Sex at the Zoo

Watching a movie like Schindler's List can give us an idea of what life may have been like once upon a time with regard to public nakedness. All the Jews are stripped naked and sent to the (ahem) "showers." The audience, clothed almost continuously since birth, sees people like cattle. All those naked women. They all have tits. So what? Nothing sexy about it. We adjust to boredom about the body within seconds. Civilization invests a great deal of energy in keeping us fascinated by the very ordinary.

Human beings are keyed to visual signals more than most other creatures. Our dogs sticking their noses into other people's business embarrasses us. On the other hand, I am convinced that one of the reasons people love horses is that those animals have great round haunches and they have them right out in the open. One time I was riveted by the plump round ass of a young blond girl as she mounted her trail horse. I was placed right behind her on the trail. If I lost sight of the girl's ass for those moments where it was buried by the saddle, I never for a moment lost sight of her horse's ass. Her horse started to fart at every other stride. At each fart this almost nubile girl would turn around and shine embarrassment at me. She knew what she was carrying around a quarter inch from her ass. She knew how the horses bluntness highlighted her covertness.

Even Victorian girls at some point, despite the piano's "limbs" being covered by skirts, got to see some huge shlong flop out of the hidden recesses of the sanitation wagon's horse. You may cover your own fart but you can't cover it from yourself. For all her concealment, the menstruating girl knows she's menstruating.

Once upon a time ... men were animals and didn't think they weren't. Civilization expends even more energy denying our relationship to everything that's around us than it does to hawking our sexuality as perpetually interesting. (Take what's common, and artificially make it scarce. Men were sex capitalists long before there was economic capital. Schools are a Johnny-Come-Lately in the game of manipulating value.) Everybody saw your whatever and you saw everybody else's. Everybody saw you when you were sick, when you were puking, when you had diarrhea ... Yet when the girl approached puberty, her body found a way to get noticed, to stimulate attention. One or two fucks per lifetime per pubescent girl can keep the species going. If everybody in the clan wants to fuck her the second she turns twelve ... you get six billion people in no time.

Et cetera.

That's the context in which I want to approach my adulthood's most memorable discovery of the commonness of what we advertise as uncommon. I wanted to take my son, age three or four, to the zoo. I ran into my army buddy, Phil. I boarded the subway for the Bronx. The Bronx Zoo was just then redesigning and re-landscaping itself into the new zoo architecture. Soon everyone living will have no memory of the horrible old zoos of the horrible old days. But that occasion was my first experience of seeing lions unfenced. My son had nothing to compare it to. He walked or rode my shoulders. Phil may have carried him too on occasion. What sticks with me even more than the re-landscaping is that that visit was also my first experience of a modern zoo's "night house." The zoo keeps night creatures in a reverse daylight time zone. The night creatures are fooled into being active during the day and sleeping at night: like the rest of us. The night house is cleverly lit so that we can see the creatures in a kind of twilight while they think it's dark. Many of the animals' burrows were exposed through windows to the public. I presume the animals had no awareness of being observed.

(I recalled this situation in bed to my girl friend the other night. I pointed out to her that we had no idea what gods were watching us when we thought we had privacy. There in our own bed, in the middle of the night, fully dark for hours, we could be on display in some well lit arena in Heaven or Hades or on Betelgeuse.)

Anyway, the armadillos were at home that afternoon: a large nest of them. And what a home life they had. Mama, papa, grandma, brother, sister-armadillo, baby-armadillo ... were all strung together in one long chain of pussy sucking. Every male had his tongue in some twat somewhere. All of the females (the majority) were splayed open so their lips were readily accessible. Every great once in a while I'd see a female tongue (the armadillo's have some tongue, by the way) snake out and caress a penis or a pair of testes. Rather more regularly did I notice that the tongue in a particular twat was a female tongue. At no point did I see an erect penis. I saw no penetration, no spurting jissom. But obviously that was just because I wasn't there long enough. The nest was full of armadillos and they didn't get there from the mouth.

Everybody did the eating. All the females got eaten. The male is stimulated by stimulating the female. The female stimulates and is stimulated the long night long. Whatever fucking takes place takes place in the interstices.

Only twice in my life have I been regularly subjected to pornography. The first time was when I foolishly agreed to sort my father-in-law's mail for the year he'd be in Europe. The second is right now. Email was so wonderful so recently. Now it's as unusable as the snail mail. Who can possible find any important messages amid the unsolicited barrage? Until a week or so ago, I threw most spam including all spam I prejudged to be porn away without looking at it. With my newer, faster computer I allowed myself a quick peek at the letter itself. In a small number of those cases I connected to the top page of the site for a fast, free look (only to find them easier to get into than get out of: each time I'd exit some other bordello would open.) Anyway, 90% of the porn is indistinguishable from that I saw thirty years ago: tit, pussy ... fuck, suck. Some of the girl's have come in their eye, some of the girl's have something in the bunghole: but mostly it's still just tits and ass, sucking and fucking. Yet the prose keeps promising something new, something unusual, something abnormal, something unnatural ...
Sorry, folks. Even armadillos do it. But they do it without apology.

(If the armadillos had the technology, would they be spying into our beds at night? Or is that just men and gods who have no shame?