My first collegiate relationship survived almost the entirety of freshman year (ending via phone call the day before my birthday). The second held out through four months of sophomore year. The third, two months of junior year. And the last person with whom I had any appreciable romantic success during college dated me for about two weeks, just before graduation.

The half-lives of my romantic entanglements seemed to be dwindling inexorably toward zero. I feared that the duration of any future relationships would be measured in hours… or minutes… or seconds. How quickly might one progress from a first kiss to “I don’t particularly want to see you again”?

Instead, I passed through a singularity. My next relationship has held out for a decade and still seems to be going well.

Not that I deserve too much sympathy for my past failures. I was less than ideally suave.

I laughed aloud (while grimacing in recognition) at this passage describing a first date from Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity:

On Her Job:
“Plastic surgery? Really? That’s interesting.”
“Very lucrative.”
“It seems like a mostly New York/L.A. type thing right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is actual plastic involved?”
“Sometimes. Why?”
“Well otherwise the term would seem to be a slap in the face at the type of person who becomes a patient.”
“I don’t think I have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“You know, like there’s surgery for when something is actually wrong and then there would be plastic surgery for plastic, superficial people who can’t cope with their nose.”

On Misunderstandings:
“No I didn’t mean to imply that at all.”
“Right.”
“I’m serious. What kind of a hostile lunatic would purposely insult their dinner companion? I was just trying to be funny.”

Trying – and failing – to be funny. Well, not failing, exactly. I think that is funny. But De La Pava’s protagonist, like my own younger self, was insufficiently careful in considering the audience for his jokes.

So De La Pava’s protagonist returned home alone. Perhaps he then whiled away the evening reading some erotically-charged literature… like this eyebrow-raising article from the newsdesk at Science. Decidedly the most fescennine piece of writing I’ve stumbled across in some time. Each weekday morning I bring the kids to the YMCA to play while I check my email and do some typing, and I blushed while reading in the snack room.

So obviously I’ll share it with you now.

From Virginia Morell’s Science news article:

He did not penetrate her, but did ejaculate, and [she] then licked her back clean …

Which seems quite racy even knowing that the pronouns refer to a male macaque and a female sika deer.

Unfortunately, the article then alludes to violent rape porn – maybe this appeals more to all the Fifty Shades of Gray fans than it does to me. A kinky set of male fur seals has taken to pinning king penguins, thrusting for minutes (with, um, likely penetration), and, in a gruesome S & M twist, devouring the object of affection.

Just like rape culture in frat houses – or the White House – each assault makes future violence more likely. From Matt Walker’s BBC Earth article on the seals:

“Seals have capacity for learning – we know this from their foraging behavior for example,” explained de Bruyn.

So male seals may see each other coercing penguins, then attempt it themselves.

That might explain why the number of incidents appears to be increasing. “I genuinely think the behavior is increasing in frequency.”

It’s unfortunate that our press so rarely uses accurate language when describing violence against women… or against penguins, for that matter. “Coercing” sex is bad, but what these seals are doing is not coercion. Similarly, the word used for 45’s behavior toward women should not have been “groping.” The appropriate word is “assault.”

(A bit of linguistic mincing might be appropriate sometimes… like when describing the crabs who forcibly trigger asexual reproduction of anemones. Although the process sounds violent – “the crab tears the … anemone into two similar parts, resulting in a complete anemone in each claw after regeneration” – the crabs are acting calmly, and, besides, these anemones live only on crab claws and do reproduce this way.)

In the case of the deer-humping macaque and those penguin-molesting seals, scientists have documented that low status individuals are the most likely to assault other species. The same principal holds among orangutans – only low-status males assault females.

Yet another indication – as if all the pomp and bluster and Twitter bullying and gold-plated doodads weren’t enough – that 45 is a pusillanimous individual at heart.

Because, after all, consensual behavior is more fun. Contrast those dour seals with the ribald joy of W. H. Auden’s “The Platonic Blow”:

We aligned mouths. We entwined. All act was clutch,
All fact, contact, the attack and the interlock
Of tongues, the charms of arms. I shook at the touch
Of his fresh flesh, I rocked at the shock of his cock.

If only those low-status seals – or our low-status president – calmed their desires with some Auden! We’d live in a world with fewer traumatized women (and penguins).

Or, if you’d rather get your kicks from prose, might I proffer this passage from Victor Pelevin’s The Clay Machine Gun (translated by Andrew Bromfield):

“And you talk, talk …”
“Of what exactly?”
“Of anything at all, just talk. I want to hear your voice when it happens.”
“By all means. To continue that idea… Imagine that everything which a beautiful woman can give one adds up to one hundred per cent.”
“You bookkeeper…”
“Yes, one hundred. In that case, she gives ninety per cent of that when one simply sees her, and everything else, the object of a thousand years of haggling, is no more than an insignificant remainder. Nor can that first ninety per cent be subdivided into any component fractions, because beauty is indefinable and indivisible, no matter what lies Schopenhauer may try to tell us. As for the other ten per cent, it is no more than an aggregate sum of nerve signals which would be totally without value if they were not lent support by imagination and memory. Anna, I beg you, open your eyes for a second… Yes, like that… yes, precisely imagination and memory. You know, if I had to write a genuinely powerful erotic scene, I would merely provide a few hints and fill in the rest with an incomprehensible conversation like the… Oh, my God, Anna… LIke the one which you and I are having now. Because there is nothing to depict, everything has to be filled in by the mind. The deception, and perhaps the very greatest of a woman’s secrets… Oh, my little girl from the old estate… consists in the fact that beauty seems to be a label, behind which there lies concealed something immeasurably greater, something inexpressibly more desired than itself, to which it merely points the way, whereas in actual fact, there is nothing in particular standing behind it… A golden label on an empty bottle… A shop where everything is displayed in a magnificently arranged window-setting, but that tiny, tender, narrow little room behind it… Please, please, my darling, not so fast… Yes, that room is empty. Remember the poem I recited to those unfortunates. About the princess and the bagel… A-a-ah, Anna… No matter how temptingly it might lure one, the moment comes when one realizes that at the center of that black bage… bagel… bagel… there is nothing but a void, voi-oid, voi-oi-oooid!”