“So You Want to Have Sex with an Alien,” by Nathan Rudibaugh

Dec 14th, 2022 | By | Category: Fake Nonfiction, Prose

If you are an interstellar traveler for long enough, you will want to have sex with an alien.

Even if you usually have the abundance of willpower or dearth of sex drive to resist or ignore temptations of the flesh, the dull and isolated nature of space travel has a habit of turning even the most chaste celestial sightseer into a sex-starved letch.

And given the variety of diseases, parasites, mating habits, genders, and sexual organs that abound in the cosmos, you might think an abstinence-only approach to intergalactic love making would be in order. But the one constant throughout humankind’s off-world expansion has been that we will fornicate with anything that meets our most basic copulatory parameters.

With that in mind, what follows is a brief primer for those wishing to make the most of, and contract the least from, their impending pan-astronomic dalliances.

The Big Beauty Pageant in the Stars

Common scenario: An Earth-born Lothario leaves his homeworld with visions of heavenly bodies, but arrives elsewhere to find the primary sapient life form has retained much of the grace and allure that you would expect from an organism that was recently descended from mud worms.

Of course, the slender beauties of that exoctic world would be horrified by this deep space Don Juan’s bipedal locomotion, lack of radial symmetry, and absence of mucus-based pheromones.

Yes, beauty comes in all manner of carapace colorations and plumage displays. But beauty is also in the eye of the beholder, and you can’t dash off to any old planetoid expecting to behold inhabitants who look like magazine cover models apart from their chartreuse skin and additional eyelids. No, to get your rocks off in the cosmos will likely require an expansion of your personal definition of comeliness.

Indeed, an untold number of paraphilias have cropped up alongside extraplanetary contact. While this short treatise is not concerned with the details of such liaisons, suffice it to say there is absolutely no sexual act with any being of any description that has not been attempted and found gratifying by someone. So for the most brazen sexual sightseers, there are plenty of mud worms to go around.

When on Kleeb, do as the Kleebans

Visitors often arrive at distant solar systems without the faintest idea who or what they will have the opportunity to have sex with, let alone locals’ preferred methods of doing so. This problematic lack of knowledge is compounded by the inclination to generalize one’s own sexual mores onto a local population. A little knowledge goes a long way in these situations.

For example, the prevailing belief of Kleeban culture is that a sexual a encounter involving fewer than five individuals is perverse, and, in some jurisdictions, still considered a criminal sexual offense.

And while the Citadel Interplanetary Empire has a more laissez faire approach to the types of sexual interactions permitted by law, the appropriate courtship paperwork must be filed before engaging in sexual congress with any of its citizens. Those failing to do so risk having sizeable fines levied against them, as well as an additional one percent penalty tax on all future sexual transactions.

A Note on Prophylactics

In contrast to many reproductive units, human male and female genitalia is relatively straightforward, and the associated sexual protectants are equally uncomplicated. The megacosm of sexual evolution, however, has generated a truly intriguing cornucopia of propagative organs that require an equally impressive array of preventatives.

For example, a number of species have developed a hook-and-tendril system of sex organs, which poses a formidable health risk to humankind’s spongy generative instruments, and a stretchy ribbon of latex will do precious little to prevent the kind of irreversible damage that would make concerns about future sexual encounters redundant.

The most sensible course of action in this regard is to forgo stocking your spacecraft with a robust supply of sexual safety equipment. You are usually better off procuring your prophylactics on-world when you arrive, as the time dilation involved in space travel often renders shipboard reserves outdated or expired, and the locals will typically have better knowledge as to which nanomaterials, forcefield frequencies, and impact dampers would be best suited to the particulars of your carnal interactions.

Intergalactic Love Is a Many Tentacled Thing

Once you have solved the physical challenges of xenosexuality, there still remains the even more convoluted psychological aspects to be dealt with. Movies and literature have painted an image of physiologically similar beings thinking psychologically similar thoughts. But even if you were to happen upon a world where the appearance of a local species was more or less identical to humankind, it is rather unlikely that their cognition would be remotely similar.

Humans are the most social creatures on Earth, in part due to our deeply complicated range of emotional states and the ability to predict and understand those emotions in one another.  The ability to comprehend the emotions of fellow humans is a feat that took millions of years of very specific genetic changes and cognitive adjustments.

Consider that “love,” as humans understand it, is the result of Earth’s unique evolutionary pressures. Our hormonally-induced proclivity toward pair bonding can make for awkward situations on worlds that didn’t develop an oxytocin-based reward system for emotional intimacy. That means Homo sapiens’ post-coital glow and desire for cuddling is confusing for some races, repellent to others, and threatening to many.

Countless mating strategies on numberless planets have been sifted through the fine mesh of natural selection, which has resulted in a colossal range of feelings and instincts surrounding copulation. Expecting beings that formed under vastly different circumstances to understand your emotions is unfair, unwise, and will almost certainly lead to a less enjoyable vacation. 

Love in the Age of the Warp Drive

If, despite all of the wise counsel in this essay, you still find yourself unsuccessful in your mission to make contact, remember this: Given the uncountable number of beings on the innumerable worlds in the vastness of space, at least a few dozen of them will surely be willing to have sex with an alien as peculiar as you.

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Nathan Rudibaugh is a Los Angeles-based writer, editor, and photographer. His mother is very proud of him.

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