Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation

by Olivia Judson

  But you shouldn’t think that all rapists are desperadoes, guys who can’t get a girl any other way. Rape has also been reported in lobsters, fish, turtles, birds, bats, and primates. The identity of the perpetrators is not always known: in the little brown bat, anonymous males creep through the vast winter roosts, raping females (and even males) who are hibernating. But among birds at least, rapists are typically respectable married men. Take the white-fronted bee-eater, a small, colorful bird that lives in big colonies throughout central and east Africa. Males and females form stable couples, nesting together year after year. But don’t let that fool you. White-fronted bee-eaters are hardly living some matrimonial idyll. Rape is commonplace. If a female ventures from her nest alone, she will probably be chased by at least one male and perhaps as many as twelve; if they succeed in pinning her to the ground, they all jump on her at once and try to mate with her. In some colonies, females have a one in five chance of being raped in a given year. Yet despite the fact that in a given year many males are bachelors—and under the desperado theory would be the chief suspects—the bachelors are innocent. Almost all would-be rapists are paired with other females in the colony. The lesser snow goose, another bird who lives in colonies, is even worse. In this species, married males routinely attack nesting females. A female left alone for an instant will probably be assaulted by the guy from the nest next door; the usual reason she’s on her own is that her husband is off trying to rape someone else. In some colonies, each female is the victim of a rape attempt about once every five days.

  As far as anyone can tell, however, this dreadful behavior rarely results in conception. The best estimates suggest that only 1 percent of white-fronted bee-eater chicks are conceived through rape; for the lesser snow goose, that figure is 5 percent. So why aren’t these fellows content to look after their wives and children like upstanding members of the community? As in most other birds where males sexually assault females, everyone lives in close proximity. Under these circumstances a male doesn’t have to look far for his victims: the cost of attempting rape is minimal. Therefore, the reward—in terms of additional children—needn’ t be enormous for the behavior to persist.

  But how do we know the girls aren’t actually asking for it? Sexual coercion is always hard to judge: struggling is not necessarily an indication of reluctance. Many females, though, struggle only when their reluctance is real. Take the American lobster. Females can mate after they’ve just molted as well as when their shells are hard. Females about to molt start visiting males, and when they find a fellow they like, they move in with him. No struggling there. Likewise, when a hard-shelled female wants to frolic, she’ll present her rear to a fellow after the briefest of preliminaries. But an unwilling female will run from a male’s advances. He’ll give chase and may even try to haul her from her burrow. Or take scorpionflies. Females fly toward males bearing food and mate while they eat; they fly from empty-handed males. If captured, they fight vigorously to escape, twisting and turning their abdomens to avoid genital contact. When a female bee-eater mates with her husband—as she does once every couple of hours while she’s laying eggs—she permits him to feed her an insect, then lifts her tail and holds still while he flutters behind her. But when she’s accosted by other males, she flees. If they force her down, she presses her rear firmly against the ground and keeps her tail down, a posture that hinders sex. Moreover, before she leaves her nest, she whistles. If her husband is near, the whistle calls him over so he can escort her. It’s a good idea: escorted females are hardly ever assaulted.

  All this, together with the small fraction of rape attempts that produce offspring, suggests that resistance is not a ruse to attract male attention. Instead of lying back and thinking of England, most females adopt a “death before dishonor” response to sexual assault. Which raises another important question. Since resistance can result in serious injury or death, why don’t females evolve to submit? This is not something that has been studied. But my bet is that there will often be a cost to submitting—one that, on average, outweighs the risk of injury or death. Such a cost can be inferred: remember that in some birds a male who suspects his mate of infidelity will make less effort to feed the chicks, and chicks sometimes starve as a result. In some species of scorpionfly, females live off male efforts to provide food and never have to soil their hands by foraging, an activity that would increase their risk of becoming spider fodder. A female who fails to resist rape attempts would have to forage for herself or go hungry. And we know that in some species females suffer significant costs if mates are foisted on them—by a scientist, for example—rather than being chosen freely. In both the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and the field cricket Gryllus bimaculatus, females assigned a partner have fewer children than those who get to choose.

