Long ago, when time had barely began and the old Goddesses ruled, the Three Fates determined the time on earth for all beings.
Clotho “The Spinner” - Maiden - spun the Thread of Life. Lachesis “Caster of Lots” - Matron - measured the Thread of Life. And Atropos, or Astropos “Unbending” - Crone - cut the Thread of Life.
Sixty million years ago, there weren’t any humans, so each thread determined the life of a creature, including lots of dinosaurs and even bugs.
But without human lives at stake, the Fates found it boring to tend to the threads. Atropos, the Crone empowered to cut the thread of Life, took to drinking wine all day, and put the thread cutter on a timer, rather then tend to it every time a bug’s life thread needed cutting.
One day Dionysus, the god of wine and partying visited, and he and Atropos got especially drunken. Atropos stumbled and fell against Clothos’ Spinner, and her shears cut deeply into a spinning thread.
“Oh Athena!” cried Clothos, “That’s the threat for the life of the Earth itself!”
Fortunately Dionysus grabbed some duct tape and hastily wrapped up the damaged thread, which now thumped every time it spun, since the duct tape put it out of balance.
“That should hold it,” said Clothos,”But what will happen?”
What happened was the fraying of the thread caused a massive meteorite to smash into the Earth, damaging it as Atropos’ shears had damaged the Earth’s thread, and vastly changing every feature of the Earth, 60 million years ago.
Most dinosaurs and multitudes of other creatures and plants went extinct.
However, dinosaurs that were capable of flight did survive the impact. Some of them were already feathered.
Later, representatives of every surviving species of flying dinosaurs convened on what would be the Plain of Jordan. They met in a mammoth conference to discuss their future, shaken by their brush with extinction, and upset at the Goddesses’ lax oversight.
The female flying dinosaurs organized their own caucus to discuss their own issues.
An Archaeopteryx spoke first.
“I’m out there looking for alpha males for breeding to strengthen our gene pool, when out of the blue, some loser is jumping on my back. This has to stop. Sex should happen solely at the Females’ discretion!!”
The conference broke out in wild approval with all sorts of squawks and tweets and caws filling the air.
“But what can we do?” asked an Avialae.
“I say we all swear together, right now, to boycott males with large penises that facilitate sexual assaults. Natural selection will take care of the rest. “
All of the female flying dinosaurs, from that day on, refused sex with large-dicked dinosaurs, and for good measure, some refused all large dinosaurs, too.
As millions of years rolled by, the flying dinosaurs evolved, replacing scales with feathers, and the larger dicked dinosaurs died off without breeding, and without heirs. The flying dinosaurs eventually became birds, and by then the bird penis has been naturally selected out of existence, and replaced by a cloaca.
In some cases, such as raptors and shorebirds, the females are also often larger than the males.
The manly Eagle or strutting rooster? No penis. Over 95% of the bird population? Dickless.
Instead most male birds have a universal opening for excreting, pissing, and ejaculating, called a cloaca, and breed via a cloaca “kiss” with the female.
Only ducks, and some flightless birds, still have penises.
While I am writing figuratively, three books I am currently reading gave me a scientific basis for the idea that female birds could deliberately plan an organized meeting to boycott large penises for millions of years until they vanished.
The first book, The Evolution of Beauty, by Richard Prum, posits that female sexual choices actually determine many important evolutionary changes. It is true that when birds were flying dinosaurs, the males had penises. But as they evolved into birds, the penises disappeared from the vast majority of birds because of the females’ rejection of it.
The Second book, The Genius of Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman, claims birds are extremely smart. Nest building, navigation skills, and vocal learning are only part of their abilities. Could birds be brilliant enough to deliberately shape their own physical evolution, I wondered?
My final source is The Far Side Cartoons, by Gary Larson, which conclusively demonstrated that animals, including birds, can meet confer and plan at advanced stages.
When I read Prum’s claim that female preferences would drive dramatic physical changes in the male, it blew my mind. I screamed and cried that my little world would not let me go.
I had to stop what I was doing and write about it.
This theory surprised me, because I’d been seeking explanations for notable frog activity in the Chorus Frog Mitigation Area every early spring, in my back yard.
Why would (dickless) male frogs assemble into groups and croak together, loudly all night, revealing their presence to every predator within a half mile?
Now I realized it’s because the female frogs insist on it. If a male frog demurs from this very audible and visual display, his gene line ends.
I once thought the male frogs’ gatherings (leks) were a harem. There’s clearly an Alpha voice in their ribbetings. But the more I watched, I realized that the female frogs have total autonomy over mating. Ten or twenty male frogs will croak all night, but females may approach only one or two the whole evening. Many male chorus frogs probably never mate, and croak every night until their vocal cords wear out, or a bullfrog or coon happens onto them.
The female chorus frogs are also massive, compared to the males. Why? Among other benefits, it would help the female thwart sexual assault.
Charles Darwin wrote about sexual selection as aesthetically and female driven. Prum wrote lyrically to revive this convincing theory in The Evolution of Beauty.
I for one seem to have witnessed it in my own backyard.
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