Review: 'Bitch: On the Female of the Species'

 by Dan Frampton

Bitch: On the Female of the Species, by Lucy Cooke

Books are often described as a ‘must read’, but this one, I think, might just be.

‘I was under the impression,’ Lucy Cooke writes in her new book, Bitch: On the Female of the Species, ‘that science was, well, scientific. That is, rational, evidence based, empirically deduced and uncontaminated knowledge.’ Cooke, and the reader along with her, are shocked by the extent to which she proves it is not. 

Cooke’s target is evolutionary biology, and the ways in which female animals have been completely misrepresented by science. She examines how, under the influence of Victorian attitudes towards human females, as well a desire to categorise and impose order on the natural word, Darwin and other biologists since, have misrepresented, ignored, and even, in some cases, completely fabricated the truth. 

Throughout her book, Cooke reveals how deep human prejudices and biases are ingrained. It’s in the language used (males have ‘adaptations’ and females ‘counter adaptations’) and it’s in the people using it (Darwin felt science was no place for a woman and, despite recent progress many women, even leaders in their field, still struggle for funding and recognition). The type species, used to define a species, are heavily biased towards males and, in live specimens, females can too often be avoided due to the myth of their ‘messy hormones’. Furthermore, Cook argues, the female white mice used for much laboratory research, have been ‘domesticated by chauvinism’, with the aggressive female behaviours demonstrated by this species in the wild completely bred out to create a ‘model animal’.

And yet, despite these challenges, in just shy of 300 pages, Cooke strips away stereotype after stereotype to reveal a new diversity. We all know of the Queen Bee and the male seahorse who carries his young, but we meet a whole range of other animals that do not fit human assumptions. We read, for instance, of female bonobos who shun males to have regular sex with each other and post menopausal orcas whose wisdom is so respected that they, and not males, rule their pods. Perhaps most fascinatingly, we learn of clownfish who live in a colony with a dominant breeding pair and, if the dominant female dies, the largest male undergoes a sex change and becomes the new female, and the next largest male then moves up in the hierarchy and becomes the breeding male. Not quite the plot of Disney/Pixar’s blockbuster film, Finding Nemo, Cooke wryly comments!

It all matters not just in the name of truth, but because so often biological fact is also used to pass comment on humans too. How often do we read of certain aspects of our own behaviour being justified or undermined by virtue of them being ‘natural’ or not? Biology can be just politics by another name. In this book, Cooke convincingly demonstrates that females throughout the animal kingdom defy the stereotypes: they are not always (or, in some cases, ever) monogamous, passive and weaker; their lives are not solely determined by selfless motherhood; their reproductive systems are worthy of study; they have an important and overlooked role in evolution; and, in some cases, the categories of male and female are useless. In doing so, Cooke has simultaneously brought us closer to the truth of nature and shown human diversity as entirely natural also.