Milk, Memes, Masochism

We're all going crazy for Nicole Kidman's dairy consumption

“To all of the babygirls in the room!” This salute, coming from Nicole Kidman as she raises a glass of (cow?) milk to NBR awards audiences, is already one of the cultural meme highlights of 2025. We’ve learned that Dutch director Halina Reijn poured a cup of her own experiences into a particular scene early in Babygirl where all-powerful CEO Romy (Kidman) downs said glass of said cow’s milk, delighting in the knowledge that Samuel (Harris Dickinson) has secretly ordered it for her. Moreso, he’s silently ordering her to drink it. This is a snapshot, or a fragment of their D/s kink journey to come, one where consent is asked and given silently, and Romy’s affirmative gesture is what made the Internet light up. 

In my piece for Mashable, I spent a lot of time tracking the subtle reinventions of the film’s visual landscape to accommodate the shifts in Romy and Samuel’s emotional one and I quasi-theorised on the double meaning of ‘scene’ in kink and in film. Cinema aspires to and despises realism, its origins bound by mechanical reproductions have always been at odds with its creative, escapist if you wish, properties. Sex, being a physical act that two humans engage in with the potential to offer some sort of transcendental experience (or at least, being outside of your body for a little bit – ecstasy or ἔκ-στασις in the Ancient Greek), is not too dissimilar. So I thought of Obscenes: a newsletter/blog where I can write freely of sex and film outside of the editorial cycle, i.e. here and now. But first, milk. 

Babygirl has sex scenes (very few or suggestive penetrations), but they are far from the most erotic parts of the film. The shared looks, the undressing, the hums and ummms, and of course, “Father Figure” are what make me salivate. The milk scene doesn’t. Not because I am lactose intolerant—although I’ve never in my life drunk a glass of milk of any kind—or vegan, but because the sex in this scene is distilled not in a fetish—the drinking of the milk—but in the surrender despite the fetish. It probably would have had the same narrative effect if Romy was presented with a tumbler of tomato juice and downed it, but the liquid substance is of course, not coincidental and Kidman apparently downed 16 (!) units of it while filming.

I think of Four Chambers’ Maman series (you SHOULD get yourself a subscription ASAP) and the intense, beautiful presence of breast milk as the films explore even “the role of pleasure and oxytocin in connection and milk making… and the annihilation of the self in sex.” (their copy, my italics) I love how vocal Vex Ashley is about the cinematic role of fluids in the works she produces (and stars in) and especially her praise of milk, its smooth texture with the same, guaranteed density. I certainly perceive images of pouring milk and how it trickles down skin as titillating. Whether it faces zero resistance on a smooth-shaven body part, or diverts its track slightly to deal with the hairs or pubes it encounters, it’s a wave of visual pleasure washing over me. 

Milk is easy on the eyes and *maybe* tickles my homo sapiens brain with a biologically determined predisposition for milk-liking. Psychoanalysts have a lot to say on this, I am sure, but let’s face it, any causal connection between breast milk and milk (as a fetish) can only be upsettingly literal. And the psyche has a distaste for the literal. Also, I don’t think anyone’s still interested in explaining away fetishes – I surely hope that’s an outdated aspiration doomed to find its own demise in the myriad of memes that exist online outside the kink community. Most importantly, in Babygirl, neither Romy nor Sebastian have such a fetish. No, it’s more instrumental than that: the glass a vessel, the milk a promise. But what do we call something that (accidentally) acquires the properties of something else? A metaphor. 

Okay, if I call the milk in that scene a metaphor for Romy’s devotion, her act of drinking it a means to become one with her Dom, we might have ourselves a case of kinky transubstantiation. You know, the wine, the blood of Christ… but before we get entangled into theological debates on whether the sacrament can be a metaphor or not (spoiler: more no than yes), I want to draw attention to the fact that, even while it functions as a metaphor, the milk gulped by Romy is real; it’s actual, it’s factual, it’s organic, it’s an animal product.

In addition to their physical strength that made them useful for agrarian purposes, cattle were of course herded, bred, milked, and slaughtered long before the industrial era. With the automatised and grand scheme of capitalism kicking into gear, it was soon the case that no leftovers were allowed: animal stock from cattle becomes glue, glycerin, gelatin, bone meal, soap; other byproducts make for brushes, hairpins, imitation ivory. In her book “Animal Capital”, critical theorist Nicole Shukin highlights “a tangle of biopolitical relations within which the economic and symbolic capital of animal life can no longer be sorted into binary distinction.” She writes at length about how animals have become forms of capital we’ve subsumed so deeply into our lives and industries, that we no longer see them as such. Shukin has been very influential for my own thinking and theorising on the role of animals in cinema, as both “forms of capital” and as “the literal” in every cinematic metaphor they partake in. 

In that particular scene, the presence of cow milk is what marks the literal, unyielding element that binds Romy to Samuel, but for the audience, it is the hook that is just the right amount of abject that it can become the next big meme. We’re scandalised, laughing at the (well-founded) artistic choice to include dairy versus the different in colour and texture non-dairy milks. I can see a pro-veganism campaign taking off. A £2 glass of milk order at the Picturehouse Central. 

In conclusion, of course, it was this scene that went viral, not the one where Romy laps the same milk out of a tiny bowl while on all fours. In the latter, she is too animal-like and we don’t fw that. Give us the right amount of kink, the right amount of animal, don’t be too much: that’s the recipe for viral stat. Although, I’m not sure whether Romy would agree with being contained like that.