SEXUAL ENERGY SERIES-3: The Shock & Awe of Penis Evolution – Emily Willingham, Ph.D. : 789

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to talk about some people's favorite topic, the penis. We are going to talk about the fallacies that surround the phallus. You see what I did there? And our guest today is Emily Willingham, a PhD who's written a new book called Fallacy Life Lessons from the Animal Penis. And she's a journalist who specializes in medical and health topics and a science writer and a research scientist looking at biology. And we're going to talk about how evolution and the natural world have made the penis into what it is and maybe explain why we're so fascinated with it and probably not that much about what to do with it. Emily, welcome to the show.

Thanks. Thanks so much for having me.

I have to ask, and I'm sure you've answered this before, in fact, I know you have, why did you decide to write a book about penises?

I actually was considering a book about the brain, which is what I'm working on now. And while I was going back and forth with the proposal on that, I was just driving around one day, perhaps with a car with my three sons in it, and it occurred to me, oh, wait a second. I've done a postdoctoral fellowship in, in penises. I actually studied how they develop. I wonder if maybe there's an opening to write a book about those. So I emailed my agent and we were on the phone in like a half hour. I just, I was still in the car and I just pulled over into a parking lot and we talked about it. And it was just a really exciting idea.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that call with your agent. It's just the number of jokes I'm not going to make here intentionally is large. So you decided, okay, I've really studied this. I know about it. And what's the main takeaway? Like that after you wrote the book, it forces you to think differently when you write a book. So what was the number one thing that popped out after you ordered your thoughts in that way?

It's interesting. I wish I could do a three way tie to answer this question. But I would say the number one thing is that the penis that we hold as this amazing thing that we send pictures of to each other. And that kind of thing, when you put it contextually among all of the analogous structures in the animal kingdom, it's not so much on the wow end of things, but because of that, it means it's kind of on the. We can have a lot more fun with it. End of things. So there's a positive and a negative to it.

What animal has the worst penis of all?

I don't want to characterize them as worst.

I know you don't. That's why I asked.

No, I would say that the one that has. Yeah, yeah, I'm judging your penis. Seed beetle. Speaking of which, possibly that one.

The seed beetle.

The seed beetle.

Why is it the worst penis?

Oh, my gosh. Oh, I couldn't say it's the worst. I would say it's the most daunting from the human gaze, probably because it's really tiny, because it's a little bitty beetle. There's a few species of them, and they have spikes and they have bumps and they have jawed structures on them that leave marks on the genital tract of their mating partner. And so that sounds kind of terrifying, right?

Oh, it could sound kind of interesting, depending on what you're into, sort of.

Yeah, I guess that's true.

So we have these. These fearsome things and they evolve that way. For some reason, though, and because you studied this, why would you need spikes and barbs and things like that on a penis?

So one of the patterns that you see, and I emphasize this in the book, is that the more bells and whistles a structure like this has, a penis, has, then the more likely there is to be a little bit of tension in the mating process. Sometimes it's even what we call forced copulation. But it's definitely. There's some tension there. And so on one side, on the female side, usually it's female side, there are these adaptations that kind of are block a penis or kind of make the sperm go somewhere that doesn't succeed and that kind of thing. And in response, you see these adaptations that are like, you know, spikes or little jaws that are going to make a little damage and get those sperm in there anyway and things like that. And so the more accoutrements they have, or accoutrement, depending on how you like to say that word, the more you see that kind of tension in the mating pair.

Why would the females of any species evolve a chastity belt?

This is an interesting question, and there are plenty of evolutionary biologists who focus on it. Usually the females make, first of all, the larger of the two gametes. The egg, as we call it casually, is much larger, usually than the sperm. And then they invest a lot more in the actual process of gestating or creating the offspring. So with that level of commitment, they, you know, the idea is that they're being pretty choosy and, and sort of sorting things out right there on the ground.

Okay. So just lots of demand, little supply, energetically intense. So make it so they have to work for it. Okay.

Or compete for it. Yeah.

Sounds not that different than the typical bar when you think about it.

That's a different kind of mate choice, actually. That's a choice where. Yeah, that takes. And that's our different features we're looking at. Okay. Usually it depends on the bar.

