Something you learn about marriage growing up in an animal hospital: some husbands will tear up and cradle their groins when advised to neuter their pet, and some wives will drop $150 bills on prosthetic silicone implants to avoid the indignity of such an episode. As you might expect, to preserve the illusion of professionalism while a client arranges to install tiny rubber balls in their Springer Spaniel, any staff present would usually excuse themselves from the exam room at least two or three times to fully exercise their ha-has in private. In the upper right corner of these patients’ records, my mother liked to draw two glandular looking ovals in black or red sharpie; it was like a hobo sign to signal “sort of bonkers.”
Typically, a wife who would secretly neuter the kitty was basically married to cro-magnon man, or some evolutionary throwback effecting similarly charming mannerisms. Cro-mag was unable to divorce his own testicles from the ones hanging off his stallion of a tomcat, but it usually didn’t seem like Cro-mag was able to divorce his testicles from much of anything. Fake balls have a sort of flawless comedic sheen, lit and fig, but it’s a real collar puller when you have to watch some lady get all worked up worrying that her husband will no longer love the treasured family pet if he returns to the hut only half a man.
That’s a good anecdote to drop at a party, but actually it’s a clever little segue into how we experience control, the biology of pleasure, and the sexual imagination.
It never seems to occur to the Cro-mag, nor it seems the ball at the end of his chain, that in the sack, a pussy (cat) is more pragmatic than philosophical. Even the most devout Cro-Mag Catholic fucks first in the name of orgasm, and then to spill the gametes; the relationship of the two mechanisms becomes less clear as the cognitive physiology between species gets less complex. To say it plain, most animals are not boning for pleasure, and when you’re not having sex for pleasure, it doesn’t seem to merit a high five any more than all the other unglamorous biological realities. A dog will hump to communicate social dominance whether his sack is empty, all natural, surgically augmented, or had never existed at all—without all the imagined psychophysiological theatre humans hitch onto the Almighty Phallus, the actual appendage is more or less decorative to any animal treated in a small animal clinic. If anything, you’re vaccinating him against the horror of blue balls every time he catches a whiff of some hott bitch through the screen door.
I was reminded of rubber dog balls when I read the passage a friend pulled from the mission statement for an exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, Animal Roto (Broken Animal).
Symptomatically, the the physical and spiritual ailments now fracturing contemporary society are related to the degradation of the intuitive and powerfully interconnected animal we all carry within us.
He seemed to like it. I do too; the reason I’m preoccupied with sex in the way that I am is because it is base, primeval, hideously uncivilized—amphibious, even. There are only two truths which have remained unchanged since bacteria stopped having to knock itself up and finally grew some sea legs to drag its ass up from the sludge: death and sex. In light of how all human civilization ever for all time has essentially organized itself around denying exactly these two conditions, it seems a generally impossible hand to overplay.
Even the absolute duds of every age and empire have recognized the perverse grooming we try to foist on all that is spiritual and sensual, but there is something ultra-pasturized about the modern age, something grotesquely sanitary and increasingly hermetic about the directions we are all heading in our cultural understandings about sex. Among any population for whom resources and technology afford sufficient leisure to, we see the most extreme inversions of our animal nature, erasure of instinct and the will to survive, a waning hold on our humanity; women with every material freedom willingly starve themselves to death, men sincerely feel most fulfilled and at ease romantically involved with a Real Doll.
In this context, Cro-magnon Man might be a thing of beauty. Even the possibility of “fathering” a castrated animal is an abstract threat of death to him! Though there is little behavioral difference between a neutered dog or cat, in the narcissistic mirror-image we project onto who and what we admire, he sees himself made a eunuch. His balls, even his kitty’s balls, are the source of his power! Despite the miles between himself and any rational understanding of the matter, Cro-Mag’s anticipated response to his pet being neutered is severe enough to seek out two smooth, evasive silicone measures. He may be crude and beastly, but unlike the glossed, deflated milquetoast who prefers the touch of silicone to skin, he’s at least invested in the carnal. Also just like a dog or cat, I don’t imagine he’s usually overly burdened with his wife’s orgasm. But remember, he is Cro-Magnon man. You don’t want to chain yourself to him, you’d only like to appreciate. From afar. Like an animal in a zoo. You avert your eyes and move onto the next exhibit when he starts behaving too rudely.
