Charles Darwin posited that throughout the animal kingdom, males are active, females are passive, and that’s pretty much that. Females, in sum, are boring. That’s poppycock, Lucy Cooke writes in her latest book, Bitch.
Historically, when females did something potentially interesting, like exercise leadership over their social groups, many scientists scratched their heads and chalked it up as an aberration. When behavior didn’t fit the mold, like female-dominant spotted hyenas or peaceable male pinyon jays, it was either ignored or shoehorned into existing theory. For instance, ornithologists posited that aggressive female pinyon jays must suffer “the avian equivalent of PMS,” Cooke writes.
Cooke draws on this recent science to systematically take down myths about females. She begins by asking what biological sex actually is — what makes a male a male, and a female a female — and shows that it’s far less black-and-white than we’ve been led to believe. Take the case of the European mole, in which the female sports gonads called ovotestes that produce eggs during the short breeding season, and testosterone the rest of the time.
The mole is just one example of sexual ambiguity among many that Cooke outlines. As the science of recent decades has revealed, even the genetics of sex is far more complicated than having either XX or XY chromosomes . In humans, males and females have the same set of about 60 sex-determining genes, which can create either testes or ovaries.
Cooke also takes on many other ways scientists have misread sexual dynamics over the years, such as the myth that males benefit evolutionarily from promiscuity and females from monogamy. She addresses misconceptions about sexual cannibalism and animal genitals, complete with silicone replicas of animal vaginas. And she challenges ideas about the maternal instinct.
In short, Cooke demolishes much of what you probably learned about the sexes in biology class. This may be disconcerting, even confronting for those who feel comfortable in the warm embrace of Darwinian order. But it’s also exciting, and fascinating, and very well might change the way you see the world.is a Bookshop.org affiliate and will earn a commission on purchases made from links in this article.