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Aren’t we all just lonely anemones on barstools, waiting for the currents of fate to push our soul mates into our tentacles?
Actually, sea sex is way more fraught than your average tinder hookup, Dr. Marah Hardt suggests in her weird, excellent new book Sex in the Sea: Our Intimate Connection with Kinky Crustaceans, Sex-Changing Fish, Romantic Lobsters and Other Salty Erotica of the Deep. With endless enthusiasm and innuendos, Hardt explores the “salty erotica of the deep,” from barnacle boners to the mass simultaneous orgasms of coral (take notes, gentlemen). We called up Hardt to learn how her insights into deep-sea sexy times can inform and improve our own sexy times. Go forth at your own risk, lusty land lobsters.
Try a lot of different positions!
We learn in Sex in the Sea that when mandarinfish mate, they must first match by size. Then they have to line up next to each other so that their “vents,” from which they expel their procreative goodies, align. Then the male has to reach his anal fin around the lady mandarinfish to make sure her eggs don’t disperse too quickly.
Humans are not like the mandarinfish. Humans are more like ostracods, tiny shrimp-like lovers whose mating Hardt calls “crustacean Kama Sutra.” Why can ostracods indulge in wild acrobatic lovemaking while other sea creatures are cruelly stuck in missionary? The same reason humans can: “My gut feeling is that with something like an ostracod, where you have internal fertilization happening, the way that you get sperm to the egg doesn’t really matter,” Hardt speculated, “if you’re upside-down, or you’re on the right, or you’re on the left, it doesn’t matter.” Plus, the lady ostracods dig it. Or don't care.
…Like the inverted reverse sixty-nine!
One diagram in Sex in the Sea shows two squids having squid sex, which is as tentacle-y as one might expect. “Basically it’s an inverted reverse sixty-nine,” Hardt explained. Indeed, in the diagram the squids appear to be joined near one of their heads. “The female is still swimming languidly along as a giant schlong invades her head and dental cavity. The male is basically on his back lying on top of the female, like on her stomach, but then they’re displaced in space, so that his head is kind of the equivalent of where her hips are."
Hehhhhh?
"So imagine there’s a woman lying on a bed, and the man is laying on top of her but he’s lying on his back. And she’s on her back. So they’re basically both lying face-up. Then flip them around so that his feet are going over her head, and then his head is facing her feet, and his head is resting on her stomach. And his penis is basically coming up over his chest, down under his shoulder, and inserting into her underneath him. And she’s doing the elementary backstroke underwater."
Oh.
Orgasm like coral!
If ever you feel like a simultaneous orgasm with your partner is beyond your capabilities, consider the coral. "When talking coral sex," Hardt writes, "we are talking millions of individuals, across miles of reef, all coordinating their climax within moments of one another." #Coralgoals, amirite?
Coral only spawn once a year ("like New Years Eve!") which helps explain why coral, like your shy, involuntarily abstinent friend, needs you to be a solid wingman by putting less bullshit into the ocean.
Celebrate your tiny dong!
Maybe your sex tentacle isn't the biggest in Davy Jones' locker room, but rejoice! The barnacle is the most well-endowed species on the planet, with a penis eight times its body size ("to fertilize and mate it literally reaches its gigantic penis out of its opening, and it blindly pokes around in the tides").
But Hardt said that's not always an asset. "If there are other animals nearby that would like to pinch off or bite of some fleshy meaty bit of an animal, they’ll do it. Some of them can regrow. But even that’s still sort of a danger—you’d probably rather not have to regrow your penis."
Indeed. Hardt continued: "There’s also structural limitations, like for male penises that have to stiffen up—that go from soft to erect—there’s going to be a limit to how much bloodflow can you actually get there, or how much thrusting that organ can take while still being able to be tucked up inside."
Your takeaway for the day: while a 12-foot schlong may make you more attractive to mates, it is also more likely to be bitten off by a predator.
Make sweet lobster love!
Hardt pointed to lobster coitus as the most romantic undersea mating ritual: "It’s brief, but the female is at this unbelievably vulnerable state, because the most optimal time to mate is right after she’s molted. She has to go before this crazy, raging, aggressive male and basically undress, and be soft and be unable to stand. She can’t even walk away if she wanted to. And he turns into this incredibly gentle tender lover. A woman, Diane Cowan, who witnessed a lot of this, described how he would even stroke her with his antennae, and stand over her, and wait until she was ready. Then he literally just picks her up and cradles her in the hammock of his legs and she arches back," Hardt said. "We think of them with their giant claws that walk around and feed off the sea floor and whatever, but it’s remarkably tender and sweet."
Hardt said she hasn't eaten lobster since she was a kid ("I like them in the ocean") and the revelation of their tender lovemaking was almost—almost—enough to keep us from craving a big, buttery lobster.
Fear not the golden shower!
Urine also figures prominently in lobster love. "If you are a male and you go pee on another male’s doorstep," Hardt explained, "you’re basically saying you’re about to do some ass-kicking. 'Get the hell out of here, I’m the boss of this realm, smell my pee, know me, quake in your shell." While a male lobster shooting gallons of urine at another male lobster is clear sign of aggression, a female lobster's urine has a crazy aphrodisiac effect on the male. "He’ll become putty in your claws."
Noted.
