Bonk (9 page)

Number 433 has a politician’s deft timing, staying just long enough to make each contact seem personal, but never lingering so long that the other sows lose patience. They seem not to mind that a viscous, salival froth clings to the boar’s chin like a Santa Claus beard.

The smell of the boar is heavy and repugnant. Anne Marie said that when she flies back from farms in northern Denmark, businessmen coming down the aisle often ask if they may sit beside her. Anne Marie is young and pretty. “I say, ‘It’s alright, but I smell.’ They think it’s a joke, and they sit down.” And regret it the whole way home.

Anne Marie has short, mahogany-hued hair set off by a pair of stylish green eyeglasses. We too are wearing coveralls and boots, to protect the pigs from any pathogens on our clothes and to protect our clothes from the smell. A full day after leaving the farm, I realize that a noticeable pall of boar stink clings to my pen and notepad. Anne Marie must wash the enviable glasses after each visit. When we go to lunch, a couple seated behind us gets up and moves.

Anne Marie’s beauty and style belie a down-and-dirty education in the particulars of practical AI (artificial insemination). She has milked a boar of his prodigious ejaculate—over two hundred milliliters (a cup), as compared to a man’s three milliliters—and she has done it with her hand. For, unlike stallions and bulls,
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boars don’t cotton to artificial vaginas. (In part, because their penis, like their tail, is corkscrewed.) AI techs must squeeze the organ in their hand—hard and without letup—for the entire duration of the ejaculation: from five to
fifteen
minutes. “You should see the size of their hands,” she says, of the men and women who regularly ejaculate boars.

Anne Marie’s training also covered the use of artificial vaginas (for bulls). As the bull mounts a dummy cow—a sort of heavy-duty ironing board with hair—a technician, seated alongside, quickly slips the organ into a hand-held artificial vagina. It is important to stay focused. “Our instructor was talking to us, not really paying attention, and the bull mounted his coat sleeve.” Fortunately for the man and his dry cleaner, the bull ejaculates a scant eight milliliters.

Martin, Morten, and Thomas are making sure the twenty sows are still in heat. A simple indicator is the ears, and whether they are standing up straight. Normally, they flop forward and there is a coy sweetness to the way a sow peeks out from under. (Apologies to the margarine people, but the Blue Bonnet lady comes to mind.) The other way to tell is to sit on her back; if she lets you, she’s in heat.

The steps of the stimulation plan mimic the boar’s rather uncouth courtship behaviors. Martin places his hand—though the boar would use his snout—at a sow’s inguinal fold, the place where the back leg meets the belly, and then lifts her an inch or so off the ground. He does this four times. Boars are not gentle and so the inseminators are not either. Martin hefts the sow and lets her drop, bouncing her up and down as though testing her shocks.

Now he moves around behind her. He pushes rhythmically just below the pink fleshy bulge that is her vulva. Again, the boar would be using his snout. Martin and Thomas use their fist. Morten, who is working up the sow two stalls down, is using his knee.

“Morten?” I want to ask him if he feels odd doing this.

Anne Marie leans over to speak in my ear. “That is Martin.”

Martin indicates that maybe he did at first, but he does not now. As Kaj, the farm’s owner, said earlier, “It’s just how it is.” There is, however, a limit to what a pig farmer will do in the name of higher farrowing rates. I asked Anne Marie whether they had tried stimulating the sow’s clitoris.

“We thought of trying this. But actually it was a big hurdle just to get farmers to touch underneath the vulva.” And in pigs, lucky pigs, the clitoris is
inside
the vagina. “So we thought, let’s not mention the clitoris right now.” However, it is possible to purchase a specialty sow vibrator. The Reflexator is made by a Dutch agricultural supply company called MS. Mads keeps one hidden behind a row of binders on his bookshelf but brings it out with almost no prodding. The design was recently modified so that no insertion is required of the farmers, who tend, even in a progressive country like Denmark, to be conservative. A hook now allows the Reflexator to hang benignly on the sperm feeder tube; the vibrations travel along the tube, so that hopefully, quoting Mads, “nobody has to feel funny.” Except that they do. Mads estimates that fewer than 1 percent of Danish pig farmers Reflexate their sows.

