Cuddling is like milk

“Cuddling is like milk” is Victoria McCandless’s compact metaphor for affection as nourishment: an ordinary, sustaining need that does not end with childhood. In A Loving Economy, the phrase underpins her challenge to the separation of sexual love from everyday intimacy, and to the idea that closeness can be reduced to a rare or commercialized act.

Meaning and Formulation

McCandless expands the metaphor by arguing that cuddling “can, and should, nourish our health from birth to death.” She places it across the whole span of life, not in a narrowly defined phase or relationship. The comparison with milk makes affection sound sustaining and commonplace; its value lies in continuity rather than novelty or scarcity.

She describes wedding as “the cream of cuddling,” the chief delight of the middle years, but insists that it is “not different from cuddling.” The formulation does not deny sexual love; instead, it presents it as continuous with broader tenderness. The contrast is between intimacy as part of daily human care and intimacy set apart as an exceptional commodity.

Argument in A Loving Economy

The phrase appears in McCandless’s discussion of commercial contraceptives. She argues that they focus users’ minds on the genitals and distract them from cuddling. In her account, this separation is reinforced by teaching that presents sexual activity as distinct from other forms of closeness, even when that teaching comes from an advocate of birth control such as Marie Stopes.

McCandless links the separation to a damaging model of sexual relations: men deprived of cuddling, she argues, may fear sexual love or treat it as a “smash-and-grab business.” The metaphor therefore carries an argument about conduct as well as affection. If cuddling is nourishment, intimacy detached from it becomes impoverished and potentially exploitative.

Reception and Significance

A Loving Economy, published at McCandless’s own expense in 1920, attracted little serious attention. Her claims about birth control and intimacy drew condemnation from clergymen, while advocates of birth control objected to her criticism of commercial contraceptives. Beatrice Webb’s hostile account recast McCandless’s proposals as sexual madness, illustrating how readily the book’s argument could be reduced to scandal rather than engaged on its own terms.

Against that reception, “Cuddling is like milk” condenses the pamphlet’s central revaluation: tenderness is not an optional prelude to sex but a sustaining human good in its own right. Its plain domestic image also resists the language of rarity and transaction that McCandless believed distorted sexual love.