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Sexual Selections What We Can and Can't Learn about Sex from Animals
Downloadable eBook versions available: Adobe eReader at Amazon.com, $12.95
"Fascinating and persuasive. Zuk is not an idealogue, just an unusually clear-eyed scholar. No doubt some readers will resist her efforts to claim scientific dispassion for feminism. But few will dispute her modest and sensible conclusion: for those open-minded enough, 'nature does not provide object lessons so much as challenges to our assumptions.'"--New York Times Book Review, 7/14
"Zuk's analogies are better than anyone's--pithy, insightful, and funny. Who said feminists lack humor? Zuk made me laugh with deep pleasure more than once, as she reviewed the lessons of feminism for our understanding of non-human animals. Her main point--that studying the lives of non-humans should not be for the lessons they seem to provide for our political purposes, but for the pleasure of knowing nature on its own terms--will be compelling reading for all naturalists, feminists and not-feminists alike."--Patricia Adair Gowaty, editor of Feminism and Evolutionary Biology DESCRIPTION (back to top)
Scientific discoveries about the animal kingdom fuel ideological
battles on many fronts, especially battles about sex and gender. We now
know that male marmosets help take care of their offspring. Is this
heartening news for today's stay-at-home dads? Recent studies show that
many female birds once thought to be monogamous actually have chicks that
are fathered outside the primary breeding pair. Does this information
spell doom for traditional marriages? And bonobo apes take part in
female-female sexual encounters. Does this mean that human homosexuality
is natural? This highly provocative book clearly shows that these are the
wrong kinds of questions to ask about animal behavior. Marlene Zuk, a
respected biologist and a feminist, gives an eye-opening tour of some of
the latest developments in our knowledge of animal sexuality and
evolutionary biology. Sexual Selections exposes the
anthropomorphism and gender politics that have colored our understanding
of the natural world and shows how feminism can help move us away from our
ideological biases.
As she tells many amazing stories about animal behavior--whether of
birds and apes or of rats and cockroaches--Zuk takes us to the places
where our ideas about nature, gender, and culture collide. Writing in an
engaging, conversational style, she discusses such politically charged
topics as motherhood, the genetic basis for adultery, the female orgasm,
menstruation, and homosexuality. She shows how feminism can give us the
tools to examine sensitive issues such as these and to enhance our
understanding of the natural world if we avoid using research to champion
a feminist agenda and avoid using animals as ideological weapons.
Zuk passionately asks us to learn to see the animal world on its own
terms, with its splendid array of diversity and variation. This knowledge
will give us a better understanding of animals and can ultimately change
our assumptions about what is natural, normal, and even possible.
Acknowledgments ABOUT THE AUTHOR (back to
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