Right after 6 p.m., my friend Tom had just finished a delicious dinner that Mary had prepared for him. Selfish as always, he sits silently and stews, not saying a word, wishing he could find the right words to make Mary suddenly become attracted to him.
He was frustrated, feeling like he was at the end of his rope. He felt like he had to come clean and finally confess what’s been plaguing him.
He wants her sexually.
The two have been stringing along like this for several years now — friends on the outside, conflict on the inside.
Some days, it felt like she might be secretly attracted to him too, but he could never be sure. It felt like she was communicating in some weird code language he didn’t understand.
He tried to decipher the signs and signals she was throwing his way, in his mind, at least, but he couldn’t. Trying to read her felt like trying to understand an entirely different species.
The whole thing has been unspoken for so long it’s settled into the cold groove of awkward friendship — the last thing Tom wants. But Mary isn’t ignorant of the niceties of the situation, either.
Mary unmistakably knows Tom’s intentions. She’s quite a bit smarter than Tom, and while she may not have read the science that I’m about to discuss here, her intuition tells her what’s up.
She knows Tom doesn’t understand her humanity.
He sees her as an object — an ideal — not a human being.
Tom and Mary’s story is familiar to most of us.
It’s a tale as old as time. Call it unrequited love, call it profound, unilateral attraction, call it unanswered animalistic lust, call it whatever you will, each one of us who’s made it through puberty knows the feeling.
Desire unmatched. It’s crushing.
We all remember cringing at Forrest Gump’s lifelong unrequited love for Jenny. But Tom’s situation is quite different.
Tom is a duck.
Mary is a human being.
The Curious Magic of Sexual Fingerprints
While this story sounds like a ridiculous piece of children’s fiction, it’s a true story, one that happens all the time. It’s as if the erotic part of Tom’s brain is fingerprint unlocked, like an iPhone, and Mary’s fingerprint — or one similar — is the only thing that will open up his desire. She’s a representation that triggers sexual arousal in him.
But how does that work if Tom’s a duck and Mary’s a human?
It works through a little process called sexual imprinting.
Sexual imprinting is when organisms learn to desire something sexually based on a phenotype. A phenotype is an observable trait that someone has. It can be anything, from eye and hair color to breast size, height or weight, and beyond.
When Tom was a young duckling, he was taken from his mother, sadly, and placed in the care of Mary. When he reached a certain age, Tom began to associate Mary with the concept of mother, which he then associated with the idea of woman.
Mary represents womanhood in Tom’s little duck mind, so Tom’s instinct to procreate is telling him to find someone who looks like Mary, not to find another duck.
Young ducklings lock onto the first large, moving object they see and interpret that as “mother” from that point forward — for the rest of their lives. If that large, moving object happens to be a human, the “imprint” is set into the duck’s mind.
Animals falling in love with humans have been observed throughout the animal kingdom for eons. It’s been documented in scientific literature since as early as the 1930s by Konrad Lorenz.
Sexual Imprints in Humans
While Tom’s story of unanswered interspecies love is unique to many who first hear it, his sexual desire for the illusion of what Mary represents is not. Humans, too, form their sexual desires, at least in part, from sexual imprinting.
Science has linked some facets of human desire to “imprints” installed in our brains during a particular period of human development. Like many other things, this is a natural part of human development.
Between the ages of 1 and 6 years old, children have a knack for becoming masters of grammar. This is a special period when a child’s brain is exceptionally adaptable to learning languages. They absorb it like a sponge takes on water.
Similarly, between 1 and 5 years old, children are looking around for cues about what sexuality is, signals they can use later in life to forge their sexual selves.
During this period of our lives, our brains are trying to scan the environment to look for cues that tell us who we should try to mate with to achieve reproductive success.
All of this makes you wonder; what images were imprinted on your brain when you were young that have now matured into inexplicable desires for specific visual cues?
Shoes, Cigarettes, and Shapes
A 5-year-old boy sees bare breasts and a mother smoking, and over time his brain is wired to conjoin the image of smoking (and breasts) with the concept of the opposite sex. If the boy grows up to be heterosexual or bisexual, the womanliness he associates with those images will become visual cues that he desires.
