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Summary
Summary
A fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom
Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser.
Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones--dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted.In Bitch , Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn't your grandfather's evolutionary biology. It's more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun.
Author Notes
Lucy Cooke is the author of The Truth About Animals , which was short-listed for the Royal Society Prize, and the New York Times bestselling A Little Book of Sloth . She is a National Geographic explorer, TED talker, and award-winning documentary filmmaker with a master's degree in zoology from Oxford University. She lives in Hastings, England.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"The truth is that males and females are more alike than they are different," writes journalist Cooke (The Truth About Animals) in this zippy survey on females of the animal kingdom and the scientists who study them. Cooke emphasizes how research on female animals was woefully inadequate until the past few decades, when scientists began to challenge the "standard paradigm" of female passivity and male agency. In vivid detail, Cooke highlights animals that defy stereotypes: there's female spotted hyenas, who dominate males with their "masculinized body and behaviour"; the "matriarchal and peaceful" society of the bonobos, where females avoid conflict by trading food for sex; and orcas, who have seen menopausal matriarchs spend their post-reproductive years leading their pods. Cooke emphasizes the importance of female choice in evolution, and bite-size profiles of scientists appear throughout, including ones spotlighting Patricia Gowaty, who studied adulterous female songbirds, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist who's spent her life "weeding out sexist dogma." The author has a charmingly irreverent style that, among other things, pokes holes in the sexist scientific research of old that used cherry-picked data to conclude females weren't worth studying. This hits the right balance between informative and entertaining; popular science fans will want to check it out. (June)
Booklist Review
Noted TED speaker and author Cooke dives into sex and gender across the animal kingdom, dispelling all the misogynist notions of females being the weaker sex. From the female mole's venomous saliva to female spiders that devour the male after sex, Cooke upends the Darwinian notion of female submissiveness with those "that deviated from the passive, coy and monogamous template by being vicious, promiscuous and unquestionably dominant." With humor and candor, she also discusses the diversity of female genitalia: the opossum's two ovaries, two uteri, two cervices and two vaginas; and the female hyena's eight-inch clitoris in which she has sex, and through which she gives birth. Other chapters discuss female promiscuity, female sexual aggression, homosexuality, reproduction by cloning, sex-swapping animals, animals that have three or more separate genders, and menopause (experienced only by humans and some whales). Cooke also places much-needed female faces to related studies, citing the work of Jeanne Altmann, Patricia Gowaty, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, and others. Their pioneering research shows that sex and gender have always been complex, innovative, and varied throughout the animal kingdom. This book elevates not just the science itself but the scientists that have been marginalized for too long.
Choice Review
The title of this book may jolt readers, but the text is more prosaic. Bestselling author Cooke's point is that Darwin's theory of natural selection, despite being both groundbreaking and enduring, is also sexist. Presenting Darwin as a child of his Victorian culture, Cooke then offers evidence of how wrong he was in his thinking about sex and gender roles. The evidence is wide-ranging: Cooke cites studies of orcas, lemurs, mole rats, spiders, sage grouse, hyenas, and chickens. She presents many convention-busting scenarios, from sexually demanding female partners to aged matriarchs, also recounting division of labor in parental care as demonstrated by particular species. Along the way, she points out studies that were either ignored or whose authors had difficulty getting published, data that was selectively mined, and unconventional conclusions that were simply explained away. The book opens a window on the extent to which scientists are social animals, illustrating that they have a point of view and are happier in consensus. The situation is improved today, though not totally changed, and this book pointedly reminds scientists to remember that objectivity is limited and relative, that they have a point of view and should be careful not to reject a novel idea assuming different must mean incorrect. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. General readers. --Jennifer A. Mather, University of Lethbridge
Guardian Review
