Why should you care about animal sex? (w/ Perrin Ireland)

Perrin Ireland is an artist and environmentalist who draws science comics. She’s also the author of Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn from Animal Sex. In this episode, Perrin discusses why learning about the kinky sex lives of animals is a form of biodiversity! From topics such as animal caregiving to how language tends to ascribe sexual characteristics onto non-objects, Perrin shares why openly talking about animal sex isn’t scandalous, but allows for better understanding of animal and human social organization. Factcheck Notes 1. Reported estimates of same-sex pairings and divorce rates in penguins vary across species and populations. Some studies have found values similar to those mentioned here, although these should not be treated as general estimates. 2. Rostrum-to-genital interactions in dolphins have been interpreted in multiple ways. In addition to possible sexual functions, studies suggest they may facilitate the inspection of chemical cues, allowing dolphins to gather information such as identity or reproductive status. Therefore, describing this behavior solely as a form of oral sex may oversimplify its potential functions. 3. Although it has been suggested that dolphins may obtain information by listening to the echoes produced by another dolphin’s echolocation, there is currently insufficient evidence that dolphins can intentionally transmit complex 3D images or engage in "holographic communication". This remains mostly a speculative hypothesis rather than an established scientific theory. Featured guest Follow Perrin Ireland on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/experrinment, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/perrin-ireland-8b866420/, and at https://www.experrinment.com/Buy Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn from Animal Sex https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324089049 Connect with the team Follow Chris on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en and at chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/Buy Chris’ book, Humor Me https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcL Watch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDPods https://www.youtube.com/@TEDPodsFollow TED on X https://x.com/TEDTalks, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ted, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TED, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences/, and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoksVote for our show in the Signal Awards for Best Advice & How To https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2026/shows/genre/advice-how-to podcast! For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Fill out our survey at bit.ly/BHSurvey6 https://bit.ly/BHSurvey6 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. There's a conversation I had several years ago that I have not been able to stop thinking about since. I was interviewing a bonobo expert, which I understand is a totally bizarre sentence to be able to say, but that's just how my life goes. Sometimes I'm talking to a bonobo expert. So I'm talking to this bonobo expert, and she tells me that one of the reasons she thinks bonobos are so important to study is because they are very closely related to humans, and yet they defy so many of our expectations about what is natural and how the wild world supposedly works. Bonobos are matriarchal, and they tend to resolve conflicts with physical touch, grooming, and sex rather than violence and attack. Now, another one of our relatives,

• 2:57Speaker 00

  on the other hand, chimpanzees, they are patriarchal, and they're often violent to each other during conflicts. We are closely related to both bonobos and chimpanzees, but for some reason, we have decided that what is natural is the chimpanzee method, for males to be in charge and for there to be violence and bloodshed. If you think about that for even just a few seconds, you realize that the idea that there is only one natural and that there's a strictly defined way of doing things, that does not hold up to scrutiny. That's not how actual nature works. And I think if we want to be better humans, we should both acknowledge that we are animals and sometimes driven by our biology, but also question what exactly the story that we are being told about that

• 3:38Speaker 00

  biology is, because it is often being used to shame or exclude people for not fitting in to dominant cultural narratives. Today's guest, Perrin Ireland, wants to change all that. She wants to shatter the myths about what is and isn't natural, so that maybe we can have a broader view of our own place in the ecosystem and think differently about what actually is natural about ourselves after all. Perrin wrote and illustrated the fantastic new book, Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn From Animal Sex. So today on How to Be a Better Human, we're going to ask that exact question, one that you probably have not asked yourselves before. What can we learn from animal sex? To get us started, we're going to jump right into the deep end with a clip from Perrin's extremely popular

• 4:22Speaker 00

  online series, Thirsty Science, and this is a clip where Perrin is talking about the rear ends of sea cucumbers.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Today on Thirsty Science, the magical sea cucumber anus. Sea cucumbers use their buttholes, number one, as a second mouth to filter feed on algae. Number two, when they're reproducing and they need more oxygen because they're consuming a lot of energy, they use their butthole to breathe. Number three, as a defense mechanism, they eject these sticky tubules out of their anuses to entangle predators. And number four, sometimes they house a little friend in their butthole, the pearlfish, which for some reason doesn't activate their tubules and has more resistance to kind of their internal poison to invasions

• 5:12Speaker 02

  than other fish. Pearlfish just kind of hang out inside the sea cucumber butthole.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Have you already learned things that you never thought you would learn? I know that I have, and we have so much more to come. We are just getting started. We're going to be right back with more from Perrin after this quick break.

