Not that we’re counting, but bonobos and fruit bats do it, in addition to us. Whatever was the Creator thinking!?!
A Little Fellatio Goes a Long Way
By Cassandra Brooks
ScienceNOW Daily News
30 October 2009Oral sex is surprisingly rare in the animal kingdom. Humans do it, of course. As do bonobos, our close relatives. But now researchers have observed the practice for the first time in a non-primate. During intercourse, female short-nosed fruit bats lick the genitals of their partner, a possible ploy to increase copulation time. The discovery suggests there may be a biological advantage to fellatio.
The article mentions three reasons why they perform oral sex:
1. It has to do with sperm survival.
2. It means the penis is cleaner, and so presumably the likelihood of a healthy pregnancy is higher.
3. It’s fun.
I’m not sure the last is supposed to mean it has survival value.
All the justification seems flawed to me.
The first point I can not see the relation with.
The second seems only a very «imaginative» explanation.
The last : it is fun,ok, but for whom?
I think that it is better to be very suspicious about this kind of «scientific» explations.
I ask also why we don’t see nobody interested in the justification of male sex oral on women.
Adilia, your comments make me realize the piece was too rushed and done without much thought. Let’s stick with the bats for discussing this. Behavior like theirs, that is apparently pretty universal in the species, probably is very automatic, and the first two explanations are just instances of a very typical story in terms of evolutoinary gain. An important thing I left out is that the fellatio means the actual copulating lasts a lot longer, so that could have something to do with the sperm being more like to fertilize the female. The second also looks at evolutionary benefit; maybe it means that the pregnancy will go full term because there aren’t infections.
I like your question about the last one. Who’s having fun? I think there is some idea that the female might like the longer period of copulating.
None of this has anything to do really with justification. The bats just seem to do it automatically, and so we are just inquiring about why they have the instinct – e.g., why would that behavior get passed on from one generation to the next.
Opps. I did say in the piece that the licking increases copulation time. Still, I didn’t draw the connections. My bad.
[...] male professor showed a female professor an article about bat fellatio (which we commented on here). She complained to human resources, and he was censured and is subject to two years of [...]