From Bitch: What does it mean to be female? (2022), by Lucy Cooke:
“Darwin’s authenticator was Angus John Bateman, a young but distinguished plant geneticist working at the John Innes Horticultural Institute in London. Bateman hatched an ambitious plan to legitimize Darwin’s ‘general law’ that males are ardent whereas females are coy. Bateman noted that Darwin had based these gendered roles on observation alone and, without empirical support, the great man had been ‘at a loss’ to ‘explain the sex difference. Bateman’s self-imposed challenge was to offer an empirical lifeline to Darwin’s ideas.
To do so, Bateman turned his attention away from plants and on to the minuscule flies that seem to magic out of nowhere to waft around rotting fruit. Drosophila melanogaster, the humble fruit fly, may be an annoying pest to most frugivores but it is the geneticist’s best friend. These tiny insects reach sexual maturity in a matter of days, lay hundreds of eggs and, most crucially, can be bred in the lab to display obvious genetic mutations…
…’Bateman’s gradient’, as it is widely known, proved that for males competition was such that while some flies were studs, others were duds. Females, on the other hand, showed little difference in their reproductive output. Bateman’s results revealed that the most successful male fruit fly produced nearly three times as many offspring as the most successful female. Whereas a fifth of all males failed to sire any offspring at all, compared to just 4 per cent of females.
This variability in reproductive success cast a dull shadow over the female of the species. It implied that sexual selection acted more strongly on males than females, which were pretty much guaranteed to breed at capacity. So, as well as being branded coy, females were also deemed evolutionarily irrelevant and their behaviour unworthy of scientific scrutiny.
Despite the fact that Bateman had only tested Darwin’s theory on fruit flies, he felt confident that his conclusions could be extrapolated to far more complex organisms, like human beings. He proclaimed that a dichotomy in sex roles, namely ‘an indiscriminating eagerness’ in males and a ‘discriminating passivity’ in females, was the norm across the animal kingdom. ‘Even in a derived monogamous species (e.g. man) this sex difference might be expected to persist as a rule,’ Bateman concluded.
These fixed sex roles, Bateman proposed, were underwritten by anisogamy. A female’s reproductive success is constrained by her finite number of large, energetically expensive eggs, whereas for males, a limitless supply of cheap sperm means their reproductive output is only curbed by the number of females they can win over and mate…
…Throughout the animal kingdom, females have busted out of the *Playboy mansion and are leading sexually liberated lives for the benefit of themselves and their family, with no shame attached. Darwin’s sexual stereotypes may have been psychologically compelling to generations of male scientists, but they’ve been overthrown by an army of sexually assertive warblers, langurs and fruit flies, and the intellectually assertive females studying them.
The female of the species is emerging from the shadow cast by Bateman’s rigid paradigm, and revealing a wealth of sexual strategies that expand, rather than restrain, Darwin’s concept of sexual selection…”
* “The Playboy Mansion is the former home of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner, who lived there from 1971 until his death in 2017. The west wing of the mansion contained the editorial offices of Playboy.
The 21,987-square-foot (2,042.7 m2) house, built in the Gothic and Tudor Revival styles, sits on 5.3 acres (2.1 ha). It was designed by Arthur R. Kelly in 1927 as Holmby House, at Charing Cross Road on the Los Angeles Country Club, for Arthur Letts Jr., son of The Broadway department store founder Arthur Letts.
Arthur Letts was a skilled horticulturist and avid plant collector. The grounds of his Los Feliz, Hollywood, estate were formally laid out with wide variety of trees, shrubs, and flowers, and his cactus collection was known across the country. It was bound by Franklin Avenue, Vermont Avenue, Los Feliz Boulevard, and Laughlin Park. The gardens were open to the public for tours, with the Pacific Electric Railway stopping at it. It was his wish that the gardens be continued even after his death. Upon his death in May 1923, his wife, at the suggestion of son-in-law Harold Janss of Janss Investment Company (who lived at the back of the property), demolished the gardens and mansion in 1927 to subdivide and develop the land, and moved to a new residence in Holmby Hills. She had remarried by June, 1924 to Charles Quinn. Henry E. Huntington purchased many of the rare specimen cacti for his Huntington Desert Garden at his estate and Huntington Library in San Marino.
From the 1970s onward, the former Holmby House became the location of lavish parties held by Hugh Hefner which were often attended by celebrities and socialites. Following Hefner’s death in 2017, allegations began to emerge of drug and sexual abuse at the Playboy Mansion during Hefner’s lifetime.” (Wikipedia)
Julia Upton 