Birds Do It, Bees Do It . . .

The first message, championed by technical advisor Roughgarden, challenges Darwin’s formulation of sexual selection. Sexual selection posits that useless and costly structures like a peacock’s tail evolve to show off the quality of a male’s genes to groups of picky females. Roughgarden challenge the gender roles implicit in that theory and charge that sexual selection doesn’t account for or accurately explain the frequent presence of bi- and homosexuality amongst nearly all vertebrate species.

The second implicit message of the exhibit turns the focus from animals to man, using the plastic sexuality of animals to critique our own society’s rigid sexual classifications. It is no accident that the exhibit ends with sculptures, videos and text about bonobos, sexual voracious apes that, along with chimpanzees, form humanity’s closest living animal relatives. For bonobos, oral sex, sex with children, same sex pairings, in fact, nearly any imaginable sex act, are a daily part of life. Sex is often used as payment for food and to assert dominance, and only sex between mothers and adult sons is taboo. If many behaviors thought exclusive to humans are seen in our relatives, the exhibit asks, what behaviors of theirs should we consider natural to us?

While the exhibit does an excellent job of surveying sexual mores regularly ignored by prudish biologists, it shies away from a thorough and explicit discussion of evolution. Sex itself originated specifically to take advantage of natural selection and speed up evolution. Moreover, evolution cannot be properly taught or understood without looking at sex. At a time when Americans seem to have a worse understanding of evolution than ever before, it is unfortunate that the exhibit doesn’t take advantage of the chance to teach visitors about the important relationship between sex and evolution.

Lack of evolution-related content aside, the exhibit manages to present an important side of nature that you won’t find at the American Museum of Natural History. Sure, they have more dinosaurs, but only the Museum of Sex teaches visitors about the prevalence of chlamydia in koalas. Informative yet playful, explicit yet classy, The Sex Lives of Animals is worth visiting if you have even a remote interest in sex or science or both.

The Museum of Sex is located at 27th Street and 5th Avenue, and is open Sun.-Friday, 11AM to 6:30PM, and is open on Sat. from 11:00AM to 8:00 PM. The Sex Lives of Animals will run through Spring 2009. The Exhibit is not appropriate for children.