In the annals of female animals and their sexual antics, few can match the ferocity of the British fen raft spider, a rare wetland arachnid with a legspan the width of a human hand and an appetite for insects and tadpoles. During courtship, a male will caress a female by vibrating his legs across her body. Then - wham - the female will often grab him, kill him and gorge on her dead mate's corpse. But in that instant before death, the male may insert his sperm-transferring pedipalp into the female, fertilising hundreds of her eggs even as he is being eaten. "So his life, although short, achieved its purpose. What's more, sucking dry her lover's body may well have nourished the female's eggs, giving her spiderlings a better chance in life," writes Lucy Cooke in Bitch, her bold and gripping takedown of the sexist mythology baked into biology. Offering a wealth of examples ranging from cannibal spiders to sex-switching reef fish, Cooke dismantles a mass of misconceptions about binary sex roles, many of which can be traced back to that beloved bearded icon, Charles Darwin. According to Darwinian dogma, male animals fight one another for possession of females, "perform strange tactics" and mate promiscuously, propelled by a biological imperative to spread their abundant seed. Females are monogamous and passive; they wait patiently for their large, energy-rich eggs to be fertilised by cheap and tiny sperm, then selflessly give their all to their offspring. Cooke gleefully rebuts many of these assumptions about male dominance and female docility. Only 7% of animal species are sexually monogamous, meaning that throngs of female animals, from Barbary macaques to blue tits, seek sex with numerous partners. (A female lion, for example, can copulate with multiple males up to 100 times a day during oestrus.) Among ring-tailed lemurs of Madagascar and meerkat matriarchs of the Kalahari (which kill their competitors' babies) females are the authoritarian sex. Female topi antelopes of Kenya's Maasai Mara grasslands gather in their hundreds to battle with their antlers for the chance of sex with the prime bull. Some mums dote on their offspring, but in two-thirds of fish species, single dads care for their young while females disappear after donating their eggs. Many female animals, from mallard ducks to earwigs, use their complicated vaginal anatomy to dislodge sperm or thwart the path of the penis, and thus control paternity of their offspring. But old stereotypes stick. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection explains how individuals with adaptive traits are more likely to survive and reproduce. But he was puzzled by certain traits, like the peacock's tail, that offer no obvious benefit, and are even an obstacle to everyday life. The only purpose of these flamboyant accessories, he reasoned, must be to attract and win the opposite sex. Competition for mates, Darwin claimed, was largely the domain of males, almost all of which "have stronger passions" than females. With the rarest exceptions, the female "is less eager than the male ¿ she generally 'requires to be courted'; she is coy," he wrote in 1871. "The main problem with this neat binary classification is: it's wrong," Cooke writes. "Female animals are just as promiscuous, competitive, aggressive, dominant and dynamic as males." Decades of research, much of it conducted by female scientists, refutes the Darwinian dichotomy that had dominated the thinking of (mainly male) evolutionary biologists.Cooke describes how an ancient network of genes and sex hormones interact, "to create a mixture of gametes, gonads, genitals, bodies and behaviour that disregard binary expectations." The African spotted hyena, for example, has an eight-inch clitoris shaped like a penis; she also gets erections. Female bonobo apes pursue sexual bliss (with each other). In dolphins, the clitoris is shaped like a "pair of oversized fleshy burger buns". Patricia Brennan, a University of Massachusetts evolutionary biologist who collects these giant clitorises, is convinced that female dolphins derive pleasure from sex. Some animals even glide through multiple switches in sex. The Caribbean chalk bass fish swaps sex up to 20 times pera day. The brain of the clownfish, or anemonefish, starts out as male, and becomes female - a change that may surprise fans of the Disney movie Finding Nemo. Belligerent female anemonefish defend territory while the male cares for their eggs. But if the female is, say, chomped by a barracuda, the male anemonefish will transform into the new dominant female. During transition, the fish has a female brain but male gonads. Bitch is so full of marvellous surprises about sex roles that I sensed Cooke herself was transformed in its writing. Studying zoology at university, she writes, made her feel like "a sad misfit", an "egg-maker ... doomed to play second fiddle to the sperm-shooters". But after three years of delving into the dizzy variability of female roles, she feels liberated. Much of the distorted science she had been taught was shaped by the values of a certain kind of man. To change that, she insists, we need more diverse scientists: "a mixture of sexes, sexualities, genders, skin colours, classes, cultures, abilities and ages". Only then, it seems, will we be able to see the female experience in nature for what it is: "variable, highly plastic", and refusing "to conform to archaic classifications".
