Wang Dake held her book. Courtesy of respondents
"Their Sex" by Wang Dake New Classics/Nova Press
Wang Dake's painting "Dumb Woman" courtesy of the interviewee
Only when peeking into the scene is the chicken in the coop will be so consistent: the roosters and hens who eat, drink, fight, and sleep rush to the wire cage and watch the two chickens in the laboratory mate.
In charge of the mating experiment was Wang Dake, a Ph.D. in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. To relieve the pressure on the two chickens ready to mate, she pulled a dark green curtain and gathered it around the iron cage, trying to block the view of the voyeurs.
This group of "voyeuristics" emerged from the gap under the curtain and looked at it with their necks folded; Jump on a branch and stand on a high place to watch; Other hens pecked through a corner of the curtain and peeked sideways with one eye.
Standing on the sidelines, Wang Dake's research topics are somewhat "fierce": the sexual behavior strategy of chickens in different social environments, sperm allocation strategies, and cognitive decision-making strategies.
Simply put, it is to study how chickens find objects from the courtship and mating behavior of chickens. For example, how does the rooster ejaculate change in a relaxed environment or when two roosters are competing?
Wang Dake is a post-90s generation, and in her words, the initial research on this topic was curiosity about human intimacy.
As a child, she read literature depicting swans as loyal to love, and if a hunter kills a swan, its partner will immediately commit suicide. But after the student sex, she learned that the swan cheating rate is very high, if a litter of swan eggs are given a paternity test, most of them are not from the same father.
This became the starting point for her research on zoology. She found an Oxford university supervisor from a paper studying animal affairs and applied to become a doctoral student at the world's top ornithological research institute.
More importantly, she wants to understand human society from the study of animal sex.
In her view, sexual relations are not only partnerships, but the relationship between parents and children also originates from the occurrence of sex. Sex connects the smallest unit of relationship, and only then does it have a family, a community, and a state. She hopes to explore the laws of human society from animal research.
This unique research direction can make people remember her at once. An Oxford classmate recalled that when she first arrived in Oxford, a group of classmates from different majors gathered around to introduce themselves, and she immediately remembered the girl who studied animal sex, although Wang Dake did not say much.
Her parents and elders know her research direction, but when they get together, they tacitly do not bring up this topic. A friend confided in her the hidden disease of sexual dysfunction, and she directly said that the phenomenon observed from chickens could not answer this question, and it was recommended to go to andrology. "It's like going to a veterinarian."
Her elementary school classmates recalled that Wang Dake often had new ideas and was easily attracted to new things. She was once dragged by Wang Dake to learn diving and listen to lectures; Her high school chemistry teacher said that unlike other students who were busy taking the test, Wang Dake often asked questions that were not related to the college entrance examination in high school. Once, she took her chemistry textbook to the teacher and asked questions, but did not open the textbook until she left, but asked her curious questions that were not related to the book.
Her Oxford classmates also said that Wang Dake had studied many disciplines, and even on the eve of graduating from the Department of Zoology, he wanted to go to another doctorate in philosophy. When she is mentioned, the words that often appear in the mouths of people around her are "interesting" and "curious", not only to describe her research, but also to summarize this person.
Wang Dake is often asked: What is the use of studying this topic? She usually replies, "It's useless, it's just pushing the boundaries of knowledge." ”
It's a little-understood direction of research: She's more likely to be attracted to some of the animals' instinctive behaviors than experiments that unscrew animal organs and cells like screws.
She had long known that this research direction was not conducive to employment, but curiosity drove her to experiment in the chicken coop.
About the time when there is a Resident Evil in the movie, you can see such a dress: a set of protective clothing, a pair of rubber boots, a protective helmet with a drawer, Wang Da can bring a record manual, grab a chicken net, enter the laboratory in a strict line, and buckle the door of the laboratory - once the chicken runs out, it will be a huge experimental error.
In the suburbs of Oxford, British residents who walked in the morning saw Wang Dake, who was "fully armed" to end the experiment, and ran straight in fright.
All animal experiments are carried out on the premise of obtaining a British animal ethics license. Wang Dake had to do experiments in the early morning and at night, the chicken fixed mating time. In summer, the semi-open-air experimental greenhouse is like a greenhouse, and people are prone to feel stuffy and hot when they stay inside. In winter, Wang Dake sat on the ground of broken stones wrapped in a large cotton jacket, his hands and feet frozen, and he was still watching the chickens and phoenixes falling, while recording the experimental process.
The most "flattering" rooster in the chicken coop is "K48", after each mating, instead of warming up with the hen for a while, he circles around Wang Dake. Wang Dake once thought that the rooster liked her, and later found that K48 was so enthusiastic about almost everyone in the lab, so researchers were happy to use it for experiments, and it also had more mating opportunities.
A rooster numbered M21 has a general status in the chicken coop - the rooster attracts the opposite sex by fighting ability and beautiful crown, and the with strong fighting ability has a higher rank in the group and has more mating rights. Once, M21 saw Wang Dake walk into the chicken coop and challenged her. It jumped up, hit Wang Dake's calf with a hard kick on its paws, and then began to circle in the chicken coop "in a spirited manner", accepting the attention of other roosters.
"Probably for it, man is like God. M21 can hit people, and its status in the group goes up. Wang Da can guess. Because of this chicken, desperate to prove herself, she had a bruise on her calf.
Her classmates had gone to the lab with her and seen her relationship with the flock of chickens—some roosters would run and come to her, while most of the hens would pretend not to see her arrival.
Wang Dake explained that there are fewer hens in the laboratory than roosters. Therefore, the rooster is relatively more "hungry" and more willing to participate in mating experiments, "the rooster sees me as if he saw the god of wealth, and the hen sees me as if he saw the plague god".
