Sink your unusually large and venomous fangs into my abdomen. And yes, we are doing this in the White House cabinet rooms, out there in plain sight of the watching world, just a gleaming golden ball between us. Now take a sip of those sweet, sweet tiny male arachnoid entrails.
An exciting new study was published over the summer into the habits of the Australian redback spider. The research made headlines for its focus on reproductive behaviour, specifically the male’s urgent and very willing engagement in what is known as sexual cannibalism, AKA copulatory suicide. Scientists observing these tiny arachnoids discovered that during the act of lovemaking with the larger, more decorative female, the male will perform a spectacular sexual death-somersault, flipping himself upside down, presenting his underbelly to the female’s fangs, and urging her to literally consume his intestines mid-coitus as an energy snack and self-dooming sweetener.
You’ve already ripped my heart out, babe. Now take my guts as well. This doesn’t paint a very flattering picture of the male redback’s sense of himself, his ability to recognise boundaries in a relationship.
Overall, the picture is of a craven, fawning, hairless entity, entirely in thrall to its power-master. Yes, it might make sense for a while to place your prospects in the hands of a glassy-eyed red-tinged predator at the heart of a toxic web of power. But it can land you in a spot of bother down the line.
In unrelated news, there was a sense this week that Gianni Infantino’s entanglements with Donald Trump may have now moved one step closer to scrutiny, sunlight, consequences, perhaps even some kind of decisive intestinal devouring. The sight of Infantino cavorting for the US president was one of the more grotesque sport-adjacent spectacles of recent times. What kind of relationship was this?
How will history remember that display of power-fluffing, the supposedly apolitical Fifa president sat nodding gravely at the walnut-veneered table as the latest immigration policy is trailed, beaming along as some random crypto-waffle is chucked into the mix, and becoming through this an ever more contorted figure, as though essence of human mendacity has been condensed, reconstituted into a fine paste, pumped into a serge blue suit and taught to walk around saying the phrase: “My magic ball unites the golden peace world.” At the time it felt as though this was some kind of warning siren, a real-time satire on the idea of unaccountable executive power. Is this just allowed now, confirmation in human form that acting as though you exist outside the rules is halfway to actually being there? As of Wednesday there is for the first time a sense of something potentially self-dooming about that public two-hander.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
