Huffpo Live
Neil deGrasse Tyson may make a good argument for the world being round, but judging by a tweet he made on Friday night, he might not know much about sex.
Most of us were focusing on the Trump protests in Chicago last night. Here’s some counter programming, courtesy of Tyson:
If there were ever a species for whom sex hurt, it surely went extinct long ago.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) March 11, 2016
The Washington Post explains why Tyson misunderstands evolution with this statement. Animals do need to have sex in order to not die out, but they aren’t driven solely by the fact that it feels good, which is hard to measure anyway:
We’re working from the limited experience and perspective of a single species. It’s pretty much always a mistake to assign human feelings to any other species, because we’re totally working from a sample size of one, biologically speaking.
Wired has a list of animals who engage in painful sex. The list includes female praying mantises eating their male partners, and poor female kitties, who have to endure a spined penis.
And in a development that makes me feel sort of sorry for bedbugs for the first time, while also repulsing me even more, these pests reproduce through something called “traumatic insemination.”
Sex also hurts for humans. For example:
#sexhurts4 roughly 10-20% of human females due to vulvodynia & other chronic pain conditions. Most common treatment? "Have a glass of wine."
— Mika McKinnon (@mikamckinnon) March 11, 2016
(via Washington Post and Wired)