I seem to remember there being a quote (or a translation of a quote) that runs something like, “One may declare the male nipple to be equivalent to the female, but it still won’t give milk”. I’m trying to track down the actual original quote, and the speaker.
I think that it arose around revolutionary France, as a response to (or commentary on) the “Egalité” theme. If I’m right about that, I’d like to find the original French.
Don’t know about the origin of the quote, but it is factually wrong!
Males producing breast milk is not unusual at all. Look up “gynaecomastia”, for example. Or just google ‘male breast milk’ (watch out for some porn-like sites).
The point is that no one can simply declare that all male nipples are capable of producing milk and it is suddenly so. Brevity over precision.
Thank you, gary. I never metaphor I didn’t like.
A quote, not the same, but expressing the same idea is often attributed to Abraham Lincoln.
(From The Weekly Standard [Raleigh, North Carolina], 29 October 1862.)
OLD ABE GETS OFF ANOTHER JOKE. – A couple of Abolitionists having called upon Old Abe to persuade him to issue his Emancipation Proclamation – that is, before he issued it – he got off the following good thing and knock down argument against his own act:
“You remember the slave who asked his master – if I should call a sheep’s tail a leg, how many legs would it have? ‘Five.’ ‘No, only four, for my calling the tail a leg would not make it so.’ Now, gentlemen, if I say to the slaves, ‘you are free,’ they will be no more free than at present.”
some discussion here: http://tinyurl.com/yw8s54
Lincoln may well have used it, but it pre-dates him.