Zoobiquity (14 page)
Authors: Barbara Natterson-Horowitz
Like some erections, lordosis is considered to be reflexogenic—a spontaneous, hormone-driven response stimulated by touch.
Receptive female elephant seals, for example, have been seen spreading their flippers and raising their tail ends when their “harem master” places a foreflipper on their back before mating. However, intriguingly, fear and anxiety can interfere with lordosis, so it may be that, like psychogenic erection, the brain can play a role in enhancing or shutting down the response.
While some sex researchers insist that human females don’t display a lordosis reflex, Pfaff has pointed out that a “
large number of mechanisms for hormone action in the central nervous system [are] known to be conserved as we move from animal brain to human brain tissue.” He thinks it’s possible to apply “
basic, reductionistic principles … to all mammals, human patients included.” Indeed, as he colorfully puts it in
Man and Woman: An Inside Story
, “
The most elementary functions of the hypothalamus, such as the female’s ovulation or the male’s erection and ejaculation work quite similarly … proved true from ‘fish to philosopher,’ from ‘mouse to Madonna.’ ”
The swaying back and vaginal presentation of a lordotic animal occur in association with a cascade of hormones, neurotransmitters, and muscular contractions. And the components of this cascade are shared by human women. We may not be wired for the overt and reflexive lordosis
displayed by rats or cats. But the lordosis posture is certainly something human men find alluring and women feel sexy engaging in.
i
Once you start looking for them, media images of human lordosis are all around us. One of the most famous pinups—Betty Grable’s iconic World War II–era bathing suit shot—shows her from behind, her back flexed in a slight lordosis as she solicits the viewer over her shoulder. Marilyn Monroe’s unforgettable
Seven Year Itch
publicity pose over the subway grate shows her in a similar lordosis, her buttocks swayed backward while her arms hold down her billowing dress. Slightly less demure lordotic poses include Irina Shayk’s cover for the 2011
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue, where she kneels in the sand, her lower back arched as her buttocks tip up and back toward her feet. (Granted, her breasts sort of steal the show, but her back is unmistakably lordotic.) Pop star Katy Perry took feline lordosis to a literal extreme by donning a purple catsuit and mask and getting down on all fours in a classic lordosis posture to advertise her perfume brand, Purrs.
The “sexiness” of lordosis is hardly mysterious. For hundreds of millions of years, animals from big cats to mares to rats have become lordotic to signal receptivity. At an early age, males learn that approaching nonreceptive females can mean getting bitten, scratched, wrestled, or boxed. For human males it can be challenging, too. Far better to pass by the nonreceptive females in favor of the ones who are soliciting and signaling, with, among other behaviors, lordosis.
Knowing about lordosis isn’t going to make a woman with HSDD suddenly start having orgasms. But understanding cycles of receptivity and nonreceptivity in animals could provide valuable human insights. At least it could reassure some women that it’s okay not to want sex all the time and present a simpler reason for why and when a flattened desire might be normal.
The partners of HSDD sufferers might also consider a survey of comparative foreplay. Stroking, neck biting, vulva licking, and ear tonguing
are seen across many species of animals. Cornell professor Katherine Houpt notes that for horses, “
an adequate period of sexual foreplay is essential.” Stallions will nip and nuzzle a mare, starting at her head and ears and moving backward and down to her perineum.
Dogs, too, engage in oral grooming precoital activities. Parasitic wasps and fruit flies stroke each other’s antennas. Beetle birds engage in cloacal pecking. Of course, what occurs between humans has distinctive appeal to our species, but studying the foreplay of crustaceans, gulls, bats, and geckos could yield the ultimate suite of erotic moves retained by millions of rounds of natural selection for their ability to facilitate copulation and conception.
Perhaps help for HSDD can be found through study of the true nymphomania seen in some cows and mares.
Hypersexual behavior occurs as a consequence of disturbances in ovarian function leading to increased testosterone and other male hormones. In horses and cows, ovarian cysts are the cause. Nymphomaniacal cows (most often dairy, as opposed to beef, breeds) paw aggressively at and try to mount other cows. And they
bellow “like a bull,” with distinctive masculinization of their voices. Similarly affected mares exhibit stallion-like behavior. They flehmen, compulsively urinate, and mount other mares. Experts suggest removal of the affected ovary in this highly disruptive situation.
