The establishment had finally accepted females would actively seek out sex with multiple males. But why they would do so remains a source of controversy. The Bateman-Trivers paradigm predicts that females have nothing to gain from ‘excessive’ matings, so their lusty advances make little sense to devotees of this ‘universal law’. ‘The mystery still is, what do females get out of it?’ Birkhead told me on our birdwatching trip to Bempton Cliffs.