Okay, fair point.

Right.

What is the best penis of any animal out there? Now that we're into the judgment land.

Yeah. Now we're judging the penises. I've been asked this question and after a few answers, I realized that I really and truly believe the best penis is ours because I'm human. And because it doesn't have all of these attachments to it, we can put it in places where lots of other animals might not be able to put their penis. And so we get to kind of. It's really flexible. You can do a lot with those things, as you might know. And so it just makes it a lot more fun. It's my favorite.

All right, that is a truly honest answer. I was thinking you were going to say octopus or something weird.

It's a tough competition, actually.

What is an octopus? What does an octopus penis look like?

Well, so they, as you know, octopuses have their names because they have eight arms and they can have a penis structure. But there are some species that, well, they'll pass along these structures called spermatophores, which I refer to as sort of like sperm lollipops because they're little packets of sperm on a stick. And in a lot of cases, well, here's a very specific example is a kind of octopus called the paper nautilus, which is neither paper nor a nautilus. It's a little octopus. It creates a white kind of sail like structure. It's one of the only ones that comes up above the water and it looks like little fleets of sailing ships. The female is so much bigger than the male and so if he gets near her, she might just eat him. Not his outcome that he probably would benefit him very much. So he has one of these eight arms, kind of loads it up with these spermatophores and kind of does the sneak attack and pokes it underneath the little sail and leaves the arm, just drops it off. And then he takes off with his seven arms, his seven remaining arms.

I didn't see that in My Octopus Teacher, the movie that just came out. Because that's not something that I want to learn as a skill in my life.

Yeah, you don't want to do that. Wow.

When you sit back and you look at this incredible diversity of reproductive organs, but you find there's almost always something that's penis or penis. Like why do you think it evolved in that way?

The going explanation for that is that it's just a more direct placement. Right. Of the. The sperm that's being transferred. You're not just kind of broadcasting it underwater, which is what a lot of marine animals do, like coral and that kind of thing. You're not just kind of dropping it on something and hoping something else comes along and spawns on top of it, which is kind of the behavior of maybe like salmon, something like that. You are really picking out an individual organism and you are placing those sperm into that organism. That's very directed target thing.

You talk about the bad boys and bad studies of evolutionary psychology. It sounds like you kind of have a different bone to pick. I just said bone to pick. I wasn't trying to.

You can't get away from it anyway.

You have a bone to pick with the traditional view of this. What's different about the way you've seen this in your studies and in writing the book?

Those studies that I write about in that first chapter, they bother me because they purport to kind of ask a question about what women want and what would best serve them sexually. But then they center how they answer that question. They always center it on a penis. And as I point out in that chapter, when you do look at studies and you really get a broad group of women and you ask them what they want, what you find is that's kind of a secondary consideration when it comes to sexual satisfaction. And there are lots of other features that get involved, including hands and things like that that, you know, it's more how much do you know about what you're doing than the tool that you're doing it with.

Got it. So the studies were all very much around reproduction. A lot of them are pretty old studies, right?

Well, a couple of them. A few of them are not that. It depends on what you think of as old. Fair point. My. My sort of measure for that is getting possibly a little longer term than it used to be. There's definitely some from this century for sure. And they very much focus on a penis. Like can a penis induce an orgasm? You know, go ask a lot of women that question. How much they care, and what they really know works for that. And it's not going to just be just the penis at all. There's so much more involved.

Do you think that human penises actually are evolved to cause orgasms, or is that kind of a side effect because they really evolved to get the sperm where they need to go?

Yeah, it's an interesting question because one of the things that evolutionary biologists fight about is why female orgasm exists at all. Why do human women have orgasms? And there's one little study that I found that's not in the book, that suggests that in rabbits, of all things, that there used to be a direct connection between the stimulation, the orgasm and ovulation. So you could see those two things being really clearly connected. And last, you know, being passed on and being important anatomically, where we register for orgasms has now been separated from where the penis goes in. And so now those two things are not anatomically linked like they seem to be in rabbits. And so everybody's like, well, why do women orgasm? And you can't just say, well, because it's super fun, because it's not an optimal explanation for evolutionary biologists. So it remains kind of a mystery. But it's not about the penis being able to do it. Ask bonobos.