Until I learned about nymphomania on the farm, I believed the concept to be less a proper medical diagnosis and more a pornography plot driver. But veterinarians not only make this diagnosis—they worry about it, because a nymphomaniac in a barn can wreak havoc and inflict injuries. Learning that the cause in animals is often cyst growth on the ovaries, I wondered whether the millions of women in the United States with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) also experience increases in sex drive and activity. Intriguingly, some women dealing with this virilizing disorder (the medical term for “masculinizing”) do describe increased sexual drive. However, the excessive body and facial hair growth that are also features of the disorder may adversely affect a woman’s self-image and discourage her from engaging in sex.
The day after Lancelot struck out because of the three-mount rule, I was watching his stallion colleague Biggie go through the same precopulatory paces. Biggie was led into the barn. He received a whiff of frozen mare urine. He was given a look at a receptive mare. He was led to the phantom.
Then, with a practiced flair, Biggie straddled the phantom, pumped four or five times, and climaxed. I was looking for behavioral evidence of an orgasm. What I saw was an unmistakable clenching, shuddering, and gripping, followed by a brief motionless moment before Biggie slid off the phantom. Like many stallions who have just ejaculated, Biggie appeared sleepy and “depressed.”
j
The handlers retrieved the giant tube and took it away to be processed. Biggie was led to his stable, and the barn was prepared for Lancelot, who, on this new day, had no trouble getting back in the game.
Obviously we can’t know how a horse experiences pleasure with his own ejaculation. But a Japanese research team has reported on behaviors that suggest shared sensations in other animals. In monkeys, they wrote, “copulation culminates at the moment of male ejaculation with body tenseness and rigidity, possibly accompanied by orgasm.” Male rats “show jerky stretching at ejaculation following repetitive intromission, firmly holding the female body.” Even salmon, the researchers pointed out, “show convulsive stretching with their mouths open wide at sperm emission and egg spawning.” And insects show a standardized sequence of movements during sex. Pressed against a female, a male cricket, for example, “
assumes a stretching posture,” transfers his sperm packet, and suddenly “falls into a complete motionless state.” Their conclusion: “There may be a similar mechanism in the final acts of copulation across species.”
After examining the similar function and physiology of erections, ejaculations, and orgasms in many species, it’s impossible not to postulate that the feelings are also shared. Sensations of orgasm may reward a marine flatworm’s multiple penises as profoundly as they pulse through a human male’s single member. The “
shudder” that a primatologist observed “cours[ing] through” a female siamang’s “entire body” after her genitals were licked by a male may have feelings in common with the “
violet flannel, then the sharpness” of the poet Molly Peacock’s description of an orgasm. The open-mouthed grimace of a lion climaxing could indicate a roar-gasm; the squeals of a mating tortoise, an expression of pleasure.
This could help explain the lengths to which creatures go to have sex.
An animal version of the opioid-oxytocin rush of melting expansiveness that accompanies the muscular fluttering of human orgasm may serve as a crucial incentive that impels animals to try that behavior again and again.
Sexual desire in mollusks, fruit flies, trout, worms, gorillas, tigers, and human beings may be driven by a craving for another hit of the chemical cascade that accompanies ejaculation and orgasm.
A
Homo sapiens
–centric view of sexuality can make orgasms seem one of a kind, special, perhaps even uniquely human. But the push of biological reward forms a stronger argument for shared pleasure across the animal kingdom. If this is the case, then orgasm is not the by-product of sex. It is the promise, the erotic ancestry, the bait.
*
Not his real name.
†
At the other end of the spectrum, stallion experts know that “too much serious sexual experience too early” is detrimental to normal libido. Stallions “overused” as youngsters often develop low libido or even impotence as adults.
‡
Not all internal fertilization requires a penis. As the behavioral ecologist Tim Birkhead has noted, male cockroaches, scorpions, and newts produce a sperm packet called a spermatophore that they attach or place near the female’s reproductive opening. Most squid, octopuses, and cuttlefish use a specially modified limb to transfer spermatophores into the female. Many birds simply touch their genital regions together when they have sex.
