has been associated with a variety of different disorders including general delusional disorders, organic brain syndromes (e.g., senile dementia), mental retardation, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, epilepsy, metabolic syndrome, neuroendocrine abnormalities, sexual identity confusion, cerebral syphilis (following encephalitis), polydypsia, and drug-induced lactation.

A 1996 paper by Dr. Shabari and Dr. G.K. Vankar published in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry, made the important distinction between delusions of pregnancy and four other related – but psychologically different – disorders. Exactly the same observations were made in a 2009 issue of the European Journal of Psychiatry by a Hungarian team led by Dr. Maria Simon. The four pregnancy-related disorders were:

• Pseudocyesis (whereby false ‘pregnancy’ occurs in either women or men with marked bodily signs of pregnancy but where the individuals are not actually pregnant).
• Couvade Syndrome (whereby the male partners of pregnant women experience empathetic pregnancy-like symptoms including loss of appetite, morning sickness, constipation, etc. The male knows he is not pregnant)
• Malingering (whereby individuals – male or female – claims to be pregnant knowing that they are not).
• Pseudo-pregnancy (whereby a somatic state resembling pregnancy occurs in women that is triggered by organic factors, such as ovarian tumours causing endocrinal changes leading to pregnancy-like symptoms).

In a 1994 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, Dr. A. Michael and his colleagues reported five cases of pregnancy delusion (three females and two males) that included one case where the delusion had lasted 20 years. Other case reports by Dr. K.N. Chengappa and colleagues – also in the British Journal of Psychiatry – found that he same individuals can have multiple delusional pregnancies over long periods as well as believing they are having multiple births. There doesn’t seem to be any common characteristics among those with pregnancy delusions as demonstrated by these four reports from various cases reported in psychiatric journals.

• Report 1: A 51-year old American man turned up to a hospital insisting he was pregnant. The man was said to have no organic cerebral pathology but had a 20-year history of chronic delusional disorder. He even inserted a knife into his anus to facilitate delivery of the “baby”. The delusion of pregnancy subsided over a four-month period following a course of chlorpromazine (reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 1991).
• Report 2: Delusions of pregnancy were reported in five women aged over 64 years. All five women were reported as having major depressive episodes with mood-congruent delusions. The symptoms were discussed in relation to other delusions such as Cotard’s Syndrome (reported in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 1995).
• Report 3: While on chlorpromazine medication, a psychotic 15-year old female developed a delusion of pregnancy. The delusions were initiated because the girl developed galactorrhea (breast milk production) – one of the side effects of taking high doses of chlorpromazine. It was concluded that the incidence of pregnancy delusions may be higher among female institutionalized patients treated with chlorpromazine (reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 1971).
• Report 4: A 43-year old man presented with a persistent pregnancy delusion. The man suffered from chronic schizophrenia and was described as coming from a background of poor sexual adjustment (reported in the journal Psychopathology, 1995).

A 2002 study by Dr. D.S. Rosch and his associates published in the International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine was the first to utilize a standardized mental disorder assessment tool (the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale) to compare a group of 11 women with delusional pregnancy with a group of 11 female controls. Compared to the control group, women with pregnancy delusions had significantly higher levels of hostility, higher rates of prescribed poly-pharmacy, and a trend toward higher antipsychotic medication dosages. The authors reported that their findings may be suggestive of greater resistance to treatment in women with pregnancy delusions.

A more recent 2008 study published in the journal Psychosomatics by Dr. N. Ahuja and colleagues looked at the association between pregnancy delusions and antipsychotic-induced hyperprolactinemia. Among 12 patients taking such medication, six of them had erroneous ideas of being pregnant (four delusional and two non-delusional).

Most of the literature comprises case studies and therefore the literature base is limited by relatively few cases and by those who present for treatment. As Dr. Maria Simon and her colleagues concluded in their paper in the European Journal of Psychiatry:

“Case reports usually reveal demographic characteristics, describe response to treatment, and/ or suggest etiology. Patients with delusional pregnancy have been reported to be more hostile and treatment resistant compared with matched controls. Possible etiological factors in delusion of pregnancy are typically limited to neurophysiologic, endocrine and traditional psychodynamic factors. Given the growing evidence of cognitive and affective models of delusion formation, an integrated, individualized model of delusion of pregnancy can advantageously contextualize the phenomenology and course of the illness”.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Adityanjee, A.M. (1995). Delusion of pregnancy in males: A case report and literature review. Psychopathology, 28, 307-311.

Ahuja, N., Moorhead, S., Lloyd, A.J. & Cole, A.J. (2008). Antipsychotic-induced hyperprolactinemia and delusion of pregnancy. Psychosomatics, 49, 163-167.

Ali, J.A., Desai, K.D. & Ali, L.J. (2003). Delusions of pregnancy associated with increased prolactin concentrations produced by antipsychotic treatment.International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, 6, 111-115

Bitton, G., Thibaut, F. & Lefevre-Lesage, I. (1991). Delusions of pregnancy in a man. American Journal of Psychiatry, 148, 811-812.