I had a guest on recently who had extensively studied Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, read every paper published, unpublished, probably slept in his bed, for all I can tell, and found unpublished work that was near publication when he died about the hierarchy of needs. Food, shelter, safety, et cetera. But his final unpublished thing was transcendence. And that that's actually a basic human function and a basic human need. And I definitely know a few people who would describe some of their orgasms as transcendent. So maybe it's there for that, at least if it's done right, as you're saying.

I think that if for evolution to work on, it has to give you some kind of reproductive advantage. And what my take on it is, the advantage is a bonding advantage. It helps you bond with the. If somebody can do that really well for you. Yeah, that kind of thing. But if they can do that really well, you might want to stick around with them as a partner and that might actually boost reproductive chances. It's really huge debate, though, about why, you know, we, like women, still somehow manage to do this, even though it's not needed for reproduction.

You talk in your book about the many uses of the penis, by the way. Your chapter titles just make me laugh. Tell me about some of the many uses of the penis.

Well, it kind of depends on which animal you're talking about. There are some animals whose what we call. I made up a whole word for this because they use so many different body parts for this. But some animals use their legs. I talked about, you know, millipedes that use actually two pairs of legs. They have one pair that they use kind of to test things out. Just nothing in it, they're just testing. And then they then use another pair of legs to pass up sperm to the first pair and then they go for the real thing. They're not the only animals that use legs for that. Spiders, I know people don't like spiders, but I've really come to love them because they have these two structures in the front of them called pedipalps and they're sensory structures. So they use them to smell and taste and that kind of thing. But then they also use them to inject sperm into a partner. And they have these little mitten kind of things on the end that look like boxing gloves, but that's where the sperm is packaged in. And they'll insert that into the female and release the sperm, you know. But they do a lot of other things. Those structures do just lots of different things.

You also, in your book, you talk about female control as a whole chapter. So talk to me about penises versus female control and what you learned from that.

So that takes us back to this idea of if there's tension in the copulatory act, if it's sort of forced copulation, what you see and what you have, what we do see is on the male side, all these structures. Let's talk about duck penises, which I talk about a lot people really want to know about duck fetuses that, you know, they're famously, they're corkscrew shaped, they emerge ballistically, they just kind of wham, bam, thank you, ma', am, with the female duck and take off. And for a long time these penises have been quite famous and pictures of them and all this. And it wasn't until this century, which in my view is not that long ago now, right in 2005, that somebody decided to look at what was happening in a dark vagina with this. And it's kind of anti scientific in a way, not to have looked before, because if you see all that on the penis, you should expect that some adaptive response to obstacles in a vagina. So when the researcher, who by no accident probably was a woman, did finally look, she found that the duck vagina would have like Cul de sacs where sperm would get trapped and that it even had a corkscrew that was in the opposite direction of the corkscrew of the male, of the dog penis. It was just worth looking and we should do it more.

Are you going to write a book about vaginas next?

Well, I don't need to because, well, I mean, I guess I should say I don't need to. Jen Gunter wrote. Wrote a book called the Vagina Bible, which really covers so much territory, you know, about the human version, that I feel like that's probably. She's got that covered.

Yeah. In fact, she recommended your book. One of the quotes on the back cover.

Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.

Now that's about the human vagina, though. But it seems like most of the research has been penis focused in the animal kingdom for a long time. Are vaginas as fascinating as penises?

Yes, they are. I'm just going to state that one clearly. The problem is that they've been dismissed just even like explicitly. Researchers who focus on genitalia will say, oh, the male genitalia are so interesting. But we don't think there's probably much to see on the female side. So I think there's a lot.

That's because it's inside. It's still there. You just can't see it as well.

You can still look. They're cutting these little animals open all the time. They can look in there. It's just who's asking the question? Who cares about the answer? Right. So.

You have a whole chapter about size.

I do.

Does size matter?

