Penguins, Prurience and Projection
Like most pet owners, Calico isn’t exactly averse to attributing human qualities to her little animal friends. The cats don’t just come lie down next to her for a quick visit, for example; they knowingly engage in “tribute” to their wonderful, humble human. The dog isn’t just shitting in the first convenient place to come along on his walks; he has some kind of problem with the neighbor and craps in that man’s driveway as a form of nonviolent protest.
Such anthropomorphism can go too far, though — and we should really discourage it strongly in the context of science.
Otherwise, before you know it, we’ll have penguin researchers suppressing their own observations about penguin sexuality and keeping the rest of humanity in the dark about their self-censorship for a hundred years.
What the hell am I talking about? For the answer to that question, refer to Calico’s latest post: “Penguins, Prurience and Projection.” Read on…
by Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com
By and large, we humans aren’t that great at discussing, or even thinking about, sex.
This is not to say we don’t talk about sex a lot, just that we’re not very good at doing so. As academics who study sex are quick to point out, much of what people “know” about human sexuality is based on flawed assumptions, like the notion that “men provide women with goods and services in exchange for women’s sexual fidelity.”
In fact, we’re so bad at understanding our own sexuality, even people who aren’t prone to using definitive language (like, say, stuffy researchers from King’s College, London) will tell you that human sexuality, “as a field of interest as well as a human experience, is inundated with myths, fallacies, and dead beliefs.”
Given how poorly we do at talking about our own sexuality, it probably should come as no surprise that we’re often similarly awful at talking about the sexuality of other animals – or even entirely unwilling to do so.
Take the sexual behaviors of Adélie penguins, for instance
It turns out humans have known for over 100 years that these birds exhibit all kinds of sexual behaviors that are deemed to be “deviant” in a human context – but the guy who first observed those behaviors decided not to publicize what he’d seen.
“During his months observing Adélie penguins, which included an entire breeding cycle, (George Murray) Levick witnessed the birds engaging in same-sex mating rituals,” according to Carolyn Gramling of ScienceNews.org. “He also saw the birds engage in a variety of other sexual behaviors that in humans we might call promiscuity, infidelity, even prostitution.”
Now just wait a damn minute here; penguin prostitution?
This very idea fills me with questions – including, “where do penguins get their money?” and “what do they spend it on?” (other than penguin prostitutes, I mean.) I’ll put those questions on hold for a minute though, to let Gramling continue to fill us in on the curious observations of George Murray Levick.
“Levick recorded these scandalous details in a second manuscript, ‘The sexual habits of the Adélie penguin,’ in 1915,” Gramling reports. “But the manuscript was stamped ‘Not for Publication’ and remained unpublished for nearly a century.”
What!?!? Forget about the other aspects of Adélie penguin sexuality for a minute and let me wrap my brain around this one fact: This Levick motherfucker knew about the existence of penguin prostitutes back in 1912, but decided to leave the rest of us in the dark? For shame, George, for shame!
Coincidentally enough, it turns out shame may well have been part of what held Levick back – or more precisely, a desire not to besmirch these penguins by calling attention to their sexual misconduct.
Gramling’s article isn’t really about Levick
It’s about a book called A Polar Affair, written by Penguin biologist and author Lloyd Spencer Davis, who thought he’d been the first to record same-sex behavior in Antarctic penguins, back in 1996. Davis, much to his chagrin, later found out about Levick’s self-suppressed manuscripts and began wondering: Why would Murray Levick “discover the dirty side of penguins” but then try to cover it up?
Sadly, Gramling’s review doesn’t really shed light on this question – but since I’m the self-professed Queen of Baseless Speculation, I’ll be happy to hazard a guess.
My hunch is that despite being a man of science, Levick suffered from a tendency I imagine is shared, at least to some extent, by all humans: We anthropomorphize damn near every animal behavior, even when we should know better.
Back in Levick’s day, it’s fair to say most people weren’t exactly enlightened and tolerant when it came to things like homosexuality, promiscuity, infidelity and prostitution. Never mind the fact that throughout human history, each of those things has been commonplace – we still managed (and continue to manage, sadly) to think of them as dirty, naughty, awful or even evil.
Levick likely worried that if he were to report on all the randy, kinky things the Adélie penguin were up to, he’d bias people against the birds – or possibly worse from the viewpoint of his Victorian-era mind, provide the ‘perverts’ of the world evidence to support an argument that their aberrant sexual behaviors were natural.
Who knows, maybe Levick just didn’t think his observations were numerous or solidly documented enough to present as scientific findings, or maybe he had some other reason for holding them back. Ether way, for any of us to project human motivations, ethics or desires onto a bunch of birds is asinine – unless, of course, we’re trying to make hundreds of millions of dollars with an animated film, in which case anthropomorphism obviously is the way to go.
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