We can learn much from the laws of nature about the proper sex roles of human men and women. (1) Consider first the penguin which like humans, is monogamous. The penguin mates for life and only goes onto another mate if it can safely assume that its first mate is dead. And like humans, the female penguin abandons the care of its fertilized egg to the male while it traipses off for months on end to feed. Oh wait, that's not what women are supposed to do. Maybe we'd better switch species to find a more proper role model for humans.
Consider the female preying mantis, which is passive throughout an ordinary sex act, letting the male approach and make all the moves. Surely this is an appropriate example for the human couple. But what happens if the male crosses her? She snatches him in her arms and begins to eat him, starting with his eyes, progressing to eat the entire head wherein all his sexual inhibitions lie. Thus relieved his headless body mounts her and begins to mate like there's no tomorrow. As he works away she continues eating him, down to the last morsel, his twitching organ. Perhaps we'd shouldn't use the mantis for a model of human behavior either.
The male snail is a considerate lover. Even though he might sometimes experience premature ejaculation, he stays for hours to cuddle with his lady love. This species sounds like a possibility. But why is he so considerate? Because next time he may be the she. Snails are hermaphroditic and can change sex at will or be both sexes at the same time. One "male" snail may be mating with a "female" and a "male" will mate with him as a "female." Group sex is not uncommon. And snails are also able to mate with themselves.
"But, come now, these are all lower animals," you say, "mankind must be expected to emulate a higher standard." Then let's look at the chimpanzee, so much like us that one can't tell the difference between our blood hemoglobin and theirs. Chimpanzees are highly social animals, actually promiscuous. While among humans, the family that prays together stays together, among chimps a more earthy experience bonds the group. Sex, sex and more sex! Even cross generational sex is engaged in with infant males copulating with mature females and mature males having sex with adolescent females. Females often take all comers, whether they are experiencing estrus or not. Sex is definitely NOT done solely for procreation.
So it seems that if we learn anything about sex roles from nature it's that nature LOVES variation. Concepts such as "male" and "female" lose their hold as nature sometimes opts instead for convenience and desire. While monogamy exists in some species, it is not a universal. And while procreation might be the primary reason for sexual behavior it is not the only one. Sex is engaged in for pleasure and socialization as well.
It's unrealistic to draw behavioral parallels from the animal kingdom. And in fact, it is NOT true that homosexual behavior is absent among animals. (2) So let's put the tired notion of "unnatural sex acts" to bed. Whatever two or more adults decide to do, consentually, is fair game.
NOTES:
1. The writer gratefully acknowledges, as its information source, How They Do It, by Robert A. Wallace, William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, 1980.
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2. John Boswell, "Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality." "The . . . assumption is that homosexuality does not occur among animals other than humans. In the first place, this is demonstrably false: homosexual behavior, sometime involving pair-bonding, has been observed among many animal species in the wild as well as in captivity. NOTE: Much material has come to light since Wainwright Churchill published his Homosexual Behavior among Males: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Species Investigation (New York, 1967). References are collected in Weinrich, pp. 145-56 and passim; and in Kirscha and Rodman. For more recent material, see George Hunt and Molly Hunt, 'Female-Female Pairing in Western Gulls (Larus occidentalis) in Souther California,' Science 196 (1977): 81-83." p. 12.
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