It's a funny. It's an interesting question in humans, actually. Not really. You can ask people who engage sexually with penises about what their preferences are. You know, there's kind of a tie between a certain width and a certain length. But it's not the crucial be all and end all of sexual satisfaction for a lot of partners. And when you get to other animals, though, it gets kind of interesting. I sort of set up the size chapter as a competition and I awarded a gold medal, I think. But the way you determine size, you can do it in lots of different ways. Absolute size, in which case the blue whale is just going to be the big winner. Right. Because it's a gigantic animal and it has this gigantic penis to go with it. But if you're looking proportionally, there's this almost microscopic barnacle that has a penis as many, many, many times its body size. So it's really, in that sense, by far the big winner. It doesn't matter so much in terms of reproductive success generally. Although there are some specific examples where there might be a mole, there's an underground, you know, lives underground, can't see. And there might be some effect of penis size in with whom the female will mate because she can't see. So there's something sensitive maybe at work.

I bumped in into something I must be a penis. In some forms of like ancient Chinese practices around Taoism, they go to great lengths when they're matching partners to match the male penis size and shape to the female size so that they don't have reproductive problems where, you know, one is too big or too small for the other. That's the only kind of example of that that I. I am aware of in human practice. Is there any. Anything there around it just doesn't fit in other animals or is that just because they're being a little bit obsessive about it?

I think that sounds a little obsessive on the human side. Yeah. We used to teach that animals had these kind of very interesting adornments on their penises because it was kind of a lock and key test to make sure you had the right species. Because lots of animals make that mistake. They just try to copulate with completely wrong species, which is. It's an evolutionary dead to do that. But now we found that it's not necessarily that so much. It's. That's not what's driving it. It's not always a lock and key. So that actually doesn't matter as much. It does matter to get the right, the right species though. So, you know, I guess they get selected out if they do that too often.

All right, that's a pretty easy one then. Are there any other species besides humans who intentionally modify their penises like circumcisions, piercings and God knows all the other stuff you can do if you're really into that.

It depends on what you mean by intentional. There are. I don't know.

Well, I mean we choose. We choose to, you know, remove foreskins in some percentage of the population. Are there animals were like, oh, before I have sex, I'm going to bite off the tip and I have no idea.

So there are animals that chew one another's like they're hermaphroditic slugs. There's an example of what they call apophalli where if they kind of get stuck, they'll just kind of chew the penis off because they can just do that just to separate. I know that sounds terrible, but that's.

Why your Book is funny.

It's one way, one way to get apart. There are some animals, again, invertebrates, you don't see a lot of this with vertebrates because they're just, you know, put together very structurally, specifically. But in some invertebrates, they have penises that have bespoke parts that break off, like little weak points where there's ones like where they have three penises basically joined together by a kind of serrations, like you see when you, like, tear a coupon or something. And so they might mate and then that little one end breaks off, but they still got two there in storage waiting to use them.

As the owner of a penis. It seems odd that we would need this much variation versus, like, just a basic thing that, like, you know, sticks sperm. And is there a good explanation for why a slug would do that? This is just ancient stuff. They didn't evolve far enough. I'm just trying to put together my piece of why does life do what it does, humans and otherwise? And that just doesn't make sense.

Evolution goes back and forth with things. It's just what fits the environment at the time. And it may be really useful for that animal that has a tripartite penis to be able to leave it behind. One reason might be because when they do leave things behind like that, it's not the only animal that does it. It keeps anybody else from putting anything in there. And so it's a bit of a blocker on. If another male comes along and tries to mate with that partner, they kind of can't because there's a penis stuck in there. You can't.

It blocks the hole. All right.

Yeah. It's the physical plot. So that's kind of adaptive for that male to have that capacity. So it sticks around.

You also wrote a chapter called Small but Mighty Like a Sword.

Yes.

Which is, I mean, an incredibly Freudian thing to put in a title, which you obviously did on purpose. What does the mighty like a sword part of that mean?

There are, speaking of what evolution does over and over again, all these unrelated animals, you know, like squishy things from the sea and things with exoskeletons on land. But one of the things that they seem to have in common, a lot of them, is they have what is called a hypodermic penis. I'll just call it a penis. And it is what it sounds like. It's kind of needle like. And they don't necessarily go for the partner's genital tract to deposit the sperm. And in some cases, they'll just kind of Job around on a mating partner until they insert that hypodermic somewhere in the body and release the sperm. So that's. That's sword like, right? Way more sword like than anything we see on ourselves, I think.

