Book review - Bitch: On the Female of the Species
Bitch is a book from zoologist Lucy Cooke on correcting misunderstandings and cultural biases in our biological science. She explains, via animal studies, how existing notions of sex, male/female roles, and “what is natural” have been incomplete, if not incorrect.
In Bitch, Lucy goes through the behaviors of lemurs, meerkats, hyenas, moles, orcas, elephants, bonobos, termites, birds and fish to challenge conventional wisdom on nature and the roles of male and females. This alone makes for an engrossing read. I cannot help but to be delighted by learning brand new things about nature and animals. It brings me back to being a child again. What makes things better is her amusing way with words. (I am jealous.) Some choice phrases from the book:
To survive this hostile environment evolution has equipped the mole with some cunning specializations… [Perhaps] most impressive of all are the female mole’s balls. - The anarchy of sex: what is a female?
The weight of the male’s gonads provide a generalized rule of thumb, or perhaps rule of testicle, that lays bare the female’s sexual habits - The monogamy myth: female philandering
In his 1952 opus on the opossum, the zoologist Carl G. Hartman recounts a long-standing belief surrounding his study subject’s mode of reproduction: ‘Opossums copulate through the nose.’ - Love is a battlefield: genital warfare
Animal matriarchies are no feminist Eden… Nowhere is this so stark as the collective lives of that loveable TV star, the meerkat, whose violent totalitarian society is somewhat at odds with their saccharine screen image - Bitch eat bitch: when females fight
A biologically accurate version of [Finding Nemo] would there have seen Nemo’s father, Marlin, transition into a female, and then start having sex with her son, which might have made for a less popular family film amongst Disney’s die-hard conservative audiences. - Beyond the binary: evolution’s rainbow
Bitch is just not a fun romp through science, however. It carries a couple important messages that really resonated with me. One is how little we know about nature: We’re living in an age where the creation of an artificial intelligence is a plausible scenario and all the knowledge of human civilization is a google search away. Yet, so much of what we think we know about the world is either incomplete or likely wrong. There is still so much work for scientists to do. There is still so much to learn.
The second point is the critical importance of diversity. As much as we’d like to think of science as a pure and matter-of-fact activity, it is still a domain of humans and subject to our biases and social norms. Lucy has shown that so much knowledge about sex, nature, and biology was historically ignored or suppressed because they were taboo or wasn’t thought to be interesting by a monocultural scientific community. It took a diversity of scientists to foster interest in new theories and come up with models that work better than before.
Bitch was such a fun and great read. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who is still a curious kid inside.