The Rape of the Duck

"Would you kill kill kill for me?
You won't be kissing me unless you kill for me"

 

Marilyn Manson - Kill4Me

______________________________

 

"Remember, you're fighting for this woman's honor, which is probably more than she ever did."
Groucho Marx in Duck Soup (minute 1:04:00 here)

______________________________

"There's the answer, if you're clever:
Have a child for warmth
And a Baker for bread
And a Prince for... whatever"

- Into the Woods

______________________________

 

 

Back in the mid-2010s it was quite trendy to voice shock and outrage at duck penises. As it's been a while, let's remind younger readers of this particular bit of pop-culture insanity. Far as I can tell it started some years earlier, with a 2007 paper detailing the peculiar genital morphology of waterfowl, mallard ducks in particular. However, it took several more years for the topic to filter down to mass media, for a video of the explosive eversion of a duck penis to go viral, for comedians to start tacking duck penis jokes to their acts and for "journalists" to start publishing articles like DUCKS ARE SADISTIC RAPING MONSTERS!!! Nor was the hub-bub totally useless; the study's lead author made a career of it.

The basic observations are solid. "Forced extra-pair copulations" do happen in any number of species and ducks really do have weird corkscrew-shaped genitals, unusual in birds which are overwhelmingly lacking in the ding-dong department. But then the animal world is replete with trauma and bizarrerie both, so this particular factoid's time in the limelight is better explained by its political convenience. It was framed as a battle of the sexes. As the "Weinstein effect" and #MeToo witch hunt ramped up, media figures and reddit echo chambers cast as wide a net as possible for any bias-confirming sound bites, and rapist ducks certainly make a memorable one.

 

The original discussion and subsequent reiterations had framed ducks' plight squarely as inter-sexual competition with a clear villain: males started raping, so females (purely in defense against male aggression!) developed convoluted genital tracts to protect against insemination; then the evolutionary arms race continued lengthening and twisting both pegs and holes. The important part is that it fits the fearmongering "rape culture" narrative, complete with lurid high-FPS footage of corkscrew dongs comin' ta getcha! It fits the image activists want to draw, of a world utterly pervaded by violent rapists at every corner, even where you least expect them like harmless-looking quackers, and of masculinity as malformed, Lovecraftian monstrosity. Perhaps even more importantly it also frames femininity as an innocent, protective, united front.

The basic facts are fine. The politically correct framing? Therein lies the bullshit.

 

You might well guess "the unsympathetic side being wrong about everything" is too simplistic an argument to really cover a real-world situation... but you wouldn't guess it from how it's addressed in universities, much less media coverage. The original studies hinged on the females' genital tract being longer, spiraling in the opposite direction from the males' penis (clockwise vs. counterclockwise) and having blind pouches to divert eversion, but however effective those obstacles may prove in foiling giant rapey corkscrew dongs, they are implicitly even better at eliminating males lacking that adaptation. The females' "defense" breeds out non-rapists more effectively than it does rapists. (With demonstrably absolute effectiveness, in fact.)

There is in fact a very widespread group of adaptations in the animal world termed "cryptic female choice" (itself a euphemism for getting away with cheating) which seems more likely to have kicked off the ducks' intersexual arms race. What came first, the duck or the egg? The rape or the cryptic choice? If females' genitals get so good at separating out sperm, at cheating on their mates, that a more invasive penis is the only guaranteed means of insemination, they are de facto breeding that trait into their progeny. A Royal Society published follow-up by the same authors in 2009 dismissed the question of cryptic choice offhandedly with:

"females of many waterfowl species select and pair bond with mates weeks or months before the breeding season" - which time frame seems irrelevant if she's going to cheat on him anyway

- and, more egregiously:

"direct costs of forced copulations are expected to be high for females" - which flies in the face of the injuries up to and including death which males of the vast majority of species incur in reproductive contest. The only way that statement sounds like an argument-ender to you is if you're working on the conceit that girls are just smarter than boys and would never make a bad choice. But remember, our savage mother nature doesn't give a flying duck-fuck about your personal well-being. If an inherited predilection for self-harm results in you leaving more reproductively successful offspring, then the next generations will show more self-harm. "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg" runs an increasingly relevant saying in biology, counterintuitive as it may sound. Females' control over reproduction, their closer association with the offspring's success, generally affords them a greater care for their own health as proxy for the young's. (In fact females' most common means of avoiding extra-pair copulations is to outsource that confrontation to their male companion via mate-guarding. After all, if the father of future offspring changes, the female may get lower quality young, but the original male gets eliminated entirely from that equation; thus males are more motivated to risk harm both cheating and preventing cheating.) But female prissiness is by no means an absolute. If getting your hands (or cloaca) dirty gets you better kiddies, then better kiddies shall be got.

Which brings us to the sexy son hypothesis. In most species, variation in the number of young females can produce is minor, say between two or three. But in males that difference can be between zero (because many do not have a chance to reproduce) and dozens for the NBA stars of every species. And because natural selection hinges on RELATIVE reproductive success, females can often pass down their genetics more successfully by having wildly oat-sowing sons. You may lift an eyebrow hearing that Genghis Khan and his sons might have descendants in the tens of millions, but if true, I bet you've never considered the necessary corollary that so do the queens, whores and courtesans who fucked them! (Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.)

