I wanna try to explain homosexual anal sex to corvids
This is for a lot of reasons but mainly I want to see what they’d think of it. See, the “homosexual” part isn’t really the point. Plenty of species do gay stuff, so I’d think they’d be like “yeah sure we get that bit” but the other two parts are really outside their experience.
They don’t have assholes. Corvids, like a lot of birds, have a cloaca: it’s an all-in-one hole. They use it for sex and waste (which is also complicated by the fact that they do have urine but don’t have a bladder and don’t urinate: it just gets mixed in with the feces). So the idea that for humans, we’ve got a separate orifice for sex and homosexual sex doesn’t use it… That’d be tricky to understand.
But the real stumbling point, I think, would be the penis. They don’t have them, so the whole idea that we’ve got this specific appendage for penetrating each other? That’s gotta be hard to understand, no pun intended. I wonder how much they’d be “oh that’s neat, nature is so diverse and wonderful!” and how much it would be “you guys are fucking terrifying. It’d be like us talking to a xenomorph or spider wasp . They think it’s perfectly normal that they reproduce by traumatically injecting their young into the host who then burst out, killing and eating them. Yeah, nature is amazing but also you’re giving us nightmares.
Possibly more so because corvids (like most (or even all? I’m not sure)) birds don’t "kiss” either. They do something that’s sometimes called a kiss, but it’s basically just rubbing beaks together. There’s no tongues in other birds’ mouths. So the corvid idea of their body is presumably one that’s never penetrated. The whole idea is foreign to them. Their only reference point for that kind of thing would be in the context of injury, like getting shot or cut or impaled on thorns.
So I don’t know how much they’d really be able to see our sexual practices outside of a body horror lens.
On the other hand, I think they’d understand fellatio without as much difficulty. They eat, after all, so having something go in your mouth isn’t AS weird to them.
Still, I don’t know how much that’d be “oh I can see why that’d be pleasurable” vs “that doesn’t squick me out completely, but I still don’t exactly get it”. They can’t exactly do it themselves (no penises!) and I don’t know if any birds practice… It’s not exactly cunnilingus, because it’s a cloaca, but it’s kinda similar? I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me if they do… I just don’t know.
But yeah. I’d love to talk to some corvids. They’re very smart so I’m sure there’s a lot we’d have in common if we could talk to them, but I can’t help but imagine they’d find how we have sex completely horrifying.
Although I wonder how much they’d already think that before we tell them? I mean, the chances for your average corvid to see some humans fucking each other are rare, but, like… There’s wild animals and farm animals. Surely some crows have been hanging around when some Hot Mammal Sex has happened, and they have to have seen it. They’ve got good eyesight, after all. Better than ours, in many ways. So I guess it’d make sense if they already know and just consider it one of those weird mammal things.
Not that it’s solely a mammal thing, of course… There’s birds with penises and vaginas, and they arguably do worse things with them than we humans manage to get up to. Don’t look up how duck genital evolution works, it’s frightening.
Anyway. I want to talk to a corvid about sex.