Several years ago, I tried to impress a new girlfriend (now my wife) with my cultural credentials by dragging her to an off-off-off-off-Broadway play about psychedelics in a tiny East Village theatre. I can’t remember much about the play – other than it was terrible – but I will never forget the young man sitting in front of us. He arrived late, awkwardly clambered over a few people to get to his seat, and then proceeded to down a carton of milk. The lateness and the clambering I could excuse. But the milk-drinking? That was horrifying. There is something undeniably unsettling about adults who drink cold cow’s milk in public.
I have tried to scrub the East Village milkman from my mind but I was reminded of the incident last week when Nicole Kidman chugged a glass of milk while accepting her award for best actress in the film Babygirl (which features an erotic milk-based scene) at the National Board of Review Awards. Babygirl isn’t the first film to use milk, a liquid strongly associated with childhood and innocence, in a symbolic manner. “Adult milk-drinking has long been used to evoke creepiness in films,” Vice proclaimed in a 2022 piece that cited the milk bar in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and the famous milk scene in Inglourious Basterds (2009).
That Vice piece (headlined: Adults Who Still Drink Milk: Are You Okay?) is a classic of the genre but, every few years, there seems to be a furious debate in the anglophone world about what’s going on with mature milk drinkers. In 2018, for example, white supremacists made headlines when they chugged milk at gatherings to make some kind of weird statement about how good they were at digesting lactose. Now, Babygirl has kicked off this dairy-based discourse once again, prompting the likes of Vulture to declare milk “the pervert’s beverage”.
I imagine Big Milk is going to be watching this new interest in the white stuff closely. Cow’s milk has been dropping out of favour in recent years as plant-based alternatives grow in popularity. But there’s no such thing as bad publicity, is there? One suspects that the dairy industry will be milking the Babygirl drama for all it’s worth.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