  If male birds, lobsters, scorpionflies, and sagebrush crickets can gain from forcing females to have sex, what about humans? I know. The thought that rape could be natural—by which I mean an intrinsic, evolved part of a man’s behavior—is distasteful, even offensive. But to be blunt, it is possible. Evolution does not obey human notions of morality, nor is human morality a reflection of some natural law. The deadly sins would be different if they mirrored evolutionary no-no’s. Lust, for one, would be deemed a virtue; chastity would be deplored. In principle, rape could have evolved in humans just as in any other animal: if rapists, on average, had more children than other men, any genes underlying the behavior would spread.

  This logic is indisputable. Beyond that, however, it is impossible to say anything definite. Nothing is currently known about the genetics of rape in any animal, let alone humans. But suppose some men do turn out to carry genes that predispose them to rape. Would that somehow make rape acceptable? Of course not. Understanding human evolution and genetics may one day tell us why we are the way we are. But it can tell us nothing about what we would like to become.

  Girls, if you want the profile of a typical rapist, I can’t give you one. In some societies, they are desperate losers. In others, they are married men. In still others, all males, whether young, old, subordinate, or dominant, use force sometimes. There is no general rule. So what’s a girl to do? Here’s my Guide to Self-Defense:

  1. Don’t attract attention. Hide or be otherwise inconspicuous.

  2. Don’t leave home alone. Hire an escort or, failing that, stick with other females.

  3. Do avoid groups of idle males. If they congregate at a place you must go to, try to time your visit to coincide with the arrival of other females.

  4. Do carry weapons. Males tend to be servile if females are well-armed.

  8

  HELL HATH NO FURY

  So the guys fight and brawl with each other while the girls live in peace and harmony? Not bloody likely …

  Dear Dr. Tatiana,

  My name’s Jerome, and I’m a moorhen. I’m seriously alarmed by the violent behavior of the girls in my species: they’re not babes, they’re brutes. At the slightest provocation, they leap in the air and start clawing each other. Why are they so truculent, and how can I stop them from killing each other?

  Bring Back the Ladies in Norfolk

  Don’t worry: in most species, females are far too sensible to kill one another. And when they do fight to the death, it’s not usually over a man but over something important—like a house. Even then, a fight to the death is rare. It occasionally happens in thrips—tiny black insects with wings that look like miniature feathers. In certain Australian species, females are armed with massive front limbs and kill each other for their ideal home, a gall on an acacia tree. Queen ants can be belligerent too. In the seed-harvester ant, queens cooperate to found a colony and get it up and running: several queens can establish a colony faster than a queen working alone, and it will be less vulnerable to raids from neighbors. As soon as the colony looks like a going concern, though, the queens are at daggers drawn, tearing one another to pieces in battles for control of the nest. But in general, if you’re a girl, the
rewards from bumping off rivals are not worth the risk of getting killed yourself.

  That doesn’t mean that girls don’t fight over boys at all. As anyone who’s been to a girls’ school can tell you, things turn nasty when boys are in short supply. Often the problem is temporary: at the start of the breeding season of the smooth newt, girl newts are hot to trot but boy newts, who have a fixed supply of sperm for the whole season, are initially reserved. The result? Bad manners. Since newts set packets of sperm on the ground, single girls barge in on courting couples to steal the sperm just as the male deposits it. But by the end of the season, most girls have lost interest—having mated, they are busy laying eggs, a slow process because they wrap each one in a leaf—and it’s the boys who quarrel over any girls who are still keen. Likewise, in the Australian katydid Kawanaphila nartee, an elegant twiglike creature related to crickets and grasshoppers, bachelors are in great demand early in the season. That’s because these insects like to eat pollen, and in early spring most flowers haven’t bloomed yet. But males woo by secreting a large meal, which they provide along with their genes, so that springtime scarcity of pollen is a double whammy: lots of hungry females eager to mate in order to dine and hardly any males who’ve eaten enough to be able to make lunch. Under these circumstances, when a male rubs his stumpy wings together to announce he’s prepared a meal, several females come jumping and wrestle for the right to mate. Once pollen becomes abundant, however, calm is restored. Being better fed, females are less hungry for sex even as more males are able to join the dating game.