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• 8:42Speaker 00

  Today, we're talking about what we can learn about being human from challenging our preconceived ideas of what's happening in the animal world. And we're doing that with our guest, Perrin Ireland.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Perrin Roosevelt Ireland, an artist and environmentalist and author of Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn From Animal Sex.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Let's just start with, for people who aren't already familiar with your work, Poking the Squid is not a normal nonfiction book. And I don't just mean in terms of topic, in terms of form, too. So can you tell people about the way that your work looks and why it looks that way?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Sure, I think I can show a little.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  So I work in watercolor comics. And the way that I learned my biology degree in undergraduate, where we met, is by drawing what I was finding in lab, while I pretended I wanted to be a scientist, when I actually just wanted to make art about science the whole time. And so it's exciting to hear you say that it's not like other science writing books, because it is in serious conversation with what's happening inside the academy and feminist and queer theory. But it's like coming inside my journals and my sketchbooks of how I learned my way through that, which is hand-drawn watercolor comics.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  And you know, I think most people who, when they think about like watercolor, or they think about art in general, they don't think about a person working, for example, the National Resources Defense Council. They don't think about a person being like a serious science person as well. They think about it as like art and science as separate things. So how did those two come together for you?

• 10:23Speaker 02

  If something doesn't make sense to me, the problem is how it was explained.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  It's not that I can't get difficult things, which is a wild way to go through the world. I didn't really know that. But for me, it's really about, I think, a combination of wanting to unpack things and understand how they work, and also wanting to treasure them. So I make really goofy work during a sixth mass extinction. And so even though I am trying to be playful, and I find a lot of nature to be an excellent practical joke on us, on deep time, on evolutionary time, on whatever, I also am making eulogies as I go. And it feels urgent and important to be treasuring and documenting and paying homage,

• 11:11Speaker 02

  which I am someone who happens to do with watercolor paint, each animal in this particular precipice that we're on. Honestly, I handed copy to the College Hill Independent about a new jellyfish study, and my editor, Rachel Blatt, said, okay, this is okay, but can you draw it? And I went and made my first like, science comic. And I've been translating journal papers by making science comics ever since, and then got to go do that at NRDC, the Natural Resources Defense Council, for 10 years in conversation with policy advocates and lawyers. And the mission the entire time has been, I'm comfortable in these spaces,

• 11:51Speaker 02

  asking these people questions, but like, just inviting people in to what is happening behind closed doors in these labs, that is life-changing for me.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  I imagine what most people are going to ask you about right as soon as they see the title of this book, which is the subtitle, which is What We Can Learn About Animal Sex. Why should people care about how animals have sex and what animal sex looks like or is?

• 12:19Speaker 02

  People respond in a very human way to animal sex and to stories about animal sex, which is their right. It just happens to be the case that I think then, a whole rich conversation can unfold. So I think people should care about how animals get their rocks off, because animals are sexual geniuses. When we think about how animals have sex, how they reproduce, and how they have nonreproductive sex, or how they asexually reproduce, or any combination of the above, which many animals are partaking of all different versions of that in one lifetime. We learn so much about life's genius at making more of itself, and how good life is at continuing to live, which, again, during a sixth

• 13:01Speaker 02

  mass extinction, is a balmy salve for despair and hopelessness, and the way that the powers that be, in my opinion, would like us to disconnect and disinvest from the fates of our more-than-human kin. The other thing I would say is that, you know, I think that it's, for me, it's a pleasurable invitation. Like, I'm a child of the 90s, so I only ever grew up in a conversation about extinction already. And for me, taking pleasure in learning about animals, when there's so much shame and guilt associated with the fates of animals right now, is a really important resilience tool. But the last thing I'll just say is, I also think when we learn about the sexual diversity of animals, we learn sexual diversity is a form of biodiversity.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  And I think it liberates our minds and maybe allows us to be better partners, not only to biodiversity, but also to the sexual diversity in humans that is so under attack right now.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  You are doing work that is surprising because it is art. And so art is really accessible, cartoons, comics, they're really accessible. But they're about these topics that otherwise I wouldn't be learning about. Many of the people who are reading your book or looking at your artwork would never hear about otherwise, because we're not reading the scientific journals about, you know, different types of condors, or, you know, the lizard diversity. The other thing, though, that really is striking to me is, there's a real, like, a political message that people have around what is, and I'm going to put this in big quotes, right, "natural." And I think it's so interesting how you have put up a real defense

