With reproductive rights devastatingly at stake in the US, as the historic Roe vs Wade ruling on abortion looks likely to be overturned, women’s bodies remain a political battleground. Long considered the second sex, the female sex — and, in particular, female sexuality — has been misunderstood and maligned since time immemorial.
We know this to be true culturally; what’s shocking is how much it affects what we take to be scientific fact. Two new books tackle the subject from different angles, offering an important corrective to the “accidental sexism” baked into so many biological studies.
In the provocatively titled Bitch, Lucy Cooke, a broadcaster with a background in zoology, debunks longstanding myths about female sexuality in the animal kingdom. Until the end of the 20th century, when more women entered the field of evolutionary biology, female animals were rarely a focus of study. Cooke meets the scientists taking a closer look — challenging gendered assumptions dating back to the Victorian era, and beyond.
A Darwinian dichotomy holds that male animals are propelled by a biological imperative to spread their seed, while females coyly await impregnation and are naturally monogamous to protect their brood. Tell that to the queen of the jungle: the indefatigable lioness can copulate hundreds of times a day with multiple mates during oestrus. “True till-death-do-us-part sexual monogamy,” it turns out, is “extremely rare.” DNA testing has shown more than 93 per cent of animal species to be non-monogamous, with polyandry far more common than had been believed.
Despite his genius, Charles Darwin “was viewing the natural world through a Victorian pinhole camera”, concludes Cooke, and his legacy has loomed large as his successors suffered from “a chronic case of confirmation bias”. Because natural selection couldn’t account for flourishes such as the peacock’s tail, Darwin surmised that animals struggle not only to survive but to mate. His theory of sexual selection posited that it was males who compete for females, which he attributed to the abundance of sperm versus the rarity of eggs.
On closer observation, however, female animals demonstrate much more agency than had been assumed. Female topi, for example, gather in the grassy plains of the Maasai Mara during rutting season to spar for a spin with the prime bull. The vaginal morphology of some species can even control the paternity of offspring — what Cooke calls “a homegrown ‘cock-blocker’”….
Read the full review online at the Financial Times