Revenons a nos canards, that story about plucky, ducky damsels valiantly fending off the assaults of quackling maleficent male-ards falls apart when you realize a female getting "raped" by a male "raping" five other females runs a good chance of producing a son who will rape five other females in turn, as opposed to her loser of an official mate who just sticks by her side and will likely father a son who sticks by one female. One choice might give her four or nine grandchildren, the other thirty-six. The trick is, if you're making that trade-off, to ensure you only select for the rapiest rapist, which is where the convoluted genitals come in. The female's genital tract as "resistance" to rape becomes a proxy for the estimated reproductive success of a potential sexy son. I don't mean to imply any sort of waterfowl or waterfair moral value by this. Again, nature simply doesn't care. Females which produce the rapiest rapists leave behind more grand-daughters inheriting the tendency to produce successful rapists, and so on. The pattern builds on itself. Note, even if you accept the premise that it must have been males' propensity to rape which kicked off such a dynamic thousands of generations prior, the female counter-adaptation has only worsened and accelerated the supposed problem with every generation. And that's the part you don't hear from either college professors or the New York Post.

Also, the question is too commnly posed as either/or: either a stable mate or a rapist. That's not how cryptic choice works. Why not both? Why not have their cake and eat it too? Overtly, females pair-bond with a baseline acceptable male. Whatever rapists come along must beat that baseline viability. If a really rapey one gets through, you've got yourself a sexy son. But, if none of the randos that season have big enough corckscrew dicks to grab you by the ovaries, well, it's not a complete loss, you still have your standard schlub, your plan B as backup. Roll the dice but hedge your bets. Clever girl.

So, first off, realize that whatever perception you have of women as a group as some plucky rebel alliance merely defending itself against the evil testicular empire has not come from objective analysis of reality. It comes of being bombarded all your life with just such sound bites as "rapist ducks" piling on, drowning your reason out by ginned up moralistic calls to save the world from the dire threat of duck rape, or really anything which fabricates a subconscious impression of female entitlement and male debt towards the unfairer sex. Every such random bit of outrage starts from the presumption of exclusive male guilt and willful ignorance of females' shared culpability, profiteering or simply demonstrably exercised agency. (Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.)

I was living in Illinois in the 2000s during the media circus concerning Drew Peterson, a cop who murdered two of his wives. What makes it an interesting case study is that he was actually married four times, had a history of cheating on and beating on the first two wives and his children, murdered the next two wives (presumably while still cheating on them) and got engaged to a fifth WHILE being investigated for those murders. Note one headshrinker interviewed as to why women keep doing this immediately shifted the conversation to the Oedipus complex, inattentive daddies and women being "at risk of being seduced" in other words shifting all the responsibility onto men. Umm, nope, bullshit! Girls want bad boys. This is female mate choice at work. You want the rapists. You want the murderers. They swagger oh so damn sexy! The same personality traits which make him an overbearing sadistic thug make him irresistible to women. I may be an asshole sometimes (in fact I'm fairly sure I am) but I've never killed anyone. I have zero children. The double murderer has at least six. Which of us is looking like the sexier son?

In fact, a recurring item in both "news" fluff and trash TV has always been the flood of marriage proposals women send to men on death row. Sure puts having a few neck feathers plucked out into perspective, don't it?

 

Second off, if you've ever taken a course on evolution, you've likely had to listen to your professor bemoaning the rampant sexism of Victorian politics refusing to acknowledge the importance of female mate choice in natural selection, because Victorians refused to believe females might have that much power. Here you have a prime example why modern feminist attitudes are so often likened to a Victorian fainting couch. It's all well and good to say look at those pretty peacock tails that peahens have selected for, but we still refuse to acknowledge female mate choice wherever it might have negative implications, like picking the most destructive mates because they want offspring which will destroy the competition, from double murderers to finance bros. The power females wield over males by controlling reproduction is just that - power! - and with power comes superheroic responsiblity for its application. Might not society's refusal to openly acknowledge female agency be less a matter of oppressive patriarchy than women dodging responsibility, whether personally or for the world's ills? (Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.)

 

Third off, anyone interpreting inter-sexual conflict at face value as male aggression upon innocent females would do well to remember your Nibelungenlied. There are entirely too many cases to ignore in which a Brunnhilde merely refuses to mate with any unworthy male that cannot best her feats of strength.

 

Lastly, and on the more speculative side, let's reverse the polarity. In humans, the neediness of our young prompted increased paternal investment and resource contribution, but that contribution also gave males some value and a greater degree of choice, at least the ones registering as good providers. And there is every reason to believe that our excessive neoteny may have been prompted by cuter females being better at securing male protection and providence. The guy sticks around the pretty girl more than the virago after mating, one child benefits more than the other, increased viability, boom, ya gotcherself an adaptive advantage. Human males have selected for the most effective raptors, for those who can best steal our attention. We love the cute ones. We selected for our own manipulation in the distant past, not for our own benefit any more than those raped female ducks, but because better kiddies were thus got.

 

It applies to a female's viability as mate too. A cuter one instills maternal protectiveness, gets ganged up on less by the tribe's other females, gets more resources. Though men have far fewer reproductive options than women, due to our use as labor we nonetheless do exert some evolutionary pressure, and it is again in the morally wrong direction, picking greedy, manipulative, sociopathic bitches, one obvious interpretation being if she can make your life a living hell, she'll leverage that much more subterfuge and acquisitiveness into promoting the survival of your shared progeny after she throws you under the bus.

 

So stop favoring the showgirls. C'mon guys, we all know we're not that picky. Sexy enough is sexy enough. Wanna really improve the breed? Fuck a librarian.

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________

 

P.S.: If you're curious about the waterfowl extra-pair copulation question, there was a more multifaceted article published shortly after the penis papers back in 2010. It doesn't largely disagree with them (and I'm sure the author would be scandalized at being recommended by a mangy snarler like myself) but does a much better job of contextualizing the issue:

Sexual conflict in waterfowl: why do females resist extrapair copulations?

 

P.P.S. After I referenced Brunhild, I was so, so tempted to rename this "riding the valkyries"