I'm glad we're not into that. That doesn't sound very, very successful for having children.

It works for them. And you know, it's funny you mentioned that because it must be so successful for these animals because it's such a. It's such a common theme and these unrelated species to have these super pointy needle like delivery systems.

I guess it requires less decision making. So sometimes if you have less compute power in an animal, they're going to have to just go for the lowest common denominator. And thus the penis would be hypodermic.

Right, Right. You just kind of get it in there because you don't really have to figure out where you're putting it necessarily.

And barnacles aren't that smart. Okay, I'll get you there. You move in in the book next into penis free to blurred boundaries. So what about penis free? What's going on there?

Well, one of the stories, there are two stories I really focus on in that part. One of them is about an anaconda at a zoo that just suddenly went, she was female. And suddenly one day the zookeepers looked in there and she had more than a dozen babies, like 2ft, 2 foot long little anacondas. And there was no an. You would know, Right. If there were another anaconda in there because these are enormous snakes. And it turned out that she had done something called parthenogenesis where her eggs started acting like they were embryos, like just a single celled embryo and started dividing and made all these little anacondas. And you see that in species like reptiles, some fish have done it. There was a shark that very famously did that. I think maybe in Monterey Bay Aquarium that is definitely penis free.

There's one religious icon in human history who may have done that as well.

Right? Yes. I think parthenogenesis actually means something like virgin birth. So yeah, that would be apartment and.

So what's the implication? You also talk about blurred boundaries in there. So what does that mean for the rest of the penis equipped kingdom? There is this only reptiles or.

No. And I think if I'm remembering that I've situated this in this chapter. There's also, you know, we tend to associate penises with male animals. And that's our human need to sort of have a binary. We'd like to create Two buckets and assign things to them. And one of the things you see is that that's not really how it works out there in the animal kingdom. There can be a. There's a continuum sometimes of the features that animals have that we would associate with being masculine features. An example is pigs. The pigs on Vanuatu. This is actually genetic. There are pigs that are female, but they have a lot of structures that we associate with being male. But for the pigs, they're associated with being that female pig, right? And so you have to, like, break through that boundary and say, well, this is actually a structure occurring on a female animal. So it's not strictly a male structure.

So a certain species of pigs, the females have penises, but they don't use them in the normal way.

They don't. They have some features. There are two different kinds of pigs on this island, and they have these structures. They're also very aggressive. They show a really aggressive behavior because I think they have higher levels of testosterone. And it's not. It's just not just a. Just a male thing. And I think something that made news just within the last couple of years is a pair of insects that they found in a cave. And everybody was like, oh, my God, this female has a penis. And then you look at it and it is an insect. And the one that makes the eggs has a structure that everybody said was very penis like. And what she does with it is that she inserts it. And this did not make the headlines. And into what the male has, which is extremely vagina. Like he has a vagina. And that didn't get talked about quite as much. So she puts that in there and she draws up, you know, his sperm into her for herself.

That's. That's definitely unique. It's funny, the island where those pigs are from is famous in the bulletproof and keto circles because.

Oh, really?

The native humans there also have an unusual diet. They smoke like chimneys, eat a lot of fat and a lot of starch, and don't get heart disease. So everyone's like, how do they do that? So there must be something in the water on that island.

Islands do interesting things to any animal. Island living does for long enough.

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You talk about the rise and fall of the phallus towards the end of the book, the fall of the Phallus. Tell me about the fall.

You know, the rise of it was interesting because it seems to have been associated at least in some parts of the world, with the rise of agriculture. You started to stake out your plot of land and you want things to grow on it. And one of the most, you know, at least to a lot of eyes, one of the most obvious manifestations of fertility is a penis and what comes out of it. And so they would, you know, some very early manifestations of this are like the Egyptian God Min M I n is depicted with a flail, which is what is used to harvest grain, right. But he also has an erect penis. It's parallel to the ground. And it's this dual association of fertility with this kind of rise of agriculture. And I am just speculating here, but I also feel like just the fact that people with penises tend to have greater physical strength, it's also associated with being protective. And I don't think it's any accident that Priapus, which is a very early Greek demigod, was both a scarecrow, but he also given his name, was Priapic, right? And was depicted with having a gigantic penis. And so these were protective and it was fertility. And they even put it on amulets in ancient Rome with little wings of phallus, you know, to protect children. And then somehow that transmogrified into removing humans out of it entirely and just having a penis there. And I feel like that was kind of the fall in a way because it erased the person entirely.