So what’s to keep and what’s to leave behind of our animal natures? How do we decide? I want nothing of mediocrity (passionlessness, sterility), but I also aspire to all that’s compassionate—and nature, in the raw, is not easily said to be compassionate. Pleasure, sex for pleasure, is a province of nature we mostly have to ourselves. What’s amazing about the orgasm is that it’s like this spectral cherry garnishing the mechanical fact of ejaculation. Nobody really understands the adaptive purpose of it (fuck what ya’ heard), least of all for women. Even in human males, orgasm and ejaculation are not necessarily coincidental, while in other species obviously unable to articulate the erotic experience for empirical value, there’s little to support an adaptive relationship of pleasure to ejaculation at all resembling the psychosexual storm at work in our brains. All lady mammals are born with a clitoris, but only the most physiologically developed species have seemed to make use of it (primates, dolphins, elephants). Of that pool, it is humans alone who deliberately communicate pleasure through clitoral stimulation; any sensation achieved at the hand of a partner among other species is incidental. The sexual imagination is ours alone, and we may do what we please with it.
The opacity of female pleasure has long been used to rationalize its suppression or purported irrelevance, and a fixation on the evolutionary why of the female orgasm has forever wished to explain a woman’s physiological capacity for pleasure as a Darwinian contingency of the male orgasm/ejaculation response; a clitoris exists to encourage pair-bonding between two partners, so that the female may secure her partner’s support and protection over vulnerable offspring (that bitch tricked him and now he’s got 18 years of alimony checks!). A clitoris is a sexually selective trait to weed out the deadbeat coozehounds (she needs a man with a slow hand). My favorite: a clitoris is a miniature failed penis in terms of purpose, and the orgasm is a little biological consolation prize, a by-product of the physiological necessity for jizz. Feminist biologists have challenged these androcentric histories and the sociopolitical contexts they came from, but even these accounts offered by Lloyd or Hrdy take only the slightest empirical edge because they sound a bit prettier. Lloyd’s theories are too a product of context; she was hoping to erect a biological model that didn’t allow for women’s sexuality to be secondary, and so yet again reinforce sociopolitical injustice through what is celebrated as the “natural order.”
And that is the problem, that is exactly where the overarching feminist narrative continues to betray not just women, but all of us: it is always trying to erase danger from pleasure, in fact death from pleasure. In narrowing our attention to the mechanics of the whole ordeal, hoping to find an existential purpose we can read from the physical body, we become as stupidly hysterical as our Cro-Mag who couldn’t separate a culturally manufactured metaphor from the groins of not just himself, but his cat. I imagine the hope of discovering the orgasm’s origins is to prove conclusively that women have an inherent dignity equal to every man’s; rape, slavery, exploitation, tyranny of all kinds will eventually evaporate under the light of this perfect consciousness. It’s a wish that’s not just hopeless but harmful. The recognition of another’s dignity is a choice to be made, not a fate to lie passive under.
The irony is that in hoping to discover some natural set-point of the mind that will be explained by the body, we only further alienate ourselves from what is most human. We have the gift of consciousness and from that, a sexual imagination unlike any other species. How grossly alien sex becomes when articulated as if it were “science.” The beginning of Kundera’s novel Slowness opens by recounting a woman who spoke of sex like a 1930’s anthropologist in the “heart of the jungle”:
A curious alliance: the cold impersonality of technology with the flames of ecstasy. I recall an American woman from thirty years ago, with her stern, committed style, a kind of apparatchik of eroticism, who gave me a lecture (chillingly theoretical) on sexual liberation; the word that came up most often was “orgasm”; I counted: forty-three times. The religion of orgasm: utilitarian puritanism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explosion, the only true goal of love-making and the universe.
Some things are meant to be kept in the dark. Some things (all things fun, anyway) will whither if described like a bureaucratic press release. Animals fuck quickly, thoughtlessly, robotically. Their pleasure only knows utilitarian bounds. Human joy is darker, more complicated, hideously selfish and yet implicitly reliant on the other (real or not) in a way that other species do not appear to know. Are we trying to be other animals? Are we hoping to ignore the power of our imaginations, shove it way down low into our panties? It’s just too much power in the pussy. This is not the Epcot Center of your value or destiny. When you believe the world revolves around your crotch, what happens if it’s suddenly wounded? When you come back from the vet’s office snipped and tied? When you come back from a date having just been raped?
Nature is not imitation. Our physical and spiritual ailments come from the terror of facing our own somatic animalism. But our capacity for empathy means that embracing this nature is an even greater responsibility, not an invitation to regress back into (or remain essentially stuck inside) any sort of anarchic nihilism. That’s not an appeal to holiness, but to kindness.