The original stimulation plan had six steps, not five, but the last has been deemed, says Anne Marie, “too much.” The training video—but not the poster—includes a shot of a handsome, suntanned Dane lying on a sow, his chest pressed to her back. With one hand, he reaches down beneath her to rub her mammaries and squeeze her teats.
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A close-up highlights a gold wedding ring, as though to reassure the viewer that nothing untoward is going to happen between these two.

t
he linking of sexual delight and fertility, for right or for wrong, dates as far back as Western medicine itself. Hippocrates, the famous Greek “Father of Medicine,” believed that female orgasm was linked, like men’s, to a bursting-forth of seed—in this case, deep within the unfathomable female interior. The commingling of male and female seed was thought to spark conception. No orgasm, no babies. Then along came that other famous Greek, Aristotle, to make the point that it is altogether possible for women to get pregnant from an interlude that did not culminate in orgasm. You never see anything written about Mrs. Hippocrates or Mrs. Aristotle, but I’d put a few drachmas on the former being the one with the spring in her step.

Happily for Western women, it was the Hippocratic version that stuck. Even long after the concept of womanly seed had been debunked, the notion that simultaneous orgasm bettered the chances of conception lingered on. It made a great deal of intuitive sense. If the man’s climax was essential to the makings of new life, surely the woman’s was similarly invested. Indeed, for centuries, physicians routinely advised men on the importance of pleasuring their wives. Marriage manual author Theodoor Van de Velde quotes an imperial physician’s advice to eighteenth-century Habsburg empress Maria Theresa, who was slow to conceive: “I am of the opinion that the vulva of Your Most Sacred Majesty should be titillated for some length of time before intercourse.” Evidently, it was sound advice; she eventually had sixteen children.

Ironically, given the goings-on in the swine farm today, it was artificial insemination that put the formal kibosh on medically sanctioned titillation. In 1777, inquisitive Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani “chose a bitch of moderate size,…confined her in an apartment and kept the key” so as to prevent insemination of the more usual variety. Twenty-three days later, when she was clearly in heat, he “attempted to fecundate her artificially in the following manner. A young dog of the same breed furnished me, by a spontaneous emission, with 19 grains of seed.” The semen was syringed into the vagina of the bitch, who, sixty-two days later, “brought forth 3 lively whelps.”
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The experiment raises important questions. Who agreed to let Spallanzani lock a stray dog in their apartment for twenty-three days? Did he really expect us to buy the bit about the male dog spontaneously ejaculating? But the main point here is that the needle of a small syringe is unlikely to cause a bitch much pleasure, and thus pleasure could be assumed irrelevant—or certainly not necessary—when it came to conception.

In 1840, a different dog, breed unknown, reopened the case file on orgasm as an aid to conception. A German anatomist named Hausmann killed a bitch while she was mating and then—presumably allowing a moment or two to disengage the flummoxed male from the proceedings—picked up his scalpel and opened her up. Though the male had ejaculated only moments before, semen had already reached the uterus. This suggested that something other than the sperms’ lashing tails was propelling them through the reproductive tract. Uterine contractions seemed a likely candidate. Since these contractions are a hallmark of orgasm, Hausmann supposed that it was some version of canine bliss that served to suck the sperm through the cervix and into the uterus. It makes intuitive sense: Orgasm causes a release of oxytocin—the “joy hormone,” also involved in nursing—and oxytocin is known to cause uterine contractions.

Five years later, a second dog experiment confirmed what Hausmann had found, as did an 1853 guinea pig experiment, a 1930 rat experiment,
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a 1931 rabbit experiment, and a 1960 golden hamster experiment.
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In all cases the sperm were found to have traveled, within seconds or at most a few minutes, a distance that would take the sperm considerably longer to traverse under their own steam. But since none of these animals can be assumed to possess the same anatomical responses as a woman, the studies are inconclusive as regards human fertility.

The other trouble with these studies was that none of these researchers could say for sure that it was the female’s sexual bliss that was causing the contractions that moved the sperm along, rather than some other facet of the mating process. Human semen, for instance, contains a hormone called prostaglandin, which causes powerful contractions when it comes in contact with a woman’s uterus. (For this reason, when fertility doctors place sperm in a woman’s uterus, they use à la carte sperm, “washed” of its semen.)

