At first glance, the swear word "bitch" is not a compliment, but it doesn't have to stay that way. British zoologist Lucy Cooke has now published a book entitled "Bitch", in which she offers what is announced in the subtitle as "a revolutionary guide to sex, evolution and the female animal".
It is a mind-blowing insight into the evolutionary understanding of what females do in what is called sex, to avoid the horrible word of intercourse, where you always think you see detours and prohibition signs.
Like many disciplines of science, the study of sex - even there the "bad" rings through - was the domain of men, and when Lucy Cooke was a student, she was told that the difference between males and females was due to the different sizes of the egg and sperm. Evolution had placed the huge egg cell in the female body, to which the tiny sperm cells then raced.
This is how the early biologists of the Victorian era saw the roles being defined - men had to fight and assert themselves, while women waited dutifully to conceive and carry to term. In other words, Charles Darwin looked further and noticed that men hardly invested in offspring, while women often risked their lives to have children. This gave him the idea that, in addition to natural selection, there must also be sexual selection, in which nature gave females or women a power that Darwin called "female choice".
Apart from that, in the eyes of most biologists, the role of women remained passive, but now the opposite seems to be the case, and observations in the animal kingdom are accumulating that see in women the "bitch" that Lucy Cooke introduces in the title of her book. She talks about how female lemurs in Madagascar physically and socially dominate their male partners, how female albatrosses in Hawaii team up to raise their offspring without males or how guenon mothers become the most murderous mammals on the planet.
Apparently, the pioneers of sex education wanted to impose their ideas on nature, but it didn't work. "Bitch" shows that there are more similarities between men and women than differences. That doesn't make sex boring, on the contrary, it makes it really exciting.