• 14:39Speaker 00

  of what actually is natural, and how natural is so far from being limiting. In fact, it is incredibly broad, and continues to be discovered how incredibly broad it is.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  This book is an argument that it can feel good to learn hard things. We are allowed to have a good time learning hard things. And because I do, and I have all this privilege, when I move through those spaces of race and class, and what I've been taught about my capacity since I was young, and all of it, all of it, then I feel my work is to make that intelligible and enjoyable for as many people as possible. Comics is such a very utilized, very popular, very maligned, underground discipline historically. And Alison Bechdel and other people that are working with theory in their comics, you know, I'm not the first one to do this by any stretch, but it's exciting to join that community of people to really say,

• 15:35Speaker 02

  no, we can grapple intensely with feminist theory, while we're also like, swinging some duck dicks. But I think all the smartest people I talked to in making this book were a little bit like, beware of naturalizing anything, because that will come back to bite us at some point. So if you look at a movie like March of the Penguins, that was really popular with the evangelical right. And it seemed to really naturalize and normalize monogamy. But then, when you talk to the scientists that study emperor penguins, they're like, oh, at least a third of those couples were same-sex pairs. And the divorce rate in emperor penguins is 86%. So it's like, the minute we try to grasp anything to land on an answer,

• 16:19Speaker 02

  we're going to be in trouble kind of soon. You know, I had a conversation with the science writer Riley Black, who's an out-trans woman at the beginning of my process, when I was doing research for the Seahorse section of the book. And seahorses have become popular with trans dads. On Instagram, they use this hashtag #sehorstdad as a way to find companionship in the journey of identifying as male and developing a body inside your body. And seahorses do that, and they teach us so much about pregnancy, which I talk about in the book. But Riley Black told me in that conversation that she and her partner have a meme that they really love, where in one panel, it's a comic, in one panel, a trans person's trying to talk to a cis person about gender.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  And they're like, in a nursery classroom, you know, with, playing with building blocks. And in the next panel, a trans person is talking to a trans person about gender, and it's like a dissertation-level thesis. And because I am like, that competitive bitch, when she was telling me that story, I was like, I'm going to get out of nursery school in the course of making this book, and I'm in a graduate kindergarten by the time I'm done learning from these animals. And so I feel so comfortable standing behind how much they teach us about sexual diversity, because doing the research to understand what does sex mean, blew my mind, and I came out of that process so much more humble about how I would never presume to tell any organism how they should,

• 17:47Speaker 02

  or could, or would organize sex inside a body, respond to chromosomes, hormones, manifest genitalia, who they should fuck with, when, like, it explodes, all of those ideas. And that's natural, I think. What is very earthly to me about that is, Marlene Zook says, and I quote her at some point in the book, "People think that biology makes rules, but actually, the study of biology demolishes them."

• 18:14Speaker 00

  So one of the things that you start in the book with is a quote from the historian of science, Beans Velocci. And Bean says, "Sex is just about everything, and therefore, also nearly nothing." It makes me realize, in a way I hadn't really thought of before, that I think I know what the word sex means. But in fact, sex can be so many different things. You talk about how it can be behaviors, it can be biology, it can be life history, it can be more, it can be a noun, a verb, an adjective. So a lot of what animal sex looks like is also trying to figure out, well, what do we mean by the word sex? How do you currently think about what the word sex means? And especially in terms of the animal world and the natural world?

• 18:54Speaker 02

  The most simple way I think about it is that sex is composed of many different variables that are in conversation with each other in different combinations, in different bodies. And I'd start with hyenas, because they're such a good example of... There's this sex that they have, right? My goal was really to talk about how animals bury their boners, if I may. Really, what's the verb of sex? Like, how are they polishing the porpoise? But the reason that I had difficulty doing that straight up is that I would be in a journal paper, and they would be talking about sex as a verb. But they would be talking about the sex of the animal and then what it did as a result