This is why a team of fearless Illinois researchers, in 1939, took to sexually stimulating rabbits themselves; they wanted to take semen out of the equation. The stimulation was done, they wrote, “with the finger,” a phrasing that seems to suggest a piece of specialty lab equipment or a disembodied digit of unknown ownership rather than the flesh and blood of the researcher himself. Happily, these rabbits’ lives were spared, for the observations were made via fluoroscope. Before the stimulating commenced, a dye was injected into the rabbit’s vagina. This was then seen on the fluoroscope screen, poststimulation, to have spread upward into the uterus within two to five minutes.

The best animal evidence that sexual responses produce uterine contractions comes from the old water-balloon-in-the-cow study. In 1952, a different team of Illinois researchers inserted the thumbs of latex gloves into the uteri of four cows and filled them with water. The balloons were linked to a device that registered the movements of the cows’ uteri as pressure on the balloon. As the researchers expected, powerful uterine contractions were detected after a bull was brought in to “mount, copulate, and ejaculate” (a process clocked, tragically, at under five seconds). More surprising was that, with all four cows, the machine began registering uterine contractions the moment the bull walked into sight.

What does this mean? Does a cow have a mild orgasm when she merely casts her gaze upon a bull? Can we be sure these uterine contractions imply orgasm? Does anyone know for sure that female animals have orgasms?

Let us check in with the sows.

t
he inseminators are working side by side. Morten is lagging behind slightly. He is just now inserting a semen feeder tube into the pig he’s working on. He wears the look of concentration and vague worry that my husband wears while snaking the bathroom drain. He tugs gently, making sure the placement is good and then holds up the semen pouch like an IV bag. Next he climbs on the sow’s back. This is intended as a substitute for the weight of the boar. He bounces slightly to mimic the male’s movements. All three men are now sitting on the backs of a sow. They look like people on an antique merry-go-round where everyone, not just the last two to board, has to ride a pig.

One by one, the semen bags are drained. It happens abruptly, sometimes after a few seconds, sometimes after a few minutes. Patience is key. You never rush a sow. (For this reason, there is no clock in the insemination area.) Thomas is said to have a way with the sows. His focus is unwavering. He never talks on his cell phone, as Kaj sometimes does. He pushes the sow’s mammaries with his boots and rubs the sow’s neck and behind her ears, though these things are not prescribed on the poster.

Anne Marie and I watch as Thomas’s sow draws in the contents of the semen bag. It happens so fast you expect to hear that sucking noise from a straw at the bottom of a milkshake. The sow appears calm and content, but she does not appear to inhabit a frenzied, ecstatic physical state. I ask Anne Marie whether this pig is having an orgasm.

“We don’t know,” she answers. “And to be honest? We don’t really care whether she has an orgasm. We just know these contractions seem to improve the semen transport and the fertility.” I must have registered chagrin, because she was quick to add, “Me in person, I think it would be nice for her. But it doesn’t improve the economy of pig production.”

I watch Martin’s sow carefully, to see if her expression shifts as the semen is drawn in. I cannot discern a change. Anne Marie cautions against making assumptions. Pigs can be in a great deal of pain, she says, without it registering obviously on their faces, so presumably intense pleasure might not register either—or not in a way we recognize. Animal and human faces are wired quite differently. Our mouths and lower faces are generally more mobile and expressive than those of animals. Whereas animals express emotions more with their upper face—in particular, their ears.

Few scientific studies directly address the question of animal orgasm, because most researchers, like Anne Marie, have little reason to care. One who cared was a graduate student I’ll call Carl Kendall. In his master’s thesis “Orgasm in Female Primates,” Kendall relates that he “manually stimulated the circumclitoral area and vagina of several adult, adolescent, and juvenile chimpanzee females.” What ensued? Orgasms. How did he know? He felt it. “During intravaginal stimulation,
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perivaginal muscular contractions of about .8-second duration and about one second apart were palpated. The average number of digital thrusts (at an approximate rate of one to two per second) performed before the onset of the contractions was 20.3.” Meaning that the chimps were having orgasms after as little as ten or fifteen seconds of thrusting. As speedy as this sounds, it’s not speedy enough; male chimps ejaculate after five to seven seconds. Meaning that Kendall was most likely delivering a rare treat. By the end of the passage, his scientific veneer had eroded somewhat: “On one occasion,…this female reached back to grasp the thrusting hand of the experimenter and tried to force it more deeply into her vagina.”