Flightless and Fabulous: The Surprising Science of Gay Penguins

going to try. Yeah, you know right. I looked up it's like how much are Beyonce tickets going to be when they do go on sale? And I saw they were like, well, you know, probably a hundred and ten dollars or the cheapest seat will be somewhere in that range big range, big range, one of those numbers. I'm like, all right, we can make that work. And in one of those numbers, I'm like that I would never pay that for anything. I can't do that, I cannot go. I mean, to be honest with you, I might pay

for that much. We'll talk. I might just because I love Renaissance, sure, and I would like to see Beyonce live one time, and well, that's where I'm at because like I don't, I couldn't. I'm still on scrubs, you know, Like that's where I'm at with Beyonce. Grubs is TLC. Damn, I'm still on bills, bills, bills. I haven't kept up, That's what I'm saying. But that show, I know from just a production standpoint, is going to be one of the most impressive shows ever made. So yeah, yeah, I

would go. That's what would right And I did see recently someone was like, just go to the concert, Like, just go because money it comes and it goes. But you have one life, yeah exactly, and who knows, you know, you might miss your chance to see Beyonce or you know whatever legends you want to go see seem as well, shell out and do it. You know, you like not

likely to regret it. We have one to live, uh, and that time slips through the hourglass like the days of our lives, and you know, you might find yourself in a I don't know, a general hospital at some point and you're gonna be wondering, Uh, you know, what are all my children doing? So you're guiding light enjoy the Beyonce dynasty. Well, today we've got a really amazing story, another one that felt so simple when we decided to go into it and got so complicated in the best

of ways. So I'm really excited to tell this story today. Y'all. They're here, they're queer, they're from the Southern Hemisphere. It's penguins. Now, there's been a bunch of gay penguin stories in the news in the last decade, and you would think that these are just mostly happy little puffin pieces in the news. But of course, for some people, these penguin stories just

don't fly. But there's actually quite a long list of homosexual or bisexual behavior in the animal kingdom, and of course it turns out that it's a lot to get into. So today we're gonna talk about some famous penguin pairs and some other same sex animal partners, and then we'll hear about just how common this is in the animal kingdom. Finally we'll get into why biologists and LGBT activists alike don't really like to lean on the term gay for

penguins and other animals. But then, while we're at it, just to top things off, there is another crazy fact that we'll get to about the only other animals besides humans to engage in prostitution. Well, let's make like a penguin and do it. Let's go, Hey, their French, come listen. Well, Elia and Diana got some stories to tell. There's no match making, no romantic tips. It's just about ridiculous relationships, a love it might be any type of person at all,

and abstract cons that don't a conquer e ball. But if there's a story where the second glance ridiculous a production of I Heart Radio. Okay, So, first of all, let's talk penguins, y'all. Penguins of course, flightless water birds. All but one species of penguin lives in the southern hemisphere. Uh, there's one species that lives like on the Galapagos Islands, just in the northern but most of them live in south, and the further south you get, the colder the environment is,

the bigger they typically are. So you've got these little island penguins that are real tiny. And then of course like the Emperor penguins and the Antarctic are huge. Now, unfortunately, I gotta tell y'all this episode starts at a bit of a downer. We've all seen the meme floating around that says that the Chinese word for penguin is business goose, which is great because you can see a goose in a suit. You got yourself a penguin, right, beautiful. Well,

I'm sorry, y'all, but that is another Internet lie. Not on the Internet. I know, I know, you can't. You can't always trust what you see time. Look, the truth is that it's kind of complicated because it goes into a lot of like Chinese characters and their literal and generic interpretations. It's complicated, but you can look up an article on Chinese boost dot com that will tell you that the Chinese characters for penguin actually means something closer

to tiptoeing goose, which is just as cute. Honestly, I kind of love tiptoeing goose. Yeah, just like penguins. I mean, penguins are scientifically adorable. It's been proven again and again. I also want to throw out if I don't know if anyone's seen Happy Feet, but it is one of the greatest animated movies ever made. The Happy Feet directed by George Miller, the guy who makes the Mad Max movies, so it is intense. It is insane. Also, Babe to

pig in the City. I'm not going to go into a whole George Miller thing here, but his kids movies are great. I mean, no one doesn't like George. And one of the best penguin facts is that penguins have no particular fear of humans, and that's because they don't really have any land based predators of it um. They only have to worry about flying murder birds and swimming murder monsters. So when they see humans just like walking around boring style, they probably just think we're basically bigger,

weirdly featherless ugly penguins with weird long legs. Love it. I love that a penguin would see me and be like, Yo, you and I were the same, you and I. You're not You're not some terror of the deep, and you're not some horrible, screeching hearty from the skies. You must be a penguin. God, I want to party with the penguins.