• 19:37Speaker 02

  of them sexing them in that way, what it meant about the kind of caregiver they would be, what it meant about the way its society was organized, what it meant about the energetic investment that it was putting into making different sex cells. And it was doing different combinations of those things in different papers, and in many papers, multiple uses in the same paper. So I think about this little three-letter word being like so tuckered out. I'm like, sweetie, we really put you to work. We make you do so much, so much. How can one little word hold all of that? There's this kind of like cool kids' club in evolutionary biology of a couple of different groups that were co-authoring literature reviews together.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Or inside evolutionary biology, you can have sort of testing of theory papers, and you can have theory papers. And the people that are writing the theory papers say, test this theory. We want you to go into the lab and test this now, but we're putting forward something we think might be new theory that we're developing. And then there are the people that are like, these are the observations we made. We tested this in this amount of organisms, whatever. And so I started to kind of track these cool kids. Beans is in that crew. Julia Monk is in that crew. Ambika Kamath, tons of them. They're all over. And I was like, wait, these people wrote a paper over here saying that the word sex is being used in all of these expansive ways, but it actually means many things. And then these people over here are arguing that we look at it this other way.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  So I started going to each of them and saying, what does sex mean? I'm confused. I don't understand what sex means. And some of them, like Beans would say, you're not crazy to be reading all that you're reading and to think we haven't really landed what it means. We haven't. And then others of them would say what was true for their study species. So sex is which animal makes which gamete or sex cell. Sex is which animal contributes sperm to a copulation. Sex is which chromosomes an animal has. And then I talked to a different scientist who would have accidentally stumbled on a finding that upended that.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  And it was really cool to be with these really smart people that have devoted their lives to these animals who were staying in that humility, too. And to get comfortable with them in, there's not an agreed-upon definition inside the academy of biological sex, which means when we see it used outside the academy to restrict human rights, that's a lie. That is not some scientific, classifiable statement that's being used. And I think Sam Sharp put it the best when they said to me, you know, each scientist knows what sex means for their study species. We just don't all do the work every time of clarifying what specifically we mean when we say the word, when we go back out in our journal papers, or to speak to the community.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Why don't you tell us why hyenas are an interesting example of humans struggling to put their own messy understanding onto the natural world?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Well, so hyenas have been in long-term relationship with indigenous peoples in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years, right? And the way that they've been talked about is sort of in this liminal space. They're shapeshifters. They're moving between worlds. Sometimes they're not trusted for that reason. Sometimes they're revered for that reason. And Aristotle is really obsessed with them because the legend about them, when he is doing his research, is that they're hermaphrodites. And this is a word that is still in use in science that we never use to apply to humans, that is often used to describe an animal that has multiple sexual functions in one body at one time. And there's different ways to categorize hermaphrodites within the sciences.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Many fish will shift sexes across a lifetime, so they're called sequential hermaphrodites. But the ones that have, are maybe making both sperm and eggs in their body at the same time, are classified as simultaneous hermaphrodites in science. So Kay Holcamp is this scientist I'm obsessed with. She's based out of U. Michigan. She inherited and now runs, she's been running for 40 years, the longest-running spotted hyena study on the Massamara. And they have like these amazing, like Real Housewives of the Massamara, like dynastic maps of the hyena hierarchies, because they're really tightly run. The alpha female, they're in a matriarchy. The alpha female is dosing her babies with androgens. They literally come out the womb swinging, is how Christine Dreia described it to me.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  She was like, I've never seen an animal be born fighting like that. But the alpha female's daughters are defending their rank, tutor-style, from the day they're born. But what happens is scientists will be in the field, and they will be sexing hyenas who seem to have penises.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  And in this case, why, when you say sexing, you mean trying to determine whether they are male or female?

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they're building their map of like, this is this community, that one's interacting with that one, that one fought with that one. That one we call a male, and we've named him X. And this one's female, and we've named her Y. And then the males kept getting pregnant. Because hyenas have a pseudo penis, or the more feminist biologists say it's an externalized clitoris, which is, you know, an externalized clitoris. And it has baffled scientists, and they've been obsessed with it. Like, if you watch the last 30 years of nature documentaries about hyenas, ask me how I know, the incredible amount of like gender essentialism, and I would say transphobia, in describing

• 25:18Speaker 02

  these animals that are not definable in the ways we're comfortable with. And my trans friends always tell me, like, cis people are obsessed with genitalia. You guys are obsessed with genitalia and what it means about a body. And we do that with hyenas, too. And the reason I mentioned the androgens earlier is they've done studies to, they were like, okay, well, the androgens are what's making them have these externalized clitorises. And they've done studies where they've knocked out the androgens, and they still develop them. So we can't even in hyenas, map this hormonal bath that we are used to associating with the development of certain body parts onto the way that their anatomy takes shape.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  And of course, they're like only newly being admitted to zoos because they were so disliked for so long.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  We're going to take a quick break, and then we will be right back with more from Parent after this.

