Reading 26
“Meerkat culture is tense and homicidal. A study investigating lethal violence in more than one thousand different mammals unmasked the meerkat as the most murderous mammal on the planet – beating even humans to the brutal top spot. Every meerkat born has a one in five probability of being killed by another meerkat, most likely a female and quite possibly their own mother.
“All of which makes the meerkat an odd choice for wholesome family entertainment or as a trusted purveyor of car insurance.”
- Lucy Cooke, Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal (2022)
“Originally classified as the pygmy chimpanzee, Pan paniscus, bonobos are now recognized as their own distinct species. They do indeed look a lot like their chimp cousins – if a little smaller, more lissom and with less hair. Like chimps, females are around two-thirds the size of males and also migrate from their birth group. Their social lives could not be more different, however. Instead of living out their adulthood as a forlorn diaspora with little or no agency, females join groups and form alliances with unrelated females. The power of this constructed sisterhood allows them to dominate the bigger males. It is formed and maintained not by fighting and physical intimidation, but by what scientists describe as G-G rubbing, shorthand for genito-genital rubbing. In other words, female bonobos have evolved to overthrow the patriarchy by perfecting the art of mutual frottage.”
- Lucy Cooke, Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal (2022)
“The bonobo’s sex life is as creative as it is unrestrained. Males, for example, will enjoy each other’s company by ‘penis-fencing’, which sees them rubbing their ‘swords’ together whilst dangling from a branch (nice work if you can do it). For females, the most frequent and preferred sexual activity is G-G, which they will choose over sex with a male if both present themselves at the same time. […]
“Like humans, bonobos have a partial separation between sex and reproduction, with females frequently initiating and engaging in sex outside of their fertile period. But with the average copulation lasting thirteen seconds, bonobo sex is fast, frequent and seemingly as casual as a handshake is to us.”
- Lucy Cooke, Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal (2022)
