I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear and Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

Soology in particular is really vulnerable to cultural bias and the Victorian norms

informed his idea of the sexes and so when he came to define them he branded the female

of the species in the shape of Victorian housewife because that was what was seemingly at the time.

That's Lucy Cook. She has a serious bone to pick with her great hero Charles Darwin.

Not to mention the famous biologist she studied under a Oxford University Richard Dawkins.

She feels that both these men in keeping with the culture of their times, characterized women as

passive a little dough and not nearly as interested in sex as they were. So Lucy set off around the world

meeting mostly women biologists and researching how being female plays out in species as diverse

as mere cats, bonobos and songbirds and she's now written the fears and funny book about her

adventures with the provocative title Bitch on the Female of the Species.

This is going to be really fun because you're dealing with a subject that everybody is dealing with

nowadays gender and sex. We've been dealing with sex longer than just recently but you have a wonderful

take on it that it's all varied. Yeah I do. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it and I think

that the subject of sex, one of the reasons why we're grappling with it culturally is that it is

incredibly complex. So it's a lot more complicated than we've been led to believe.

We can see evidence of that across the animal kingdom and perhaps when you see it across

other species it sort of starts to make sense a bit. I thought it was so interesting that a large

thrust of your book is how science itself has been short changed by the adoption of Victorian

ideals about the roles of men and women that had not only spilled over into our culture but it spilled

over into the scientific view of men and women the differences among them. It goes back even before

Darwin doesn't it goes back to at least to Aristotle. What did he actually say about women?

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