• 26:19Speaker 00

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• 29:17Speaker 00

  Okay, we are back. Another question that people really think about, I think, in the natural world is, what is a relationship? What is love? What is commitment? And there's a whole section that is about albatrosses. Albatrosses are often thought of as these paragons of monogamy, because they fly millions of miles over a lifetime. Their lifetimes can be up to 70 years, but every year, they come back to the same partner. And divorce rates, for what it is, have been very low among these particular type of black-browed albatrosses. And so people have kind of put this whole narrative like, that is the model of natural monogamy.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  For me, this section on albatrosses is really a love letter to the long-term field study, which I think that hyena researches also, because I think for researchers to spend season after season watching these animals that have long-term relationships with each other, like albatross, and to have them return each year to the colony, I have loved what I've gotten to get out of those scientists in interviews that might not wind up in the journal paper about what they feel about what they see. But we are, through particularly our behavior in the global north, forcing sea level temperature rise. And scientists are finding, in a, looking at over 30 years of data,

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Francesco Ventura and his team at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute found that when a female albatross, when the ocean is hotter, comes back to her breeding colony at the end of what they think was a long, hard winter, searching further afield for less food, she is inclined to divorce her long-term mate at much higher rates than we've ever previously seen before in these birds. And so, one of the things I wanted to really talk about and look at in that section of the book is, I think if we're gonna swoon over certain kinds of animal love at this point in planetary history, that means we need to take responsibility for it.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  We're forcing them apart. And so what do we want to do about that if we love these unions so much?

• 31:26Speaker 00

  There are several types of albatrosses that you talk about. One is the black-browed. The other is the lazen, I think that's how you say it?

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Lazen.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  The lazen albatross. And the lazen albatross, there's a very funny story about how in 2007, First Lady Laura Bush of the United States went to visit these lazen albatrosses to highlight natural monogamy and how faithful they were to each other and kind of the traditional family values version of these birds. And she didn't realize at the time that a very significant portion of these monogamous couples were actually same-sex female-female couples of albatrosses. And to me, that's just very funny, that she's like, look at these birds, they're doing it right, the way that it's meant to be doing. And then the birds are like, actually, this does not fit your politics the way that you think that it does. It's an interesting example of how,

• 32:15Speaker 00

  when we put our human lens on animals, we can often get it wrong.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  I like really take delight in at readings, reading that section. And when, you know, there's a drawing I made of Laura Bush holding one of the eggs that the scientist is showing her. And it's like, she's holding an incubating lesbian that's gonna grow into an adult lesbian one day. And for me, it's also like the way that nature is kind of perpetually pulling pranks on us. Like, in the end papers, I have a bunch of charcoal drawings of animal genitalia. And there's this really kind of juicy, four-headed penis surrounded by all these spines. And that belongs to an echidna. Echidnas are those like tiny adorable little marsupial. And then they have like a four-headed penis,

• 33:03Speaker 02

  and they only use two heads at a time, and no one understands why. And it just, for me, is like the joy of spending time with animals and spending time thinking about animals. And their reverence and their relentless creativity, like these lazen's are forming these alternative partnerships in response to an ecological and a social need. And we don't always have to ascribe reasons for same-sex pairs in animals. And the evidence indicates it's an adaptive response. Talking about queerness as an adaptive response is radical right now. But I just love that it's like this combination of just goofing on us and just living their lives and goofing on us until we advance the technology

• 33:48Speaker 02

  and can actually understand what's happening, while they also are so good at living their lives.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  You reached out to people about albatrosses and the story of how albatrosses get together once a year.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  For about 10 days, maybe at a time. But every year, for, you know, an entire lifetime, for maybe 70 years, they could be together for this short period of time. And what were people's responses?

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Oh, people said incredible things. And I had couples respond. You know, some of them would be like, oh, there must be a ton of therapy. And another was like, that's an intense nine days. And it's like, oh, I wonder, I wonder what their conversations are like. And, you know, then there would be sort of more swoony ones where a friend said something like, you know, I'm a child of divorce with commitment issues, and climate change is stressful and relationships are stressful, and I think this is reasonable. Or another friend was like, wow, thinking about love in the era of climate change is so swoon-worthy. It just makes you, we have to fly further afield for each other, and we have to really dedicate ourselves to each other. And it's so fun, the way people come out of the woodwork.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  And this like one-step-removed proxy opens up these conversations. Like, a lot of parents are asking me if the book is kid-friendly, which I just think depends on what, you know, the conversations you're having in your home. And I think comics can be like that, right? Like, people are sending me these photos of like, seven-year-olds spending 45 minutes with a book. And I have no idea what they're taking in or not. And I'm just not too worried about it.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  You have a lot of research in your book. One of the other books that you quote is a book that's called, What Would Animals Say If We Were Asking the Right Questions? So, obviously, that is another book. But I'm curious for you, with what you've learned and with what you've written, what are the right questions that we should be asking? And what would animals say?