I would also party with a penguin. So anyway, they'll usually walk up to people and get about like nine or ten feet away before they get nervous and keep their distance, which is also like people get about that close. I want to. I don't know about you. There are about seventeen different species of penguin, and they can be as small as about a foot tall, like the little blue penguin, up to the largest, which is the emperor penguin,

and they get to be about three foot seven. But some prehistoric penguins could be as big and heavy as an adult human and I just want to give one a hug, me too. Write So for our non American listeners out there, an emperor penguin is a little over a meter tall, which I guess is easier than three ft seven. Whatever metric with it, I can appreciate the

metric system. So when it comes to breeding, most penguins breed as a colony, and most of the pairings of penguins are monogamous, but not exclusively and not necessarily long term. According SeaWorld dot org, a Deli penguins, for example, repair with their previous year's mate sixty two of the time. A chin strap penguin is repaired at the time, and gentle penguins repaired with their previous partner each year of the time. That's incredible. That's way better stats than I

think humans have. Honestly. Penguins usually share a mating ritual, and this involves a lot of lay heads swinging and trumpeting. They'll bow down, they'll look up, you know, a bird mating ritual basically. And then all penguins lay two eggs per nest, except for king and emperor penguins, who both lay one. And in all penguins, the two parents share incubation duties, or one sits on the egg while the other goes out fishing or whatever, except for emperor penguins,

where exclusively the male does all of the incubating. Yeah, men pulling their weight, praising a child. You know, for penguins, we could learn a lot. I wonder if emperor penguin ladies are like, uh so you get to sit around all day? Oh my god, you really were really pulling your weight. A BBC article called if you think penguins are cute and cuddly, You're wrong says that if a female emperor penguin loses a chick, she might attempt to

steal one from a nearby mother. That's crazy, straight up chicknapping. But then things get violent because if other nearby female penguins see it happening, they will gang up and fight her. What which, you know, that's community coming together kind of prevent child being. Some penguins have been seen stealing chicks from other birds. One emperor penguin kidnapped an egg from her own natural enemy, the scow up, which is a

bird that eats penguins. So when the chicks actual parents showed up to try to you know, get their kid back, the penguins fought them off twice. Like I would like to keep this natural predator with me, please. This is like a Jerry Springer story or a Mori. Actually, that would be a pretty amazing episode of Jerry Springers and tried to penguins and they're just like now. BBC says that zoologists had to step in and return the chick to its real parents to basically save everyone involved. This

was going to be a constant. Oh yeah. Plus when that school grows up full size. I don't know if it would think it was a penguin. Some some bird stories make me think it would. But maybe it's instinct would kick in and it would eat other baby penguins in the In the Mowgli situation, like the other penguins are like he's going to grow up and be a man. He's going to shoot us, and you know, the wolves were like, no, he's one of us, so he won't

because he grew up with us. It's whole nature versus nurture. Okay, alright, Brad Bird, I know you're listening. I want you to go call your friends at Pixar and we're gonna do this. We're gonna get this penguins school kidnapping story again. It's gonna beautiful. Yes, it's basically in the Jungle Book on ice, the Ice Blow Book. Yeah. Okay, So we're learning all this and what we're seeing is that penguins are devoted

parents and they have pretty balanced gender roles. And that brings us to one of the first big sensationalized same sex penguin stories to hit the news. Roy and Silo. These are two male chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan. They were seen performing mating rituals together. Every day. They would find each other and do those dances. They would entwine their necks and you know, and fling their heads back and let out these trumpets calls, and

frequently they would, according to the reports, have sex. Now The Guardian, New York Times, BBC, and even National Geographic all declined to go into any detail on that. But also I kind of don't want to know, you know, but is their imagination worse is the real question. But anyway, apparently they had sex. When presented with female companionship, Roy and Silo both kind of just gave a big shrug and went back to each other. So they're actively choosing

their partnership over the same sex pairing. And then their instinct started to take over, and Roy and Silo clearly wanted to raise a chick together, so much so that they found this like egg shaped rock and they took it back to their nest and tried to incubate and hatch it. Well, after that, there's book keeper Rob Graham's a decided it was time to see how they would do as parents, so he brought them a fertile egg from another nest. Hopefully there was he left one behind

or something. Yes, this particular pairing was having trouble raising their egg together. I don't I don't know if that meant they were fighting or what the deal was, but okay, so it was like an adoptive parent, Yes, it was. It was a rescue, all right, so he brings them the sag. Sure enough, Roy and Silo were great dad's.

They alternated sitting on the egg for the standard thirty four days until their chick, Tango, was born, and they raised Tango just like any other pair, keeping her warm, protecting her, feeding her from their beaks until she could

eat on her own. In two thousand five, a children's book was written by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson called and Tango Makes Three, all about this happy penguin family, and it was widely seen as this very charming and delightful book all about the validity of same sex parenting.

