Reproduction in Nature
(six minute read)
What if our breeding methods were different? How would that affect our society and what we focus on?
What if humans bred like salmon. Once a year, women would make a nest for her eggs and then men would come along and masturbate all over the eggs. That’s it. That’s the mating cycle. No dating. No tinder. No interaction. Just women making nests in shallow streams for a guy to come along and ejaculate on the deposited eggs.
Cities would have designated mating sites. Rivers would be redirected and redesigned with shallow areas suitable for depositing eggs. Would women have to drive to the place they were born to lay their eggs or would they just live where they were born in an effort to save money on gas? Men would stop trying to impress women. They’d be all disheveled and slovenly dressed knowing they’d still breed just the same. There’s no need to buy fancy cars and clothes if you’re just going to end up jerking off in a river.
Industrious types would sell pre-made nesting kits for the busy woman. “Don’t have time to dig a pit in a river to deposit your eggs? Try our new insta-pit! It sets up in minutes and is capable of holding over 6000 eggs. You’ll be the envy of all the other breeders on your block. If you act now, you can also receive a free semen blocker. Make sure your eggs only get fertilized by the best semen. Our semen blocker keeps out the less desirable semen with our new advanced technology that senses the net worth, IQ and height of all incoming sperm.” Of course it would be a sham, but it would sell nonetheless.
Pornography wouldn’t be images of naked women anymore. Magazines would be pages filled with curvaceous rivers and egg beds filled with thousands of eggs. Playboy magazine would end up looking like National Geographic. Pornography for women would be photos of shallow rivers meandering through forests. The light glistening on the sinuous rivers and highlighting the quality of rocks and river bottom that is ideal for laying eggs.
What if humans bred like oak trees? Once a year, women would be ripe and ready to be fertilized. The males would shoot their semen into the wind and hope it lands on some receptive female. Every spring, we’d have to be cleaning up spunk from millions of men ejaculating into the air. Cars would be covered. Windows encrusted with it. There would be advertisements for cum removal products. We would have specially designed hazmat clothes to prevent unwanted pregnancies. If a woman forgot her hazmat jumpsuit, she couldn’t go outside for fear of getting randomly inseminated.
On windy days men would be out on the tops of buildings masturbating into the air. They’d jostle and fight for the best and highest positions. The prices of penthouses and rooms with balconies would skyrocket during spring. Inventive men would rent planes or go sky diving to ensure maximum dispersal of their seed.
What if humans bred like the infamous black widow spiders? The world would be filled with women, young men and old men who never bred. There would be recipe books that talked about creative ways to cook your spouse. The food network would be disgusting. Young men would try to fight their urges to have sex for as long as possible before finally giving in to their natural desires even at the risk of being eaten afterwards.
There would be stores that sold poisons and a wide assortment of weapons marketed to easily dispose of the unwanted men in your bed. After sex, the women would kill their mates, ate what they could and freeze the rest. The freezer business would be thriving. Butcheries would have an entire new market, but there would still be parts of the body that couldn’t be eaten. Bone furniture would be a thing. Tables made from femurs. Dishes made of skulls. Jewelry made of men's teeth would be all in fashion. The candy aisle of the grocery store would have treats like chocolate-coated eyeballs or gummy tongues.
For men, there would be products that increased the possibility of survival after sex. Full chain-mail armor to arouse your mate and protect yourself would be sold next to the latest running shoes for a quick getaway. Women would still complain about men not cuddling after sex, but now the men would have an actual reason to get up and leave.
Imagine if we imitated the horrific mating cycle of the deep-sea angler fish. Men would be attracted to the women by their pheromones they release into the air. Men would be driven wild by the scents. Capitalistic entrepreneurs would seize on this and create perfumes and incense.
Once the woman found a suitable mate, the male would bite into her side then never let go. Their blood vessels would fuse as the two become one. He would in fact become a parasite. Living off the hard work of the host as she brought home the money and groceries. His diminutive body would dangle off her side as he reaped the rewards with little input other than some semen.
What if we reproduced like asparagus. Each sex would have specific flowers. Honey would be dirt cheap cause everyone would have bees in their backyard to facilitate reproduction. People would have all their flower parts on display and our clothing styles would be quite different than the puritanical clothes we wear today.
Bars would be full of buzzing bees flitting from one person's genitals to the next. We wouldn’t know who we mated with. Sex wouldn’t be something shared between a couple, it would be threesomes that included insects. Would sex include orgasms? Do flowers get sexual gratification from bees? Of course, we’d all have our favorites. Some would like to have sex using moths, others bees, maybe hummingbirds for some. Sex toys would all be fake replicas of insects. Would people have legs covered in pollen the way some shoulders are covered in dandruff? Would it be socially unacceptable or admirable?
In some ways, our breeding habits are already similar to many animals. For instance the male Bowerbird makes a beautiful nest for the female. He not only creates it using natural twigs and grasses, but he goes the extra mile and decorates it with various man-made, colorful accoutrements that he hopes will catch the fancy of the females. Many men buy expensive cars or purchase houses to entice the female looking for security. For some people, the accessories are more important than the actual person just like that bird.
The males of the Bird of paradise enacts a complicated dance for the females in order to woo their affections. If the dance impresses the females, then they mate. If the dance is pathetic, the female moves on looking for a more able dancer. People in clubs exhibit similar behaviors but it’s usually the females wooing the males since males dance like clumsy oxen.
Polygyny is seen in animals such as deer or lions where one male collects and protects a harem of females. It’s surprising that this method hasn’t taken off in humans yet. With the consolidation of power and wealth, it seems that a few rich individuals could purchase millions of wives leaving the rest of the humanity in a more limited marketplace.
There are plenty of methods of reproduction, but I'm glad it worked out that humans do it like humans. All the other methods suck.