One snowy night last January, a giggling, handsy couple wandered into a Williamsburg steak restaurant near closing time and plopped down at the bar. They ordered two steaks (expected) and almost every side to share (decadent). The woman asked for a glass of red wine (sophisticated) and a glass of water (responsible). The man asked for the same red and then a personal twist: a glass of milk. “Whole milk, if ya have it,” he said in a loud southern accent with a confidence that stunned the waitress.
I overheard the exchange from my perch a few seats over and wouldn’t stop bringing it up to my date. “Did you hear that guy order milk? Who orders milk? Is he really going to drink milk and red wine at the same time? Do you think his stomach can handle that much lactose?” (My date, a nonjudgmental midwesterner, was hardly as disturbed by the whole thing as I was.)
Their meal came — including the milk — and Milk Man went to town: taking big swigs between chomps of steak with such gusto that my blood ran cold. That hairy, masculine hand. The glass of frothy milk. The pure delight. The cow two ways. I felt disturbed to the very core of my soul; the same feeling I get on a 75-degree day in November. Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t ignore it. My restraint ran out before his beverage did, and I interrupted his conversation. “I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “but what’s with the milk?”
“Oh, I know it’s weird, right?” he responded, self-aware but not ashamed. Then he leaned over and drawled, “I can’t explain it. I just love a big glass of cold milk with a rare steak. Mmmmm-mm!” Milk Man’s date didn’t seem to feel weird about it; she gave a “Yes, my man is a freak” smile as he finished his Big Ol’ Glass of Cold Milk.
There’s just something about milk in the hands of an adult that is truly unnerving. Milk symbolizes innocence and purity, and the adult who continues to indulge in it — nay, cling to it — long after their loss of innocence provokes light repulsion, confusion, and fascination in the observer. As an old Vice headline once put it, “Adults Who Still Drink Milk: Are You Okay?”
I knew Milk Man was a deviant, but I didn’t know what kind of deviant he was. Filmmakers had trained me to assume that as a milk-drinking adult man, he was either a nihilistic youth hellbent on random violence (A Clockwork Orange), a psychopath about to murder someone with a cattle gun (No Country for Old Men), or a racist white woman collecting Black boyfriends to brainwash into assimilation (Get Out), but none of those felt right. Later, he revealed he was in town on a business trip with his mistress while his wife was at home, and I realized the kind of milk drinker he was — one with a potentially freaky sex life and no real shame about it.
Of course, one man drinking milk while openly discussing his extramarital affairs does not totally redefine Adults Who Drink Milk. But thanks to a few good recent sexy scenes, milk has become cinematic kink; a frothy, creamy symbol of power in sexual relationships. From the horned-up milk-drinking scene in the Showtime limited series Fellow Travelers to the horned-up milk-drinking scene Babygirl, in which Nicole Kidman chugs milk in restaurant at the wordless command of her lover-intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), before they embark on a potentially ruinous affair, it’s clear milk is no longer just the drink of disturbed adults. It’s officially the beverage of perverts.
But why milk? “Because we’re supposed to have outgrown it,” explains Mistress Colette Pervette, a Bay Area–based dominatrix and domme educator, who has clients who enjoy all variations of milk play. Drinking milk pulls us into the realm of the taboo and the forbidden, yet consuming it is also an act of surrender. “A grown woman drinking milk at a restaurant? That’s definitely odd-looking to anyone who is privy to it. With this one command to drink the glass of milk, she’s being infantilized, degraded, publicly humiliated, all in one sensuous gulp,” she explains. “Milk is a paradox; it’s nurturing yet commanding, gentle yet brimming with primal energy. It’s a drink that speaks of fertility rituals, breast worship, and the pull of the forbidden.”
Babygirl might be the reason we finally recognize that milk is the substance of freak-sex stuff, but really its perversion was there all along. Consider the “Got Milk” ads of the ’90s and aughts, which featured the most-lusted-after celebs (Giselle, Heidi Klum, Tyra Banks) with milk smeared on an upper lip as they threw fuck-eyes at the camera. Or the 2017 Instagram by the photographer Eugeny Hramenkov with the caption “Forced to Drink Milk.” In the photo, one woman holds a bottle of milk to another woman’s lips while gently but firmly tugging her hair. The milk drinker is on her knees with her cleavage out. Both women are fully clothed, but it still feels faintly pornographic, and the image became a meme, thanks to Elon Musk, used to illustrate a clear power imbalance. I highly doubt the photograph would have spread if the model had been forced to drink Red Bull or water. It had to be milk.