  But this is nothing. In some species, the shortage of males is chronic. For Acraea encedon, an African butterfly, the deficit is severe. More than 90 percent of the butterflies in some places are female. Why? They are infected with the dread disease Wolbachia. Wolbachia is a bacterium often found in insects; like a shape-shifting monster, it has different effects on different hosts. For these butterflies, it is King Herod, killing little boys early in their embryonic development. Where Wolbachia is common, male Acraea are rare—and females gather, chasing any butterfly they see in desperate attempts to find a mate.

  The usual reason for a dearth, happily, is more benign. In some species where males help with child care, a given male cannot look after all the eggs or young that one female can produce. Ideally, then, each female would have more than one male at her disposal. But that causes shortages—and fighting. Consider the midwife toad Alytes muletensis, a mottled olive and orange creature who lives in gorges on the Mediterranean island of Majorca. In the evenings, males croon love songs from hiding places in the rocks. Females who are ready to lay their eggs will answer one of the singers and then hop around to his home to make his acquaintance. If she likes the looks of him, she’ll stroke him on the snout—midwife toad for “Let’s do it, baby.” At that, he grabs her from behind. She responds by stamping in place, and he starts strumming her genitalia with his toes. They keep this up—punc—tuated by brief pauses—for perhaps a couple of hours, although heavy petting can go on all night. At last, the female goes into spasms and releases her eggs, each one connected to the one before by a thin gelatinous thread, a kind of poor man’s pearls. As the eggs appear, the male wraps his arms around her neck, releases sperm, and starts scissoring his legs like a demented gymnast. The point of this antic soon becomes clear: he’s winding the string of eggs around his legs, where it will remain until the eggs are ready to hatch into tadpoles.

  Which is why the fighting begins. Once a male has a string of eggs, he’s unavailable until he’s dumped the ripened eggs into a pool of water. That could take anywhere from nineteen days to two months—exactly how long depends on the weather, as eggs develop more slowly at lower temperatures. But females can produce a clutch every three weeks or so, and they must find a male to look after them; if they cannot, they will lose the clutch. Available males become hot items, and females are not ashamed of trying to steal someone else’s guy. Females wrestle with each other or, more often, intrude on a courting couple and hug the male from behind so he can’t strum properly—in hopes that the rival female will get fed up with his lousy tap dancing.

  This combination—males looking after young and females wanting more than one male each—often leads to blows. That’s why I suspect the Darwin frog of having pugnacious females. This little green frog with a pointy nose, who makes its home in the leaf litter of Chilean forests, has an obscure sex life. But we do know a few salient facts. Females lay between thirty and forty eggs. Once fertilized, the eggs sit in the damp earth for about three weeks, at which point the muscular twitchings of the developing embryos stimulate males to start parental care. The form of parental care is peculiar, perhaps unique: the males swallow the eggs and brood the tadpoles in their vocal sacs. After about fifty-two days, Dad opens his mouth and, abracadabra, tiny frogs hop out. Obviously, while a male has his vocal sacs stuffed with tadpoles, he can’t sing to attract more mates, so brooding is a big commitment. Unlike the Japanese cardinal fish, a species where males brood fry in their mouths, the Darwin frog doesn’t eat his children if he sees a girl sexier than his original mate. But since each male can manage only about fifteen tadpoles, a female needs two or three males per brood. Moreover, every brooding male is out of action for over seven weeks. In such a system, competition for available males must be intense.

