Subscribe to Newsletter
Before I signed up with Cornell, I was very scared of invertebrate hexapods. I would withdraw in disgust at the sight of a butterfly land on my arm. The thought of a ladybug grazing my thigh kept me spinning around all night. Once at the kindergarten playground I actually got ants in my pants, and it was precisely this episode that, along with throbbing prey bites, put me in a psychotic spiral. Bees were the worst of my fears. My parents dragged me to Bee Movie and I left the theater hysterical. For some godforsaken reason, the first grade I enrolled in as a freshman was “Honeybees and Humans.”
This class made me appreciate the insect world. It grew beyond a simple appreciation and became something I couldn’t get enough of. It didn’t help that the first friend I made during O Week was Bug Boy, the ferocious creature who dances fiendishly in the silent Disco des Arts Quad. He and his colleagues in entomology took me on an insect hunt. You could see them on campus with their nets, like a group of Animal Crossing characters. It was so stupid that I had to infiltrate their way of life. I have a passion for people with passions; Fools obsessed with no excuse for a particular niche. Be it water birds, 15th century Arabic calligraphy, mazes, inedible uses of cheese, or the art of boomerang throwing, I try to understand the seemingly random interests that people are willing to devote their lives to. This time it was mistakes.
Through my adventures with Bug Boy, I discovered something about insects that everyone should be obsessed with: how they fuck. The realization came when I entered an entomology course in which I intensively studied slides of moth vagina. People think they have a monopoly on sexual degeneration, but we have been beaten by our creepy companions. The fauna of our planet does not follow the prudish lifestyles of the 1950s as we imagine them to be. Eating donkeys is a missionary position compared to the fruit fly Drosophila bifurca, which shoots sperm that are 20 times the size of its body. It has such a long tail that the female is filled to the brim that it cannot mate with other sexy suitors. Imagine dropping a load and consisting of a single float that can easily bring you down in Mortal Kombat. If you were a Mormon cricket, your Splooge would be 27 percent of your weight, so a 200-pound person would pop out a 54-pound nut. To say the least, it would be a little harder to wank yourself into a sock.
Insects can also twist into positions that “the Kama Sutra” could never fathom. Flies have to spin on their penis, sometimes a full 360 degrees, in order to continue fucking. It’s the ultimate pole dance. Then there are stick insects that cook for months without a break. You are allowed to do this in the wild because it looks to predators like two sticks are sleeping together, rather than a vulnerable snack waiting to be eaten in the middle of orgasm. In addition to endurance, these kinky crawlers also master the orgy with their stick threesomes.
While the insane world of critter coitus may seem tempting at first, there is a more barbaric limit to insect busting. There is coitus with blunt trauma and cannibalism. Since female bed bugs do not have a vagina, the males developed a spear tail to stab their bodies. Bean beetles were blessed with vagina hood, but the man’s penis is still full of gnarled spikes that are understandably harmful to have sex with. Then of course there are the female cannibals like the praying mantis who devour their companions as an expression of the weirdness of evolution or perhaps as an act of radical feminism.
Unlike most of my columns, this is not advice. I can’t approve of taking tantric tips from insects, but I would be impressed if you had a spare penis like an earwig in case your first one breaks off. Perhaps it would be remarkable if you were to spend 79 days like a stick insect in contact with the forest floor, but those 79 days could be used for something more productive, e.g. B. to find the origin of mysterious mushroom circles near your house or to compose a klezmer rock opera.
Ranking list 2
What we can appreciate from studying kinky crawly animals is how user-friendly our genitals are in comparison. If evolution took a little turn in a more chaotic path, our wobbly parts might also be terrible hardware for reproduction. When examining insects, we should be grateful that we don’t have to cannibalize every tinder port or do aerial aerobics to stay in the hole. Biology has been more or less kind to the way we fornate.
Anya Neeze is a student at Cornell University. Comments can be sent to opinion@cornellsun.com. Boink! runs during alternate intercourse on Thursdays this semester.