Since then, milk has only gotten sexier in an iconoclastic way. In 2021, the writer Emily Sundberg declared whole milk “back,” observing in a column for “Grub Street” how a certain kind of hot girl (the kind who populates the sort-of-fictitious, sort-of-real Dimes Square scene) was rebelling against oat milk (and other dairy-milk alternatives) and requesting whole milk — even half-and-half. Sundberg suggested that people found alt milks fussy and austere, a symbol of a Goop-y “path to dietary nirvana,” devoid of any life force or pleasure. Whole milk was satisfying and fulfilling as only full-fat things can be. Drinking whole milk felt like a return to smoking — but only a little bad for you, and pretty wholesome as vices go, and vintage in a defiant way; the drink equivalent of sporting a full bush of pubic hair in a world that wanted everyone to have a Brazilian bikini wax and a bleached asshole. Drinking milk meant embracing something feral and something human, which also happen to be the elements that make good sex good.
Milk turned up in the Showtime drama Fellow Travelers, which aired in 2023. The show follows the decadeslong love affair between two men, Hawk (Matt Bomer), an older, more established bourbon drinker, and Tim (Jonathan Bailey), an idealistic, milk-drinking recent college graduate. In the beginning of the series, which starts in the 1950s and goes through the AIDS epidemic, Tim is still boyish, and his affinity for milk is just another cute affectation that catches Hawk’s eye. But as time passes, we learn that Tim is now a freak in the sheets and milk drinking becomes foreplay. The writers’ room for Fellow Travelers had two rules about the show’s many sex scenes, creator Ron Nyswaner told me over the phone: It had to be about power, and it could never repeat a sex act. By episode eight, they were running out of options and had only one combination left to try: Tim had yet to top Hawk. This is where the milk comes into it. Right before they have sex, Hawk pulls out a bottle of milk and instructs Tim, “Drink your milk,” in his bossiest voice. Rather than let Hawk pour it into his mouth, Tim grabs the bottle, drinks it himself, spilling it down his chin. Hawk quickly starts lapping up the dribbles — becoming the adult milk drinker. The milk is the transfer of power. Hawk surrenders, Tim takes control; they have insanely hot sex. Milk, the drink of choice for an adult about to just absolutely blow someone’s back out.
In this scene, milk is the key to Tim’s hero’s journey. Tim starts out middle class, conservative, repressed in his sexuality, and his habit of drinking milk represents those values, Nyswaner says. “By turning milk itself into a sexual gesture, it’s a completion of a journey that he goes on to be liberated and to accept being a very sexually active homosexual.”
This brings us to the current occasion: Babygirl, writer-director Halina Reijn’s exploration of the manic horniness that sets in during middle age, in which milk once again is at the center of giving and taking power. Nicole Kidman plays Romy, a successful CEO with two precocious daughters and a successful playwright husband (Antonio Banderas) who loves having sex with her. She has it all, but it’s not enough to satisfy her, and her creeping discontent leads her out of the high rise and into a seedy motel room with Samuel, an intern who somehow intuits that the best way to please his boss is to tell her exactly what to do. Their romance has all the makings of a perfect forbidden age-gap romance: guttural orgasms, kitty-cat role-play, a druggie rave, and a sensual solo-dance sequence, but his seduction begins with that glass of milk at the bar. He sends it to her in front of her colleagues at a work function, and as they gasp in shock — Are you really going to drink that? — she gulps the whole thing down. Power transferred. Later, as she pays the bill, he passes by and whispers, “Good girl.” The milk was a test and a provocation. It was his opening question (Are you a willing freak like me?) and the answer goes down, well, like a glass of milk (Yes, I am drinking the milk). Reijn, who was inspired by an encounter from her own life, considered it one of the most erotic scenes of the movie, she said on an All of It segment.
As with Fellow Travelers, in Babygirl, Romy takes milk — a symbol of motherhood and traditional roles of women — and uses it as the first step to her sexual freedom and embrace of her own freaky desires. By drinking milk, Romy is subverting expectations, taking power in being disempowered, and in doing so, finally getting exactly what she wants.
But maybe I’m overthinking all of this. I ask Nyswaner why he thinks milk itself is so sexual. He clears his throat. “Milk dribbling down someone’s chin is very reminiscent of something that might happen in a particular sex act between two men.” Got milk? You’re damn right you do, you perv.