Bitch: On the Female of the Species

by Lucy Cooke

When I was a zoology student, I was taught that this was the male’s biological imperative, written not in stone but in gametes. Anisogamy – the fundamental difference in gamete size, from the Greek, meaning ‘unequal’ and ‘marriage’ – is said to define not just the sexes but also their behaviour. Sperm are small and bountiful, whereas eggs are large and limited; so males will be promiscuous and females will be choosy and chaste.

This biological law always made my head (and heart) hurt. How could one sex be promiscuous and the other chaste – after all, who were the males having sex with if the females were all so demure? It didn’t make sense to me. And if a female’s sexual behaviour is prescribed by her gametes, then how can we explain the unrestrained sexuality of the lioness? Well, it turns out the female lion is by no means the only strumpet in the animal kingdom. The time is long overdue for a radical reappraisal of anisogamy’s clichéd sex roles – if only our species is ready to accept them.

Despite the fact that Bateman had only tested Darwin’s theory on fruit flies, he felt confident that his conclusions could be extrapolated to far more complex organisms, like human beings. He proclaimed that a dichotomy in sex roles, namely ‘an indiscriminating eagerness’ in males and a ‘discriminating passivity’ in females, was the norm across the animal kingdom. ‘Even in a derived monogamous species (e.g. man) this sex difference might be expected to persist as a rule,’ Bateman concluded.

Scientists from Alfred Kinsey to David M.Buss (author of The Evolution of Desire) have focused on male promiscuity against the baseline assumption that this behaviour resembles mating strategies in the animal kingdom prescribed by anisogamy. Some even justify the worst human male behaviour – rape, marital infidelity and some forms of domestic abuse – as adaptive traits that evolved because males are born to be promiscuous while females are sexually reluctant.

Far from being monandrous, therefore, females are apparently under strong selection pressure to be promiscuous.

‘With the exception of humans, rats and mice, we don’t really know what the clitoris looks like. But all vertebrates have a clitoris,’

It turns out that mammalian sperm aren’t even capable of fulfilling their biological function without female intervention. They can’t actually fuse with the ova without a period of activation known as capacitation. This is under female control and involves chemical alterations of the sperm, probably involving uterine secretions. But guess what? We don’t know much more because it’s not really been studied.

Abortion, at every stage of pregnancy, is an unconscious adaptive strategy for many animal mothers facing unfavourable situations that place themselves, or their offspring, in peril. Even pandas do it.

The goal of motherhood isn’t to nurture babies indiscriminately but for a female to invest her limited energy in creating the maximum number of offspring that survive long enough to reproduce themselves. There is nothing truly selfless about the job; it is absolutely selfish. A ‘good mother’ instinctively knows when to sacrifice all for her offspring and when to cut bait, which might even be after the infant is born.

Adoption has been recorded in at least 120 mammals from elephants to shrews.

The existence of these so-called ‘secondary sexual characters’ on the ‘passive’ female was therefore something of a mystery to Darwin. Horns are just as costly for the female to grow as they are for the male, after all. So why do the females of some species have them? The idea that females might be using their horns to fight other females is never considered in the many pages of Darwin’s thoughtful conjecture. Instead he concludes that although such armaments must be a ‘waste of vital power’, their presence or absence in females depends not on them being ‘of any special use, but simply in inheritance’. A female’s horns are thus the ghosts of male bravado, squatting on her head in a redundant fashion until natural selection gets around to removing them.

Darwin’s blinkered yet highly influential view ensured that for the next hundred and fifty years studies of intrasexual competition focused on male competition for mates, and the combative potential of females was largely ignored by science. The resulting data gap on females then masqueraded as knowledge. It’s assumed females aren’t competitive, and theories are based upon that understanding – when the truth is we just haven’t been paying attention.

Much like Victorian ladies at a dinner party, female birds had no reason to compete. Hushed by Darwin’s theory, their primary role was simply to listen to the jazzy showmanship of the cocks and reward their chosen favourite, albeit reluctantly, with sex. Any female songbirds caught singing were written off as babbling freaks. Their calls fell on deaf scientific ears and were brushed aside with all too familiar excuses; female vocalizations were the result of a ‘hormonal imbalance’ or, like the horns of an antelope, simply a non-adaptive by-product of shared genetic architecture with the male. ‘The accepted wisdom was if you hear a female sing, it’s a functionless aberration – an old female that has a bit too much testosterone in her system,’ Naomi Langmore, professor of evolutionary ecology at the Australian National University, told me. ‘The textbook definition of birdsong is that it’s “complex vocalizations by male birds during the breeding season”. So it’s actually defined as a male vocalization.’

