At half-term, the L ondon Zoo is a cheerful cacophony with blue macaws out-screaming six-year-olds, but in the relative calm of the lush spider exhibit. The golden orb weaver is 125 times bigger than her small mate.
This is a very Lucy Cooke observation, uncensored, pithily expressed and startlingly informative. Her new book, Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal, is a brilliant, funny and angry demolition of our preconceptions about female behavior and sex in the animal kingdom.
Female animals are just as promiscuous, competitive, aggressive, dominant and dynamic as males
For too long, we have accepted a view of nature that has been co-opted by ideologues to claim that a host of grim.
Bitch is fun. I read it, my jaw dropped in astonishment, I wrote down my favourite parts to send to friends, and I read out snippets to my male housemates for days. I don't want to ruin it for you, but I will tell you a little about spotted hyenas and female moles.
Back to the mate-eating spiders. They are one of the less surprising parts of the book, they fit that female of the species more deadly than the male.
She says on the way out that the world's greatest engineer is a woman. They look cute, but they are a bunch of bad-ass bitches.
I wanted to see her among the animals because this is her element, as close as you can get without trudging through snow to find a bird in a national park. She is an adventurer, not just a thinker, and her TV work and book research has taken her to 60 countries and remote biological field stations. She made a point in Bitch that thatnurture is not a solely female characteristic after seeing mountain gorillas.
After an outdoorsy childhood in a family of nature lovers, Cooke studied zoology at Oxford under Richard Dawkins. She went into TV and documentary filmmaking, but quit when no one would let her make a film about the decline in amphibians. She spent six months travelling around South America, exploring the story under her own steam.
The perfect person to tell these stories is Cooke. I asked what surprised her the most during her research. She tells me that the genetics is the most fundamental thing, because the genes that make an ovary or testes are the same as the genes that drive you down the male or female pathway. I couldn't believe it. The idea of male and female being distinct genetic entities is nonsense. We want everything to be black and white, but it doesn't work that way. This section of the book is both exciting and unexpected, and it was written in the Victorian era.
The complex and chaotic process of genetic sex determination, parthenogenesis and gynandromorphy are explored by Bitch. A biologically accurate Finding Nemo would have seen the father of the child transition into a female and have sex with his son, which would have made for a less popular family film.
The fact that so little is known about what it means to be female reminds me of a book by a woman. In animals, scientists not interested in the female experience failed to research it, creating a data gap that means we don't get the full picture. For decades, female scientists have been fighting for a radical perspective shift that would allow them to see and understand the more complex and less deterministic real story of sex and reproduction.
Bitch is fond of a group of professors who are semi-retired.
She was sitting on a table with a rainbow of animal dildos on her desk and she sat back in her chair.
Bonobos use sex toys, practise oral sex and maintain female-led social structures through “genito-genital rubbing”
The battle against this male-oriented bias continues, even after all the efforts of the brilliant young scientists. As late as the 1990s, researchers were not interested in the reproductive advantage of promiscuity for male fruit flies.
She says of The Mating Game that she ended up screaming at the television. Can we change the record? What about the strategy of being a mother? She knows that it's as big as a bigger drama.
The book is a rebuke to anyone who wants to derive ideological comfort or support from depictions of animal behavior.
She dislikes the theory that males are competitive and females are monogamous. The game of using animals as weapons is dangerous. You can find anything you want in the animal kingdom. You could look at the hamadryas baboon, where the males kidnap the females while they are still adolescent, then use systematic bully in their harem to keep them oppressed, that is a model for human behavior.
bonobo use sex toys, practise oral sex and establish and maintain female-led social structures through genital rubbing. That's entertaining, but it also challenges the narrative about sex roles in primates.
She never wanted children, and when she isn't finding new stories to tell, she lives in Hastings with her rescue. She doesn't fit the stereotype of female behavior and feels weird about that. It was one of the reasons I wrote Bitch. If you haven't seen your reflection in the animal kingdom, you might think it's ok for me to be me. It's all natural.
Lucy Cooke wrote an extract from Bitch.
I felt like a sad misfit after studying zoology. Not because I loved spiders, enjoyed cutting up dead things I'd found by the side of the road, or was willing to look for clues as to what their owner had eaten. There was no shame in the fact that my fellow students shared the same curiosities. My sex was the source of my uneasiness. Being female meant I was a loser.
Richard Dawkins wrote in his book, The Selfish Gene, that eggs are larger than sperms and that is the basis of the exploitation of the female.
Egg-makers were betrayed by our bulky gametes. Our forebears had pulled the short straw by investing in a few ova rather than millions of mobile sperm. We were doomed to be second fiddle to the sperm-shooters for the rest of our lives.
Dawkins told us that the difference in sex cells laid the groundwork for sexual inequality.
Male animals were at the forefront of thrusting agency. They fought over control of females. They were propelled by a biological imperative to spread their seed far and wide. They were socially dominant, where males led and females meekly followed. We had zero competitive edge because a female's role was as selfish as her mother's. Sex was more important than a drive.
Men were the ones who drove the bus of change. As long as we kept nice and quiet, we could hop on for a ride.
As an egg-making student of evolution, I couldn't see my reflection in this 50s sitcom of sex roles. I wondered if I was some kind of female outlier.
Thankfully, the answer is no.
The way we view female animals has been distorted by a sexist mythology. The natural world has a fascinating spectrum of anatomies and behaviors. The doting mother is among them, but so is the jacana bird that abandons her eggs and leaves them to a harem of cuckolded males to raise. A lot of philandering females seek sex with multiple partners because only a small number of species are sexually monogamous.
Alpha females have evolved across a variety of classes and their authority ranges from benevolent to brutal in some animal societies. Females can compete with each other as viciously as males, and topi antelope engage in fierce battles with huge horns for access to the best males, and meerkat matriarchs are the most bloodthirsty mammals on the planet. There are cannibalistic female spiders that consume their lovers as post- or even pre-coital snacks and lizards that have lost the need for males altogether and reproduce solely by cloning.
A new generation of scientists are helping to redefine what it means to be female, thanks to a revolution in our understanding of what it means to be female.
Darwin's theory of sexual selection drove a wedge between the sexes by focusing on our differences, but these differences are more culturally than they are biologically. There are both plastic and varied animal characteristics. Sex traits are fluid and can be changed by a selection. The environment, time and chance all play a role in shaping a female's form. Females and males are 888-609- 888-609- 888-609- 888-609- It can be hard to know where to draw the line.
Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal is available from guardianbookshop.com.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
