lessons from the female of the species
birds don't get PMS + reading from around the internet
Well hello there. I hadn’t meant for it to be so long between posts, but here we are.
A lot has happened since mid-May, when we were talking about a formula shortage and the fact that mothers have always gotten abortions, and so much of it seems bad. I’ve got posts on abortion and contraception and gun violence and patriotism in draft, and I’ve honestly just been too sad to finish them. So I’ve been sitting in the sun and revising my book proposal and reading tons of thrillers of widely varying quality (any recommendations?) and hanging out with my kids. Basically, I’ve been trying to take a break.
I also wanted to share something I’ve been telling myself, just in case it helps you: there’s no threshold for deserving a break. Just because lots of other people have it worse, or you could maybe power through a couple more tasks today, or you’re not totally burned out yet, that doesn’t mean you have to keep going. (Work is a scam, anyway.) It’s summer, it’s a bajillion degrees and humid, it’s a good season for slowing down. My brain’s going about half speed these days, and I’m just leaning into it.
In any case, I thought I’d pop in today to share a snippet of a book I’ve been reading and loving, Bitch: The Female of the Species, by zoologist Lucy Cooke.
Cooke’s book, which I first discovered when I happened to catch her on 1A, aims to unsettle the assumption, going back to Darwin, that male animals are the ones worth watching, with female animals being basically passive and predictable. The book follows Cooke on adventures from observing spider mating in a London zoo to fostering a wild baby owl monkey in the Peruvian Amazon to visiting the field station on the Isle of May in Scotland where thousands of grey seals gather to give birth. The book focuses on the diversity of animal life—and what she finds challenges a lot of received wisdom about gender and sex across the animal kingdom.
One of the enduring obsessions of the book I’m working on now is how animals have informed our understanding of what’s “natural” about human mothering, and Cooke’s book speaks really brilliantly to that theme. As Cooke explains, early evolutionary biology operated, where female animals are concerned, on a bit of a feedback loop: male scientists, going back to Darwin, set out into the wild expecting to see female animals behaving the way they believed the women they’d left at home should, as devoted, passive, monogamous partners and mothers. Because that’s what they were looking for, that’s what they found, even when they significantly twist the evidence before their eyes to make it work. And then, they had ostensibly empirical evidence to support the thing they’d believed all along: that females are by nature docile and submissive. An angel on the savannah, if you will.
I’ll share one particularly delightful example of the lengths scientists have gone to in support of this wild and unfounded assumption about the essential nature of female animals.
Ornithologists John Marzluff and Russell Balda set out to study pinyon jays, and they began by looking for the “alpha male.” When they couldn’t find obvious conflict among the males, they worked to gin some up by creating special feeding stations stocked with all the tastiest-to-jays treats, like greasy popcorn and mealworms. But even that didn’t do much to stir up fights among the males, and the subtler signs of conflict didn’t point to the clear social hierarchy they’d expected.
Here’s what they did find: “dramatic airborne battles where dueling pairs became locked in combat mid-air.” But this posed a problem for their alpha male theory because the battling birds were all female. Rather than adjust their hypothesis about the naturally aggressive and dominant nature of the male pinyon jay, they came up with an explanation for this belligerent female behavior. They waved it away as a wild, seasonal anomaly: “their hormones surge as the breeding season approaches giving them the equivalent of PMS which we call PBS (pre-breeding syndrome)!” (!!!) (As you’ll see below, the original exclamation point is in the original, but the supplemental ones are mine.)
My dudes, there is no such thing as PBS. Rather than accept that the sex roles of birds didn’t align to their anticipations, these very smart, well-respected scientists invented bird PMS.
And, as Cooke’s book so eloquently demonstrates, this isn’t just about birds. The “accidental sexism,” as she puts it, that’s baked into the sciences has filtered out into the culture, reinforcing longstanding stereotypes about gender roles, male aggression, promiscuity and monogamy, mothering, and more. What I love about her book is how it illuminates all the surprising weirdness and wildness of the animal kingdom—and how considering those animals can help us rethink our own lives.
elsewhere on the internet
I’ve been thinking a ton about parenting in community, and I loved this essay, “The World Needs Uncles, Too,” by Isaac Fitzgerald.
My new book, Pocket Universe, got a really lovely review in Colorado Review from Katherine Indermaur, who called it “a tender and expansive poetry collection on new motherhood.”
I was on the fun podcast Mother Plus recently, talking about writing and mothering, the nonsense of parenting styles, and our bonkers expectations of mothers in this country.
I got to talk with my colleague Cynthia Arrieu-King, who hosts the poetry podcast The Last Word, about my new book, Pocket Universe. I also read two poems from The Long Devotion and may have cried a little (January Gill O’Neil’s poem has a line about her love for her son that always gets me), but I hope she edited that out.
Over on Write More, Be Less Careful, I had a great interview with novelist Erin Flanagan, whose new thriller, Blackout, is smart and zippy—a great summer read.
I’d love to hear from you. You can always reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).