• 35:41Speaker 02

  I think a right question we could ask is, what do we need to do to support these animals in having the best sex they possibly can for as long as possible? I sort of make a joke in the end of the book that I'm forming the society to save slap and tickle, to conserve kink lords. But I actually am curious, like, in an environmental movement, which I came of age in, where we're so, it's like, defend, protect, stop, you know, the assault is so intense. What would it look like to orient environmental policy around? Like, how could they best get their rocks off? Because when we remove habitat, when we destroy these,

• 36:24Speaker 02

  these far-flung breeding colonies these albatrosses are living on, if you look at pictures, they are living in piles of our plastic trash. And that's not sexy. So like, what's the sexiest possible way we can support them?

• 36:38Speaker 00

  That's a great question. And, you know, it goes right back to the dedication of your book is, this book is for the last wild creatures having the last wild sex in the last wild places on earth. May their cries of passion haunt us forever. What's another question that you think we should be asking animals?

• 36:53Speaker 02

  I would love to know what their experience of pleasure and orgasm is. Because it's kind of this wall in science where, you know, Patty Brennan, who we spend a lot of time with in the book, she's incredible, really expansive-thinking evolutionary biologist. But she's like, you can't ask a dolphin if they orgasm. We find these huge clits inside dolphins, highly enervated. They have the corpuscles of pleasure that clitoris's and human bodies have. But we can't outright ask them, what are you using this for? And particularly with dolphins, since they echolocate as a form of oral sex. And since, because they echolocate, and echolocation is packaging information in sound.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  And high-frequency sound contains far more information than the range that humans can hear. And for me to tell you, Chris, something I've seen, something I've felt, something I've experienced, I have to package it up and give it to you in words. There is a theory that dolphins do not repackage information they share with each other, that they kind of like beam a direct line. And this is one of the theories that is used to explain stranding behaviors. If they are not repackaging what they communicate to each other, might they have a concept of the individual that extends between bodies and organisms? And might that be why they strand? Because they're moving as one? But what does that imply about their sex lives?

• 38:21Speaker 02

  What is a pod-wide orgasm like, if that's possible? I'm speculating.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  You said that they use echolocation as a form of oral sex? So like, they are?

• 38:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're like clicking and buzzing.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  And that is pleasurable for them, potentially?

• 38:35Speaker 02

  I worked at a dolphin lab. Right after high school, I worked in the lab of Dr. Lou Herman. The lab is shut down now. But he kind of inherited John C. Lilly's work on cognition and memory in dolphins. And there was this hilarious veterinarian, and she, it's called a rostrum-to-genital, the behavior. But as the interns, we would do 24-hour ops. So we'd be there in the middle of the night, and that's when dolphins are sexually active. And we'd be writing, you write, Ross Jenny. She'd be like, that's a Ross Jenny! So I would be like, Ross Jenny, Ross Jenny, Ross Jenny. And it's when they, yeah, they put their rostrum on the other's genitals, and they click and buzz.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  That is wild, fascinating. I'll just lay my cards on the table then. I am certainly not like opposed, but I consider myself to be a little bit of like a prude. Having an open sexual conversation, I'm like blushing from ear to ear, bright beet red. That's not my, um, my natural state. I find that this is like a little challenging. And I'm a little bit like, oh, boy, I am uncomfortable. And I think that that is maybe a good thing. My argument would be, we as humans create so much meaning and such a narrative over what is normal and what is natural. And when we think we know the answers to those questions,

• 39:56Speaker 00

  we exclude groups of people, or we exclude types of behaviors, or we treat things that shouldn't be normal as normal and other things that should be normal as not normal. If we understand nature in a different way, it changes how we understand ourselves. Like, that's why this is on a show called How to Be a Better Human. Am I missing something? Is that too limited? What do you think about why a human should understand this?

