The COVID pandemic wreaked all kinds of havoc on our sex lives — don’t even get me started on monkeypox — and a lot of us are still trying to figure out how to reclaim pleasure in this hellish world. Balinese macaques, on the other hand, do not seem to be suffering from the same kind of existential libido crisis. A new study found that these playful and inventive primates are even finding ways to use stones as sex toys.
The study, published this month in Ethology: International Journal of Behavioral Biology, followed a group of macaques from 2016 to 2019 to see how they used stones as tools. What the researchers discovered was that the monkeys used stones not just to crack open hard fruits or whatever it is that you might expect monkeys to do with rocks, but also as toys — namely sex toys.