Kirkus Review
A cheerful and knowledgeable popular science review of female animals. For decades, writes British science writer Cooke, "studies of intrasexual competition focused on male competition for mates, and the combative potential of females was largely ignored by science. The resulting data gap on females then masqueraded as knowledge. It's assumed females aren't competitive, and theories are based upon that understanding--when the truth is we just haven't been paying attention." The author emphasizes that it was only at the end of the 20th century that women began to enter biology in large numbers. Many turned their attention to female animals, heretofore considered too boring to bother to study, and discovered that "true till-death-do-us-part sexual monogamy…proved to be extremely rare, found in less than 7 percent of known species." A skilled journalist, Cooke has traveled the world to interview experts, most of them women, who have performed groundbreaking research and are unafraid to confront skeptical male colleagues. Despite deploring his Victorian sensibilities, Cooke remains a Darwin enthusiast, but she maintains that his later (and lesser known) theory of sexual selection deserves equal status with natural selection. Readers will receive a superb education in the evolution and mechanics of animal sex as well as countless colorful anecdotes describing bizarre reproductive behavior. Readers will find the familiar account of female spiders eating males as they try to mate, but there is much more to discover in Cooke's fascinating pages: Almost all birds are monogamous, but it's a social monogamy; 90% of female birds sneak away from the nest to copulate with multiple males, so a single clutch of eggs can have many fathers. Permanently attached to a rock, a barnacle possesses the longest penis for its size in the animal kingdom, but this is purely functional, enabling it to search for neighboring females. If there are no females within reach, as a last resort, the hermaphroditic creature fertilizes itself. A top-notch book of natural science that busts myths as it entertains. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Cooke (The Truth About Animals) freshly analyzes a hot-button topic--the use of "sex" and/or "gender" to describe human sexuality, identity, and social roles--in terms of the zoological kingdom. She makes a clear argument that notions of binary sex or gender are even more ambiguous in animals than in humans. Today, assumptions about evolution and the female role linger from Darwin's Victorian-era writings, clashing with current zoological research that seeks to "fight the scientific phallocracy with data and logic." Cooke's case studies analyzing the five types of sex (chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal, morphological, and behavioral) prove that each category has fluidity and instances of non-fixed sex; as examples, she offers spiders, the common mole, and the female spotted hyena, whose physiology and behavior defy categorization. Cooke expertly explains current scientific research with engaging humor, interspersed with first-person accounts and an impressive number of interviews with scientists who are rewriting the binary narrative. Her book encourages reflection but never overwhelms with information, even when, for instance, debunking accepted wisdom about XX and XY chromosomes. VERDICT Zoological notions of gender will challenge general readers to appreciate sexual diversity in animals and reassess human notions of "female."--Jessica A. Bushore
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. ix |
| 1 The Anarchy of Sex | p. 1 |
| 2 The Mysteries of Mate Choice | p. 28 |
| 3 The Monogamy Myth | p. 44 |
| 4 Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover | p. 77 |
| 5 Love Is a Battlefield | p. 99 |
| 6 Madonna No More | p. 122 |
| 7 Bitch Eat Bitch | p. 156 |
| 8 Primate Politics | p. 182 |
| 9 Matriarchs and Menopause | p. 215 |
| 10 Sisters Are Doing it for Themselves | p. 237 |
| 11 Beyond the Binary | p. 262 |
| Conclusion: A Natural World Without Prejudice | p. 281 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 289 |
| Notes | p. 291 |
| Selected Bibliography | p. 347 |
| Index | p. 353 |