One Leg Up

Where does the time go? Sorry, but I’ve been switching computers and that’s a much bigger task than it sounds like it should be. Can you say “Where the hell does Vista hide the delete button?” Ah, but the new machine not only handles my blogging, writing for work, Photoshop, and so on, but it also has an HDTV receiver and a wide screen. Not that I would ever get distracted while I should be working. Not me.

In the first of what I expect will be several posts on sexual oddities in the animal kingdom, take the case of the male wasp spider. You’re already aware that mating can be a tricky and life threatening thing for the male spider. Hell, I think that’s even in Charlotte’s Web. But it turns out that the male wasp spider may get the last—though probably posthumous—laugh:

bq. “When a male wasp spider discovers a potential partner, he turns her on by shaking her web. The female thereupon supports herself on her long legs on the web so that the male, who is much smaller, can then creep under her body. The rest works hydraulically: the tip of a transformed leg filled with sperm is inserted into the female’s sexual orifice – like a ski boot in its binding.

The female usually puts an end to the affair after a few seconds by attacking her partner and killing him if he does not escape in time. ‘When the male detaches himself from the female, in more than 80 per cent of cases the tip of his genital breaks off,’ the Bonn lecturer Dr. Gabriele Uhl says. ‘The tip then remains in the sexual orifice like a cork, blocking it.’”

Think of it as a chastity belt. And the fair maiden has just happened to bite the head off of her knight before he is able to either go off to war or give her the key. Oh, well. (Damned urban myths. According to the Wikipedia article on chastity belts, “There is no evidence of the existence of chastity belts until ca. 1400 which was over a century after the last Crusade.")

Oh, BTW. The “login for access” panties (sans enlarged spider) are available from Jinx.com.