In her latest book, Bitch: On the Female of the Species, London, UK, the author argues that the stories of pure females resisting male-dominated seduction and mothers protecting their young are based on centuries of sexist science that we have been deceived by myths about female animals. Cooke spoke with The Sunday Magazine’s Piya Chattopadhyay about why she wanted to reinvent the narrative and stereotypes that suggest that female animals are associated with things like motherhood and monogamy – tropes that have also influenced the way in which we see the roles of the sexes in humans. Here is part of their conversation. Your book begins with reflections on being a zoology student and feeling that you do not fit. And you felt that way because of your gender. You write, “Being a woman meant only one thing. I was lost.” Now, I suspect it was a bit of a joke, but still, what do you mean by that? Well, I was taught at Oxford by Richard Dawkins, a well-known evolutionary biologist. And they taught me that females are exploited. The fact that we produce a few eggs rich in nutrients and the males produce a lot of motile sperm, basically means that we pulled the short straw in the primordial lottery of life and our sex cells that we produce determine our behavior. Males will be fiery, aggressive, competitive and naughty, while females will be passive, hospitable, pure and submissive. So yes, that’s why I felt lost. Because that sound was pretty depressing, actually. Charles Darwin was a “brilliant and meticulous scientist,” Cook said, but his science was also shaped by the “cultural lens through which he saw the world.” (Hulton Archive / Getty Images) You mentioned Dawkins, obviously a very modern, productive, smart man, but he was not the only one, right? This goes far back to Charles Darwin, one of your heroes. And you point out that although he is one of the greatest scientists of all time, his work has been deeply influenced by cultural prejudices. Explain it. Charles Darwin, who is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant and meticulous scientist, but fascinating to me, was also a man of his time and this cultural lens through which he saw the world influenced his science. And that’s really what my book is about, essentially, the power of cultural bias to obscure biological truth. He was Victorian, so he marked the female of the species in the shape of a Victorian housewife, because that was what he looked like. And then, because Darwin said it, it meant that generations of scientists who followed him were simply suffering from a bias of confirmation, and they were simply looking for what fit Darwin’s example and ignoring what was not. And indeed, it took a bunch of wild feminist, female scientists in America to actually start challenging these half-hearted stereotypes. Okay, let’s talk about another stereotype. Your writing shows how it has been incorporated into our beliefs that males are unrestrained. Females, on the other hand, are pure and hospitable. What are your favorite examples or elements you can point to to demystify it? This is a very pervasive idea, that females seek monogamy and males are wired for promiscuity and is still routinely developed by evolutionary psychologists even today, with the Darwin seal. But it is not true. And one of the first people to challenge it was Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who is this amazing American anthropologist. He studied langurs in India and noticed that females were not at all hospitable. They went up and asked men outside the group for sex, very aggressively. With paternity confusion, males are less likely to kill babies if they have recently mated with the female who acquired them – Lucy Cooke He was really the first person who, instead of ignoring it and deleting it and saying, “Well, we’ll just ignore what does not fit the example,” actually investigated. And she realized that the reason females do this was to confuse paternity. Males are often pesticides on several species of primates. And so, confusing paternity, males are less likely to kill babies if they have recently mated with the female who gave birth to them. Multiple mating is useful for manipulating males, whether they are caring for offspring or not, but it only increases the chances of winning the genetic lottery and finding a good match. So in the primates, there is something amazing. I can not remember if they are macaques, but during the season, females have been observed having sex every 17 minutes with every male on the team. This is another myth that only males derive pleasure from sex. So Patricia Brennan, who is this amazing scientist from Boston, has done a lot of work on the clitoris and recently, she just did something with dolphins who have a lot of sex, and found that the clitoris on the dolphin all have the same nerve endings. and are strikingly similar to ours. I also want you to tell us about orca whales, because as we review what we know about animals, there are some lessons we need to learn from other societies, animal societies, and orca whales turn our views on patriarchal animal societies, turning them to the right. mess. So orcas, also known as killer whales, live in family pods. And they always believed that males were the leaders. But it turns out that not only women are the leaders of the orca society, but postmenopausal grandmothers are the leaders of their hunting community. So menopause is really rare in the animal kingdom. It is only humans and four species of toothed whale that naturally go through menopause. And it seems that in the case of orcas, the reason is that if females stop breeding in the middle of their lives and instead of investing in their existing offspring and leading the team, then their genetic heritage is greater. Orca whales live in pods, but the grandmothers of these groups are the leaders, Cook said. (NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center) They compete with their daughters basically until old age. But basically, orcas have these great minds. it’s like seven pounds. And they even have that palatal lobe that we do not have, and it suggests that they experience emotions in a way that we cannot comprehend. And they are incredibly socially cohesive. There are orcas that I went and visited in the Salish Sea of the State of Washington. There was a member of their community who had scoliosis and they took care of it. And you could see that the fin was bent, but they shared fish with him and they took care of it in the community. So I found this story of these compassionate, wise old whales leading their community after menopause as a real beacon of hope. Written by Samraweet Yohannes. Produced by Andrea Hoang. The Q&A has been processed for scope and clarity.
