Penis sword plausibility

DanLett said:

I am getting quite giddy with the idea of the ovipositor impregnating people with something, but I'm not sure if I want to go all the way with that thought.

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Ovipositors don't impregnate anything; they're for laying eggs with, which is a different thing.

Yes, I'm quibbling: but if you're going to write this you have to write it in a way which is believable.

Little Anonymous Me said:

According to the author's blog, the female Wasps are actually stronger, and it's the societal structure that has the kinden going about war bass ackwards.

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Weird way of being superior, too.

Sorry, I don't buy it. Male wasps are drones who exist purely to fertilise the queen. Then they die. Making them warriors is making them not-wasps but still pretending they are wasps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctn6n-OciBY&list=UUxPMeC8Brcb1EC73-PaqdSA&index=1

I'm sorry, I had to.

Buffysquirrel said:

Weird way of being superior, too.

Sorry, I don't buy it. Male wasps are drones who exist purely to fertilise the queen. Then they die. Making them warriors is making them not-wasps but still pretending they are wasps.

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He was fairly egalitarian about distributing powers between the sexes of his bug people, IIRC. I mean, they also shoot lightning bolts out of their hands, so I'm assuming 'Wasp' is really more about their aggressive hive mentality than their actual waspishness.

Maybe I just didn't like the book . I do like wasps, though. At a reasonable distance.

Buffysquirrel said:

Maybe I just didn't like the book . I do like wasps, though. At a reasonable distance.

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I am so terrified of them that just reading the word gets a reflexive twitch out of me. Horrifyingly enough, my mother likes letting them land on her hand and walk.

I don't know how bug people do it, but I salute you from a very safe and not entirely reasonable distance.


ETA: she just stated that she likes letting bumblebees land on her best, because they're fat and coated in pollen, which makes them look cool. *twitches*

Sollluna mentioned upthread various examples of yer actual penis fencing. Have a look through a copy of William Eberhard's 'Animal Genitalia and Sexual Selection' (1985) and/or Menno Schilhuizen's 'Nature's Nether Regions' (2014) for some inspiration.

DanLett said:

Look, if people are going to buy the humanoid with a stinger weapon, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess they are not going to draw the line at me taking liberties with an ovipositor or two. People bought Alien, after all.

Let's say they lay eggs inside you. Eggs that do things to you. Things that you don't like.

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There's a whole load of real examples to build on -- parasitoid wasps that lay eggs in or on a host, which might either be ambulatory while being eaten from the inside or paralysed first. The latter group includes my favourite parasitoid, the jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa). (Yes, I like them even more that nematomorph worms. There. I said it.)

At least jewel wasps go after cockroaches.

You could go in all sorts of different directions with this one. Some random ideas:

I recall reading somewhere that domestic cat penises are barbed with the barbs facing backwards. That means that they go in smoothly, but hurt the lady kitty when pulling out. That apparently promotes ovulation ... and also explains why they yowl like demons in the middle of the night. Ouch.

Not sure what use you might make of that. Move on.

I was wondering whether your aliens would use this stinger on their own species or as part of a parasitic relationship with a different species. There are a number of insects who lay their eggs inside a host. The eggs grow, eat the host from the inside out, the host eventually dies. It's similar to the lifecycle of the xenomorph in the Alien films.

So you could have a race of aliens who reproduce by forcibly inserting eggs into any host they can find.

That could get you into some interesting relationship questions. If your species don't pair-bond, how do they relate to each other? Presumably they don't have family units. Do they have some other kind of clans or hierarchies?

A bit like offering someone a cup of tea - do they have one sex or two? Or maybe even more.

On a battlefield, they might try to kill each other with their stingers. But after the battle, wounded aliens might still die because they have been impregnated.

Or could someone be impregnated very quickly? Might a soldier be able to sting an enemy, who would instantly (or very quickly) turn into an ally and start fighting with the alien who had stung him/ her/ it?

Earth evolution has arguably produced two very successful survival mechanisms. We have homo sapiens who have dominated their part of the world by being intelligent tool-using pair-bonders.

And we have the insect world where different species are also dominating the planet by being small but incredible numerous, and by using tactics such as parasitic symbiotic relationships and hive relationships.

Your aliens could take more inspiration from the insect world. Who knows? One stray asteroid impact in the wrong place and earth could be overrun by insects instead of humans. In terms of sheer numbers, it already is.

I see one logistical problem. It's not an insurmountable problem, but I think it needs to be tackled. Limbs which are used for fighting can get damaged. And no species is going to survive for long if it exposes its sex organs to damage. That seems like an evolutionary dead end.

