Bitch

On the Female of the Species

Hardcover, 400 pages

English language

Published June 14, 2022 by Basic Books.

ISBN:
978-1-5416-7489-9
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A fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom

Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser.

Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones -dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted.

In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn‘t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology. It’s more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more …

6 editions

An Entertaining, Research-Infused Tour Through Female Biology

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

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