It won several awards, but according to the American Library Association, it was also the most challenged book in the country from two thousand six too, meaning that people wanted it banned and they didn't want their kids to read it and stuff like that, and it remained in the top ten until nineteen. So people were really like feeling some

type of way about these two penguins. One of the things that was funny is that funny and like the frustrating way is that people were using it and saying it was supporting gay marriage, and the authors and the publishers came out and they were like, actually, there's literally nothing in this book about gay marriage. It's specifically about same sex parenting and how it's totally fine, and you know, again it's just a metaphor. People were losing their minds

about it. Still do, still do. I was amazed to see that it was still it was like number nine in twenty nineteen. Then it finally fell off the list because I guess people have just found enough other things to be angry about now. Unfortunately, in two thousand five, the same year that the book was published, Roy and Silo broke up. I know it's a tragedy. I got a speculation station. I just think that you know, that kind of fame can really affect a partnership. You know

that they've got agents calling them all the time. You know what if Roy has offered a book deal and Silos nods, they're like paparazzi coming out, Barazzi all. There's no privacy. You know, there's no intimacy everybody. They don't spend enough time together. Next thing you know, they're clashing about panting styles. The fame goes to your head, you know, suddenly Silo is like, well, let's you know, let's keep our heads cool. We're still just each other, and Roy's like,

I'm a fucking rock star out groupies all the time. Well, according to queerty dot Com, Roy and Silo started having issues and drifting apart in two thousand four after a pair of aggressive penguins took over their nest, literally came and pushed him out. It's like, y'all made this nest real pretty, and now we're going to come in and

take it over. A couple of years before they have these troubles, this female penguin named Scrappy had been transferred to the zoo from Sea World, and I guess in Sea World they must teach penguins to be home wreckers, because she swooped in on Silo, and Silo and Scrappy paired off together. New York Times reports that after that, Roy mostly stayed by himself and would often be seen quote alone in a corner, staring at the wall. Give him a stuffy or something that breaks my heart. It's

not the same, he says. It will never be Silo. Now. On the plus side, for fans of same sex penguin stories, their daughter Tango did end up pairing off with another female named to Newsy. Yeah, well there you go. An article by Eric Caston's from Museum Studies at Tufts University called What's with all the Gay Penguins mentions another penguin couple,

Harry and Pepper, who had a similar story. They had been together for about five years when Harry cheated on Pepper with a widow penguin named Linda end up probably killed her. Hug specs the black widow of penguins. What Linda was described by her own caretaker as quote conniving, according to an article in Time, and I love the caretakers being like that penguins manipulation. She's always plotting, and bloggers called her a home wrecker who quote lives for

her own happiness no matter who gets hurt. M Linda has a real personality on fire. I need to see this this Bravo needs a show about Linda. Then in there were two female Gentoo penguins, Rocky and Marama, who hatched a chick together in London, and the London Aquarium ruffled a lot of feathers when they announced that they were not assigning a gender to this chick. Making it

the first gender neutral animal in kept tip. This sounds kind of cooky, it might even sound trendy or click baby, but as the aquarium set in a statement quote, gender neutrality is a human construct, but it is completely normal in the animal kingdom. They say that in the wild penguin males and females look and behave almost identically. Some studies have even questioned how much more prevalent same sex pairings and penguins might be because it's just so hard

to determine males and females without active invasive testing. There's a lot of animals like that very true, they say. A lot of times biologists will study a pairing of animals and they will determine which one is the male and which one is the female by watching them have sex, and depending on which one behaves a certain way, they're like, oh,

that must be the female. But they really don't know, and so they're like, this whole time, we might have been watching two males or two females and just didn't realize it. That happened in a penguin study in the early two thousand's. Wow, I just remember having a bird that we thought was a girl. So we named your Grace, and then like years, a couple of years in found out it was a male bird, so we just called

him Mr Grace. Very pretty lazy, but yeah, it was just one of those things where like I guess, you know, he was kind of guests or like the pet store guests. I don't really know who said that that was a female bird, right, but eventually it was like, it's not. I don't even know how we determined that either because I was too young. I just love being like, well, what are we going to call it now? Mr? Grace? Okay, I mean think about Jurassic Park. You know, how do

you know the dinosaurs are female? Somebody go out and pull up their skirts? You know. Very true? Okay, But on the other hand of all that assigning gender identities and sexual orientations has been called anthropomorphizing, or assigning exclusively human characteristics to non human things. All of this is a lot, so I say, we just take a quick break.