§
Birkhead notes, “
It is generally assumed that most birds lost their penises over evolutionary time—probably as a weight-saving adaptation to flight, for their reptilian ancestors possess one (or, in some cases, two).”
‖
Although barnacles are generally hermaphrodites (they possess both male and female genitalia), they prefer to have sex with other barnacles as opposed to with themselves.
a
Nonetheless, interest in comparative aspects of male genitalia has had a long history, starting with Paleolithic cave paintings and continuing to the Icelandic Phallological Museum. Devoted exclusively to phallology—the study and collection of penises—it houses embalmed or dried penises from most of the mammalian species in Iceland. On display at the museum, for visitors’ scrutiny, are the embalmed members of a narwhal, polar bear, Arctic fox, reindeer, and many species of whale. Most of the specimens are housed in jars of formaldahyde, but an impressive (though flaccid) elephant penis hangs from a wall.
b
In the 1990s, scientists figured out that nitric oxide could be delivered in pill form and thus was born Viagra and other erection-enhancing drugs. This discovery restored sexual function to millions of men and garnered the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine for my UCLA colleague Lou Ignarro, as well as Robert Furchgott, and Ferid Murad.
c
If you are an ER doc in São Paulo, you are most likely aware that erections can arise from another surprising source: the venomous bite of the Brazilian spider
Phoneutria nigriventer
. While potentially toxic and possibly fatal, the venom can also induce an erection lasting many hours. Not surprisingly the venom has been marketed to males for whom more conventional pharmaceuticals have not provided success.
d
Compared to other animals, humans have evolved facial muscles that are complex and numerous. The reason a dog’s or cat’s face may not seem as expressive as a human’s is not that they lack an interior experience and even emotional input to the facial nerve. Rather, they have fewer facial muscles and fewer branches off the facial nerve to control them.
e
Psychiatrists have historically considered sexual interest in urine to be pathological. They have viewed “water sports,” “golden showers,” and bathing in or consuming urine enjoyed by urophiliacs as abnormal acts by disturbed patients. It’s interesting to note the broad range of species for whom urine plays an important role in attraction and arousal.
f
Some five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci remarked, “The penis does not obey the order of its master, who tries to erect or shrink it at will … the penis must be said to have its own mind.” A few centuries later, Leo Tolstoy grimly noted, “Man survives earthquakes, experiences the horrors of illness, and all of the tortures of the soul. But the most tormenting tragedy of all time is, and will be, the tragedy of the bedroom.”
g
Fear can in some cases enhance arousal. “Mile-High Club” members and others who are stimulated by having sex in dangerously public places will attest to this. The neurocircuitry of desire and fear converge in the brain’s amygdala.
h
True, some animals take much longer. Rats may ejaculate rather quickly, but only after a long chase-and-mount pattern, which first involves eight to ten penile penetrations into the female’s vagina. Some animals, including some cats and some insects, “lock” together after intercourse, using genital barbs and spines, inflatable body parts, and physical force. Sometimes the delay is used for inserting a copulatory plug made of mucus or gel. But for many couplings, it’s an advantage to make it as speedy as possible.
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To create instant lordosis (the posture, if not the hormonal reflex), you can go to your closet and put on a pair of high heels. Whether stilettos or wedges, high heels exaggerate the lower back’s normal lordosis. If we didn’t compensate by tipping out our buttocks and arching that lower spine, we would topple over. Maybe the forced, if artificial, lordosis is what’s enduringly attractive about high heels—and why wearing them both looks and feels sexy.
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Katherine Houpt describes a depressed facial expression following ejaculation in breeding stallions.
Zoophoria
Getting High and Getting Clean
Against the wall of the lab where I perform heart-imaging procedures stands a beige metal box about the size of an office photocopier. It’s got a computer screen on the front and, below that, a keyboard. To the right is a little trapdoor that can spit out receipts, like an ATM. Near the keyboard is a dime-sized, glowing red oval—a fingerprint reader. Once you’ve pressed your thumb and confirmed your identity, you must enter a series of numerical codes before the box will open. And even then only a small sector will be exposed; you can never gain access to all its contents at once.