Greetings, Meteor readers,

I am still recovering from the emotional hangover that was this weekend—the Knicks win, New York City’s Puerto Rican Day Parade, and a kid’s birthday party. I’ve never been so desperate for silence.

In today’s newsletter, a dispatch from Peru, where women’s rights are on the ballot. Plus, what we can learn from lesbian seals and amorous lionesses.

Hydrating,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

A high-stakes election: Women’s rights under attack. Hard-won gains rolled back. A political agenda moving steadily backward. Sounds familiar? As Donald Trump’s administration chips away at women’s freedoms in the United States, women inhabit a similar battlefield a few thousand miles to the south in Peru, where I am based as a journalist. Heading into the final stretch of a deeply polarizing presidential election, we find ourselves stuck between a rock and a hard place.

After a chaotic first round, the runoff has come down to an unexpected contender and an infamous veteran, respectively: leftist Roberto Sánchez and right-wing Keiko Fujimori. After initially trailing Sánchez, Fujimori—a woman—has clawed back to a lead of around 30,000 votes. Though the race remains open, with 99% of ballots counted, each update makes it more likely that Fujimori, who has run four times, will finally win.

At first glance, the candidates couldn’t seem more different: Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular (FP) carries a legacy of human rights violations linked to her father, president-turned-dictator Alberto Fujimori. Sánchez’s Juntos por el Perú (JP) promises to defend human rights while positioning the candidate as heir of socialist ex-president Pedro Castillo.

But here’s the rub: Neither party appears to have women’s interests at heart. Peru is following a global trend of setbacks in women’s rights amid rising conservative pressures, but in our case the trend pops up across the political spectrum. As former Minister for Women and Vulnerable Populations Marcela Huaita tells The Meteor, those advocating for human rights are “no longer pursuing a progressive agenda, but one of resistance.”

AND:

• Yesterday marked the 14-year anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which was supposed to create a pathway to citizenship for those who came to the U.S. as children. But under the Trump administration, some DREAMers are worse off than when the program first launched. In an interview with The Latino Newsletter, one DREAMer said, “Given the political climate, I noticed my renewal was taking too long…I tried to get ahead of it. I asked my senator’s office to inquire with [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services]…no answer. Complete helplessness, every day. The senator’s office can’t help me. I have to watch my parents suffer and cry every other day. I could lose my job. I feel very lonely and helpless.”

KARLA TOLEDO, A DACA RECIPIENT IN ARIZONA, WAS TAKEN INTO ICE CUSTODY LAST MONTH. HER FIRST DEPORTATION CASE WAS DISMISSED, BUT NOW, DESPITE THE PROTECTIONS PROMISED UNDER DACA, ICE IS RELAUNCHING ITS CASE AGAINST HER.  (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

• The United Kingdom has announced that it will ban anyone under 16 from using social media. Naturally, there are questions about how the government plans to enforce this, or what constitutes social media (for instance: what happens to your Roblox account?). Still, considering how dangerous social media has become, particularly to young girls, any move toward reining in its influence is welcome.

• Last week, dozens of women joined the hunger strike at Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center located in Newark, New Jersey. The women are making gender-specific demands, including the release of young girls being held there and the dismissal of a guard who has been accused of sexual assault by ten different women inside the facility.

• In an expansive report further detailing sexual abuse in the United Farm Workers union, The New York Times tells how Cesar Chavez set a tone of dismissiveness and complicity when women tried to report rapes and harassment.

• I’ve recently been informed that “Love Island”’s Casa Amor episode will be screened in movie theaters. Honestly, between this and Nolan’s “Odyssey,” cinema is so back.

• The (flamingo) revolution will be televised.

• There was a lot of chatter about the burning of witches at the most recent Turning Point USA convention. And apparently the witches deserved it?

Three Questions About…Animal Sex

Perrin Roosevelt Ireland’s new book about nature’s “horndogs” is a wild, and feminist, ride.

By Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

THE AUTHOR AND HER HORNY MASTERPIECE (COURTESY OF PERRIN ROOSEVELT IRELAND)

Did you know that climate change is causing the albatross divorce rate to spike? Or that lionesses have sex 100 times when in heat? Perrin Roosevelt Ireland’s new illustrated book, Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn From Animal Sex, will teach you everything you had no idea you didn’t know about how non-humans do it. Ireland is an artist and environmentalist whose book is an utterly delightful journey through the animal kingdom, brought to life with her effusive watercolor drawings. We asked Ireland about animals’ pleasure, sexual orientation, and gender behavior—and how these things intertwine with feminist and queer theory. (They do!)

One of the things I most appreciate about this book is how scientifically rigorous it is. You interviewed more than 50 scientists, and read hundreds of peer-reviewed papers. What’s the wildest thing you learned while researching? 

We could do more rigorous reassessing of evolutionary theories, specifically sexual selection theory. For example, Kaya Tombak, an evolutionary biologist, said to me that we’ve never actually studied whether egg cells are more energetically intensive to make in the body than sperm cells.

We assume the animal that makes eggs is more invested in the fate of the offspring, wants to have sex less frequently, and is going to energetically protect her body. Victorians were the ones generating the initial theory that, like Darwin, sets up these gender roles that we repeat and replicate and project onto animals: female animals that are coy, less interested in sex, and want to take care of babies. And you have males that want to wander the globe and shoot their shot because sperm’s easy to make. This set of assumptions comes up over and over again in the way we talk about animals. So I started asking each of the researchers whether [those assumptions] had been assessed in [the species they study]. And often they would say, “No, and I don’t even know how you would design that experiment.”

MONKEY THROUPLE, ANYONE? (ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF PERRIN ROOSEVELT IRELAND) 

One theme of the book is that earlier researchers were also blinded by their own heteronormativity. Then, over time we’ve learned that actually there is incredible sexual diversity across the animal kingdom. So what can humans learn from animal sex? More specifically, what can we learn from animals about how to have better sex? 

I think we can learn that sexual diversity is biodiversity, that “all God’s critters got a place in the choir.” Animals don’t kill each other when they change sex countless times across a lifetime [as some fish and amphibians do]. They don’t harm each other or remove each other from communities if they’re carrying a multiplicity of sexes in one body [as banana slugs and earthworms do]. They are partaking of pleasure without judgment. And they are sexual geniuses. Life has come up with astoundingly inspiring ways to keep making more of itself.

And I love the “better” question, because better for who? What works for me, what is better for me, might not be for another animal, given what they need in their evolutionary history and for their species to thrive. Like, dolphins can teach us better oral sex because they are echolocating on each other’s genitalia. And dolphins can access frequencies far beyond the scope of human hearing. So we can’t even imagine how pleasurable that might be. And then you pair that with more recent developments of understanding how innervated and complex the dolphin clitoris is and how large it is, and that’s quite a compelling combination.

My first exposure to your work was being charmed by your deadpan Instagram videos where you hula hoop while explaining the sexual behaviors of various species. But before that, you worked at the Natural Resource Defense Council for a decade, and the majority of what you post on social media is about habitat conservation. Help us connect these dots, between animal sexual diversity and conservation. 

It’s pretty hard to be an animal lover during a sixth mass extinction. Part of why I talk a lot about animals to people is to not be alone with that. It’s so excruciating to me, every day. And I can’t talk about my joy in finding out how much sex a lioness has when she’s in heat, which is so fun, without talking about habitat loss and climate change. We are currently making impossible the kinkery we celebrate in this book. I can’t talk about albatross monogamy without talking about how much plastic they’re living in. I can’t talk about a 50-pound elephant dick without talking about how the savanna’s gone. I can’t talk about seal lesbian relationships without talking about how fur seals got listed as endangered after this book went to the printer.

The environmental movement’s communication for my whole lifetime has been about loss, about despair, about stemming tides of harm, and not as much focused on the beautiful world we want. How do I invite people in, in a planetary crisis, to this sense of resilience and ability to act from a place of love? I just want to provide people an opportunity to get a giggle and then take an action on behalf of the horndogs that they most admire in the book.

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