When we come back, We're going to look at sexuality in a bunch of different animals and see what the X what you're saying about all these bye birds and queer koalas and denisexual dolphins. We'll be right back with that after this, Welcome back to the show, everybody. So can animals be gay? It's a big question, and it's also the title of a New York Times article from by John Muallem. And the answer is very clearly yes and no. Okay, so it's not very clear. It's actually

super muddy and company, of course. So is there same sex sex in the animal kingdom? Now that's an easy yes, very much so. A Dazed Digital article says same sex behavior has been observed and up to a thousand species, from ducks to apes, to bats to beetles, pretty much any species, and all of them said, excuse me, can I get some privacy here? Is this really any of your um? But for a long time, biologists would not

study this, or they would write it off. It's like some random, isolated event if they recorded it at all, picturing some like early twentieth century explorer seeing two male penguins and what what did I just? You know what I saw? Nothing? Clearly, just in preparatory school. Anything can happen at eton. No more. Recently, though, scientists are starting

to actually pay attention and document when it's happening. But of course people are being you know real people about it, and they're putting a lot of extra weight on these studies. So when biologists Lindsay Young published a short paper about two female albatross pairings, she was quote pretty careful to plainly and simply report what we found, just you know, the objective factor. But by the end of the next day, the inner net was like flooded with people using it

as propaganda. Either it was this big revelation about the human gay experience, or it was selective pseudo science meant to further some kind of gay agenda, the kay agenda, we're all better dressed with conditioned hair is the gay agenda in the room with us. Now. Now, on one hand, of course there's an obvious positive lesson here for homosexuality

in humans. There's this constant disparagement that homosexuality is not natural, and that now gets thrown in the garbage because now we see that totally absent of any social structures or agenda's, same sex activity and partnerships both definitely exist in nature. And that is a really important finding and I think

something people can take a lot of validation from. But now John Mualum points out that the central tenet of biology has always been like ever since Darwin that basically everything that happens, everything that non human animals do, goes

back in some way to propagation of the species. So no matter what you see an animal doing, it's somehow related to producing offspring in the long run, right, the survival tactics, you know, what they eat, where they go, how they form as a community, and things like that. It's all about propagation. So why would an animal invest in sexual behavior that isn't reproductive? I mean, you know, biologists like, well, this caused you know, this costs energy.

This uh might leave you vulnerable, It takes time, Like what's the point? They call it an evolutionary paradox, and just the challenge of explaining it might be the main reason that biologists have kind of swept it under the

rug for so long. It's not necessarily that biologists were always homophobic, although many of them have been and probably are, But this the sort of challenge of it h might be more of the reason that people would like, let's just not worry about it, right, But in the last twenty years or so, biologists are starting to theorize on ways that same sex activity is actually beneficial to the propagation of the species. For example, here's something you didn't

want to know. Young male dolphins will sometimes stick their dicks in each other's blow ahead dolphins. They do funk around the dolphins, don't they They are crazy? Um and yeah, this is something that scientists did not look at much, like you know, they saw it and they'd be like, all right, no thanks, whatever y'all are doing, I'm just gonna let that be over there and pretend that I was busy writing something else, dops. But it turns out that probably young male dolphins are being kind of like

locker room buddies and they're bonding. It's like snapping a towel at each other or something. Because then those same groups of males work collectively to hook up with females later. So that explained why this behavior kind of stuck around in evolution. It was not bad for propagation. It was good for propagation. It helps them form a little gang because they've all they get a wingman, they've all they've

all experienced each other's dick, so they're all closer. Now there you go, and they're like, now we can all go out and get girls together. Yeah, they get a thin man and the finn man's like, look, I've had his dick in my blowhole, and let me tell you something. You'd be lucky, isn't lucky. Primatologists Amy Parish and her team found female Japanese macoux quote engaged in intimate acts, which in humans would be in the X rated category.

She says that might enhance their social position or a certain dominance in a way that helps them become more successful mates for male partners, which is very interesting that the females are like, maybe they're just teaching each other like this, this is how you satisfy a monkey. I don't know. Yah, he got these Adie mccoq's all getting together and kind of like the dolphins. They're just like fooling around together. And that they said that either helps

them create this sort of bond. So now they could be like, all right, girls night, let's go get some boys. Or one female is like I've mounted each and every one of y'all, so I get to choose first, you know. Either way, it's it is beneficial to their reproduction. Now. In bonobo apes, which are genetically very close to humans, nearly seventy of their sexual activity is nonreproductive. They're always you know, giving each other hand jobs and getting real

freaky with each other. Come dry hunt my leg. Evolutionary psychology professor Robin Dunbar said to National Geographic that males engage in same sex activity as a way to socially bond to Like the dolphins we talked about, he talks about Spartan soldiers having sex with each other, and he said, quote, they had the not unreasoned, noble belief that individuals would stick by and make all efforts to rescue others if

