Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal

by Lucy Cooke

A sexist mythology has been baked into biology, and it distorts the way we perceive female animals.

Female animals are just as promiscuous, competitive, aggressive, dominant and dynamic as males. They have equal right to drive the bus of change. It’s just that Darwin, along with the coterie of gentlemen zoologists that helped inform his argument, couldn’t, or perhaps wouldn’t, see them that way.

What is perhaps more surprising, and damaging, is how tough it has been to wash this sexist stain out of science, and how far it has bled.

But then along came the spotted hyena with her big phallic clitoris to suggest there’s trouble in the paradigm.

Honestly one of the best sentences I have ever read.

The answers lie in how testosterone is synthesized. All of the sex hormones – oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone – originate as cholesterol.

This bias in our understanding comes from Jost’s famous but flawed theory of sex differentiation, which only ever explained how you differentiate a male and never questioned how the female is created. The idea that any development process could be ‘passive’ is clearly quite ludicrous – ovaries require just as much active assembly as do testes. Yet for fifty years the ‘default’ female system went unstudied.

‘Maleness evolved as an adaptation to femaleness,’ Crews continued.

From this alternative evolutionary perspective, the ultimate answer to what is a female is: she’s the ancestral sex.