Pollination is Perversion
During my formative years in Reagan’s America, I remember hearing certain people thought flowers were obscene. That floral displays were essentially pornography, with uncovered carpel and stamen, reproductive organs for all to see, spread open, luring us in with vivid displays of botanical sexuality. It was hard for me to believe. I assumed this was real, that people were honestly disgusted by pictures of lily, but I didn’t personally know anyone with this view, as the Moral Majority was a distinct minority in my world. Perhaps their disgust had more to do with most flowers being bisexual, having both male and female reproductive parts, stamen and carpel, on the same individual. And the nerve of botanists to define this duality as perfect. Perhaps the orchidly offended folks interpreted this definition as suggesting themselves being imperfect, of having only one type of reproduction organ. Who knows? I can’t even fathom where to find the floristic prudes to ask.

Still, I can’t help but think that if these folks thought a little bit more, dug a little bit deeper, they would have realized an even greater threat to their moral world order; a realization that could have truly deflowered them. They could have discovered the true perversion that is the sexual life of a plant. Forget avoiding a floral arrangement at church, these folks would never eat an apple again if they considered what had to happen for the fruit to exist.

But we’re adults here. We can handle it. We have no stigma over the functioning of a stigma. We can take a bite out that apple and learn the forbidden truth. We can realize that plants, most of them anyway, are sexual deviants of the highest order. Don’t believe me? Think about the purpose of a flower; its color, its pattern, its shape, its scent, everything about it is to be attractive, to help the plant get a little action on a hot, steamy day. But it’s not to be attractive to another of their own species. These botanical sirens are luring in wholly different beasts. They are seducing animals ultimately to help deliver sperm to egg. Now that’s the perversion of pollination.

But to be fair, pollination is not directly about delivering sperm to egg. Pollen is not sperm after all, but it does create sperm. Plant reproduction is a symphony compared to the one-chord garage band that is animal sex. Yes, the diversity of methods animals evolved to get that egg fertilized by a sperm is impressive, but it is still all basically the same tune. An expulsion of many sperm, one sperm makes it to the egg, and whammo, an egg fertilized, a zygote created. Cool, but simple. Very straightforward. Very vanilla. In plants, sperm meets egg too, the ultimate meet cute, but the journey is more beautiful, or perverted, depending on one’s perspective. It’s a multigenerational odyssey, the likes of which have no parallel in animals. For animals, maybe there’s courtship or just a squirt in the night, but it all comes down to fertilization. For flowering plants, the angiosperms, it’s a two-step process, pollination then fertilization. Pollination is where the seduced animals participate, the transfer of pollen from the anther (male bits) to the stigma (sticky part of the female bits). Once pollen sticks to a stigma, it grows a tube that drills down through the style, carving a tunnel to the ovary, with its waiting eggs. Two sperm spelunk through this tunnel, reaching the cavern that holds the egg. One sperm unites with the egg, resulting in a zygote. The other sperm fuses with two pseudo-eggs called polar nuclei to form a nutrient tissue named endosperm. Endosperm feeds the developing embryo, cut-off as they are from other food sources. To recap the depravity, a plant seduces an animal to carry pollen from anther to stigma, the pollen digs through the female’s flesh to reach the ovary where not one, but two fertilizations occur. So, there is interspecies seduction, bodily mutilation, and then a double banger of sperm on egg and sperm on polar nuclei action. And we teach this to second graders?

Imagine a human enticing another species into the bedroom to help sperm meet egg. Could a more perverse sex act be imagined? It’s bad enough when Fido stares from the edge of the bed, with vacuous eyes and slobbering tongue, just waiting for the madness to end. Or even worse, when Felix watches from atop the dresser with the dismissive eye that only a cat can possess, passing judgement on the ridiculous behavior of the humans who dare occupy his space. But to lure in that dog or cat for the express purpose of getting human sperm to human egg. That would be a truly twisted. Yet, that is what most plants do. All the time. It’s a compulsion. Addicted to interspecific seduction.

But honestly, plants must do it. There’s not much in the way of other choices. It’s not like plant can deliver the goods themselves, being rooted in and all. Their only options are to dump genetic material into the environment, be it air or water, and hope for the best or to lure in unsuspecting animals to do the dirty deed. About three-fourths of species of flowering plants recruit animals into the act. With such a common behavior, I suppose it’s not correct to call it deviant, except perhaps from our morally myopic perspective. It’s more accurately described as commonplace, typical, even normal. But not boring, certainly not boring. There is nothing boring about pollination, about a plant species using its own seductive powers to lure in an animal, reward it with some sugar, and trick it into carrying its pollen to an eagerly waiting stigma, all sticky in anticipation.

It does all sound morally suspect – the deceit, the interspecies attraction, all in the name of sex. But then, don’t we co-op the purpose of flowers for our own reproductive pursuits? What is a gift of a dozen long-stem red roses but a blatant attempt to use plants for our own sexual ends, be the end game fertilization or not? We consider the rose’s pistil loaded with bullets of love, that we may fire to strike our target, to convince them to embark on a romantic journey. In the end, the perversion of pollination is little different from our own courtship. Plants use animals for pollination, to ultimately get sperm to egg. Humans use plants for seduction, to ultimately get sperm to egg, or at least to get sperm in the general vicinity of an egg. The big difference being plants must use animals and humans choose to use plants to achieve their sexual goals. Plants at least reward their seduced animals with sweets, we reward our floral wingmen by killing them, cutting them off from the rest of their body. Those dozen long-stem roses are nothing more than a display of decay, a bouquet of destruction, masquerading as a celebration of life. We kill in our interspecific seduction, plants reward in theirs. Perhaps plants aren’t the immoral ones after all.

For those searching for evidence of immorality in our world, plants offer a tempting target. And I haven’t even brought up asexual reproduction. To do so may cause the sexual purists to lose their minds. Self-pleasure is bad enough, but self-reproduction? An individual plant just making copies of itself, cloning from stem or leaf, an endless orgy of self on self. How could the easily offended not find the perversion in that? But I couldn’t resist, I had to bring it up. And now I fear I’ve planted the seed in their overly fertilized minds. I just hope it doesn’t germinate into a grassroots effort to ban botany books in libraries and schools, to prevent the teaching of perceived whorticulture, to uproot threats to our children by denying them an education about plants in all their wonderfully twisted reproductive glory. Now that would be the ultimate perversion.