they had a lover relationship. You know again, that's right, That's sort of like, well, if we're all doing it, then I'm going to be a lot more invested in this battle because this is someone who I've been really intimate with the most intimate level that I'm fighting next to. So it's sort of a similar thing maybe for the bonobos. But he also says it could be more of a developmental phase, like kind of like when young animals wrestle with each other and they sort of play fight to

build their strength. This might be young animals trying out these different parts of their bodies and minds by fooling around with their pals, and then some of them just end up sticking with it. I was gonna say that because I feel like kids do that, you know what I mean, Like not not even a sexual way, but like kids are just like, oh, look at my dick, or like, oh I'm growing kitties, look at them or care or something, you know what I mean. Like, you're

just like you're were on the same level. So it's the same level of exciting and scary and weird and embarrassing and you know all those things. You can't really a younger kid or an older person, you can't really you wouldn't share. Does that make sense? And some snail species, all of them are born male. It's only after pairing up that one of the males will become female, which is a process that takes a few days, and then

those females might go pair up with someone else. But some male snails consistently choose male partners, and then others always went for partners that had already become females. So these lab studies show that they have preferences. And more recent study from twenty nineteen said that same sex behavior goes way way back to early evolution, sexual behavior would have evolved before the kind of traits that differentiate the sexes, like size, odor, shape, color. Know, if we're just crawling

out of the use, we haven't grown titties yet. We just trying to get rid of the tail. We started having sex before we started to look different. Yeah, yeah, we all look the same. So individual animals would have just been having like indiscriminate sex with each other and like eventually reproduction would happen and be like, oh cool, that worked out. I have this rudimentary dick. I'm just going to keep sticking it into things until reproduction happens.

Happens that way, we'll figure it out trial and error. Right. Basically, is that not evolution at work? Biologists Joan rough Garden told New York Times quote to think of all these animals as multitasking with their private part It kind of sounds like Telula Bankhead. She used to say she was

not bisexual, she was ambisextrous. As those other traits evolved and animals became more distinct between male and female, they would be more likely to pair off in different sex pairings, but same sex behavior didn't really have a reason to go away. So it just kept happening. Yeah, there's like why you know, if if an animal has tendencies towards

same sex behavior, it's not hurting their reproduction. In fact, in the Washington Post article Queer Animals Are Everywhere, Elliott Shreyfer says the study shows from twenty nine that if animals are having same sex sex, or even bonding with the same sex partner, it does not necessarily mean that

they're not also reproducing. Vincent Saviolinans calls it the bisexual advantage and that this fluid sexuality actually increases reproduction chances over the history of life, largely by simply increasing the amount of time that animals are having sex. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, if you're just screwing everybody in your colony,

you know somebody's going to get pregnant. But ultimately there might be no evolutionary advantage to same sex sex at all in animals, and that's something biologists might just have to get over. Deal with it. Biology. They talk about that, they're like, you know, Darwin's rule that kind of like you mentioned earlier, Darwin's rule that everything must relate to procreation. Biologist think of it as they're like speed of light, Like that is the one rule that can't be broken,

and they might have to break it. That might be too rigid. Isn't that interesting when you're doing science and you have to go, what am I assuming? You know? What is the foundational assumption? That might be the thing that's incorrect. Paul Vacy, who studied the Japanese macaques, said, quote, it isn't functional. The behavior has no discernible purpose adaptationally speaking. And that leads us to the reason that we've probably all been thinking that you've probably been screaming at us

the whole time. And so why animals are having same sex? Sex? Sex is fun? Hey, In the last twenty years, studies have started to teach us that a lot of animal is really like having sex. Wow, what a surprise. So let's just take a quick break and we'll talk about how fun it is for everyone. Right after this welcome back, we're going to talk about why sex is fun. So Matthew Grober, who's a biology professor at Georgia State University, to old National Geographic quote, if sex wasn't fun, we

wouldn't have any kids around. I don't know how he learned that at Georgia State University. Heyo, because I didn't learn it while I was there. I didn't have any sex in college. Just what I'm saying. So, he says that same sex behavior and animals might literally be just them enjoying themselves. I was wondering this the whole time, because it's like, if you're really thinking that all sex is about procreation, then why do we have oral sex? Why do we have fingering? You know, what's the point

of it? And we're not gonna maybe I'll get to a point where I want to have your dickens. I mean, but like a lot of people do non penetrative stuff all the time. Uh, A lot of monkeys and big cats have a lot of oral sex apparently. Yeah, And the biological explanation has always been, uh, it's because it prolongs their sexual activity and they have better chances of procreating and things like that. But that's kind of coming into question now too, and saying like that, I think

they might just like it. Biologists are saying that the urge to have any sex at all might just be strong enough to overpower the instinct of reproduction, and so then the partnerships that animals form in those monogamous couples might just stem from that, And that brings us back to the original question, can animals be gay and why? The answer is kind of ambiguous and kind of no, and largely that's due to connotation. Like animals aren't straight either.