In, in Cambodia, I hiked far up a stream near one of the temples. And they carved thousands of phalluses, penises into the bedrock. They wait till the river was low, they'd carve all these penises so they'd fertilize the water that would come down under the rice paddies and all. And I was just fascinated at the amount of work it would take to do that much carving, to have a bunch of penises. So they represented something. And you go into this in the book about penises representing dominance and power. And thus the flip side of that means vaginas are, you know, weak or submissive. And do you think that that's. That that's shifting? I mean, at least from the research you're seeing or from anything else you've.

Seen, this may be aspirational on my part, but I think it is and I hope it is. If you're seeing what the younger generation is doing, you see that they are not taking on the burden of some of this impossible masculinity we impose on boys and men in our society. Freighting them with this kind of really rigid.

Look at you, laughing, sorry.

Really constrained version of what masculinity should be. And that makes me really hopeful. I think that it would be great if people could relax about this one body part and focus more on the entire person around it or a person who doesn't have it.

What happens in the animal kingdom when women take charge of mating?

Females do.

Oh, sorry, women.

Spiders.

Yeah, sorry.

That's. It's another thing that. That from our perspective, it looks like it's flipped, but it's common enough that it's not flipped. It's just kind of context dependent that you'll see a lot of species where the female is the larger. Like the octopus I talked about. This happens with a lot of spiders. There's a springtail species I write about in there because they have this really complicated dance and they are the ones who are in charge. The springtail, for example, the female's bigger. The male is very hopeful little guy, and he makes these spermatophores, the sperm lollipops on, you know, sperm on a stick. And he'll plant it on the ground and then she'll grab a hold of him. She'll just grab him, start swinging him around like he's. I don't know, like it's a kind of pro wrestling performance, you know. And then he kind of adjusts himself and he puts out a little bit of webbing or mucus or something and tries to fix her in place and tries to get her to kind of stop right over the spermato force so that she'll pick it up with her genital area instead of eating it. And so the big tension here is will she eat the sperm as a snack because they have a lot of nutrition, or will he succeed in getting her to position herself over it so that the sperm will go into what I guess from his perspective would be the successful place? And that's, you know, that's a very.

Sounds like a bad date.

That's a very controlling female. There's video. You can go find the video.

Okay, maybe it's a good date. I guess it all depends on your perspective.

A springtail. It probably depends on whether or not she eats it. I mean, from his perspective. Right, right. Yeah. Wow.

I'm fascinated at the diversity in biology and what it means for us because we are ultimately biological creatures, even though we think about it more than most spiders do. I believe. Anyway, one of the issues that has come up forever is people self identify. At least men do. You know, with the penis, you know, you are your penis sort of things. Is there evidence from the animal kingdom or from your research in. In general that that that happens elsewhere or that that's changing.

Again? I think this is probably aspirational, but I think that we're getting. I see culturally we're getting recognition that the penis doesn't make a man and a man doesn't have to have a penis, and a man is not his penis. And I think when you look at the animal kingdom, one of the lessons we learned from this big, big, you know, take a step back, look at all of this whole array of penises is, is that it's not our most impressive organ. And if you're going to compare organ to organ, our brains are really impressive. And it would be great if we could focus so much more on those from a sex perspective, a gender perspective, behaviorally, and a little less emphasis on. I know the penis is an important body part. I'm not trying to diminish that at all. But it would be great for people to be able to relax a little bit about theirs, I think.

Have you studied or has anyone studied that you've come across anything about penis size to brain size ratios?