But we can write around that. Maybe these stingers regrow, like a deer's antlers or shark's teeth? And that could be another interesting concept to explore. Would we think differently about our bodies if we could regrow lost limbs? Spiders shed their skins during their lifetimes. How would that feel?

Some interesting avenues to explore, methinks. Or you could camp it up with cock-fighting. Which would have a certain appeal, I suppose. Depending on your point of view, this could go to comedy or horror or science fiction.

DanLett said:

Look, if people are going to buy the humanoid with a stinger weapon, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess they are not going to draw the line at me taking liberties with an ovipositor or two. People bought Alien, after all.

Let's say they lay eggs inside you. Eggs that do things to you. Things that you don't like.

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People might well ignore you taking liberties. But laying eggs is not the same as impregnating, and people are likely to notice that.

Words matter. Use them properly, or don't use them at all.

Given the amount of discussion there's been of the masculinisation of hive insects, umm, I think people do notice, tbh.

Impregnate ... hmm. I wonder.

The main definition of "impregnate" is to make pregnant. But it also has other meanings, such as to saturate, imbue, infuse, pervade.

And if we are talking about an alien species, can we allow for a different kind of pregnancy that we don't necessarily have here on planet Earth? Just as we could have a different take on gender. These aliens might be neither male nor female, but something else.

I guess that oviposition is the more correct term, but my spell-checker has never heard of it and I'm not sure that it has the same overtones as "impregnate".

In a science fiction context, I think I'd vote for a little more flexibility in how we describe things.

Once! said:

Impregnate ... hmm. I wonder.

The main definition of "impregnate" is to make pregnant. But it also has other meanings, such as to saturate, imbue, infuse, pervade.

And if we are talking about an alien species, can we allow for a different kind of pregnancy that we don't necessarily have here on planet Earth? Just as we could have a different take on gender. These aliens might be neither male nor female, but something else.

I guess that oviposition is the more correct term, but my spell-checker has never heard of it and I'm not sure that it has the same overtones as "impregnate".

In a science fiction context, I think I'd vote for a little more flexibility in how we describe things.

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Sure, we can allow more flexibility. Just don't expect me to believe something when an oviposter is compared to a penis. It isn't one, and general female insects have them. It's a female organ is what I'm trying to say, so conflating it with a male organ is just silly.

Impregnate is fine with me, it has multiple meanings. But a penis is a penis unless it is a psuedo-penis, in which case I would like to know if it is a "traditional penis" or a psuedo-penis. Clarity is king after all.

DanLett said:

Good input. Yeah, I see it as a close quarters weapon akin to the human bite or headbutt. It would not be huge, nor would it be a primary weapon, but it would be venomous and freaky enough that you would not want to get anywhere near a wrestling scenario with one of these beings.

Personally, I think it would be terrifying if a six foot being with a stinger wrapped its limbs around you to hold you in place while it poisoned you to death.

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Are these creatures intelligent, or instinct-driven?

Because I can see it as an aggressive instinctual reproductive move -- there are some small critters on Earth where to ensure sperm delivery, the male basically stabs the female with his penis-thingee (in fact I read about one such recently on Parasite of the Day).

So say these are long-limbed wasplike creatures, with the strength of insects relative to size -- and in the process of hunting down females to skewer, they'll pretty much grab anything of roughly the correct size and proportions -- humans are close enough. So they grab a human and bring 'em close (and their grasping-legs are too strong to escape) and then stab mightily and repeatedly with their sperm-delivery gadget, which of course lets all the smoke out of the human. Maybe how it tells food from mates is that mates then get up and walk off, all fertilized, while food just lays there screaming.

And there's no reason that such a body part has to be limited to one use. Terrestrial animals use teeth both to chew and to bite; this critter uses its penis-equivalent both to reproduce and to kill.

On the topic of female penises:

World's first female penis found in cave-dwelling bugs.

It's called a gynosome. No, it's not an ovipositor.

That cave insect is pretty fascinating. And yep, it's actually using the organ to harvest as much sperm and seminal fluids as possible from the male during mating, possibly because it lives in a place where nutrition is scarce.

By the way, I'm going to steal your thread title for the name of my band.

kuwisdelu said:

By the way, I'm going to steal your thread title for the name of my band.

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I saw PSP open for I Have Created a Race of Robots. They were meh live.

Albedo said:

I saw PSP open for I Have Created a Race of Robots. They were meh live.

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They weren't bad when they supported the Grugs.

Helix said:

They weren't bad when they supported the Grugs.

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But in their most recent tour, it was the Space Rex opener that really stole the show.

Just don't see them with Your Favorite Pet Peeves.