These are very human terms with a very complex meaning that carry a lot of weight. Those snails that we talked about that are all born male before one becomes female after they pair up is not really a good parallel to the human transgender experience. Yeah, but it can help show that gender and sex are fluid in nature. So again, on one hand, same sex behavior in animals is validating, especially as a counterpoint to some anti lgbt Q rhetoric like, for example, Thomas Aquinas was a philosopher.

He said in the thirteenth century that homosexual behavior and humans was wrong, specifically because it doesn't occur in nature. But now we know that science has proven that Thomas Aquinas can go eat his own butt. Thomas James Essex, the director of the LGBT Project at the a c l U, told New York Times that learning about same sex behavior in animals in college in the mid eighties,

the mid nineteen eighties made a difference for him. He said he remember thinking, quote, oh, hey, this is quote unquote natural, this is normal, this is part of the normal spectrum of life. But he also said that it's totally beside the point and quote people should not be discriminated against regardless of what animals do. Yes, exactly right, which is like, duh, that does seem like a kind

of an obvious thing, but it's very important to say that. Uh. Sidney Woodruff, a non binary and queer PhD candidate at U C. Davis, told Washington Post that while they're studying western pond turtles, quote, I have to keep in mind that if I'm researching sex and wildlife species, I'll want it to be a certain way because of my own

gender and sexual identity. In our quest to find inaccuracies in previous research, we have to make sure we're being humble enough to know that we're not always going to get the answer that we want, which is very important. Again, It's like that thing where you're foundational assumption might be getting in the way of you learning. Yeah, yeah, right, And if you're basing you know, validating human behavior on

what you learned from animals. You're going to find things that are like, oh, yes, this is great, and then you're going to find things that are like I'm going to pretend I didn't see that. You know that don't parallel. I mean, it's just completely different scenarios. So there's there's value in it, but it's not, Uh, it's not really the most supportive argument, and it shouldn't need to be. We're we're really prone to seeing animals as reflections of ourselves,

and we're constantly anthropomorphizing them, like to an unhealthy degree. Right, I mean, okay, so picture a little kitty cat, right, adorable, precious cat. Can that cat solve a crime? Of course not. You wouldn't ask it to. Is just a cute little kitty cat. But now imagine that cat is wearing a little Sherlock Holmes cap and has a little pipe. And I would trust this cat to solve my own murder. I just would. I would. Everything is resting on this cat, now,

great cat detective. Yes, you know, that's the kind of thing where we put these images on animals that really just aren't there. I mean, we would love to see Roy and Silo get a little penguins sitter for tango and go out to Carly ray puffin concert and then come home and catch up on the latest episodes of Sealhousewives of Antarctica and Grace Krill and Grace Oh my God. Send us TV shows that you think gay penguin would watch, Well, we'll do it in our story on Instagram, and I

want to hear them all. I would love it, So you know, anyway, we've got this image for what you know, to quote unquote gay penguins would be like. But that's that's not their life, right because more bluntly, animals do not have the human gay experience, right. They don't face discrimination in their homes and families. They don't have their own cultures centered around you know, safety and relatability and comfort.

And animals that exhibit same sex behavior are not superior to different sex having animals when it comes to art, music, fashion, dancing, and hairstyles like they are in humans. Sorry gee, I mean they're just better. They're just better. Also, at the end of it all, nearly every animal observed having same sex sex was also seen having different sex sex too, so, as Daniel villa Real points out on queerty dot Com, most animals are probably bisexual if anything. Wow, So this

might be the best lesson to take from it. In all, sex basically happens in this place where physical and emotional experiences kind of swished back and forth over each other. It's all a big, complicated amalgam. Sometimes it's all one or all the other. And that seems to be true

in both humans and animals. But as much as we're constantly learning that animals are more complex than we thought they were, humans are just way, way, way way more complicated, and our sexual preferences and aversions and everything in between are just as complicated. So if there's a benefit to learning that animals experience same sex attraction or form same sex bonds, it's probably that the way we see gender

is not foundational to sex. Sex was there first, and there's no natural law that demands that sex is exclusively between the male and female of a species anymore. Then there's one that says that the sex that your body displays at one point in your life has to be the sex that it displays for your whole life, or that your gender needs to be tied to that sex display, no matter what it is. There's no rule saying any of that right anywhere in nature, And I I think that's

that's really the biggest thing here. We made that ship up. Someone was like wanting to make order out of chaos and control things, not even in a malicious like I'm controlling people, but just like you know, that human thing of like, ah, this doesn't make sense, and I wanted to make sense. Yeah, And it's not that like someone sat down with a rule book one day and was like, hair's I'm making gender up, you know, but it is something that we that developed and we exist in, so

it matters. Um. But there's also not a rule book for it, right right, which means we can throw them out and start over and make it however we want. We're the top of the food change may do whatever we want now. Of course, for every person who says, look, same sex behavior is natural, there's some idiot bigot out there who says, oh, yeah, well some animals eat their babies, so I guess it's okay for people to do that too.

