From boredom to bedroom - the story of the yawn
Wednesday, 8 July 2026
Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.
OPINION: Two weeks ago the sneeze. Last week the cough. And this week, as promised, well, I can sense you yawning already. For what could be more yawn-inducing than predictability?
All vertebrates yawn, apparently. Cats are especially great yawners, exposing mouths like pin cushions. And one of my dogs used to yawn when I did, though he may have thought it the other way around.
A human yawn’s a strange thing and it is considered bad manners in public. The eyes narrow to slits. The mouth gapes as wide as it will go in order to suck in a prodigious chest-expanding quantity of air. If we’re really luxuriating in a private yawn we spread our arms wide, one higher than the other, and stretch the muscles of the back, before slowly releasing the breath and letting the arms and shoulders slump. But why? What does it achieve? A sneeze clears the nose. A cough clears the throat. But their pale and peaceful cousin the yawn, what’s it for?
Read more:
The seven sounds of ‘ough’, and other joys of our mongrel language
A sneeze tells us we’re not in control the way we think we are
There have been several physiological theories of yawning. The most generally accepted of these is that yawning somehow remedies either an oxygen deficiency or an overabundance of carbon dioxide in the brain. But recent research has refuted both of these.
Don’t take my word for this. Take the word of Wolter Suentgens. Dr Suentgens is a chasmologist, a word I learned only this morning and which means one who studies yawning.
His studies have led Dr Suentgens far beyond the conventional notion that we yawn because we’re either tired or bored. He has arrived at the “First and Second Laws of Chasmology”. The First Law states that a yawn occurs: (1) if the yawner cannot do what he would like to do, or (2) if the yawner must do something that he would rather not do.
To illustrate (1) he cites the case of the dull guest who is slow to leave your house. As host, you are longing to go to bed and you yawn. But when the guest does finally leave, and you are free to go to bed, you yawn no more. Conversely, to illustrate (2), if you are lying awake in bed the next morning and happy to be there, you’ll not yawn. But if you have to get up to go to work, as you haul himself reluctantly from the warm sheets, you are likely to yawn. In other words the yawn expresses some sort of thwarting of the will.
But it’s Dr Suentgens’s Second Law of Chasmology that is the surprise. It is a special instance of the more general First Law, and it states that the yawn has an erotic and even a sexual aspect.
Dr Suentgens asserts that the stretch-yawn-sigh sequence that comes naturally to us in private is overtly sexual in nature, which is why it is taboo in public. The stretch in particular, suggests Dr Suentgens, is sexually inviting and is echoed in numerous erotic works of art – Michelangelo’s Dying Captive, Goya’s La Maja, Matisse’s Blue Nude.
Furthermore, yawning is famously contagious, but occurs only when the infectee feels warmly towards the infecter. Yawning is coded emotion.
But his strongest evidence for linking yawning with sex is drawn from the animal kingdom. Gannets yawn when courting. A male raven that yawns will infuriate other males but attract females. And then there’s the learned scientific paper he cites, the title of which I am going to quote in full because it is always a mistake to edit poetry: Apomorphine- and Oxytocin-induced penile erection and yawning in intact and castrated male rats.
I am not making this up.
- At 3pm on Sunday, July 12 Joe Bennett presents Great Comic Writing as part of the Lyttelton Arts Festival. Tickets from laf.co.nz.