Variety Show
Most land snails are simultaneous hermaphrodites. (Simultaneous, as opposed to sequential, where an organism changes sex during its lifespan.) During copulation, the male reproductive organ of each snail penetrates the female organ of the other, allowing for cross-fertilization via reciprocal sperm transfer. Snails also boast gypsobela (sing., gypsobelum; colloquially, ‘love darts’), sharp calcium structures, separate from genitalia. Upon piercing the body of a partner, these projectiles release a hormone thought to increase survival of a snail’s own sperm, thus increasing its chance of reproductive success overall.
Barnacles possess the largest penis proportional to body size in the animal kingdom, potentially reaching a ratio as high as 50-to-1 in some species. The tiny crustaceans cannot find mates using locomotion, so their extraordinary endowments facilitate inseminating far-off, similarly sessile neighbors, ensuring genetic diversity among their population.
Scorpions engage in a complex courtship ritual, involving a dance known as the promenade à deux, a male ‘kiss’ (read: grasp) of the female’s pincers using his own, and finally, the deposition of a package of spermatozoa (spermatophore) which the male guides to enter the female’s genital opening. The entire process can take over 25 hours.
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These strange facts consist of unique sexual practices among invertebrate animals.
Invertebrate: organism lacking a vertebral column. AKA: it has no backbone. Examples: sponge, jellyfish, starfish, mollusc, crustacean, earthworm, insect, arachnid.
These fun facts, my fun facts, go far beyond the typically outrageous animal sex stories we tell, the classic praying-mantis-femme-fatale eating her mate’s head post-sex, the queen bee reigning over thousands of male workers and drones. These stories are some of my favorites to tell, precisely because of their wow-factor and their shock value. And yet, I wish they were more mainstream. Perhaps they are, within my circle of family and friends, because I usually receive an eye roll, a not this again, when I bring up snail sex (often) in conversation.
But I cannot — and I will not — stop telling these stories, which are not just stories, but rather true realities of sex among all the varied species of our world, a world so inundated with heterosexual, human sex as to be drowning in its false normativity. Furthermore, if not humans, we are probably only considering the other creatures typically evoked upon hearing the word animal: other mammals, birds, fishes, reptiles, amphibians.
And yet those groups comprise only 3% of all the animals on Earth. The other 97%? Our squishy, slimy, spongy, spineless friends.
We stand to learn so much from the invertebrates. Not specifics, not incorporating love darts into foreplay or participating in spermatophoric sperm transfer. I am talking big picture: learning about variety, celebrating diversity, humbling our human selves as maybe not the most superior, exemplary, or representative figures of sex in this vast world.
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I study biology because it satisfies my persistent search for why and how, for cause and effect, for reasons and mechanisms and statistical significance. I first learned about invertebrate sex in the context of evolutionary explanation. If all snails are both sexes, all snails are potential sexual partners! Much less energy expended to find a mate! I understood such seemingly strange sexual practices that occur in the world in terms of survival and reproduction.
But when we learn and talk about sex among humans, we have a whole new dimension, one that goes far beyond natural selection. We have pleasure.
This is not to say that we cannot understand the whys and hows of human sexual pleasure. We can and do use evolution to understand pleasure in terms of reward circuitry, justifying its intimate ties with reproduction precisely because we as a species must propagate our genes. We can and do investigate pleasure physiology, harnessing technology to maximize satisfactory sensations (#lovemyvibrator). We can and do explain our (un)attraction to other humans as a product of sexual selection, drawing us toward physical traits in a mate that Darwin told us were advantageous (#sizematters?), and away from others that signal poor reproductive fitness.
But it is 2017. Aren’t we past this? Haven’t we also separated sex for reproduction and sex for pleasure?
Our society today sees sex as an act, and reproduction as one possible goal, and many ways to separate the two, in theory at least. And then there is pleasure, considered a separate sexual objective, which need not necessarily come with the terms and conditions of reproduction or pregnancy or parenthood.
If sexual pleasure is standing alone, as I believe it is, in both our minds and our bodies, we do not need to continue explaining or justifying that which gives us pleasure. Especially not in terms of basic biology; especially because biology is not basic.
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Ambiguity is uncomfortable. It is far easier to put people and things into neat boxes, to cleanly categorize in order to carry on, especially with respect to sex. And we often find that biology helps us in this endeavor, with its phylogenies and taxonomies and systematics, its intrinsic and noble attempts to create order and organization.
But we — humans — have much more than two sexes, and hetero- is only one of many sexualities that exist. To believe otherwise is to ignore the complexity and the entirety of the biological sphere in which we live. We use the concept of biology to justify stereotypical binaries and cultural categories, when in fact our realities are vast spectrums extending further than we may even know.
