Bitch: On the Female of the Species

by Lucy Cooke

It states that female menopause is the evolutionary upshot of the human male’s preference for younger females. The trio of male scientists from McMaster University in Ontario that proposed this profoundly dispiriting theory back in 2013 supported it with some snazzy mathematical modelling demonstrating how the male penchant for young skirt results in the build-up of deleterious mutations, causing older females’ ovaries (if not their hopes and dreams) to shrivel up and die before the rest of them. At the other end of the spectrum is the more enduring, and significantly more feminist-friendly, ‘grandmother hypothesis’. Proposed in 1998, it posits that females who step out of the reproductive rat race mid-life and focus their energies on supporting their children (and grandchildren), instead of squeezing out yet more babies, significantly increase their offspring’s chances of survival and, in turn, their own genetic legacy.