Topic: Penises, claspers, and hemipenes

Posted under General

Currently, hemipenes implicates animal_penis, while claspers does not. Neither are actual true penises, but I'm more concerned by the inconsistency. We should have a policy on whether all non-penis intromittent organs should implicate animal_penis, or none should, or at the very least there should be a good, explicitly-stated reason to be inconsistent.

As I said, none of these structures are "true" penises, in that they are not homologous to the mammalian penis, but merely analogous (that is, they evolved separately from the mammalian penis). However, it's also not uncommon for these organs, such as those in the few birds that have them, to be referred to as penises even in scientific literature. Either decision is viable, but a decision should be made.

Updated

vulpes_artifex said:
Currently, hemipenes implicates animal_penis, while claspers does not. Neither are actual true penises, but [..]

Please also consider that very very few hemipenes are drawn as-per-realworld-function and most depicted in furry art are standard penis but there's two of them similarly to how a lot of shark characters just have two dicks instead of claspers. To properly separate reptilian/avian penises from the penis tag you'd need a separate tag for them and then police the tagging ad nauseam when 99% of the userbase doesn't care enough to know the deeper mechanics of real biology or site-accepted definitions.Another reminder that the humanoid buttons on the new upload form have been a disaster

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