Bitch

Cooke brings an extremely entertaining style to this wide-ranging tour of female biology and reproduction. Rather than drill down on a single species, Cooke brings in experts of species from across the animal kingdom on different aspects of sex, starting from its biological complexity and going through mating and child rearing behaviors and strategies. What emerges is the plethora of strategies that different species take, which can even differ radically between those that are closely related, and the degree to which recent human cultural biases have driven the study and interpretation of these behaviors. The book is a bit light on scientific rigor, with Cooke using interviews with scientists rather than digging into the papers themselves. This is a somewhat minor complaint - I think most people won't mind skipping the details. Highly recommend

This book is probably a really good one to hand to anyone who likes clever prose and is interested in learning about actual animals (and not, as exists in the most commonly referenced texts on evolution, fucking hypothetical seaweed). There are tons of examples that discuss the concepts within the book, which really help to give a mental image to what's happening. This is something that I appreciate, even in pop science texts.

I also think it's good for any of the people others know who are interested in the topic but are sitting on the fence about gender and sexuality (like someone who still thinks men/women and their related roles are the only ones in the world but is at least open to learning some new facts about their world that could, one hopes, shift their gears a bit).

Wow, one of the most powerful books I have read in ages. This has really blown me away and made me appreciate nature gender and sex in a whole new light, including us humans. I didn’t finish biology a-level but found it very easy to read and understand.

Shines a fresh light on research previously (poorly) conducted and subsequently taught as empirical truth. Gives voice to researchers who have been previously unheard.

Should be read by anyone interested in -zoology, evolution, gender, ecology, sexuality, feminism, I cannot praise this book enough. This is one of the few books I have borrowed from the library and now what to buy to keep.


Some of my favourite quotes in this fabulous and really accessible read-


‘ I think it was those transitional anemonefish that rocked my world most. They made me think about my sex in the most radical way, forcing me to question core presumptions about how it is defined. This was both uncomfortable and exhilarating. Discovering
that biological sex is, in truth, a spectrum and that all sexes are the product of basically the same genes, the same hormones and the
same brains, has been the greatest revelation of all. It's forced a shift in my perspective to recognize my own cultural biases and try
to banish any lingering heteronormative presumptions about the relationship between sex, sexual identity, sexed behaviour and sex-
uality. A freedom of thought that's challenging to maintain, but leaves me empowered by the boundless possibilities of the female experience.

Joan Roughgarden has been a very noisy critic of Darwins sexual selection theory. Its legacy, she claims, has forced generations of biologists to try to cram the immense sexual variation in nature - the rainbows, as she calls them into overly orthodox binary boxes.
The biggest error of biology today is uncritically assuming that the gamete size binary implies a corresponding binary in body
type, behaviour and life history,; she states at the start of her book. This has dangerous implications for science and society; 'suppressing the full story of gender and sexuality denies diverse people their right to feel at one with nature', she argues.
"The true story of nature is profoundly empowering for peoples of minority gender
expressions and sexualities.'

People forget there are more similarities between the sexes than there are differences.
Crewe’s illustrated this profound and inspiring point, like all good scientists, with a rather boring graph. The overlap behind humps of linear data (one for male and one for female showed individual variation within a sex is greater than the average variation between the sexes). Biology often ignores individual variation and irons out any extremes to consider only what is typical for each sex. So on paper the sexes appear to be completely
different, but this is just a statistical phenomenon. The truth is that males and females are more alike than they are different.
We all come from a single fertilized cell. Therefore we have to have all of the elements to create both sexes, Crews added. I feel
that if we can study the similarities in greater depth we might dis cover that, in fact, everything about the individual is bisexual?
The anemonefish would certainly agree. But so might some of the more binary creatures we've met in the pages of this book. The
synchronized courtship and sexual behaviour of those all-female albatross or gecko couples and the neural switch for “maternal
instinct' demonstrated in the brains of male and female frogs and mice also suggest Crews is correct.