Zoobiquity

  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.

  aNonetheless, 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.

  bIn 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.

  cIf 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.

  dCompared 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.

  ePsychiatrists 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.

  fSome 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.”

  gFear 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.

  hTrue, 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.

  iTo 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.

  jKatherine Houpt describes a depressed facial expression following ejaculation in breeding stallions.

  FIVE

  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.

  This mute machine guards the entrance to a kingdom of euphoria. Locked inside are stacked drawers, each containing an array of highly addictive drugs. There are carousels of morphine vials. Pockets of Vicodin pills. Mini-bins stocked with Percoset and Oxycontin. Clear ampoules of fentanyl. All sit waiting but out of reach in the dark cabinet, unlit and unsparkling, like diamonds on black velvet trays deep in a Cartier safe.

  The narcotics contained in this Pyxis MedStation 3500 drug-dispensing apparatus are essential for relaxing patients during medical procedures and for relieving their pain afterward. But the box is there to deter a clever group of highly intelligent and crafty dope fiends: drug-seeking doctors and nurses. Hospitals have learned the hard way that easy on-the-job access can lead to addiction in their personnel. Brilliant colleagues, inventors of life-saving medical devices who rarely fail at anything, would find themselves red-faced, empty-handed, and referred into a career-salvaging “diversion program” if they tried to breach the machine to retrieve an unauthorized Vicodin. The lockbox—and the hospital has dozens of them—protects them from themselves.

  That’s fine for a white-walled clinical suite where Vicodin tablets don’t grow on trees and fentanyl vials don’t dangle from vines. But the painkillers and sedatives in that machine are derived from natural opiates that do grow wild—in the Papaver somniferum poppy. Imagine the security system you’d need to protect several thousand square miles of poppy fields.

  For opium-growing regions, this is a real issue. In Tasmania, a leading producer of medical opium, users sometimes sneak into the fields. Ignoring security cameras, they hop fences and gorge on poppy straw and sap. Dosed on the drug, they flail around in circles, damaging crops. Sometimes they pass out in the fields and have to be carried away in the morning. And there’s no way to prosecute these trespassing scofflaws, no rehab to send them to. Because these freeloading opium eaters are wallabies.

  I have to admit that the thought of stoned wallabies made me smile. Even the mug shot that accompanied the article in which I read about it was so “wrong”: a sweet-faced, gray-brown mini-kangaroo squints before an exotic backdrop of emerald-green poppy stalks. The tableau would be as lovable and cheeky as Peter Rabbit sneaking into Mr. McGregor’s garden … were it not for the animal’s zoned-out eyes and the fact that repeat offenders apparently have a serious drug problem.

  Often, what’s endearing in animals is detestable in humans. So while we may chuckle at the intoxicated Tasmanian wallabies, we’d be justly horrified if they were Tasmanian children with a heroin habit. And if they were human adults, compulsively eating opium day after day, putting not just their own well-being but that of their families at risk, our horror might turn to disgust.

  Indeed, this reaction points to one of the most frustrating, painful, and puzzling aspects of drug addiction. Genetics, vulnerable brain chemistry, and environmental triggers play dominant roles in this illness. But ultimately, on the receiving end of the syringe, joint, or martini glass is a person making the choice, at least in the initial stages of substance use, to shoot up, smoke, or swallow.

  To nonaddicts, that choice can be utterly perplexing. Users hemorrhage money, destroy careers, lose homes, and demolish relationships—all in pursuit of a high. Confoundingly, addicts who are parents sometimes make decisions that orphan their children. I’ve even seen patients stricken off the heart-transplant list—a literal death sentence for them—because they continued to use.

  Despite advances in imaging and genetics that clearly characterize addiction as a brain illness, it remains uniquely bewildering. Why is it so hard for addicts to “just say no”? Is “can’t stop” really just an excuse for “won’t stop”? Whether we like it or not, confusion about how we should think about and classify addiction pervades our legal systems, schools, governments—and, frankly, even the field of medicine.* Addicts belong to a set of patients that society, even doctors, judges harshly. So well do addicts know this medical prejudice that they may hide their substance-use histories when they go to a doctor’s office or the ER, lest the level of care and compassion decline or disappear entirely. As one doctor I interviewed confided to me, “No one likes an addict.”

  But nearly everyone likes a cute animal. And so it can be surprising to learn that animals, too—even if they must risk losing their children or, sometimes, their lives—plunder nature’s pharmacopoeia. With its vicious war between mind and body, addiction can seem distinctly human. But it turns out that our Homo sapiens bodies are not unique in the ways they react to intoxicating substances.

  Understanding what drives animals to ingest drugs mi
ght help us separate what is inevitable from what is optional about this perplexing disease. The brain chemicals and structures that lead many millions of the world’s population to snort, shoot up, or chug are pervasive and powerful. As we’ll see, the urge to use has stayed in the gene pool for millions of years and for a paradoxical reason. Although addiction can destroy, its existence may have promoted survival.

  No one issued Flying While Intoxicated citations to the eighty cedar waxwing birds in Southern California who crashed into a reflective glass wall one February day. Drunk on fermented Brazilian pepper tree berries, they all died of spinal fractures and internal bleeding, some of them still clutching the mind-altering fruit in their beaks. The Bohemian waxwings in Scandinavia that sometimes gorge on naturally alcoholic rowan berries and then fall into the snow and freeze to death have no irreverent nickname—unlike Russia’s podsnezhniki, or “snowdrops,” the human drunks who are discovered, dead, in thawing snowbanks every spring. When a horse named Fat Boy nearly drowned in a neighbor’s swimming pool after getting sauced on ethanolized apples in a small English village, he made the evening news but didn’t have to apologize to the local fire brigade that pulled him out.

  These animal encounters with intoxicants, however surprising and even amusing, were probably accidental. But others are not. Some animals show what seems to be more deliberate and chronic drug-seeking behaviors. Bighorn sheep in the Canadian Rockies are reported to scale cliffs to get their fix of a psychoactive lichen and grind their teeth down to the gums scraping it off rocks. In opium-producing regions of Asia, water buffalo (like Tasmania’s wallabies) are known to sample a daily dose of the bitter poppies and then show signs of withdrawal at the end of the flower-growing season. The pen-tailed tree shrew that lives deep in the Segari Melintang rain forest in West Malaysia prefers the fermented nectar of the Bertram palm to all other food. The yeasty brew has an alcohol concentration comparable to that of beer (3.8 percent).