Camus,^, V., Schmitt, L., Foulon, C., De Mendonça Lima, C.A. Wertheimer, J. (1995).Pregnancy delusions in elderly depressed women: A clinical feature of Cotard’s syndrome? International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 10, 1071-1073.

Chengappa, K.N., Steigard, S., Brar, J.S., & Keshavan, M.S. (1989) Delusion of pregnancy in men. British Journal of Psychiatry 155, 422-423

Cramer, B. (1971). Delusion of pregnancy in a girl with drug-induced lactation. American Journal of Psychiatry, 127, 960-963.

Dutta, S. & Vankar, G.K. (1996). Delusions of pregnancy – A report of four cases. Indian Journal of Psychiatry, 38, 254-225.

Manjunatha, N. & Saddichha, S. (2009). Delusion of pregnancy associated with antipsychotic induced metabolic syndrome. World Journal of Biological Psychiatry, 10, 669-670.

Michael A., Joseph A., Pallen A. (1994) Delusions of pregnancy. British Journal of Psychiatry, 164, 224-246.

Rosch, D.S., Sajatovic, M. & Sivec H. (2002). Behavioral characteristics in delusional pregnancy: A matched control group study. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, 32, 295-303.

Simon, M., Vörös, V., Herold, R., Fekete, S., Tényi, T. (2009). Delusions of pregnancy with post-partum onset: An integrated, individualized view. European Journal of Psychiatry, 23, 234-242.

Tényi, T., Herold, R., Fekete, S., Kovács, A., & Trixler, M. (2001). Coexistence of delusions of pregnancy and infestation in a male, Psychopathology, 34, 215-216.

Milking the situation: A beginner’s guide to lactophila

Lactophilia (i.e., breast milk fetishism) is a sexual paraphilia where individuals (typically male) derive sexual pleasure from watching women lactate, sucking on women’s milk-filled breasts and/or having sex with lactating women. Sometimes, the sexual arousal is enhanced by the woman also being pregnant, although many men prefer lactating women post-pregnancy. The paraphilic aspect may also be part of other sexual paraphilias such as infantilism (where sexual arousal is derived from being an adult baby). For many infantilists, the practice is often referred to as adult adult nursing, suckling, and adult breastfeeding. In fact, some lactophiles describe themselves as being in an adult nursing relationship. Those who suckle and are suckled within the confines of a monogamous sexual relationship are often referred to as a “nursing couple”.

There are a number of different methods by which erotic lactation can take place. “Lactation games” typically refers to any kind of sexual activity that includes female breast milk. The activity is thought to be widespread but can be unintentional post-pregnancy as many women who have just had babies release milk as a reflex action when sexually aroused.

Over the last decade there appears to have been an increased demand for lactation pornography with magazines such as ‘Pregnant Pink and Milking’. It is evidently a specialty market although the internet has increased the opportunity to see such pornography – even if the person is not a lactophile. Such niche pornography may also be considered taboo – even by those who have no objections to pornography – particularly because of its association with children and incest.

Adult nursing relationships involve a person (typically male) breastfeeding from a woman’s lactating breast. It is only considered to be an ANR when the practice is regular rather than a one-off or happens almost accidentally during post-pregnancy sex. Anecdotal evidence suggests that successful ANRs are reliant on trusting and stable long-term relationships. If the practice is not regular, the women’s milk production ceases. It is thought that in some cases, the suckling can be a replacement for sex and that the mutual and intimate tenderness involved between consenting couples has a stabilizing influence on such relationships. It has also been noted that some women are capable of achieving orgasm during the suckling process. There may also be a number of inherently non-sexual reasons as to why such behaviour is found within loving couples. For instance, couples who may want to adopt a child may use the context of an ANR to stimulate the production of breast milk pre-adoption.

It has also been notes that an apparently small minority of womenexperience sensual and/or sexual pleasure from pumping breast milk (either manually or from a breast pump. The feelings produced may depend on the context (for instance, some women may only get sexual pleasure if their partner is present during the pumping process. Dr. Fiona Giles (of the University of Sydney, Australia) in her 2003 book ‘Fresh Milk – The Secret Life of Breasts’noted that some women feel more “feminine” when breast feeding, and may therefore may want to continue with lactation, even after their child have been weaned for emotional and/or sensual motivations.

In a previous blog on fetishism, I wrote at length about a study led by Dr G. Scorolli (University of Bologna, Italy) on the relative prevalence of different fetishes using online fetish forum data. It was estimated (very conservatively in the authors’ opinion), that their sample size comprised at least 5000 fetishists (but was likely to be a lot more). They reported that some of the sites featured references to lactophiles. However, this particular fetish was included in a ‘body fluids’ fetish category along with coprophilia, urophilia, menophilia and mucophilia. Although this category made up a sizeable minority of all online fetishes (9%), it is unknown what proportion of these online fetish sites were lactophilic in comparison to the fetishes of other bodily fluids.

