The Birds and the Bees Talk, but It’s Different
An ode to the greatest sex educators of the earth by Ann Mary Tom, Copywriter
India is a country with a rape rate of ‘at least one a day’ and we’re not even on the list of top ten countries with the highest rates of it. To anyone unaware of this, heck, just pace across a television with the news on, you’ll hear about one.
Clearly the world needs a more comprehensive sex-education curriculum. One that involves detailed explanations of the word ‘consent’ and the fact that if you say anything other than ‘yes’, you simply have not given consent yet. (Ignoramus, take note: If the question was “are you uncomfortable?”, the ‘yes’ doesn’t account for consent.)
It took a severe number of #MeToo victims, but a lot of countries have now actively begun to encourage compulsory sex-ed with trending importance for consent education — consent that is spelled out as affirmative and truly voluntary.
As Indian millennials that were forced to enroll for the abstinence-only program, the only sex education we got was “God put you in my stomach and then one day, I had you” coupled with the more recent Netflix Original of the suggestive name, Sex Education.
However, understanding consent is an innate capacity for any human with a twinge of decency or COMMON SENSE. So anyone looking for sympathy, over their lack of exposure to sex-ed, can find it somewhere between shit and syphilis in the dictionary. (Please excuse the Duane Steinbrink dialogue rip-off.)
I’m assuming it’s clear that the issue of rape culture, as with many, enrages me.
I pored over it — about how consent can be ironclad at least in the mentalities of the generation to come. Guess what? I found my answer in a documentary about bird sex.
How birds mate is otherworldly!
So here’s the thing. Male birds are hella attractive and they know it. But they also know that the female birdies want more than just that.
Hence their sex drive isn’t inspired by an ego fuel but by a wiser instinct that they are only as attractive as how elaborate their request for consent is.
For this, they have a carefully choreographed dance routine. They practice tirelessly. Some birds have over nine distinct moves. And mind you, these slice like a blowtorch through butter. After all he’s got to convince her that he’s the one, he’s got to be faultless.
As soon as a male bird spots that a potential mate has perched over his arena, he takes position and begins to send some moves.
Fluff up the feathers, shuffle, head bob, hop, sway bounce and, repeat.
It’s got a definite order and, it’s got timely pauses. This is when he checks, a hungry gleam in his eyes, if the gal thinks he’s got moves. But women know that hunger can wait — she asks for more.
Fluff up the feathers, shuffle, head bob, hop, sway bounce and repeat but this time, there’s loud chirruping. What can we say? He stepped up his game and hit it out of the park!
The female then flutters her wings. It’s how she says ‘yes’.
He knows he hit oil, so he stops drilling, and goes on to enjoy his rightful two seconds of glorious love-making. Theirs is a ‘matter of seconds’ affair but in the bird kingdom, consent comes at the price of a virtuoso choreography. No workaround to that.
Nature sure is the world’s best teacher. Maybe we should just have bird documentary screenings be compulsory in schools. That way we can be sure that Gen Z and Gen Alpha learn consent and also come out with a stronger high-school knowledge bank than ours which constitutes the one fact — ‘mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell’.
