Sex is Weird 5: Why does it feel good, anyway?
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What role does pleasure play in successful reproduction?
ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. When was the last time you really looked at your kettle, your umbrella, the hallway mirror or even a gravestone? Every one of them was designed by someone for a reason and those choices are still shaping how you live. The ordinary isn't ordinary at all. That's By Design with me, Anthony Burke. Find it on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.
There are some things that will always be out there as urban myths and extensive Reddit AMAs, like the guy's got two penises. But one-off humans are nothing compared to the absolute batshit racy antics of nature when it comes to sex.
Scorpions don't have a penis, right? They have something called a spermatophore. It's detachable.
No!
Basically, they dropped it on the ground, and then in that male-female dance that scorpions do, they pull the female over it.
Wait, wait. The scorpions dance. The scorpions will touch claws and edge backwards and forwards. The sexual tension is palpable. He caresses her mouthparts. This is Bruno Alves Bussato.
And it gets more interesting than that, Anne, because males often sting the females during that. No. It's called sexual sting in the venom gland of males. Quite likely that it also produces chemicals that help the male's interest.
Holy moly, I'd never heard of that before.
And then in that male-female dance that scorpions do, they pull the female over it.
This is the sperm packet that he's dropped on the ground, the spermatophore. While he's been dancing, stinging, and pashing, he's also been dragging her around to look for the perfect surface to plonk his custard. And when he does put down the spermatophore, it's at an angle, like a javelin has entered the ground.
And that goes inside the female, and the tip of it has sperm, which goes inside the female, but it also normally breaks, and the tip of it serves as a mating plug.
A mating plug.
Doesn't come out to female until she has babies. So he guarantees she can't mate a second time.
He literally plugs the bunghole.
It is very complicated, actually.
Oh, I beg your pardon. Sex is weird. You know that already. And so do the romantic gods of the night, scorpions. But why do we do this stuff? Sperm packets, hooks, dances, snogging? It's all so complicated and time consuming. There must be an answer that drives us beyond this idealised need to reproduce. And today we're going there. Pleasure. romance using vibrators on livestock. We're going to look at some sex acts and some bits of sex acts in slightly uncomfortable detail so that we can try and find out what role does pleasure play in sex and reproduction? And that is what brings me to a dairy farm at five in the morning in winter near Ballarat.
I'm Lynette Greenwood. I'm a dairy farmer, just a plain dairy farmer from Learmonth. I milk 600 cows.
Lynette Greenwood is no-nonsense, welcoming, but not cloying. And she has a little Jack Russell sitting under her feet in the dairy office.
You're in the command station, aren't you? The reason I do it from in here, well, it's warm, I've got my cup of tea, but I'm reading the patches on their tail. On their tail? On the top of their tail.
Oh, that thing that was right at the very top?
Yeah, right at the very top.
I thought it looked like you'd put reflectors on them so cars... That's what it looks a bit like, yeah.
You can see on that one there, she's got a bright green one.
Lynette has stickers right at the base of her herd's tails. They're not heat sensitive. They're to show when a cow is in heat. They're covered in a light metallic substance, sort of like a scratchy, and they require the cooperation of the herd to function.
Yeah, well the other cows mount them. They do the same as what a bull would do. They just jump on the cow. They jump on each other. That's how those patches get rubbed. They look like a little tats like those scratchy.
Side note, on the transcription software, instead of tat-slotto, the software insists that Lynette has called them tat-slutto-scratchies.
It calls tat-slutto-scratchies.
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