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Well, there's something for everybody in the book. So when we're in the albatross monogamy section, you may notice, we don't really talk about how they are making the eggs they're making, or how those lesbians are spending time together. I do a little bit at the end. But I wanted to have it build over time, where there's these sort of like, long-term love partnerships that I think we've been socialized to be more comfortable with, and that also, a lot of people get a lot of fulfillment and meaning out of, and have a lot of value. In animals, they're very contextualized inside the environment they're in, and the community they're in, which I think a lot of our monogamous relationships would benefit from, more of. And then we move all the way to, oh, this animal will

• 41:00Speaker 02

  change what sex it is, like, multiple times in a copulation with another animal. Like, the sort of exploding of your mind is meant to happen across the progression of the book. And I think, I don't even track at this point. And I will be in conversations with people where I'm like, and then, he stabs her with his penis, and then she, and it's like, oh, this is really extreme for a lot of people. But Chris, then I think about how hurt I am by what is happening to many children in our country, that everybody in charge is perpetuating, in many cases, to children, right? Like, what happens when we do moralize

• 41:41Speaker 02

  sex, does not make sex safer. It does not make people safer. It does not make children safer. And it does not make LGBTQ trans community that I value safer. And so, I do think that we can be a better human by learning, again, that sexual diversity is a form of biodiversity, and that, you know, when an animal is manifesting what works for that animal, in its ecological niche, in the moment it's in, in evolutionary time, if there is this sort of allowing of those options, and we talk about them, again, one step removed from our own experiences, what might it open up for safer conversations about this issue,

• 42:26Speaker 02

  and for more of this being out in the light?

• 42:28Speaker 00

  You talk about how the idea that sex and mating are weird, you say, in my late 90s sex ed classes, they were implying that sex was weird. And you say, I deeply internalized the idea that I must keep any sexual desire I had a secret, as if it was something to be feared, punishable by social shaming, or way worse, if revealed. As a girl, I should be modest. My pleasure isn't a priority, and sex is mostly for having kids, or for pleasing men. As we've covered, this view pervades animal research to this day. So there's this way in which that view affected you personally, as a person. It also has affected the kinds of things that we know about the natural world, because of the kinds of things that are acceptable to study.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  I did a bit at Amber Tamblyn's Union Hall Holiday Show. And I did a bit about this genital morphologist, Patricia Brennan. It's a section of the book where she makes these dental silicone, what she calls vaginal popsicles, where she only works with animals that are already dead, right? She doesn't euthanize animals for her research, which is a little like, subethical commitment that I found kind of interesting. So there was a gynecologist working in the early aughts, on her patients, taking consensual dental silicone molds of their vaginas, to understand how, if possibly, different lived experiences might change a person's anatomy, and then what they were working with medically. And

• 43:55Speaker 02

  her male colleagues told her that it was not medically relevant research. And then Patricia Brennan now uses that technique 20 years later. And I did this whole bit about the vaginal popsicles, and Alana Glazer came on stage after me, and she opened her bit being like, when Perrin was talking, I wondered, am I conservative? Because I'm like, so, as we've discussed, I'm balls deep in these animal vaginas, like, really in this world where, you know, when I started to learn how Darwin described female animals in Victorian England, I was like, oh, no, yeah, that's what I was taught. I would read Cosmo, and

• 44:40Speaker 02

  I was learning how to give the best blowjob of all time, but I wasn't supposed to exhibit any desire. I wasn't supposed to actually experience pleasure. I wasn't supposed to pursue anyone. You know, I was supposed to be demure, I needed, right? It's like, all of these exhausting configurations, I felt were in a feedback loop with the prevailing way that we study both, you know, human females and female animals. And I think that this is all relevant right now, because some of the researchers that I interviewed for this book are now having to submit grants to study non-male animals.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  They're not even allowed to say the word female.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  And I laugh, but like, it's really bleak. And I do think that the lack of information about what it is that different animals want, what their anatomy is, what they're in pursuit of, has direct repercussions on the lives that different individuals are allowed to live.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And even on a more, I guess, more basic level, the fact that female animals have been considered more complicated to study, because they could be pregnant, or, you know, for example, lab mice were almost always male. And that has then changed that we don't fully understand how medicines and drugs would affect a female organism versus a male organism. We have tons of information about how it affects a male, and not very much about a female, for many different things, this history of science. So it comes down to just even an understanding of basic health, or how drugs would work.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  There's often this insistence in science of categorizing things as male or female. And you have some very funny examples, I think, of times when that has happened, it doesn't necessarily make sense, or make any sense at all.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  I was deep into my tenure at NDC. I think I'd been there nine years. And my manager said to me, we were traveling, and there were these electrical cords. And he said to me, can you hand me the female part? And I was like, are you sexually harassing me? This is disgusting. And this is like, a very polite person. And it was my first time learning that with electrical equipment, they talk about a male part and a female part. And we ascribe, like, being penetrated and being entered as a female quality. And there are some great examples in nature that absolutely defy that. And yes, I love so much this space station, where Russia and the US, neither of them wanted to be the

• 47:02Speaker 02

  female part. And so they created this, like, androgynous system, so that both of the space stations could identify as male.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  So when they were docking the two parts, neither, even though there is truly nothing male or female about the way that a space station sticks into another space station, they had to invent an entirely new type of coupling, because neither country wanted to be the female part?