  Even when bachelors are out in droves, though, girls still scrap and bicker if some fellows are better catches than others. It’s the same old story: everyone wants to marry the heir to a fortune, no one wants the poor pimply guy in the corner. This is what’s going on with your female moorhens, Jerome. All the girls set their caps at the smallest, fattest fellows; no one wants the big gangly one. If the girls start fighting whenever you approach, you must be ravishingly rotund. Why the fuss over small and fat? In moorhen culture, males do most of the work of sitting on eggs. This may not sound strenuous, but it is. Males fade away as the breeding season wears on. Fat guys can keep eggs warm for longer, and females with fat fellows can produce more clutches in a season than girls with slimmer spouses. Given the difference, it’s worth fighting to secure a fat mate. And small? Small males fatten up better. For moorhens, short and dumpy is in.

  Dear Dr. Tatiana,

  I’m a burying beetle. I met my wife when we worked together at a chipmunk’s funeral. It was love at first sight, and after a whirlwind romance I thought I’d found paradise. But now she’s turned into a frightful harridan. Nag, nag, nag. I don’t get a moment’s peace, and whenever I try to relax in the evening by doing headstands, she bites me or knocks me over. What have I done to deserve this, and how can I get her off my back?

  I Hate the Trouble and Strife in Ontario

  Are you sure you’re not trying to have your corpse and eat it too? You know as well as I do that when a male burying beetle stands on his head he exposes the tip of his abdomen and sends sexy scents wafting through the air. I suspect that when you do your headstands you’re not chilling out but trying to attract a mistress. Call it a hunch, but that might be why your wife finds your behavior galling.

  Look at it from her point of view. The two of you must have struggled for hours to bury that chipmunk. Chipmunks are more than two hundred times heavier than burying beetles. If you were lucky, the body was lying on soft earth so all you had to do was dig soil out from beneath it. But if the ground was hard, you would have had to move the corpse, perhaps over the astonishingly long distance of several meters, to soft ground. Once the body was at last interred and out of reach of ants and blowflies, you had to remove its fur and massage its poor dead flesh into a ball, ready to feed to your babies when they hatch and crawl onto the carcass. Lucky babies! Nothing like regurgitated rotting chipmunk to give you the start you need! Picture it: the grubs sitting in the carcass, rearing up and opening their mouths like baby birds when you or your wife chirrs and bends over to give them their lunch. It’s heartwarming to think that these maggoty grubs, who now bear no resemblance to their magnificent parents, wil
l one day sport shiny black wing covers scalloped with red just like yours.

  But now you and your headstands threaten this blissful scene. Sure, a mistress would be great for you—you would have more children if you could lure a second female to the carcass. But it would be a disaster for your wife. The presence of another woman and her brats would make it harder for your wife to raise all of hers. This is not just because the two families would have to share the chipmunk meat and there might not be enough to go around. Rather, the mistress would probably murder (and then eat) some of your wife’s children. (To be fair, though, your wife wouldn’t refrain from chowing down the mistress’s kids—it’s a burying-beetle-eat-burying-beetle world.)

  Females of many species stand to lose if their mate takes an additional lover. Sometimes the mistress does a burying beetle and kills the wife’s children. In both the house sparrow and the great reed warbler, for example, a male with two mates will help only the female whose clutch hatches first, so to ensure herself of male assistance, a savvy mistress will smash all the wife’s eggs. But things are not always so grim. Often the wife loses out simply because a gallivanting male leaves her with more work than she can handle and she’s not able to raise as many offspring. Or she may lose because the brats from a second liaison take food or other valuable resources away from her own children. But whatever the reason, females in many species are not interested in sharing their man—and take steps to prevent it.

  As you’ve discovered, scolding, chivying, and harrying a fellow is one way to make sure he doesn’t have time for mischief. A female pied flycatcher who catches her mate singing when he should be working isn’t subtle in her disapproval, often interrupting him to make him shut up. The story is familiar: a male pied flycatcher who’s trying to impress some floozy will hastily depart if he sees his angry wife bearing down on him.