As the authors say in A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire:
A visual cue guides a man’s attention to a suitable erotic target, then the imprinting process establishes a cued interest using the specific details of the actual visual stimulus. This stimulus-sensitive imprinting process is not limited to sexual interests — or humans.
Decades down the road, the boy has grown up into a man who can’t see bare-breasted women or women smoking without a surge of lust striking him. He seeks out this kind of pornography, and when he finds porn that combines the two, it drives him wild.
The dopamine centers of his brain light up, and he’s on the prowl.
But this process isn’t just limited to heterosexuals and men (though it happens in men more often). These sexual optical illusions happen to gay men and lesbians just the same.
Most of our object-related sexual fetishes can be explained by sexual imprinting.
Think about it.
Why else would asexual objects like shoes, cigarettes, or even feet become sexualized later in life? And it’s no secret that many people, especially men, seem to go wild at the mere sight of sexual shapes. Men especially are driven wild by the sight of something that even remotely resembles a woman’s anatomy, in a way that few women can seem to understand.
Sometimes in sex, we’re not chasing our partners, but the image of what we believe our sexual partners ought to look like. It’s not that she loves the asshole guy so much as something indescribable about his appearance turns her on. Maybe it’s his smoking or perhaps even his messy hair that reminds her of the adult men she saw on MTV or the internet when she was just a girl.
Or maybe she loves nice, sweet, calm men who are personified by the handsome hunk in glasses.
And this process isn’t just limited to our interactions with people.
It’s a Cartoon World
Few know this, but if you lay out a Croc shoe in front of a turtle, the turtle will sometimes try to mate with it. The turtle will look down upon the rubber straps with the breathing holes that strikingly resemble the shell of another box turtle, and will mount an inanimate object.
This is undeniably adorable. But if you find yourself thinking, “Oh, those silly turtles, they just don’t know any better,” riddle me this: why is Hentai one of the most popular search terms on some porn sites, even ranking #2 on some websites?
Anime porn, 3D porn, Hentai porn, and more are all examples of humans experiencing the same thing the lucky (or unlucky, I can’t tell which) turtle above is experiencing with a Croc shoe. Cartoon pornography is big business.
And cartoon pornography has been a big business for a very long time. Below are the images that were etched into a cave over 3,000 years ago. At first, they look like strange cartoon figures called the Kangjiashimenji Petroglyphs.
But upon closer inspection, we see that they’re one of the oldest examples of erotic art we’ve ever found. We see erect penises, explicit depictions of men and women, and possibly even intersex people. Researchers believe these cave portraits describe an erotic fertility festival, complete with lots and lots of sex.
The fact that humans are so predisposed to sexual desire based on their sexual imprints suggests that these pictographs were dual-purpose, ceremonial and spiritual, and pornographic and erotic.
The fact that we’re able to stimulate arousal from cartoonish representations of human anatomy (or even simple household objects) speaks to the validity of the theory of sexual imprinting (and the genius of Konrad Lorenz).
I would say it’s impressive, but it’s something we share with many (most?) other species in the world.
What should we take away from all of this?
Desire: As You Like It
By now, I’d imagine you’re taking inventory of your sexual desires and wondering where they came from. And while the ramifications of this are far-reaching, there’s also a sense of unity we can take from it, the unity we feel in the strange paradox that we’re all united in the fact that we’re all distinct, individual organisms. Our drives and desires are usually the same, but the objects and processes that pencil in the details of those desires differ night from day.
We all want sex on some level. Every sexed organism on earth does, but how and with whom? Tom is a duck who thinks he should be having sex with adult human women.
Mr. Turtle above is a turtle who thinks he should be having sex with other turtles, but sometimes he thinks the best way to achieve that goal is to have sex with a shoe.
You and I want sex just the same as a concept, but as an aesthetic experience, we probably want radically different things. You might associate whips and chains with sex, while I might associate underwear and green eyes with sex.
I think the biggest takeaway from all of this is the fact that we should all strive to be a bit more accepting of one another’s sexual nuances and weird quirks, provided they’re consensual.
Because so much of sex is an optical illusion, inexplicable desires for images we’ve solidified in our young budding brains as being representative of what we should look for in a mate, aren’t we all at least a little bit touched by this?
We are. Every one of us has a weird quirk we can’t quite explain, and sometimes a sexual optical illusion may be at work.
I know one thing; Freud is laughing maniacally in his grave.