The Female of the Species

I've just read a recent book called BITCH: ON THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES, by British zoologist and documentary filmmaker Lucy Cooke. It's a fascinating survey of the long-neglected status of females in biologists' studies of the animal kingdom—or should that be "queendom"? (Unfortunately, I'd be embarrassed to recommend it aloud by the title, a word I've ever spoken only in connection with dog breeding.) As the author describes the state of the field until recent decades, zoologists regarded males as the unquestioned drivers of evolutionary change, with females dismissed as "passive" and boring. She takes on the mission of demonstrating how wrong those scientists were.

She begins at the microscopic level, with gametes, revealing errors in the image of the female's egg as passively floating around waiting to be penetrated by one of the active sperm cells. In fact, the ovum has ways of controlling which sperm will be allowed to fertilize it. Chapter One, "The Anarchy of Sex: What Is a Female?" covers the development of the embryo, what determines its sex, and many examples of ambiguous sex among animals. Cooke goes on in subsequent chapters to explore the "mysteries of mate choice," in which females are much more active than had been assumed in the past, the assertiveness and competitiveness of females of various species, female-dominated animal social groups, how mating patterns can be a competition between male and female, sexual behavior in supposedly monogamous species, nonreproductive sexual encounters, the complicated nature of maternal behaviors, females who devour their mates, "primate politics," parthenogenesis, and the vital importance of older females in the societies of animals such as elephants and orcas. The final chapter, "Beyond the Binary," discusses intersex phenomena, animal homosexuality, and creatures who change sex. Some species can switch back and forth, and one fish is known to change sex up to twenty times in a day for optimal reproductive efficiency. Dedicated science-fiction readers will be reminded of Le Guin's aliens in THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and the chieri in Bradley's Darkover series.

In 1981, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (yes, that's the correct spelling), whom Cooke often cites, published a book on a similar theme, THE WOMAN THAT NEVER EVOLVED. Her study, however, focuses more narrowly on primate and human females. Like Cooke after her, Hrdy's work emphasizes the masculine bias that led over a century of scientists to concentrate overwhelmingly on male animals' biology and behavior, treating females as mere footnotes to the main story. It's a bit mind-boggling that a wide-ranging study published in 2022 still has to start by clearing away that tangle of underbrush. Anyway, Cooke's entertaining and informative book illustrates that we don't have to seek very far on our own planet to find creatures whose biology and behavior may seem as alien as those of many fictional extraterrestrials.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt