Consent, a fundamentally animal notion?
Browsing through the columns of the Monde, Jacques Robert raised a strange question: commenting on the collective work The Feminist Animal (quite a program!) the columnist, who seems surprised to have laid an egg, writes: "Consent [...] seems, at first glance, essentially human [...] It is therefore clear that forced relationships remain relatively rare among our animal friends."
Regarding our counter-chronicle, let us simply focus its content on consent and its conditions.
Any good observer of nature has already noted that this so-called human behavior is fundamentally animal, like many others in matters of relationships in general and sexuality in particular! It is undoubtedly consent that is the least human of behaviors, alas! Le Monde, This duck which stands as a beacon of meaning, would only dazzle white geese?
Varied reproductive strategies in the animal kingdom
The article develops some characteristics of animal consent, the main one being the coordination between the short period of female fertility and the acceptance, or even the choice, of the male. If there is in fact a specifically human characteristic, it is the desynchronization between the period of ovulation and that of mating, bilaterally consented to, in the best case. Which leads us to think that consent is not self-evident in humans… nor in animals.
Would the dissociation of fertilization and copulation in humans mean that "unbridled" consent could be a human characteristic? Not really. In the oceans, the Palolo night of marine worms has nothing to envy Walpurgis Night. As for the nuptial flight of the queen bee, we must seek its equivalent in the Marquis de Sade rather than in Walt Disney. Indeed, the young queen is penetrated by several males, in seventh heaven. Certainly, hundreds of drones remain frustrated, but do you think they are jealous, not at all, not at all[1], because for the "lucky ones" the taboo trap has closed: the extra toy has gone crack, boom, boo! The penis is torn from the trunk. Ouch, the acme without the bells! The drones were seen in Emmanuelle, they were in The Last Woman, by Ferreri. Love to death. Final downfall: they fell like flies!
Rape and coercion, human and animal practices
Would feigned consent then be specifically human, in the vulpine manner of Judith liquidating the ignoble Holofernes, a scorpion so sure of his tail that he lost his head? Not at all. Thus the female firefly Photuris versicolor mimics the light response of females of other species in order to attract their males, who are fooled… and devoured. This adaptive strategy has been used for millennia by several species. It has the dual advantage of eliminating a member of a competing colony and thus defending the territory, like Judith repelling the Assyrian invader, but also of providing a good meal… and energy to then mate with the “right” male!
Then would the forced act remain? Tough love, Vian type, violent, deviant, version Hurt me, Johnny ? Just look at the plucked and bruised heads of poor hens undergoing the ardor of the rooster, this eminently Gallic symbol, to understand that men do not have a monopoly on this type of exactions. Abuse of weakness? Male crabs seizing in their pincers the females who have just moulted and whose still soft shell leaves them defenseless also shows us that this strategy has also been adopted by many animals.
So rape. Biologists use the gentle euphemism of "traumatic copulation." And there is no shortage of rapists! For example, male bedbugs of the genus cimex pierce the abdomen of "captured" females and inject the sperm directly into the hemolymphatic circulation. It's up to them to figure out how to find their way to the eggs! The practice of rape is also found in other species, including worms, marine molluscs, certain leeches and the spider Harpactea sadistica, the aptly named. A great many species of parasites use, like humans and in an equally ignominious manner, mass rape as a “weapon of war”, thus short-circuiting the proper reproduction of the host species and ensuring their invasive proliferation.
However, we have not found among the animal species males mutilating or veiling females for the simple pleasure of asserting their power.
Ultimately, isn't stupidity the very nature of man?
