I haven’t written it yet, but I’m fairly certain this review will mostly be made up of quotes. That’s the reason I have been letting it hold up my review queue, because I haven’t had enough spoons to sit down and go through all my tabs [see below for picture] for my favorite bits, and then organize the bits into some sort of order, and then finally think up smart things to say about them. And if not smart, then at least entertaining.
I picked this book up because I happened to be in Barnes & Noble getting another book and saw this one, which had just been picked by my friend Jessy as a book club pick for February 2023. I sat down just to look at it, with no intention of buying. I read the first page and then bought it. This was the sentence that did it: “Male animals led swashbuckling lives of thrusting agency.” She goes on throughout the rest of the book to prove that sentence wrong. But it’s still hilarious.
I’m not even going to try to get detailed with this, but in general, this is a book about how social constructs like morality, religion, patriarchy and the sexism they generate has affected our perception of the natural world, and in particular the behavior of male and female animals. Science, despite outward nods to progress, is in many ways stuck in the Victorian era with Charles Darwin (who the author clearly admires but also isn’t afraid to poke fun at). Cooke unearths studies and scientists whose revolutionary and extremely interesting findings and theories are in general being ignore or are slow to be adopted because they set our cultural paradigms on their heads. It was so, so interesting, and a couple of sections genuinely blew my mind (like the part where several scientists conclude that “female” was the original/only sex, and that sexuality started out omnidirectional).
Here is the picture of what my book looks like after reading:
And here is a sampling of the author’s extremely entertaining and highly informative prose:
“There is no conspiracy here, just blinkered science. Marzluff and Balda illustrate how good scientists can suffer bad biases. The ornithological duo were faced with confounding novel behaviour, which they interpreted within a bogus framework. They are by no means alone in their honest error. Science, it transpires, is soaked in accidental sexism.”
“Darwin was viewing the natural world through a Victorian pinhole camera. Understanding the female sex is giving us the widescreen version of life on earth, in full technicolour glory, and the story is all the more fascinating for it.”
“‘Are we to believe that the clitoris is nothing more than a pudendal equivalent of the intestinal appendix?’ wrote Hrdy in The Woman That Never Evolved. To her eyes, the variety of clitoral morphology screams adaptation. ‘I cannot understand why these old canards [male scientists] persist.'”
“Most people don’t think of the world flamboyant when describing a spider. The majority of arachnids are creepy little brown jobs, their drab appearance providing necessary crypsis when hunting or avoiding detection by sharp-eyed predators. The male peacock spider, a type of jumping spider from the Maratus genus, flouts this rule quite spectacularly. He is the Liberace of the arachnid world — an outrageous performer who, just like his avian namesake, employs an extraordinary iridescent tail-fan to win his mate.”
“Redbacks are mostly famous for their enthusiastic bite and penchant for hanging out under toilet seats, a cruel marriage that fuels international Schadenfreude with headlines like ‘Spider Bites Australian Man On Penis Again.'”
“When I asked him about the Hugh Hefner Hypothesis, he told me there was no evidence of orca males favouring sex with young females: ‘I can’t see any scenario where that would be adaptive for a male orca.’ In fact, I’ve been told it is quite the reverse: post-menopausal female orcas have a decidedly cougar-like sex life and are often seen soliciting eager young pubescent males for sex.”
“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.”
“A biologically accurate version of this hit movie [Finding Nemo] would therefore have seen Nemo’s father, Marlin, transition into a female, and then start having sex with her son, which might have made for a less popular family film.”
And finally:
“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.”
CBR15 Passport: Books recommended by friends.