Bitch review – a middle finger to outdated views on sex, animals and evolution
Think you know everything about the spectrum of sexuality in the animal kingdom? Think again. A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal by Lucy Cooke takes our limited understanding of the behaviour of female animals, moulded by centuries of outdated binary expectations, to instead reveal how female animals reflect a smorgasbord of sexual identity and sexuality.
Throughout Bitch, Cooke takes the common misconceptions of female experience, baked in centuries-old patriarchal batter, and blows these myths out the water. Maternal? The female jacana bird abandons her eggs and leaves them to a harem of cuckolded males to raise. Needs a man? Female albatross couples team up together to raise their chicks in Hawaii. Heteronormative? “Lesbian” lizards have lost the need for men altogether as they can reproduce solely by cloning, and there are “bisexual” bonobos. Sexually inferior? The promiscuous female langurs would beg to differ, as would the female fruit flies who play the field. Passive? Tell that to the dominant female lemurs of Madagascar or the female spiders who consume their lovers as pre-and-post coital snacks.
In Bitch, Cooke takes us on a thrilling safari and introduces us to this wondrous cast of animals, who transpire to be every bit as sexually promiscuous, competitive and aggressive as their male counterparts. To contextualise this outdated view of passive/dominance in the animal kingdom, Cooke transports us back to Victorian England in the age of Darwin’s theory of evolution where he, along with the “the coterie of gentlemen zoologists that helped inform his argument”, hindered the multifariousness of the female experience through machismo views of bodies, brains, biology and behaviour.
Cooke gives the two-fingers to these 19th-century views by embracing the “rabble-rousing” matriarchs of the 21st century instead. The author interviews scientists looking at the female species in their own right, putting up a microscope on their bodies and behaviours and asking questions about how selection works from the perspective of a daughter, mother and female competitor.
The best-selling author, award-winning documentary filmmaker, zoologist, and broadcaster has often been spoken of as the heir apparent to David Attenborough owing to her lively and engaging demeanour on our television screens. Unashamedly X-rated, joyous, and deeply informative — Bitch is yet another notch on Cooke’s belt. Her riotous narrative and wry wit — a sub-chapter is called 50 Ways to Eat Your Lover — makes for an enlivening read that would otherwise feel like an information overload.
Bitch is a radical revaluation of ideas of sexuality in the animal kingdom and belongs on library shelves up-and-down the country.