Animal Magic

Taking some time out from the first crushes - we will go back to them.

Meanwhile, there's no way around it, this is a blog post about animals masturbating.

It's a response to this (scholarly, and safe for work) piece on the Slate website, which, I promise you, raises interesting questions above and beyond the fantastic line: "some moose can ejaculate simply by rubbing their antlers on bits of vegetation".

Putting aside the prurience and the comedy factor, the premise of the article is intriguing because of the large amount of time that it spends looking at the evolutionary advantages of sperm competition theory, and the almost no time at all it spends considering whether and why animals might have an urge to pleasure themselves in general. I realise that's the point of the piece - that masturbation is not just for fun, but also conveys an evolutionary advantage - and it is very interesting. But it fails to consider that the ability to have fun itself conveys an evolutionary advantage.

I would interpret the data about animal masturbation as follows: it is evidence of the widespread capacity of pleasure in animals, and of how animals will use fairly sophisticated means to seek it out. So the piece says that "both male and female porcupines manipulate their genitals with inanimate objects"; this is tool use, and tool use is the kind of thing that evolutionary biologists wet themselves over because of it being a marker of intelligence and sophistication. If a monkey uses a stick to get itself something to eat, that's front page news. So sexual pleasure is hugely important: porcupines using dildos is a big deal and not just because it's funny; animals don't bother with tools unless it's for something that matters. But because masturbation is about sexual pleasure, the work on it can be reductionist: sexual pleasure must be about sex. I think it's broader than that: orgasm is a visible marker of enjoyment. Similarly, you can explain domestic cats eating themselves into obesity by saying "they evolved as wild animals who didn't know where their next meal was coming from so they eat as much as they can when they can" or by saying "cats enjoy eating". Animals do things they enjoy. (Eating too much and wanking. Sound familiar?) It's all about the joy.

So if we accept that both the purpose and driving force of evolution is survival, we can look at the evolution of pleasure as a mechanism to help us to survive. We know what we need to do to survive because it is pleasant: food, sex, warmth, loving our offspring etc. We know what to avoid because it is unpleasant: hunger, pain, cold, loneliness. The story of evolution is thus the story of pleasure. Pleasure is how we learn what is right for us. A joyful animal is a successful animal. A miserable animal is two steps off freezing to death, starving, or dying without offspring.

Masturbation isn't just about healthy sperm, it's the direct result of evolution working, it's the embodiment of the message that evolution has created: do what feels good. The piece is perplexed on what advantage female masturbation might have, given that females don't have sperm, as if the author can't imagine why it might be to a female animal's advantage to experience pleasure. This may be symptomatic of the writer's inability to link sexual pleasure with any other kind of pleasure. Female animals masturbate because it is important in evolutionary terms to do the things that feel good, because if you don't, you'll die. A clever animal will seek pleasure and practice pleasure, because the appreciation of pleasure conveys an evolutionary advantage in itself. So masturbating reminds you that you enjoy sex and it might be an idea to have sex more often. But not only that, masturbation is a marker of an animal's ability to seek out pleasure for itself, and this is a useful thing to be able to do.

Or to put it another way, masturbation is the meaning of life and a sign of highly sophisticated intelligence.

Enjoy!