This persistent all-male classification seriously ruffles Langmore’s feathers. For the last thirty years she’s been studying the complex vocalizations of female songbirds and fighting to get their voices heard. She’s part of a pioneering group of scientists who, tired of dogmatic androcentric definitions of birdsong, took it upon themselves to trawl through all the available scientific data to demonstrate that, far from being dumb, 71 per cent of female songbirds sing.

Her discovery of this early branch of fierce, frightening females eroded the idea that aggressive male patriarchy is the natural state of affairs for all primates. Or, at least, it should have.

Later, in the late seventies, chimpanzees took over as the model for human ancestry. Jane Goodall’s revelations of their warlike nature fuelled the idea that human males must be pre-programmed for violent supremacy, an idea made popular by the likes of Richard Wrangham, Harvard professor of biological anthropology and one of many influential male scientists to promote our primate ancestors as mirror images of chimps: patriarchal, male-bonded and highly antagonistic.

Subsequent phylogenetic research has, however, revealed that Old World monkeys make for poor primate prototypes. Their behaviour is actually highly derived, tailored to meet specific environmental challenges and far from representative. Primate societies in general are way more diverse than the familiar patriarchal model of baboons and chimps. But this natural diversity was overlooked – not just the lemurs but also the New World monkeys.1

Where chimps are patriarchal and warlike, bonobos are matriarchal and peaceful. We are equally related to both.

In other words, female bonobos have evolved to overthrow the patriarchy by perfecting the art of mutual frottage.

Female orcas have an EQ of around 2.7, which is higher than a chimpanzee’s, and also outdoes the males of their own species. Male orcas, with their bigger bodies, have an EQ of just 2.3. This disparity between the sexes flies in the face of Darwin’s proclamation of male intellectual superiority, and is thought to be linked with the female orca’s increased social and leadership skills, which require more cognitive power than the male needs.3

When Laura Bush visited Hawaii in 2006, the Republican First Lady commended the albatross couples for making lifelong commitments to one another. What no one, least of all Bush, knew at the time was over a third of those committed couples were, to put it anthropomorphically, lesbians.

All-female species can proliferate at twice the rate of a sexual species. This makes them excellent colonizers of new territory,1 since they’re specialized for quick growth and fast dispersal.

most barnacles are simultaneous hermaphrodites. Every individual has both male and female reproductive organs so they can fertilize and be fertilized by all of their neighbours. And if there’s no one else within reach, as a last resort the barnacle can recall their roving inseminator and fertilize themselves.

As we discovered in chapter one, this inherent plasticity allows for much more variation in the expression of traits associated with sex and more overlap between the sexes than is commonly recognized, which fuels evolution. Sex is not all black or white, and labelling grey areas as anomalies – or worse, pathologies – means we fail to appreciate the natural function of diversity.

Evolution’s Rainbow cites many species – from salmon to sparrows – that Roughgarden considers to have three, four or five separate genders; that is, animals that belong to the same biological sex but that have distinct appearances and sexual behaviours.

‘I’ve come to the conclusion that the human brain likes black-and-white examples. It likes things to be one thing or the other, but that’s problematic when it comes to sex,’ Crews offered as his explanation for this paradox.

The truth is that males and females are more alike than they are different.

These females teach us that sex is no crystal ball. It is neither static nor deterministic but a dynamic and flexible trait, just like any other, that’s shaped by the peculiar interaction of shared genes with the environment, further sculpted by an animal’s developmental and life histories plus a sprinkling of chance. Rather than thinking of the sexes as wholly different biological entities, we should consider them members of the same species, with fluid, complementary differences in certain biological and physiological processes associated with reproduction, but otherwise much the same. The time has come to ditch damaging, and frankly deluded, binary expectations because, in nature, the female experience exists on a genderless continuum: it is variable, highly plastic, and refuses to conform to archaic classifications. Our appreciation of this fact can only enrich our understanding of the natural world and empathy for one another as humans. Maintaining a dogged belief in antiquated sex differences only serves to fuel unrealistic expectations of women and men, foster poor inter-sexual relations and promote sexual inequality.