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What We Can Learn from Animal Sex
by Perrin Roosevelt Ireland
The secret sex lives of animals are not so secret anymore, thanks to this brilliant, punchy illustrated guide to how the other 99.99% get it on.
In delightful watercolor comics of pregnant seahorse dads, spider oral sex, and the four-headed echidna penis, Perrin Roosevelt Ireland takes us on a wild biodiversity ride through queerness, infidelity, consent, divorce, sex change, and even sexual cannibalism in the animal world. Poking the Squid illustrates the splendid diversity of nature's eroticism. For too long, science has prudishly obscured the wildly creative kinkiness of animal sexual behavior. But Poking the Squid celebrates how assumptions about sex are shifting.
Ireland interviews researchers probing the leading edge of animal reproductive biology and, with the help of her cats Ursula and Pudge, brings readers along as she learns the latest discoveries that implode traditional notions of sex roles, relationships, and just who is mounting whom. These researchers are making dolphin vaginal popsicles, retrieving sperm packets from male squid mouths, and documenting dolphin orgies. From the externalized clitoris of the spotted hyena to mating-by-fusion in anglerfish, Poking the Squid draws on decades of feminist and queer theory to show that sexual diversity is biodiversity, and boisterous boinking is only natural.
Ireland reminds us that we humans, from habitat destruction to climate change, impact all of animal life, including their private lives. Yet Earth's sexual ecosystem is filled with joy, resilience, and vitality―a balm to climate grief and a reason to protect all forms of nature's pleasure. And by illuminating and celebrating animal diversity, Poking the Squid invites us to embrace our own.
"Thoroughly entertaining… Ireland invites curiosity and opens up new ways of thinking." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Ireland's winning debut offers a surprisingly humorous graphic analysis of animals, sex, and how badly science has failed to understand the nuances of gender and sexuality within the animal kingdom… Sharp and accessible." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Poking the Squid is a kaleidoscopic tour through the weird and wonderful diversity of animal sex. With juicy illustrations and thoughtful text, Perrin Roosevelt Ireland reminds us that humans occupy a narrow band of all possible experience. Multiplicities, not binaries, are the norm in nature. This book is a celebration of biological diversity and a call to challenge our prior assumptions: Relationships are at the center of all life, but they might not look how you'd expect." ―Zoë Schlanger, author of New York Times bestseller The Light Eaters
"Remarkable. Perrin Roosevelt Ireland takes us to the bottom of the matter―and has a blast doing it. Philosophically incisive and incredibly up-to-date on its science." ―Eliot Schrefer, author of Queer Ducks
This information about Poking the Squid was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Perrin Roosevelt Ireland is an artist and environmentalist. For a decade, she worked at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), ultimately as deputy to the executive director. Her artwork has been published in Discover, Nature, Scientific American, and The Rumpus. She serves on the board of the Roosevelt Institute, was an inaugural Artist in Residence at the New York Aquarium, and is a Banff Graphic Novel Resident. Perrin lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her cats (and muses) Ursula and Pudge.
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