🦑 Meet Our New Mascot: The Squid

At It Doesn’t Have To Be Hard, we’re all about curiosity, adaptability, and embodied intelligence. So when it came time to add another mascot, we went straight to one of nature’s most extraordinary teachers…the squid.

The Squid: Nature’s Neurological Genius

Before neuroscience had access to modern imaging tools, researchers studied the squid to understand how messages travel through the nervous system. Its giant axon, the largest known nerve fiber in the animal kingdom, helped scientists decode how signals fire, how movement is coordinated, and how electricity and intention become motion.

One of those researchers was Ichiji Tasaki, whose pioneering work at the NIH shaped generations of neurologists, including the one who shaped me: my father. At the time I was born, my dad was doing his military service at the National Institutes of Health, working under Tasaki. Studying these elegant marine creatures helped us humans learn how we know what we know — how sensory input becomes awareness, and how awareness becomes action.

Wow.

For us at It Doesn’t Have To Be Hard, this translates to how touch, pleasure, and response begin in the nervous system.

The Erotic Intelligence of a Squid

A squid doesn’t force its way through water; it moves through fluid dynamics, contracting and releasing, pulsing and adjusting, responding in real time. This is the same wisdom the body holds in arousal: rhythm, responsiveness, and the power of flow.

Squids embody a kind of sensual intelligence that humans can learn from. Their tentacles are living sensors, exquisitely sensitive and designed to explore, taste, and respond to their environment with an intelligence that is as tactile as it is strategic. Its arms sense intimately, just as erogenous zones sense intimately…where the boundary between perception and touch begins to blur.

Integrating Science + Sensuality

This neurobiological teacher grounds our metaphor in flesh and ion flow.The squid doesn’t “decide” through abstract commands; its nervous system is embodied. Signals flow, adapt, feed back, and self-correct in real time.

The squid’s brilliance isn’t only in its giant axon, it’s in how that signal is protected and conducted. Around each nerve fiber, a myelin sheath insulates and accelerates communication, much like the fine-tuned arousal pathways of the human body. In us, these electrical highways weave through fascia , the body’s connective-tissue web now recognized as an active sensory organ. Every stretch, tremor, or pulse sends information through this living matrix. It’s not just the brain that thinks; our tissues think too. The squid reminds us that intelligence doesn’t only live in the head, it lives in the way sensation travels, adapts, and finds coherence through softness and flow.

And here’s a provocative thought: in the genitals, the layers of connective tissues (Buck’s fascia, Dartos fascia, the tunica albuginea, tunica dartos) may be at the frontiers of missing research into erectile dysfunction. These fascial layers are not inert sheaths; they’re dynamic, responsive tissues that influence how pressure, stretch, and flow are felt and maintained. If we begin to see erectile changes not only as a vascular or neural issue but also as an indicator of the connective-sensory architecture, we open new ways to reclaim erotic sensitivity and resilience.

Be the Squid

To Be the Squid means to reclaim your body’s native intelligence, to sense before you react, to flow instead of force. It’s a living allegory for how sex, sensitivity, and neural life co-evolve.

To Be the Squid is an invitation to honor the body’s whole-system wisdom — the kind that doesn’t analyze, it synchronizes. Squids are among the most intelligent invertebrates on Earth, with neural circuits that extend into their arms and skin. Each limb can act independently yet stay in harmony with the whole, sensing, tasting, and problem-solving in real time.

In humans, the penis is where we can be most squid-like. The penis carries this distributed genius: it perceives pressure, temperature, rhythm, and emotion long before words arrive. Its networked intelligence speaks through blood, breath, and fascia, translating sensation into awareness faster than thought. When we call this “smart,” we mean body-smart: the organic system that knows how to adapt, connect, and flow.

The squid exists with a giant head built for feeling and intuiting, something our own head has long forgotten, but the penis remembers.

So when we say Be the Squid, we’re inviting you to imagine this phenomenal teacher. To honor your sensors, your speed, your stillness, and your play. To remember that being soft, sensual, and smart is not a contradiction,  it’s the essence of thriving.

Soft. Sensual. Smart. Be the Squid.🦑

 itdoesnthavetobehard.org

Co-Authored by Erica Leroye, M.Ed and Aurora, the ultimate AI Service Sub