Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal

by Lucy Cooke

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 400
Rating:

Synopsis:

What does it mean to be female? Mother, carer, the weaker sex? Think again.

In the last few decades a revolution has been brewing in zoology and evolutionary biology. Lucy Cooke introduces us to a riotous cast of animals, and the scientists studying them, that are redefining the female of the species.

Meet the female lemurs of Madagascar, our ancient primate cousins that dominate the males of their species physically and politically. Or female albatross couples, hooking up together to raise their chicks in Hawaii. Or the meerkat mothers of the Kalahari Desert – the most murderous mammals on the planet.

The bitches in Bitch overturn outdated binary expectations of bodies, brains, biology and behaviour. Lucy Cooke's brilliant new book will change how you think – about sex, sexual identity and sexuality in animals and also the very forces that shape evolution.

Lucy Cooke’s Bitch aims to re-examine things that are taken for biological truths (like the idea that eggs are more costly so female animals evolved to be choosy while sperm is “cheap” and male animals are always profligate with it) in order to debunk the idea that female animals are less evolved than male animals.

She digs into this through a wide range of examples, but it’s worth noting that she really takes until the last chapter to wrestle with the fact that a male/female binary is an overly reductive and in fact unhelpful way of viewing the world. Each example, until the last chapter, is predicated on the idea that there are female animals and male animals, and some of those female animals are a bit more masculinised than we thought, or the sex roles are a bit more fluid or just plain different than we thought. It’s only in the last chapter that she reckons with species that have more than two recognised sexes (humans also have more than two phenotypic sexes, but because intersex individuals are comparatively rare and viewed as simply aberrant, we don’t really talk about that and this is never acknowledged) and the fact that the variation between sexes is actually often less than the variation between any given pair of individuals (including individuals considered to be of the same sex).

Which is to say, she doesn’t really properly reckon with it at all, since it comes in as an afterthought. As far as she goes, there are some interesting examples that overturn and complicate scientists’ expectations.

It might be a good one to sneak in some more complicated biology on people who think that genes or hormones or genitalia are the be-all and end-all of sex, but have some space between their ears for new concepts.

Personally, I learned about some new-to-me examples, and learned about some scientists who are doing interesting work, but it wasn’t overall that surprising or new to me.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)