What Animal Studies Have Shown: I Want to Fuck You Like an Animal

Odd as it sounds, if animals have similar sex behaviors as people do, it strengthens a researcher's findings about human sexuality. Do animals prefer symmetrical mates? Do animals have more sex around the time that the female is fertile?

In many ways, animals act a lot like people do, even the one's that aren't even closely related to us. No one is going to say that a horseshoe crab looks at all human, but female crabs routinely end up mating with stronger, more energetic males. Younger males tend to end up with the females, and they are clearly younger, because of their shiny, slimy surface. Older males lose their shine, and tend to grow barnacles on their bodies. Even female scorpion flies prefer males with even sized wings. Having one wing smaller than the other might be a genetic defect, something that the female wouldn't want to pass on to her offspring.

Just as human women prefer to sleep with symmetrical men when they are fertile, so race horses tend to be healthier than asymmetrical horses. A British study in 1994 found that symmetrical horses tend to be faster than asymmetrical animals. Similar can be said for Japanese scorpion flies. Those with symmetrical wings tend to be healthier and live longer.

Female chimpanzees behave more more like human women than the horseshoe crabs (no surprise there). For the chimpanzees, affection, or "romance" if you like, is important. Primatologist Ron Nadler conducted an experiment that gave female chimps more control over if they had sex or not. Male chimps, who are bigger and meaner, tended to decide if sex happened. He separated the chimps into male and female pairs, all of whom already knew each other. The chimps were put into connecting cages with a door between the male and female cages. The door could only be opened by the females, some of whom were put on the Pill.

As said before, the Pill lowers sex drive in women, and it does the same in chimpanzees. As long as the females were on the Pill, they didn't bother opening the door for the males. At least, for some of them. Those that had good relationships with the males opened the door and let sex happen, whether they were on the Pill or not. The same was true of the females in what could be called "abusive relationships." They opened the door for the aggressive males as well, regardless of contraception. Others didn't bother opening the door at all, as long as they were on the birth control. As soon as they were taken off, they began having sex again once ovulation started. Similar results were found in orangutans.

Of course, people aren't animals and we have sex for many reasons besides having children. Sex is a social activity, and much of it is determined by societal circumstances and pressures. This does make the study of sex more difficult but doesn't take away from what biology was taught us.

Blum, Deborah. Sex on the Brain. New York: Penguin Group, 1998.
Watson, Lyall. Dark Nature. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.