But we can begin to try to know, and in doing so, we may begin to break open the narrow crevice of sexuality into which humans have convinced ourselves we fit. If we were to learn more candidly about the vast forms of sexual organisms and practices among all the species of the world, we might begin to emerge from the black-and-white heteronormativity we’ve always thought justified by our own biology.
I admit that discussing invertebrate sex could very well be used to underscore ‘otherness’ in contrast to ‘proper’ human penetrative sex and reproduction. Yet alternatively, and importantly, it could serve to emphasize diversity and allow us to embrace variety. We might draw nearer to an understanding that there lies no ‘right’ answer for how things should work, because what ‘works’ for any given species, in fact, works for them, since they too are living and surviving and reproducing, successful in their own right.
Learning to approach sex with such a mindset could have large implications for sex education in our society today. By accentuating the immense variation of sex, thus destabilizing the (unfortunate) heteronormative abstinence-only tradition which currently prevails, we might then create some space in which to discuss other issues, ones that go beyond pregnancy and disease prevention, but which are nonetheless critically relevant to sex. Issues like pleasure.
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At its most basic, pleasure simply is what ‘works’ for a person. But how might we go about teaching and learning this? How can someone discover what works, and just as important, what doesn’t?
Perhaps a course on masturbation comes to mind, and perhaps this seems like too much. I personally would not have minded if my first interaction with the words clitoris or orgasm had been in my fifth grade classroom. But currently nothing of the sort occurs in the States, and only barely in Canada.
Instead, maybe we could think more broadly about teaching ourselves and those around us that we possess the capacity for pleasure in the first place. Of course, our society does encourage pleasure, but only in small, low-effort ways, in pink pills and hookup apps and friends-with-benefits relationships. We don’t have the patience for a 25-hour scorpion dance.
But maybe learning about scorpion dances in the first place would help. It may seem circular to argue that learning about the variety of sex among all animals can create a space to learn about pleasure, and then that a way to learn about pleasure is to learn about the variety of sex among all animals.
Yet variety may truly be the best answer, to all of the questions.
In her hilarious book, How to Be A Woman (2011), Caitlin Moran, feminist author, criticizes the porn industry for its mass distribution of unvaryingly heterosexual, male-gaze-focused productions. She discusses her fortunate experience in discovering queer and diverse pornography, but also describes the immense effort involved in searching for and finding such material. As such, she calls for an overhaul of the porn industry, a 100% increase in the variety of pornography available to everyone.
Leaving aside the complicated and problematic dynamics between pornography and pleasure (e.g., violence, humiliation, voyeurism), I find there is a satisfying simplicity to Moran’s solution that we might apply to the problem of pleasure as well. Perhaps, in order to learn about pleasure, we need a similar 100% increase in the variety of sex about which we learn and discuss. Perhaps, if we worked to embrace and celebrate the vast variety of sex in the world, becoming more comfortable with it, we might then find ourselves better able to explore and accept the specifics that provide each of us with pleasure, the things that ‘work’ for each of us.
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To move away from conceptualizing biology as a beacon of straightforward simplification may seem unnerving, scary in its potential to send us cascading down into an angsty abyss of ambiguity, where neither reasons nor explanations abound. Yet maybe this ambiguity, and the discomfort it brings, could be what compels us to think, learn, and listen, to become more comfortable with our own desires and distastes. Maybe we could learn to find pleasure in, and derive pleasure from, that very ambiguity.
Learning about the complexities, confusions, and complications of the natural world undermines our ability to use biology to cleanly classify people and their preferences, and yet simultaneously opens a space in which we may explore, discover, and accept our own pleasures. I myself struggle to reconcile my curious, interrogative mindset — that which draws me to study biology in the first place, which seeks reasons for everything in the natural world — with the idea of not finding a justification for anything I do, especially with respect to sex.
It is certainly difficult. But there is a freedom and resistance in not explaining oneself, and I believe that recognizing the grand variety of all the organisms of the world could help us realize that we don’t have to. The best thing about pleasure, and simultaneously for me the hardest thing about it, is that we do not need — and should not have — to explain or justify it.
I use my interactions with invertebrate organismal biology to strive to not ask why, to accept what I find as pleasurable without forcing myself to rationalize it. Maybe, at the societal level, we could all venture to do the same. And maybe, via exposure to variety from the earliest age, we might then begin to foster individuals who unapologetically like what they like and dislike what they dislike, respect each other for it, and collectively work to achieve it.
