Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn from Animal Sex

Perrin Roosevelt Ireland

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Book cover for Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn from Animal Sex
Image for variant 9781324089049
Book cover for Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn from Animal Sex
Image for variant 9781324089049

Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn from Animal Sex

Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn from Animal Sex

Perrin Roosevelt Ireland

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Description

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.

Critical Reviews

Thoroughly entertaining... Ireland invites curiosity and opens up new ways of thinking.--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Sign me up for the Society to Save Slap and Tickle! With humor, thoughtfulness, and cheeky watercolor comics, Perrin Roosevelt Ireland makes the colorful case that sexual diversity is biodiversity, and that protecting how all critters poke the squid is one pleasurable way to get ourselves out of this mess!--Lucy Cooke, author of The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife

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

A deeply researched, politically astute, and brilliantly penetrating (in all senses) work that wildly expands our understanding of the natural world. When you're done blushing, you'll find your mind has been blown.--Peter Kuper, author of Insectopolis

Publishing Information

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Pub date: 2026-06-16
Length: 272 pages

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