Collar from kittensplaypenshop arrived :D sorry for shitty photos

Today I’d like to talk to you about something possibly Not Safe for Work, but hey, it’s Sunday. What I want to discuss is the baculum—that is, the penile bone. While humans, despite much rib-elbowing about “boners,” lack a penile bone, most animals have them. It’s just not something you are likely to learn about at school in Western societies. If you go to a museum of natural history and look at all the skeletons assembled there, you’re unlikely to see a baculum anywhere, due to a Victorian sensibility that there’s something inappropriate about putting copulatory bones where children can see them. However, in this post-Victorian display of a dire wolf skeleton, the baculum has been included.

Actually, Victorian gentlemen were obsessed with collecting bacula, particularly of animals they had hunted. They often had them mounted for private display in their male-only hunting clubs, or in the case of particularly large specimens, such as that of a walrus, had them set with gold for use as gavels to call their secret societies to order. Nutty folks, those Victorian gentlemen. The Western gentleman’s fetish for the baculum as a symbol of secret male power explains why the female baculum (AKA “os clitoridis” or “baubellum”) went ignored and unstudied until the 1960s, and remains little studied today. But the female genital bone is a correlate of the male, and is found throughout the animal kingdom—in tigers and seals and bats and bears and rats. Speaking of rats, scientists in the 1960s found that injecting female rats with testosterone made their os clitoridis grow, becoming indistinguishable from a penile baculum, causing a minor sensation in the endocrinological world, as it provided further proof that sex is a spectrum, not an impermeable binary of male and female. Still, in the 21st century, most research on genital bones remains confined to studies of the baculum in the male—evidence of an entrenched commitment to an ideology of binary sex, and of a tenacious sexism. That said, the baculum continues to be viewed as a sort of silly curiousity rather than a topic of serious study, and that’s got to be due in part to human chauvanism and a sour-grapes attitude. Humans don’t have bacula, and we spend a huge amount of medical resources addressing “erectile quality” in men. (Medical science couldn’t care less about “erectile quality” in those assigned female, and rarely even mentions that clitoral erection is a thing.) Anyway, what we have is a society full of men anxious about their erectile quality, while other animals get to breeze through life with literal boners—apparently it doesn’t bear contemplating. But it should bear contemplating. Because one of the things you can see in the primates is that the Great Apes have much smaller bacula than in typical monkeys. And it appears that in the course of evolution, the Homo line saw the bacula dwindle and vanish, and that is a fascinating thing—and a phenomenon barely studied at all, due to prudery and sexism in a field—Science—that is supposed to be free of either.

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