A five-and-a-half-inch deep-sea squid that lives a solitary life up to half a mile down in the dark waters of the Pacific Ocean is the latest addition to the hundreds of species that are known to engage in same-sex sex.
[Dr. Hendrik J.T. Hoving, author of “A shot in the dark: same-sex sexual behavior in a deep-sea squid,"] was prepared for attention to the same-sex behavior and was ready for people to conflate squid and human behavior and announce the discovery of gay squid.
He fended off that notion, reiterating that the squid has no discernible sexual orientation, and that a tentacled invertebrate that shoots sperm into its mate’s flesh really has nothing to do with human behavior. -- from today's New York Times
Sigh. Plus ça change, blah blah. It's weird: Years ago, the entire scientific world announced that animals were straight. Every single one. Penguins mated for life. Geese actually bought each other engagement rings. On the odd occasion when a scientist would catch, say, a couple male dogs going at it, an explanation was immediately offered:
Those dogs are really confused.
I actually wrote to National Geographic when one of their articles declared that seahorses having homosexual sex were simply confused. "How did your esteemed scientists come to this conclusion?" I asked. "Did the seahorses back off when erections appeared, or did they go 'Oops!' afterward?"
Now creatures that fuck anything that moves aren't bisexual: they simply have no sexual orientation. This strikes me as petty. It's like if you show your Dooney & Burke clutch to a fashionista friend, and she says, "You know, if it isn't Louis Vuitton, it's not really a bag."
As we delve deeper into it, we realize these folks are being awfully petty. They raise all sorts of odd conditions to keep the squid from being homosexual. "The squid aren't actually fucking," they insinuate. "They're just shooting sperm onto each other." Oh. Okay. If that doesn't count as authentic sex, then I've been a virgin since January '02. "These aren't people we're talking about: they're tentacled invertebrates."
Dr. Hoving, meet Dr. E. C. Spada:
The Times is unattractively desperate.
[The male squid] pay no attention to the sex of other squid. Understandably so. They live alone in the dark, males and females are hard to tell apart, and only occasionally do squids pass in the night.
"We'd fuck a dude too if it was dark, and we were lonely," they're saying. I'm not sure how they can glom this generalization onto incommunicado invertebrates, though. Somehow they know that the squid aren't thinking, "Hey, here's a hot little dude!" but rather, "Well, at least I found something to fuck!"
In the end, we realize that nothing has changed. The scientists are nuts, the media is nuts. It's the same old story. Animals are hetero until we can't pretend they aren't, but that still doesn't mean they're gay.
They're simply nothing. Nothing at all.
Which doesn't exactly make progress towards gay equality, but I guess somebody's gotta be in the center of the Hollywood Squares.
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