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, to be penetrated. We are ascribing value to these things when we do that. And so we have to watch how we do that through science and animals, because we generate these feedback loops of the stories we tell, and what bodies are worth studying, and what aren't, as a result.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  You know, we've talked about how there's, there's a danger of anthropomorphizing animals too much, and putting our own human politics and, you know, hangups on them. But there's also this way in which seeing animals and natural examples that reflect how we feel and how we operate in the world, can make us feel normal, and not like an aberration. There were two examples in the book. One was your own experience of what, you know, learning about sex and nature and these messages told you about yourself. There's also a researcher who had been abused as a child, and then looked at that abuse through the lens of their research. Can, can you tell us that story really quick?

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Yes. So Dr. Eileen Hebbitts, who I heard on a podcast, in her graduate work, as she was studying spiders, starting to identify that she had what she would call, because she's a scientist, a phenotype of people she was attracted to. And in the process of starting to interrogate her attraction model, she uncovered and started to actually treat this childhood sexual abuse experience from a person outside her family. And what she did that I love so much, and I wrote to her, asking if I could include this story in my book, and draw about this research, because I was so moved by it, is she let

• 49:01Speaker 02

  that shape the questions she asked of animals. Spiders are very sexually dimorphic. And so, an adult female is often multiple times larger than the male that they will mate with. And they often cannibalize their mates after they mate with them. And they get a little snack while they are also starting to incubate eggs. And she did some research that, you can see me spell it out in the book, about the attraction models that spiders had, female spiders had, based on who they were exposed to in their youth. And what I love so much about her research and what she found, is that she unapologetically reclaimed

• 49:45Speaker 02

  that experience, and brought it into the lab, and let it shape the questions that she wanted to ask of animals, which to me is deeply feminist practice. And particularly, I feel like I learned about that practice from Black feminism, of letting the intersections of our identities shape the questions that we ask in the world.

• 50:03Speaker 00

  I think it's also, there's something really powerful, too, about just this idea that sometimes, you know, we get caught up in the what is natural and what is unnatural. But for her, it was a really healing thing to be like, this thing that I've experienced that I'm somewhat disturbed by or uncomfortable with, is actually something I can see in the natural world. That having an adverse exposure when I was young, could change the things that I'm looking for as an adult. And that's not me somehow being broken. That is a natural process.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. Really, really beautiful. And I think also, to me, there's something really feminist about being in relationship to nature in that way, letting it speak back to us, letting it imprint back on us, and have something to say to us that changes how we understand our own stories in the world.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Perrin Ireland, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for writing the book. Thank you for the work that you do. This was a really interesting, fantastic conversation. I'm so glad we got to do it.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me, Chris. It was such a joy.

• 51:05Speaker 04

  That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much for listening. Before I read the credits, we are still doing our listener survey and we need more responses. It makes a huge difference in helping us shape the future of our show. Tell us what you like, what you don't like, what you think we could do more of, what topics you'd like to hear. It is a huge, huge help if you can fill out that survey. It just takes a few seconds. There is a link that you can click on in the episode description, wherever you're listening to this or watching this, or you can go to bit.ly/BHSurvey6. That's B-I-T dot L-Y slash B-H Survey 6. Thank you so much. It makes a huge difference for the future of our show. Thank you so much to our guest today, Perrin Ireland. Her book is called Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn From Animal Sex, and you can find her videos

• 51:50Speaker 04

  and her drawings and illustrations online at experimint.com. Experimint, that's E-X-P-E-R-R-I-N-M-E-N-T dot com. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find information about my book, Humor Me, which is out now, about my live show dates and all my other projects at ChrisDuffyComedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team who spend about as much time physically in person as a pair of married albatrosses, and yet, our relationship is strong. On the TED side, Poking the Squid are Daniela Balarezzo, Ben Van Cheng, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohannini, Lainey Lott, Tansuka Sungmanivong, Antonio Le, and Joseph DeBryan. Brian Lash is filming, but I swear, the video is suitable for work. And Mateus

• 52:32Speaker 04

  Salas is not only checking our facts, but he's also checking the framing of all of our assumptions about nature. On the PRX side, like a seahorse carrying its young to term, they do it all. It's Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you, you animal, for listening. Please, send this episode to someone who you think would enjoy it, someone who you want to discuss it with. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care and stay natural.

• 53:05Speaker 04

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