I have not seen. You know, it's funny because everybody is really obsessed with, do your feet communicate your penis size? And I think that's because in hands, right? Feet and hands, because they're very obvious body parts. And I think they want some kind of code that says, look, I have Gigantic hands. Therefore my penis must be enormous. And you know, there's not. For some reason the NHS has actually studied the foot size thing. I don't know why they would do that. And they did not find an association between foot size and penis size.

I. I do know one association. I've got size 16ft.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah. So you can, with a hundred percent certainty, say big feet, big socks.

That's true.

It has to be that way.

That's true. Because one of my sons is 13 size 13ft and those socks. Yeah, yep.

That's. That's all you can bet on. Of course, I'm an n equals 1. I like to think I'm average, but I don't exactly spend a lot of time, you know, comparing either because it doesn't really matter.

See, it's healthy not to. That's what it would be great not to feel compelled to do that.

So then again, it's possible that I'm way above average and I just don't know it. I like to tell myself that I.

Do give the averages in the book if you want to check later.

I'm totally kidding. Like you said, it's not important. I've already reproduced. I like what I've got. Now, what is the most abnormal location for an animal penis that you've seen?

So I didn't personally see this, but there is a report of one being on the head of a mollusk that the penis is just on the head.

Tell me. They call it the unicorn mollusk.

They have to, you know, it didn't say anything about what it was called. And I dug around the literature trying to like, where the hell is this mollusk? I want to see a picture of this thing. I would say one of the weirdest things is the velvet worm because it actually puts genital pore of the velvet worm female. And she holds it there until the transfer is complete. There are things maybe you don't want to know about. Some of the invertebrate world, they get extremely wild.

Actually, I hear that invertebrate orgies are all the thing.

Oh yeah. Dangerous, but fun apparently.

And a lot of those invertebrates are also parasitic. So there's all kinds of strange connections between behavior of larger animals and parasites. That's fascinating. But the reproductive cycle can be so weird it almost doesn't make sense.

Yeah.

Talk to me about Vikings and horse penises.

This story was so interesting to me. I went to Iceland because that's where the world's so claimed only penis museum is. And this story was interesting because one of the things I write about is how penises and how women kind of started to be treated by Christianity. And this story is right on the edge of the rise of Christianity in Northern Europe. And there's a household, and for some reason they had to. They killed a horse. I don't know why. And then the woman of the house just took a really big interest in the penis of the horse. Like the son of the house brought in. And she was like, oh my gosh, this is like a thing we need to pray to over dinner every night. And so every night she would take it out and they would pass. She. She stored it with leeks and onions, I guess, so it wouldn't be like just super grody, to use a word from my youth. And she would pass it around at dinner and they would have to say something over it. And it's really just horrible. The son of the house was just some. Just.

I don't know what the hell do.

You see anything over it? Anyway, and then one day, King Olaf, the second, I think it was the second one, I'm not sure, shows up in disguise with some buddies to the house. And he is like, one of his things he's known for is for bringing Christianity to this part of Europe. And he shows up in disguise and let him in having dinner. And this woman breaks out this horse penis and starts this thing and he gets really mad and so they end up throwing it somewhere and the dog gets it. And that's kind of the end of the horse penis. Yeah, it was kind of. It was a good representation of just kind of this shift between paganism to like, Christianity and its sort of treatment of these things.

What about dick pics?

Well, what about them?

Talk to me about the first ever one. It seems like we've had some obsession about that. You write about it in the book.

Oh my God, that story. That was such a strange story. There was a guy whose Last name was LeBlanc and he is credited with inventing, at least in the Western world, this kind of four color printing. And he got connected to the anatomist for King George iii, I believe. And that guy, the anatomist was kind of a nut. And he actually fell for this story of some woman in some part of England who claimed that she had given birth to 18 skinned rabbits. And he tried to. Apparently she'd actually just taken a bunch of rabbits and shoved them up her vagina and then pushed them out for witnesses. It was really odd. But. But in their sort of defense, people used to think that Women, if you looked at a certain thing that your fetus might take that shape. And so, you know, there was a sort of a grounding to, for them to believe that. But apparently the king's anatomist could never look at a rabbit again. Like, he just could never even, like what you can imagine. Why would you want to look at a rabbit again after that? Anyway, this LeBlanc guy, you know, he invented this. And one of the first pictures that they did and the four color printing and one of the first pictures that they seem to have done in con. In con we're working with the king's anatomist was a penis. It was a very detailed drawing of a human penis with labels, you know, veins, all the body parts. And I don't want to horrify you, but there's one version of it where it's flayed open, you see, you know, the inside of it, which I didn't include in the book because. Yikes, you know, nobody probably wants to see that.

