Overthrowing the Patriarchy Through Ecstatic Sex
Lucy Cooke was in the Serengeti, making a BBC documentary about animal communication, when the lion expert in the Jeep with her played the sound of a roar from another lion’s territory. Three lions, two males and one female, approached. The two males disappeared when they saw there was nothing that resembled a rival. But the female lion pinned them, circling the Jeep. They were stuck for two hours. What was going on? Cooke was informed the female wanted to mate with them. “That female lion—she’s incredibly promiscuous,” the lion expert told her. “She’ll mate up to a hundred times with multiple males during her fertile period.”
This blew Cooke’s mind. “I was thrilled and quite delighted by the licentious promiscuity of the lioness,” Cooke told Nautilus in a recent conversation. That’s when the seed of her new book, Bitch: On the Female of the Species (or, in the United Kingdom edition, A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution, and the Female Animal) was planted. Cooke calls it a “shocking revelation” to have learned that “much of what I had been taught as gospel at university, the very foundations of evolutionary biology, had been distorted by prejudice.” At Oxford University, where Cooke earned her master’s in zoology, she was taught that, almost as a matter of biological law, males were the promiscuous ones, and females were choosy and chaste. The idea dates back to Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, and Bitch is about bringing Darwin up to date. (“This isn’t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology,” the book’s online description reads.)
“His theory of sexual selection was infused with the chauvinism of the period, unfortunately, which was very surprising to me, because Darwin’s my hero,” Cooke said. “He’s the reason why I studied evolution. He is an extraordinary, meticulous scientist. It’s fascinating that someone who is as cautious and thorough and methodical as Darwin is also not immune to cultural bias.”
is an entertaining and erudite corrective to years of research bias against the idea of female agency in evolution and the study of female sexual anatomy.
