Sexism Rampant in Nature

...For the single mother-to-be, there is no assistance, either in the form of a partner or child support...

...Take the behavior of the ring-neck pheasant," Tannen said...

...We need to provide tigresses, hens and all other females in nature with outreach pro-grams and support networks," Secunda said...

...Tannen said...

...When female animals refuse to play along with prescribed gender roles,Tannen said, they are demonized...

...Female Poecilia reticulata [guppies] go straight to the most brightly colored males...

...Tannen said pheasants are typical of the natural world, where a mere 5 percent of animal species mate for life...

...Far from discouraged, Secunda said she plans to embark on an intensive study of the sexuality of flora...

...It's despicable...

...She also strongly advocates the legalization of infanticide, which would enable females to devour their new-born offspring when resources are limited...

...The male has no qualms about using sheer brute force to overpower his sex partner, and the female, accustomed to this sort of rough treatment after millions of years of it, doesn't even realize there's something wrong...

...During the act of mating, the female moose is subject to excessive biting, nipping Reprinted from The Onion, America's Finest News Source...

...www.theonion.com...

...We also need to impose standards through intervention.The males of all species need to hear loud and clear the message that this kind of animal behavior is not acceptable...

...When we first decided to examine attitudes and behaviors toward gender roles among nonhumans, we were wholly unprepared for what we would find," said Jennifer Tannen, leader of the UCSD research team, a joint venture between the school's zoology and women's studies departments...

...To mate, the male Galapagos tortoise simply immobilizes the female with his weight, which, as far as I'm concerned, qualifies as nonconsensual sex,"Tannen says...

...More seriously, in addition to an unfair division of labor, nature is rife with sexual abuse and harassment...

...It seems many plants have moved past conventional notions of male-female gender altogether...

...Glen Otis Brown, author of Forced To Strut: Reverse Sexism In The Animal World, countered that male animals are victims of "the beauty myth" as much as females...

...Multicellular plants alternate sexually reproducing and asexually reproducing generations, with each plant producing both male and female gametes," Secunda said...

...STUDY FINDS SEXISM RAMPANT IN NATURE SAN DIEGO—According to a University of California-San Diego study, sexism is ram-pant throughout the natural world, particularly among the highest classes of vertebrates...

...Sadly, most creatures never pause to challenge these woefully outdated gender roles...

...A N and herding...

...With other species, darker situations unfold...

...For example, female foxes, known throughout the animal kingdom for their aggressiveness, are labeled "vixen" "We've all heard the lurid tales about the female black-widow spider, who kills and eats her mate," Tannen said...

...Ilk 82 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MARCH/APRIL 2002...

...These efforts, however, yielded mixed results: Females have avoided the lighted walkways she built in several dangerously dense areas, and leaflets encouraging females to learn how their own bodies work were ultimately used to line dens for the rainy season...

...Adding insult to injury, Tannen said, the bull moose then heads off to mate with dozens more females over a period of two to three weeks, justifying his behavior as "part of the Mardi Gras-like atmosphere of 'mating season...

...But when males evolve exaggerated secondary sexual traits to attract the opposite sex, suddenly they're the bad guys...

...Annie Secunda, a Boston-based female-rights advocate, said swift action must be taken to address the problem of sexism with-in the animal kingdom...

...After mating, the male immediately abandons the hen, leaving her responsible for the total care for the chicks...

...Females living in the wild routinely fall victim to everything from stereotyping to exclusion from pack activities to sexual harassment" Nowhere is the natural world's gender inequity more transparent,Tannen said, than in the unfair burden females assume for the rearing of offspring...

...It's so liberating, I can't help but have hope for all those so-called `higher' species of animals...

...Among these dominance-asserting behaviors are chest-puffing, plumage-spreading, and antler growth...

...But no one condemns the male for his part in this destructive relationship" UCSD researchers identified 24 distinct male behaviors designed to perpetuate gender inequity and preserve the prevailing power structure...

...The UCSD study is not without its detractors...

...Among species that do form lasting pairs, the situation barely improves: Females must remain close to the nest to incubate eggs, nurse and keep watch over the burrow while males are free to go off hunting and fishing with their friends...

...The UCSD study estimates that in 2001 alone, more than 170 trillion cases of abuse occurred in the world's forests, grass-lands and oceans—all of them unreported...

...The truth is, male spiders encourage their partners to kill them because it increases the time spent mating and, thus, the number of eggs fertilized by his sperm...

...Secunda spent much of 2001 in the Amazon rainforest, working to create safe spaces for female animals...

...Secunda conducts numerous workshops aimed at creating female-friendly biomes and promoting a positive self-image of females on both land and in the sea...

...When given a choice, female green tree frogs gravitate toward males that call the loudest and most often," Brown said...

...The sexist attitude that childrearing is `women's work' is prevalent throughout nature and has been for generations, probably since reptiles first developed mammalian characteristics in the Triassic period," Tannen said...