And this is dumb, yes, but it it's also why some activists have pointed out that it's really better just to avoid the animal comparisons at all when you're talking about validating the human experience, right, Like James Essex said, whatever animals are or aren't doing quote shouldn't be the

basis of moral judgment for humans. So the general consensus seems to be, or at least the one we're kind of finally reaching here, is that, yes, this kind of behavior in the animal kingdom is validating, maybe even empowering, but it's not really a direct parallel to sexuality in humans. In fact, this twenty nineteen study, which included queer biologists, said specifically, quote, we do not use terms such as heterosexual or homosexual to prevent any conflation between human sexuality

and non human sexual behaviors. So they specifically say same sex sexual behavior and different sex sexual behavior in their study, which is kind of what we've tried to stick to here as well. So they're like, you know, the idea of what a person's sexuality is is not something you can relate to the animal that this animal is currently having sex with. Yeah. Yeah, and there's no like penguin

euphoria show, there's not. You're experimenting and it means something this where the other way it just they just find a hole and they stick that minute. Okay, So we've talked this thing to death. So let's close out with one more fun sex fact about penguins, specifically the Adeli penguin, who are the true sexual deviance of the penguin world, really are so. Researchers Fiona Hunter and Lloyd Davis studied

Adeli penguins mating habits for five years. These penguins build little nests out of small rocks and pebbles, but towards the end of the nesting season, things get warm on their Antarctic peninsula and there's a risk of flooding, so they want more and more pebbles to build up a strong nest. Well the colonies, they're all crammed together in the huge gathering. It looks like a big penguin music festival,

like a little burning man. And on the outskirts of the colony there are usually a lot of single, desperate males who never got to breathe with's just dad um. They're just kind of chilling like an empty nest, hoping to meet some desperate lady penguin. It's like the club at the end of the night. It's like four am, and you're like it is left, oh no, oh no. So they're hanging out out there. They're kind of looking around,

hoping for any stragglers at the club. I guess. So these inner colony female penguins will go out to the outskirts and let these male penguins have sex with them in exchange for a rock from their nest. And it is the first example of prostitute ship found in the animal kingdom. Incredible. Oh you gotta wonder what promises they're making too. She's just a gold digger. Oh no, do you think that? The you know, question is do the males know that this is a one time thing and

exchange her rock? Or at least do they make you do the Did the female penguins make you believe it? I don't know. Do they play games at their hearts like Linda would? Linda would straight up can I her way? She would get whatever she needed to. She would no, no, you know what she would do is she would totally partner up with one of those penguins, take all of his rocks, and then go find someone new and kill him. Oh yeah, with a little poison or something, and then

she's on the next one. That trifling bitch. Look, sometimes these female penguins will come out and just flirt to do their little mating dances, their little trumpeting bend over, look up coilie blood their actions huh. And then while the male is trumpeting back, they will just snatch a pebble and run up. Nope, there you go, girl, good for you. And they almost always exclusively do this too single unpartnered male penguins, because as Dr Hunter pointed out, quote,

otherwise the partner female would beat the intruder up. I'm telling you, these Adeli penguins are vicious and violent. There was this There was this study in nineteen fift by Dr George Murray Levick, and he went down to this island to study the Adeli penguins, and he could not publish his paper because it was so scandalous because the

behavior he witnessed. And some of that was like some pretty nasty homophobia because he saw same sex pairings of the Deli penguins and was like, these perverts that they're base desires are taking over blah blah blah. But some of it was pretty horrific. Like he said, quote, I saw another act of astonishing depravity today a hen which had been in some way badly injured in the hind

quarters was crawling painfully along her belly. I was just wondering whether I ought to kill her or not when a cock noticed her in passing and went up to her. After short inspection, he deliberately raped her. So pretty horrific story about these Adeli penguins. Well, no wonder the ladies are like, let's get my rock. Wins still get my rocks. They saw male penguins having sex with dead penguins, like

just he said after this whole incident. In his notebook, he wrote, quote, there seems to be no crime too low for these penguins. Penguins are making up like look, the animal kingdom is full of non consensual sex and pretty horrific behavior and violence, of course, but you know, you go look at these cute little penguins. I mean, this guy thought he was just gonna go watch the mating habits of the Adelhi penguin and saw true horrors. Well, honestly,

penguins turning of sex work is pretty great. I'd say, if you've got a product and you can sell it, then get what you're worth. The culture, get up there, penguin hut culture. I can respect that. BBC points out that other animals have been seen exchanging food for sex, but only within an existing partnership, and Dr Hunter said that the most stones she saw a single female penguin take in a three week mating period was sixty two, but she says she probably didn't even see them. All.

