In Bitch: On the Female of the Species, Cooke somehow peppers in all the scientific jargon while remaining wildly entertaining. I purchased this delightful novel on a whim. I wanted to support a local bookstore and I needed that aggressive cover on my bookshelf. While I don’t normally read introductions to books (I also dog-ear pages if I don’t have a bookmark handy) I again, on a whim, read this one and was immediately hooked. Now, please bare with me while I work through the delicate balance of doing Cooke justice by using her own words, while at the same time employing my meager summarization skills so I don’t get sued for breaking numerous copyright laws.
Here’s one of many quotes in the introduction that acted as a punch to my gut:
The most dangerous thing about sexist bias is its boomerang nature. What started as chauvinist Victorian culture was incubated by a century of science and then spat back into society as political weaponry, rubber-stamped by Darwin. It gave a handful of, notably male, devotees of the new science of evolutionary psychology the ideological authority to claim that a host of grim male behaviours–from rape to compulsive skirt chasing to male supremacy–were ‘only natural’ for humans, because Darwin said so. They told women they had dysfunctional orgasms, that they could never break through the glass ceiling thanks to an innate lack of ambition, and should stick to mothering.
Cooke skips over much of the current misinformation on females, which makes sense because most of us already know it. Just last month I had the displeasure of seeing my sons experience it first hand while watching a nature documentary on Disney Plus. Instead, Cooke jumps to righting all the wrongs by detailing out the ways the female species world-wide are absolute bad asses.
Correcting Misconceptions
I have no idea where you are personally on your journey with feminism and science. So please give me a little grace here when I list out the things that I probably should have known, but didn’t until I read this book. One of the reasons this book exists is because much of what I’m listing below is not widely known. I’ll give you one guess as to why it isn’t.
- estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone all originate as cholesterol and are present in everyone, regardless of sex
- many females have clitorises that are larger or are at the very least more prominent than the male’s penis (the spider monkey is an excellent example)
- the Y chromosome in humans will not exist in 4 and a half million years
- Darwin had a secondary theory about males evolving their physical appearance to please women and win mates, but that gave women too much power so his additional theory was mocked and that aspect of his work was dismissed at the time and then buried after he died. It somewhat re-emerged during the 1970s
- it’s not uncommon for a female lion to mate up to 100 times in a day, with multiple partners, during oestrus
- we humans have known about the truth on the female of the species, but the Victorian era really effed things up with its insistence on keeping females of all species in line with their thoughts on human females: submissive, weak, and chaste
There’s much, much more, but above is a sample of how science has overlooked, skewed, or outright rejected some clear scientific data when it didn’t conform to their preconceived notions of men and women. I also appreciate the first chapter which covers what differentiates between a man and woman. Spoiler, it’s incredibly complex and probably not what some hateful people want to hear, but it’s fascinating to read.
Cooke’s Writing Style
Even though the material is difficult, Cooke delivers in a clever, playful way that is sure to entertain readers. Here’s a quote from the middle of the book where she is talking about one of her favorite researchers, Jeanne Altmann.
Altmann could teach logic to Captain Spock. She had started her academic career as a mathematician at UCLA–one of only three women in her class–but was forced to quit when nobody in her faculty felt it worth their time to mentor a woman. Math’s loss was zoology’s gain. Altmann arrived at field biology unencumbered by primatology’s phallocratic baggage and uniquely qualified to tackle the pitfalls of observational bias, which so plague the science.
Blunt and with a knack for using just the right words, Cooke is likely the only author who could have gotten me to read an entire non-fiction novel about all things female animals, mammals, and insects. Also, I admit I had to look up phallocratic. Yes, I know phallic even though there is no widely known word to describe anything that physically resembles vulvas or vaginas (thank you, patriarchy). But I didn’t know there were other forms of the word like phallocratic.
Final Thoughts
This book is very difficult to read at times. The animal kingdom, much like us humans, is a cruel group and there is plenty of forced copulation (not what we would call rape, the reasoning for this is detailed out in the book), murder, starvation, infanticide, etc. However, I’ve never felt more validated about the overall strength of all the women of all species.
My recommendation for this book is that you buy it and then slowly work your way through it. It took me almost a year to read this one. Take it one chapter a week or so. But read it. Mark interesting tabs along the way and wow friends at dinner parties. Pass on the knowledge and pass on the recommendation that others read it as well. If we’re going to undo the scientific bias that has and continues to plague all of society, we all need to be educated about the truth of the female of the species.