The rise in interest surrounding lactophilic activity has led to lactation prostitution where grown adults – including women – pay for the opportunity to be breastfed. This can either be part of other activities such as infantilism (where other activities such as having a diaper [i.e., nappy] changed may play a more primary role) or may be an activity done is isolation to any other service or activity. A 2004 paper in the journal Australian Feminist Studies (again) by Dr. Fiona Giles made reference to a New Zealand brothel that offered lactation services to its clients. In a paper in Women’s Studies the following year, Giles also wrote that:

“Induced lactation allows for a splitting away of breastfeeding from maternity, opening up possibilities for elaborating on the cultural meanings and uses of breastmilk as a substance, breastfeeding as a practice, and lactation as a process. Finally, by introducing lactation into sexual play, it offers the opportunity for a mutual confluence of bodily flows which may help to disassemble the binaries of sexual difference”.

Breastfeeding can also feature in other types of sexual activity such as sadism and masochism (as part of wider set of dominance and submission sexual practices). For instance, submissive women may be commanded by their (male or female) dominant partner to be milked or to produce milk. Alternatively, breastfeeding can be used as a surrogate pleasure reward (or surrogate pleasure) for (male or female) submissive partners who have done exactly as they have been told by the dominant partner.

Lactophilia may also be associated with other specialist types of paraphilia. One such sexual fetish is Maieusiophilia (i.e., pregnancy fetishism). This is where individuals (typically male, but some bisexual or lesbian females also) derive attraction and/or sexual gratification from someone being (or appearing pregnant). There is also a very small minority of people who develop a sexual fascination with the idea of themselves being pregnant (i.e., gravidophilia). This would appear to be psychologically similar to those people who get sexually excited by the thought of being an amputee (i.e., apotemnophilia).

There has been very little empirical research on lactophilia (or associated behaviours). A recent 2011 study was published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine led by Dr. Magnus Enquist (Stockholm University, 2011). They reported the results of a questionnaire study designed to investigate whether two specific sexual preferences (for pregnant women and for lactating women) were associated with exposure to pregnant or lactating women early in an individual’s life. Their data were collected via an online questionnaire advertised in newsgroups (e.g., alt.sex.fetish and alt.sex.fetish.breastmilk) and Yahoo! discussion groups (e.g., Lactaters and Pregnant Ladies). Individuals in these online communities typically describe themselves as fetishists for pregnant and/or lactating women. The research team collected usable data from 2,082 participants. Some of the main findings were that:

• Average age of the respondents was 37 years
• Average age at which respondents became aware of their preference for pregnant and/or lactating women was 19 years
• Most respondents reported both a pregnancy and a lactation preference (71%; 1,474 people);
• A small minority of the respondents reported having a preference for pregnancy fetish only (14%; 296 people)
• An even smaller minority of the respondents reported having a preference for lactation fetish only (11%; 224 people)
• A total 4% (87 people) had neither preference and were excluded from further analysis
• A great majority of the sample had younger brothers or sisters suggesting that they were exposed to pregnant women and/or experienced seeing their siblings being breastfed when in childhood.

Because of this final finding, the authors suggested their results were consistent with the hypothesis that specific sexual preferences may be acquired through exposure to particular stimuli during a specific period early in life (similar to “sexual imprinting” in birds and mammals). In fact, there have been a number of studies offering empirical support for the idea that human partner choice is (at least in part) determined by parental characteristics. The authors concluded that their study offered new insights to growing issue of the correlation between pregnancy, lactation, and sexuality.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading (Lactophilia)

Enquist, M., Aronsson, H., Ghirlanda, S., Jansson, L. & Jannini, E.A. (2011). Exposure to mother’s pregnancy and lactation in infancy is associated with sexual attraction to pregnancy and lactation in adulthood. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 8, 140–147.

Giles, F. (2003). Fresh Milk – The Secret Life of Breasts. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Giles, F. (2004). Relational, and strange: A preliminary foray into a project to queer breastfeeding. Australian Feminist Studies. 19, 301-314.

Giles, F. (2005). The well-tempered breast: Fostering fluidity in breastly meaning and function. Women’s Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal. 34, 301-326.

Scorolli, C., Ghirlanda, S., Enquist, M., Zattoni, S. & Jannini, E.A. (2007). Relative prevalence of different fetishes. International Journal of Impotence Research, 19, 432-437.

Further reading (Sexual imprinting)

Bereczkei, T., Gyuris, P. & Weisfeld, G.E. (2004). Sexual imprinting in human mate choice. Proceedings of Biological Science, 271, 1129-1134.

Perrett, D.I., Penton-Voak, I.S., Little, A.C., Tiddeman, B.P., Burt, D.M., Schmidt, N., Oxley, R., Kinloch, N., & Barrett, L. (2002). Facial attractiveness judgements reflect learning of parental age characteristics. Proceedings of Biological Science, 269, 873–80.

Jedlicka, D. (1980). A test of psychoanalytic theory of mate selection. Journal of Social Psychology, 112, 295-299.

Wilson, G.D. & Barrett, P.T. (1987). Parental characteristics and partner choice: Some evidence for oedipal imprinting. Journal of Biosocial Science, 19, 157-161.

Zei, G., Bereczkei, T., Gyuris, P., Koves, P., Bernath, L. (2002). Homogamy, genetic similarity, and imprinting: Parental influence on mate choice preferences. Personality and Individual Differences, 33, 677-90.