Oh wow, this girl was working. She had her only fins on, only fins. Oh my god, Like, don't forget to subscribe. Incredible. Wow. I did not know any of this about penguins. There's so many of these animals. This is really fascinating. Look, sex is complicated in nature and also like completely uncomplicated too. That's kind of what I love about it is they're just like whatever, I like having sex. You down, I'm down, great, let's go do it. No, but I feel like you're right. It's so much more

like it's just fun. I just enjoy it. I like to put my dick in things. I'm curious about what

it does. I'm curious about what it's supposed to do and what it can do and why and when and how, and you know, just interesting to see that sort of exploration and curiosity and stuff like that in all these different species and learning how it's benefiting them right, you know, and to think like, you know, what experiences are we limiting for ourselves by being so trapped in our kind of like you said, sort of fabricated traditional beliefs about

sex u or even thinking about like procreation, you know, propagation of the species or whatever. I remember seeing some conversation about that about people not, you know, choosing deliberately not to have children, and you know, people are like, well, why you know you're that's not the instinct is to have them, and you know, your people are worried about

birth rates and ship like that for some reason. And I saw someone be like, you know, I think it's really great because now you have all these more adults that are interested in the kids, like more aunts and uncles that don't have their own kids, and so they can actually care about your kid. And it takes a community, you know, it takes a village to raise a child.

So you you know, you're thinking about all of these other resources and time and love and energy that can be expended on kids because you're not having one of

your own necessarily, right. That came up specifically in one of those studies about penguins where they said, you know, yeah, you do kind of get the gay uncles in the in the penguin world where they contribute to the raising of young penguins, uh, like you said, without having their own that they're focused on, because penguins do kind of they have individual parents, but there is a community there

as well. Yeah, I think that's fascinating. It's interesting to think about trying to set up your family unit in a different way, you know. And it's just again, it's all those things we're assuming and we're growing. We grow up with such cultural foundations that you're like never necessarily

think about or choose to challenge. And it's okay if it works for you, um, the way it is, but it's not doesn't mean that you can't think about it differently or look at it and go, this could be different and what if it was, and how would that look and how might that be beneficial and stuff like that, and allowing other people to do those things other ways to write, especially like who cares if you have completely doesn't affect you at all, as in literally anyone else's

sexuality that you're not actively having sex with, like pretty much exactly no bearing whatsoever at all, none of your business, none of your business. Yeah, but but there is also like again it's there's just just something nice to take from it, but just not lean on it too hard, especially like James Essex says that he won't use this in legal cases. Right, He's not going to turn to animals when he's fighting for human rights in a legal case and say, well, penguins do it, so what's the problem?

And it has been brought up in legal cases and beneficially in the past when the law specifically said. Some old laws were like homosexuals shouldn't homosexuality shouldn't exist because it does not exist in nature, and they were able to saying, hey, look yes it does. And they're like, all right, well now we have to come up with a new argument, which they always do, but we don't like it. Yeah, exactly, So I probably shouldn't have said that in the first place. My mom said I couldn't

do it, so no, you can't do it either. Well. I found this so fascinating and I hope you did too. Uh. There's a lot of really interesting lessons to take out of this. Some of those lessons are don't take too much of a lesson from it either way. But um, but I love I love learning about animals. Yeah, I love uh learning about anything that validates the l g B t Q I A plus experience And this is

a really fun story. Yeah, where the challenges, you know, our assumptions Again, I really feel like that's what I'm taking most from this story is like, what are you not questioning that you could be questioning? And that's not to say you have to dismantle everything in your life, It's just like, why not look at it just for a minute and be like, is that how it has to be? I like, it is it serving me? Why? You know? Why is it like that? You know? I

don't know. I think that's usually valuable. Then you're in evolution. Hey, brought it back to evolution. There you go. I'm so great. Well, we would love to keep evolving this show, and the best way we could do that is to get some feedback from you. Also, please send us your thoughts on all this, all these penguins and these animals that are out there having a whole lot more sex than we are, and give us your thoughts. You can reach us at ridic Romance at gmail dot com, that's right, or we're

on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at dynamite boom. That's right, and I'm at oh great, it's Eli and the show is at ridic Romance and find us on TikTok at Ridiculous Romance as well. Thank you so much for spending time with us. We love hanging out with you all. I'm talking about all this fun stuff and we will have another good one for you next time. All right, see then, so long friends, it's time to go. Thanks

so listening to our show. Tell your friends name's Uncle Sandance to listen to a show Ridiculous roll Nance