Twinderling

The smells of twinderling know no equal

Photo by Akif Waseem on Unsplash

It’’ll seem weird to you. Like if you had a penis or a vagina in the middle of your face instead of a nose. But this is more or less our anatomy and it makes us very happy even though we look a little ridiculous while having sex, unlike the dignified humping that your species engages in.

We don’t have noses. The only time we can smell anything at all is during sex, which we engage in by interlocking our facial genitalia, our “face penis/vagina.” the scientific name of which is “the favagenis.” Sometimes our toddlers cutely refer to this as “my favorite genius.”

Our genitals do not look like penises and vaginas. In fact, we are hermaphrodites and we all possess the same genitalia which resembles a tuft of squishy canary yellow tendrils. During coitus the tendrils involuntarily wrap around each other in helical fashion, each tendril automatically seeking out its matching tendril on the other person’s face using a scent reflex. The more tendrils that make helices with their matching helices, the better it feels, the more subtle and the more intense are the scents we experience, and the more likely we are to successfully exchange genetic material. Our species’ equivalent to ova and sperm flow in both directions so usually both parties are impregnated. It’s fair to say that, while your sex is messy, ours really takes the cake. Brushing teeth after sex? Mandatory!

You know how Mother Nature solved the “why would they ever wanna procreate, it’s such a mess?” problem for you by coming up with the tactile-based orgasm? Mother Nature came up with a different solution for us. You see, the only time we can smell something is when our sexual parts, which like I said are where your noses are, are locked in a tendril embrace. That embrace opens up the spigot on a delicious tableau, kind of a firehose, of scent which our species is otherwise deprived of. I’m not just talking about the smell of sex, which for obvious reasons, is way more powerful for us than for your species. It’s like the difference between how a piece of bacon smells to you and how it smells to your bloodhound. I’m talking about a mainline, a freeway, an instant and overwhelming link to the chemical world which constantly bathes all of us but to which, with the exception of the blissful moments when our genitalia are interlocking, which my teenage children naughtily refer to as twinderling, we are sadly unaware of. It’s exactly like the light rays zooming all around a blind person, to which they are completely oblivious.

Our nerve design, just like your nerve design, has many circuits which must be intact in order for the nerve to exert its desired function. But here’s a major difference between our olfactory neural circuitry and yours. Half of our olfactory neural circuit resides in another person. The circuit can only be completed when… hehe…twinderling with another person. Believe me, I’ve tried to twinderl my own tendrils and it never opens up the magical olfactory circuitry and only serves to make more bland the lack of scent which is our sad status quo.

Sadly the rich chemical world surrounding us is only available when we are copulating. Your species’ tactile sexual pleasure is admittedly a powerful incentive to procreate, but your sexual nerve signals must first be processed in the thalamus before continuing on their way to the somatic sensory cortex where the sensation of sexual pleasure is consciously realized. By contrast, olfactory nerve signals, which are intimately related to our sexual pleasure, simultaneously travel directly to the amygdala and the limbic system bypassing the way station of the thalamus. The amygdala is part of the “lizard brain” wherein emotions are generated. The amygdala has direct connections to the olfactory bulb which also has a very close connection to the nucleus accumbens which is a part of your brain (and ours too) where pleasure is realized. The result? Twinderling is an awesome emotional, scent-laden, pleasure laden, memory making experience. Since the limbic system is so intimately associated with the olfactory nerves, if we want to learn something well, it is well known that we should study it right after sex, while the circuits are still in a state of high activity. Sex and acquisition of new knowledge. What could be more rewarding than that!

What does all this mean? It means that scent is neuroanatomically situated to provide more powerful, more immediate, less prone to distraction, sexual pleasure for us than your penis and vagina friction-based set up is for you. We may look like we are always mid-munch on a piece of dry turf, but you will never experience the exquisite pleasure of a thousand, ten thousand, a million distinctive molecules blowing by during a twinderl, slotting into place on a tendril’s receptor, and shooting waves of dopamine through your deepest, most primitive brain circuits. And then a baby is born some months later. But we can’t smell the baby shit. More’s the pity.