She could tell from the rooster's cry that the chicken was in its state at the time. When a rooster makes a long, full and long sound, "Oh, oh, oh", that is to show the male style; When bugs or new things are found, they will emit a lower-pitched "grunt, grunt, grunt"; When you keep flapping your wings and making a short, low "Oh yeah," it's time to yell at the other chickens and watch the mating scene together.
In chicken coops, bullying and power struggles are everywhere. The most common bullying is when one chicken guards food and water, prevents another chicken from eating and drinking, and beats it if it gets close.
Another time, while she was doing an experiment, a rooster rushed over, as if calling for help. Before Wang Dake could reach him, he fell exhaustedly under the green cloth, and several roosters followed him and rode on the fallen rooster.
By the time Wang Dake rushed over, the rooster under the green cloth had lost its breath, its neck was hunched, and its body was still warm—it was Wang Dake's favorite rooster, L32, with golden feathers.
"It's also a form of bullying." Wang Dake said.
Sometimes, when she looks at the behavior of animals, she can't help but think of the human world.
The rooster, labeled H28, was often bullied by other roosters and could only stay in the tree, and the researchers looked at it pitifully and chose it as the subject of the experiment. But when it entered the lab and faced a smaller hen, H28 plucked the hen's feathers, tore off its bare skin, and bit off the crown, "literally abusive."
"It's not a good guy." Wang Da can see in this chicken the naked, unconcealed nature, just like some men who are angry outside and go home to resort to violence against their partners.
Her interest in animals is far less than that in people. But people can talk, they can also lie, they are elusive, and the behavior of animals is more real and objective. Moreover, she can design variables for animal experiments and adjust the research direction.
She loves exploring the unknown and about her discoveries: writing op-eds on the web about the various mating stories of the animal world. Readers who like her articles, she thinks, are also motivated by human primitive curiosity about new knowledge.
Yang Xiaoyan, editor-in-chief of the New Classic Humanities and Social Sciences Division, inadvertently brushed her article, was attracted by the lively style, "the content is also very long-sighted", and decided to sign this author at the moment.
In July, Wang Dake's new book "Their Sex" was published. In the afterword, Wang Dake wrote, "This book is not a display of various animal sexual habits of hunting, nor is it a continuation of the theory of the big coffee, I just nakedly show my thinking process." ”
She admits that when she observes animals, she naturally has a human perspective, but human observation only stays on the behavior of animals, and it is difficult to really infer the hearts of animals. For example, some animals are sexually mature, do not reproduce, but help parents with "younger brothers and sisters", this phenomenon is easy to be interpreted by humans as "selfless", but in fact, "how to know that this is not profit-driven?" ”
More importantly, what happens in nature does not necessarily extend to human society.
Oxford university has pairs of large, which are monogamous birds and often forage together. The researchers designed two long-distance food bases, giving the couple access cards and each other only entering the prescribed base to forage for food. As a result, even if hungry, the pair of giant did not want to forage separately, and one side went into the base to eat, and the other waited outside the door.
Wang Dake analyzed that this does not mean that the big couple foraged together for love, and there may be reasons that other humans do not know.
Slowly, in the process of studying animals, she found that these novel natural phenomena could not fill the lack of intimacy in the process of growing up. She has used evolution to explain many examples of the world, but when she volunteered for 3 years at the Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre in Oxfordshire and answered the hotline, she found that evolution could not explain many cases, and it was difficult for human society to obtain normative and valuable conclusions in animal research.
Her answer can only be found in human society.
Using animal studies to explain the ideas of human society, she said, is a failed attempt. She wanted to use the results of these reflections as a preface to her new book. The editor disagreed, and when the two argued, Wang Dake also cried, "The order is my life!" She wanted to tell the reader that she had originally done animal research to understand the intimacy of humans, and that although the exploration had failed, it was a step in the ladder of her self-search.
She carefully opened her scars: she had seen the less harmonious marriages in her original family, heard about the prejudice of preferring sons over daughters, and "longed and feared" for intimate relationships from an early age. When she was a child in the crowd, she would suddenly feel a stomachache and was not used to communicating with people. One of her elementary school girlfriends she envied was the kind of person who "had 50 people in the class and 40 of whom chose her as the class leader."
She painted a painting called "The Dumb Woman," and she imagined herself as a fish, half-sunken in the water, unable to breathe heavily, unable to speak, with a sense of suffocation. In her childhood and adolescence, she said, this feeling of drowning suffocation would come to her from time to time.
She is accustomed to putting on a rational shell, arranging the plan for the next 5 years clearly, not easily venting emotions, and not showing her true needs, "Obviously I want to eat Mao Blood, but I will not say, until everyone goes to drink soup, I will be unhappy." "If the instructor temporarily changed the experimental plan, she would go crazy.
Her college philosophy teacher recalled that there was a philosophical discussion on love, and Wang Dake asked, "What is the definition of love?" "She's used to using concepts to explain the world, rather than experiencing and feeling love.
The shift came quickly. In a philosophy class, a teacher suggested that we start by learning to express our needs and remove the shell of reason that we had put on.
She began to learn not to care about other people's ideas, and became less rational: when class was late, she would directly tell the teacher that she wanted to sleep, instead of turning the computer on and falling asleep; She had long since stopped planning what would happen in 5 years.
Her interest in animal sex research is getting weaker and weaker, and now she sees more people in her eyes.
(Wang Dawei in the text can be a pseudonym)
China Youth Daily, China Youth Network reporter Wei Xi Source: China Youth Daily
Source: China Youth Daily