Scientists Overlooked the Snake Clitoris, Until Now – The New York Times

You ve probably seen a snake s forked tongue, but it s not the slithering animal s only forked body part. Male snakes sport forked genitals called hemipenes that look a bit like pink cactuses and often have spines to match.

What s good enough for him is good enough for her in the suborder Serpentes. In a paper published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists provide the first proper scientific description of the hemiclitores, or a bifurcated clitoris in female snakes. The study also challenges a longstanding bias in biology linked to cultural attitudes and a dearth of women in the field that has left female sexual anatomy woefully understudied in many species.

Not only do snakes have hemiclitores, the study s authors report, but the organs also contain nerves and erectile tissue, suggesting they serve a reproductive function and are not merely vestigial.

If subsequent research confirms the presence of a functional clitoris, it could challenge the assumption that snake sex is coercive.

via www.nytimes.com

I for one never believed for a moment that male snakes — let’s not beat about the bush — *rape* female snakes, or at least not at the high rate of primates. Snakes are essentially nice animals. Slithery and dangerous, but nice.