Some
conversations I’ve been having recently have had me considering how sex is
different across species… but also how it is the same. This isn’t a new train of thought for me, but
it is a new topic for this blog, and I imagine the handful of readers who have
found this page without my linking them directly to it or finding it through
some other zoophilic page have probably been waiting for me to talk about
animal sex.
The
conversation in particular I’m thinking of had to do with vorephilia,
specifically why it exists in the first place, and I as a well-read academic
and aficionado of kinks, paraphilias and orientations of all kinds immediately
jumped up to posit the theory (not my own, but someone else’s) that vorephilia –
a paraphilia related to biting and swallowing – is vestigial of the biting that
many mammals engage in while mating to give themselves a certain dominant role.
But then I
thought: why do they do it? Anyone who watches enough Animal Planet knows
that the species who are known for it – cats, canines, bears, etc. – don’t
always do it, and the female (or male receiver) tends to be submissive enough
anyway without all the biting. Indeed, a
lot of the time it’s not even real biting, but just sort of a threat that he
could bite her if he felt like it. It
appears to have little to do with physical necessity and far more to do with
the psychological, so we’re back to square one.
From there,
I can take a different direction and philosophize a little about how mating
activities have evolved – sex across the ages, if you will. Sexual selection in larger, more modern
mammals, such as the ones mentioned above, tends to be quite complex, with the
female exerting a great deal of power over precisely with whom she will mate
with, and the male more or less needing to put up with this because the female,
while being a bit smaller, still has many sharp devices at her disposal that she can use to
make sure that even if he impregnates her against her will, he may well die of
infection or of the difficulties any injury may cause him. The only large mammals in which rape can be called
by any stretch common are primates, in which the females lack this natural
weaponry, or, in the case of humans, any injury incurred by the male will not
pose too much of a threat to his life.
This
changes when we get to smaller, simpler creatures, such as most rodents, for
many of whom mating success for the males depends on how quickly he can mount
and disable the female. Mating, then,
tends to be quite violent, and often does result in injury – presumably, the
number of young in a litter is considered to be genetically “worth it”. In order to prevent herself from being
injured, though, it is better for the female to be submissive,
since, unlike the male, she cannot be mortally injured at the time of
copulation and still have healthy young, thus passing on her genes.
We do
not see these power-oriented sexual activities in non-mammals: in birds and
reptiles, although the mating rituals can be extraordinarily complex, the
action of mating itself is quite straight-forward. In most fish, no real sexual interaction
takes place at all; only in cephalopods do we see similar interactions to our
rodent cousins, and in none do we see the symbolic gestures displayed by larger
mammals.
It is
from rodents that most other mammals have evolved from. Is it possible, then, that this fixation on
dominance in sex that manifests in such interests as vorephilia, sexual sadism
and sexual masochism, and practices like bondage and necking, still remain in
our genes from millions of years ago when we were merely rodents? Were these paraphilias, which we now
sometimes consider to be maladaptive and perverse, once part of an instinct
necessary to pass on one’s genetic material? This
gives us an interesting perspective on these enigmatic paraphilias, which are sometimes,
in the case of ones like vorephilia, to the point of being sheer fantasy. Although this explanation obviously does not
cover every paraphilia, if we consider how such interests and activities would
have affected our non-human ancestors, we can get a better idea of precisely
why they exist in the first place – and, in this, derive a greater tolerance for the associated individuals.
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