Yeah, they had to do that for a hand drawn thing. It's fascinating that that interest has been there apparently as long as humans have been alive. So there's got to be a reason for it. There's also places where semen is a gift. Tell me about that.

Well, I mentioned, like the springtail. Sometimes she'll eat this for metaphor instead of taking it up into her genital tract. And one reason is that is because that fluid has a lot of nutrition and it has proteins that you can use to build things for yourself and your body. And so there are plenty of instances in especially the insect and spider world where they have these huge outputs of semen, like, you know, more than their body weight by volume that they deposit. And, you know, the big wonderment of that is, my God, why is that so much? And one reason may be that it's providing nutrition to the, you know, the mate that's going to be responsible for making a lot of little baby versions of that species. And that takes a lot of resources. Nuptial gifts, they're called nuptial gifts, which.

You know, I guess it still works for humans. That's, that's what you're supposed to do on your wedding night is, you know, reproduce. Now Charles Darwin also apparently was a little bit repressed on lots of levels. Even though he was a genius, he was kind of obsessed with consensual sex among barnacles. What was going on with that?

Well, you know, first of all, he was obsessed with barnacles, period. Except he got really sick of them. Like you would anything, right, that you spend years of your life working on. And so he wrote four really long monographs about barnacles, but he apparently had never seen them in the act. And like I've mentioned, barnacles have these notoriously long penises because they're stuck on things, right? And if you're stuck to something and you can't get anywhere but you reproduce using this, then you gotta have a pretty long one to get it into your partner. Right? So they're kind of notorious for that. And he had heard that a friend of a friend had witnessed this act, and he got really excited about it and sent them this, this extremely long letter with a lot of quite detailed questions, one of which was, what did it look like? Rape. I mean, he really, you know, asked that question, you know, and they answered him. They're like, well, it looked like it was kind of received pretty well or something.

Ok, how would you know whether the female barnacle was receptive?

I know, right? You wouldn't. So anyway, he really was into barnacles.

And. And you can also see why. I mean, you're looking at reproduction and it's such a driver of evolution if you don't know about epigenetics. Anyway, it is. And so you could see why. But I, I was always kind of keeping an eye on that because when you study Darwin's work, you. You definitely see he was, he was ahead of his time for his interest in sex, but also probably a little.

Bit repressed, like I think a lot of men of his culture and era.

Right, fair point.

Yeah.

Why don't we have a penis bone?

Yeah, we don't. And why is not entirely clear. Because other, a lot of other primates do, primates being monkeys and apes. Right. And we just don't have one. And nobody's quite sure why penis bones exist in the first place. There have been a million kinds of sort of tests done to sort of figure out, is it because it keeps it in place longer, does it, you know, it's instant erection. What is the point of this thing? And nobody's quite sure, but it's really common, you know, it's. What is the acronym for it? It's primates, rodents, insectivores, carnivores. And the acronym is prick.

Of course it is.

Of course it is.

Someone had a fun time naming that.

They really did. But we're an exception. We don't have it.

Emily, having studied penises for your PhD and then having written this whole book about it, if there was one thing you wanted everyone to know about penises, what would it be?

You know, I would usually say that they don't make a male and a male doesn't necessarily have a penis. That would be one of them. That's one of the life lessons from the animal kingdom. The other one is that we are gifted with such an amazing brain and other parts that we can use to make our sex lives and our partnering with other people really enjoyable without putting all the focus on the penis and its involvement in that.

Thank you for being a guest on the show and thanks for just just writing a really interesting book that is tasteful but also still funny.

Thank you for calling it tasteful and thank you for having me on. That was fun.

If you guys want to know everything there ever was to know about penises around the world in all species, you want to pick up Emily's book, you can find her@emilywellinghamphd.com.

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