At the end of April 2024, a video circulated in the Russian-language segment of the Internet in which commentators saw further evidence of the blurring of gender boundaries in the West. We have verified the authenticity of this video.
The eight-second video shows an advertising billboard at a public transport stop. The man depicted on it holds a vessel with a milk-like liquid in one hand, and a baby in the other. Judging by the caption on the poster, he is advertising male lactation pills from Wet Dad, supposedly “UK's number 1” in this category.
With comments like “This is what we are fighting against,” the video was distributed by pro-Kremlin Telegram channels, in particular, “Pozdnyakov 3.0"(309,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Crossbow says"(272,000), "The world of Mikhail Onufrienko"(250,000), "Putin on Telegram"(150,000) and Voblya (133,000).
Lactation - the process of formation, accumulation and periodic excretion of milk in humans and mammals. Under normal conditions, male mammary glands do not produce milk, although this is theoretically possible. In 2009, 26-year-old Swede Ragnar Bengtsson spent three months to induce lactation naturally. Every three hours he tried to squeeze milk out of his nipples, and his attempts were watched daily by viewers on local television. The experiment was unsuccessful. And although history knows examples of fathers breastfeeding their children, modern scientists explain such cases have abnormal prolactin levels for men. Exceeding normal values, in turn, is often caused by diseases, for example, of the pituitary gland or hypothalamus. Long-term hormonal therapy can also lead to milk production in a dose sufficient for breastfeeding - in 2018 it became known about the first such case in a transgender woman from the United States.
However, to date there are no reliably known cases of inducing lactation in healthy men by taking medications specifically designed for this purpose. Moreover, there is no industrial licensed production of such products, not to mention an entire category of goods. “Verified” did not find any evidence of the existence of the Wet Dad brand, under which pills for male lactation are produced.
Although not a single major British media outlet talked about such a drug, the video was distributed in the English-language segment of social networks, and the peak occurred not at the end of April, as in the Russian-language segment, but in mid-February. On February 13, the photo of the billboard was first published in Instagram And social networks X user @fokawolf, the next day, in video format, he spoke about this promotional material in TikTok.
There are a lot of laughing emojis under these three posts. The fact is that many British Internet users are well aware of the figure of Fokey Wolf, a British street art artist from Birmingham who specializes in socio-political satire. His even called “Birmingham Banksy” - Foka Wolf may not be world famous, but he also hides his identity. This is not the first time his works have deceived people who know nothing about this artist. For example, in 2020, on London Underground trains, Foka Wolf posted posters with the slogan “We plan to halve the number of homeless people by 2025” and the logo of the Conservative Party, and Internet users began to talk en masse about the “Freudian slip” of the British authorities. And a week before advertising Wet Dad pills, the artist published A photo of another public transport stop where a poster “Eat your children” was installed. Save up to £30 a year on dinners,” allegedly commissioned by the Kingdom's government.
A photo advertising lactation pills was also taken on one of the streets Birmingham. One of the commentators on the day of publication noted, that I saw the work with my own eyes and went on the Internet to check if it was Foka Wolf. The process of creating the poster probably involved the use of artificial intelligence: the child’s right hand is clearly missing fingers, while the man’s hand, on the contrary, has an extra one.
Thus, the advertisement of male lactation pills in the UK in fact turned out to be the work of the artist Fokey Wolf, who in his work makes fun of modern realities. The poster he prepared appeared in Birmingham back in February 2024.
Cover photo: social networks
Read on topic:
- The Guardian. ‘We’re in a post-truth apocalypse’: meet Foka Wolf, Birmingham’s billboard prankster
- Is it true that breastfeeding increases a child's intelligence?
- Is it true that Biden is allowing transitioning men to compete in women's sports?
- Is it true that British doctors have been banned from using the words “mother” and “human milk”?
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