Why does the female scream during the mating
act?
As the tom finishes the brief act of
copulation, which lasts only a few seconds, his female twists round
and attacks him, swiping out savagely with her claws and screaming
abuse at him. As he withdraws his penis and dismounts he has to
move swiftly, or she is liable to injure him.
The reason for her savage reaction to him at
this point is easy to understand if you examine photographs of his
penis taken under the microscope. Unlike the smooth penis of so
many other mammals, the cat's organ is covered in short, sharp
spines, all pointing away from the tip.
This means that the penis can be inserted
easily enough, but when it is withdrawn it brutally rakes the walls
of the female's vagina. This causes her a spasm of intense pain and
it is this to which she reacts with such screaming anger. The
attacked male, of course, has no choice in the matter. He cannot
adjust the spines, even if he wishes to do so.
They are fixed and, what is more, the more
sexually virile the male, the bigger the spines. So the sexiest
male causes the female the most pain.
This may sound like a bizarre
sado-masochistic development in feline sex, but there is a special
biological reason for it. Human females who fail to become pregnant
ovulate at regular intervals, regardless of whether they have mated
with a male or not. Human virgins, for example, ovulate month after
month, but this is not the case with cats.
A virgin cat would not ovulate at all. Cats
only ovulate after they have been mated by a male. It takes a
little while – about twenty-five to thirty hours – but this does
not matter because the intense period of heat lasts at least three
days, so she is still actively copulating when ovulation occurs.
The trigger that sets off the ovulation is the intense pain and
shock the queen feels when her first suitor withdraws his spiny
penis. This violent moment acts like the firing of a starting
pistol which sets her reproductive hormonal system in
operation.
In a way, it is not far from the truth to
call a female cat on heat 'masochistic' because, within about
thirty minutes of having been hurt by the first male penis, she is
actively interested in sex again and ready to be mated once more,
with a repeat performance of the screamand-swipe reaction.
Considering how much the spiny penis must have hurt her, it is
clear that in a sexual context there is one kind of pain which does
not produce the usual negative response.