You can tell a lot about a person by his penis. The complexity of the penis seems to be related to the competition for females. Bushbabies and many other small primates have obscenely complex and fanciful penises with knobs, spikes, bristles and other accoutrements designed to stimulate the female to accept his sperm more readily. Competition for females among these groups is quite intense and any competitive advantage is worth the effort. Compare this to the male gorilla. He presides more or less unchallenged over a harem of females and as a consequence this 500 pound behemoth has a penis only 2 inches long. So much for the big-shoes/big-wang theory.
As usual though, the insect world has the world of mammals beaten by a mile. Damselflies have inflatable penises with horns and bristles that it uses to clean the female’s vaginal opening before copulation. Now that’s “washing that man right out of your… well, not hair…” Others have genitals so complex that females will forcibly eject the sperm of other suitors when a new male comes to mate, but only if he’s got “the right stuff.”
Sadly, most birds lack penises entirely. They must be content to just rub themselves together and deliver sperm that way. Nonetheless, males have devised ways to get rid of his rival’s sperm. Some will perform oral sex on the female to remove her other lovers sperm and some species have even evolved a ‘fake’ penis that it uses to scrape out the vagina before copulation. I guess all this explains the male obsession with tools.
Bibliography
Judson, Olivia, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex advice to all creation,
Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company,
3 comments:
I'm certain your blog is going to get more hits because of this article. Since I posted the innocuous piece on curling I have gotten hits from folks doing blog searches on "nude", "nude man", "naked man" and a variety of other combinations that ... ahem ... I won't repeat here.
I'd considered that, though clearly it's not the type of traffic one really wants. If they're looking for penises then they probably don't want to hear about insect penises. I'd also say that the search for penises is probably a relatively rare one. Now if I wrote about something on the other side of the gender fence... now, there's some traffic waiting to happen. I'm so NOT tempted to lace my postings with such things just for the hits.
I agree that we don't want to lace our posts with words to get hits. I was very surprised when I saw those hits to my blog from those Google search strings.
I just realized now, though, that it might be fun to write an article about something so non-sexual (like ventriloquism or something) and add a word here or there that would totally baffle certain Googlers (perhaps even using some sort of hidden text or making the text so tiny you can't even see it). That might be fun.
I just realized that ventriloquism can be very sexy. Bad example.
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