Bitch: On the Female of the Species in Science and Inquiry

Jul 19, 2022 Petra lives on a little Caribbean island is currently reading it

RTC, but briefly, the book has an overall agenda to prove that females (or 'the egg-bearing parent' as the author would prefer) can do everything males can do in the animal kingdom - lead, be aggressive, have promiscuous sex, rip other animals apart etc. This succeeds, and the science is excellent but the thesis got wearisome in parts. How to rate it is difficult. At times it was a 10 star, really relevatory, at other times a 2 star, and I'm like ok, you don't have to push the feminist, anti-unr RTC, but briefly, the book has an overall agenda to prove that females (or 'the egg-bearing parent' as the author would prefer) can do everything males can do in the animal kingdom - lead, be aggressive, have promiscuous sex, rip other animals apart etc. This succeeds, and the science is excellent but the thesis got wearisome in parts. How to rate it is difficult. At times it was a 10 star, really relevatory, at other times a 2 star, and I'm like ok, you don't have to push the feminist, anti-unreconstructed male point of view yet again. RTC
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Trigger warnings for update: ALL! don't say I didn't warn you. Have a mirror handy. Danish pig farmers have

discovered that artificial insemination is more effective if preceded by manual stimulation of the clitoris, cervix and flanks. So they鈥檝e taken a practical approach and developed a special five-step sow stimulation routine, with graphic images for guidance.

Seduction starts with the farmer stimulating the sow with a fist, moves on to massaging her hips and finishes with the farmer sitting on her back to mimic the weight of the mating male on her. This sow seduction formula results in 6 per cent more babies than going in straight with a cold hard syringe, but may put some off a career in pig farming.

Look at your face in the mirror.
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Now I'm past the early chapters and the lingering sour taste of females as 'the egg-bearing parent' has kind of faded and we are out of all that wokery, the book has become a great deal more interesting. It is a bit unbalanced with heavy science and fairly light-hearted field research anecdotes but the author comes across as having an interesting sense of humour with little quips slipped in here and there. I'm enjoying the book!
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Male sage grouse have been seen "attempting to mate with dried cowpats when there are no females around... the bar is set pretty low evidently." Which explains why the females are so drab, no need for flashy colours and make up, the males will fuck anything.

Being an entirely unreconstructed person I was kind of open-mouthed at the necessity for the author to display her woke credentials in an author's note in a science book. It is a very woke book, "I may refer to an animal's genitalia as being 'masculinized' or a brain being 'feminized' as this was the original scientific description. Such gendered terms needn't and shouldn't be used to describe animals' sex characteristics and behaviours in scholarly realms today. I also use gendered terms such as 'mother' and 'father' to describe animals..." She then goes on to deine mother as meaning the egg-producing parent. I'm wondering how the title, Bitch, fits into all this virtual-signalling?

But I thought ok, I bought this book because Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is my favourite anthropologist-author. A feminist she is the absolute antithesis of David Attenborough for whom males rule supreme in the animal world. The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture shows lions as studs and babysitters, allowed to stay by the pride of females who hunt and kill, and get rid of the lions that don't live up to their promise.

I'm finding the book an example of 'the best form of defence is attack' - Darwin and all the male scientists who thought along the lines of males are interesting, females are there to breed - get it time and time again in different ways whether out and out attack or damning with a bit of faint praise. But it isn't all like that. There is a lot of textbook-dry science about the affect of testosterone, genes and all the xy stuff (in the case of platypuses who instead of the rather general XX chromosomes for female and XY for male have XXXXXXXXXX for female and XXXXXYYYYY for male. They are mammals but lay eggs. Mixed up creatures, but happy ones, it seems.

Pornithology - the science of recording bird sex! ...more

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Dec 11, 2022 Paul Perry rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: female-author, non-fiction, british-author, read-in-2022, science, biology, evolution, culture

An excellent dive into why biological sex is less binary and straight-forward than we are usually taught, across the animal kingdom. From the (to me) startling revelation that the XX-XY sex determination we are shown in school biology is far from a universal, to overviews of many species that do not conform to the "normal" male-female binary or even change sex, one way or repeatedly.

Cooke also keeps returning to address the fact that science, rather than being simply a collection of incontrovert ...more

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Jan 01, 2024 CatReader rated it really liked it

Shelves: cc, cnet, no-audiobook

3.5 stars rounded up. An informative look at the fascinating and unexpected roles and functions of biologically female non-human animals, from fellow primates, to other mammals, to fish, to insects. This is a very information-dense book, with the Kindle Ebook abundant with hyperlinked references. At times it read like a textbook, though Cooke's central thesis (that we shouldn't accept the antiquated prejudice that female organisms are less interesting/nuanced/important than males of their specie ...more

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Feb 21, 2023 Alyssa Tuininga rated it it was amazing

Shelves: physical-books-i-have, science, nonfiction

This is the epitome of amazing science reads for me- cool anatomy, humor, random awesome facts to share with your friends, and a real look at bias and truth in science. This was one of my science book club books this month. I absolutely loved it. (Did you know female opossums have two ovaries, two uteri, two services, and two vaginas, what's more, they have a third temporary vagina that shows up simply to give birth and then closes up again? Fascinating!) ...more

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