268. Perrin Roosevelt Ireland: Poking the Squid

hello i'm perrin roosevelt ireland and i made a 272 page watercolor comic book called poking the squid which is about animal sex do you like talking about sex too Do you like talking about animals too? Then you should stay for this talk.

I've been enjoying being on tour and having some of my events have content warnings.

Elizabeth Colbert referred to my book a couple weeks ago as a work of graphic, graphic nonfiction.

This is true.

If you have an aversion to genitalia, sexual cannibalism, frequent reference to orgasm, a large amount of nerve endings in clitorises or any of the above, now is the time to go.

So I would argue that writing Poking the Squid was for me a way to answer a really long form answer to thousands of questions I have gotten over the course of more than a decade of talking to people about animals.

And I would argue, even though I am a devoted lifelong pervert with a filthy sense of humor, that you made me do it.

I didn't set out to write a filthy book, no.

Even though that's my penchant, once again, and an extreme interest of mine.

I really was responding to the way that I experience humans responding to conversations about animal sex.

And I think that those human responses are valid.

And I wanted to make a book that made space for our humanity in interacting with what we learn about animals.

The theorist Jane Bennett talks about this idea that sometimes anthropomorphism actually supports removing anthropocentrism, right? It's like, the more that we might consider animals, perhaps the less we consider ourselves the center of things.

The more we acknowledge that animals are making decisions all day long, living rich, full, bawdy, horny-ass lives, possibly that's an entryway into a deeper investment in the fate of our more-than-human kin during a sixth mass extinction.

Now, in the process of writing an R-rated magic school bus adventure during which myself and my cats, Ursula and Pudge, probe the depths of the most recent advances in cutting-edge research on animal sex, I did not quite anticipate that the stakes for a book like that would become so high in the process of writing it.

And we know that these stakes have been building for years, and they have arrived.

I didn't know while I was making my book that the American scientific enterprise would be systematically dismantled.

I didn't know that people would have to start applying for grants to study female animals by asking to study non-male animals.

I didn't know that the term biological sex of which there is no mutually agreed upon definition inside the academy by the experts, would be employed outside of the academy to restrict the rights of people I love at the level that it is right now.

And I could go on and on and on.

And so while we have this very fun, very horny conversation tonight, I want us all to hold the stakes are really high, and we're also doing it during a biodiversity crisis.

What I'd like to do with you this evening is read to you from said book.

I'm going to read you three chapters.

In the beginning of the book, I look at our human obsession with discovering animal monogamy, why we're so obsessed with that, Part of my long answer to all the questions I've gotten over the years about animal sex is an interest in integrating queer and feminist theory into discussions about knowledge production in biology and offering a space where people can see both those things together.

So I would make a video on the internet, for example, and you'll see reference to this study, where I would reference a paper that talked about dolphin sexual friendships.