HOME / the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

the breakfast table:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

Dongs for the memory

By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, July 7, 1998, at 3:47 PM ET

Wow. That Natalie Angier story on insect phalluses is the
smuttiest thing I've ever read in a family newspaper. But,
as you say, written with a wry (and distinctly female) attitude. You've probably observed, my dear, that men have difficulty getting jocular about this subject. The only male writer I've ever known to succeed is John Irving, and even he can grate. Allow me to try.

RSS

The most intriguing thing in the piece is this notion of "monandry." According to Angier, there's a very small number of insects and other "monandrous" fauna whose distinguishing reproductive trait is that the female mates only once in her lifetime. Angier does not give us any examples. That's the only fault I find with this story.

Imagine! To have sex only once! It reminds me of Woody Allen's old joke: "I reached the height of my sexual potency ten years ago, and I was sick that day."

By comparing the behavior of "monandrous" insects with "polyandrous" insects (i.e., ones where the females like to hang around wharves), scientists determined that insect species where the females sleep around a lot show greater variation of size and shape among the males' genitals (if I'm following this right; I'm having a busy day at work and
was in any case reluctant to think too hard about this). This led to some gross-me-out observations about "traditional peoples" in Australia and New Guinea and Southeast Asia who do a variety of disgusting things to the male penis in order to make it look bigger, including the insertion of "bells, balls, pins, rings, or marbles made of ground shells under the skin of the genitals."

Ha ha ha! And now I think I'm done.

Check out today's very funny A-head in the Wall Street Journal about California's Mount Tamalpais, where ad people like to make car commercials. Apparently the group of people who film automobile ads verges on a cult: 90 percent of all car ads are shot by the same 10 people. Everybody loves Mount Tamalpais because it's overcast there a lot, and "chrome, to avoid being sullied by a bluish tint, needs to be reflected against an all-white sky."

That's what I love about newspapers: They tell you things you never knew before.

Let's tone it down now,
Tim

the breakfast table:
entries