"Natural Cannibals."... 3BACK | HOME | NEXT4

___________________________________________________________

By all accounts, literal cannibalism occurs very rarely in the animal world. Most researchers believe that the practice would generally have destructive outcomes on a species if it were widely practiced (e.g., animals can contract diseases from contaminated carcasses of the same species), and therefore it is a behavior that has been selected against ("Wild Sex"). Human beings, however, with technologies that grant us the power to participate in our own evolution, have the luxury of cannibalizing at a perceived sanitary distance--in the lab, for example, where scientists experiment with fetal stem cells with the goal of developing new drug treatments. In short, if we do literally cannibalize, we often simultaneously sanitize, and that process (be it through cooking or other chemical disinfecting) turns nature into culture. Messy cannibalism is much scarier in comparison. Watching a baby suckle on its mother's breast, for example, has become an embarrassing symbol of messy cannibalistic ingestion, ideally replaced by the sanitized/cooked bottle. In countries less technologically advanced than ours is, unsanitary acts of cannibalism are viewed with utter repulsion--the reports of impoverished people in China, for example, eating aborted fetuses as sustenance might seem barbaric in comparison to the idea of injecting stem cells into a hospital patient's bloodstream. And yet these are both instances of literal "cannibalism."

In the rare cases in which animals do practice cannibalism on their own species, it is the female's act that seems to garnish the most attention, such as the praying mantis and the black widow spider reportedly devouring their male counterparts during or after mating. Female sexuality has long been associated with cannibalism in the terms "femme fatale" or "man-eater;" even the Freudian fear of castration can be seen as a fear of the devouring mother. So it is perhaps understandable that interpretations of the female praying mantis cannibalizing her mate during sex have involved projections of the male castration fear. In her article entitled "Animal Sex: Libido as Desire and Death," Elizabeth Grosz examines this idea and asserts that our understanding of female sexuality has historically been based on models of male sexuality, and more specifically, male orgasm:

  The fantasy of the vagina dentata, of the non-human status of woman as android, vampire or animal, the identification of female sexuality as voracious, insatiable, enigmatic, invisible and unknowable, cold, calculating, instrumental, castrator/decapitator of the male, dissimulatress or fake, predatory, engulfing mother, preying on male weakness, are all consequences of the ways in which male orgasm has functioned as the measure and representative of all sexualities and all modes of erotic encounter (12).

Grosz asserts that it is this male model that likens the orgasm itself to death (in the explosion that comes at the end of a build-up of tension; in the inevitability of mortality even as life is conceived; in the focus on orgasm and detumescent post-orgasm) that ignores other possible models of desire. Suggesting an alternative to such goal-oriented sex, the author asserts that intensification of pleasure per se is a logical and natural drive--not necessarily the "union" of male and female, but the erotic stimulation of surfaces bringing about dynamic development of erogenous areas and body sensations, largely through experimentation, accident, and innovation (Grosz 13). Grosz speculates that the female mantis therefore may be motivated by the desire to prolong coitus--i.e., the male mantis, once beheaded, continues the sex act out of reflex, thereby continuing the erotic friction that intensifies pleasure. "That is what constitutes the appeal of power and desire," writes Grosz, "its capacity to shake up, rearrange, reorganize the body's forms and sensations, to make the subject and body as such dissolve into something else, something other than what they are habitually" (13).

CONTINUE 4