POKING THE SQUID

The realities of sex in the animal world, from gender to pleasure and beyond.

Some tales are best told with pictures. Turns out, animal sex is one of them. Thoroughly entertaining, this first book by artist and environmentalist Ireland—a great-granddaughter of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt—is written and illustrated in graphic-novel form by someone who sees science as a storytelling medium. By using animals as a way to address readers directly—an ape, for instance, educates us about Charles Darwin—Ireland invites curiosity and opens up new ways of thinking. Jettisoning old tropes that infiltrated animal research for over a century—such as how females supposedly avoid sex and submit only as a last resort to save their species—she illuminates the complex realities of gender and sexuality. There are lesbian albatross couples, female seahorses that prefer transgender mates, dragonflies that change color to avoid male harassment, at least 1,500 species that are known to engage in same-sex behavior, and, by the way, did you know alligator penises are always erect? Pleasure is examined throughout the animal world. Female alligators are among species with clitorises, as are rats, dolphins, camels, guinea pigs, and spider monkeys. An account of bird breakups in hotter years lends the question: “What if relational arrangements aren’t as much a higher calling, but are actually deeply embedded in their environments? What if they become increasingly impossible as the climate rapidly changes?” The author points to Darwin’s shortcomings and bases her account largely on the work of female biologists who uncovered truths about female promiscuity that were long overlooked. “I wonder what parts of my book will appall people as our politics of pleasure, animals and sex evolve over time,” Ireland muses.

Humorous and educational, a book as much about animals as it is about ourselves.