Dr. Wang Dake of Oxford University knows about the sexual behavior of 105 animals.
Tsetse flies are romantic and persistent creatures, with an average mating time of 77 minutes;
Bonobos replace violence with love, turn enemies into friends, and use "snapping" to defuse conflicts;
When the chickens are mating, the chickens in the surrounding chicken cages will come over and squeeze their heads to watch the fragrant scene;
The foreplay of tiger mating is a tigress fighting a male tiger, perhaps this is why women are compared to "tigresses"?
When the male spider courtes, he will give the female a "tribute" to a food dowry wrapped in spider silk, and when the girlfriend opens the gift, the male spider will jump on the back of the female spider and do something wrong...
From the perspective of ordinary people, Wang Dake has a lot of strange knowledge. A post-90s girl, why would she study animal sex and love, with such doubts and curiosity, we found Wang Dake.
In the course of the conversation, she pondered and told how to find the meaning of human life by studying the "sexuality" of animals, pulling the listener into the river of her thoughts.
Here's what she has to say.
During my PhD at the University of Oxford in the UK, I specialized in studying how the rooster's sexual experience affects its mating and sperm allocation decisions.
Simply put, it is to study how chickens find objects from the courtship and mating behavior of chickens.
The place where we experimented, particularly remote, was a rural village with a 40-minute walk to the nearest bus stop, which was largely deserted. Each experiment requires full armor, protective clothing, rubber boots, gloves, and a protective helmet with an extractor.
Sometimes, people would walk along the country road, see that there was a chicken farm, see us dressed like that, think we were doing some Resident Evil, and run.
Chickens have their own rhythm of life, they usually get up at five or six o'clock in the morning, mate for a while, and then start looking for something to eat. At night, when it was almost sunset, he mated for a while, and after mating, he went to sleep. This leads us to do the experiment, either very early, or very late, and need to be stuck in the timing of the chicken mating.
Wang Dake with the chicken in the laboratory
K48, is a chicken that impressed me deeply. Other chickens would go for a food or walk every time after mating, and they would just circle around me and sleep on my lap.
At that time, I thought that he liked me very much, thought that there was also a sincere friendship between people and chickens, and specially sent a circle of friends for it. It turned out to be a "scumbag chicken" that played with everyone and was so good to everyone in the lab.
In addition, there is a chicken with golden feathers, which looks very handsome. Wherever it goes, there will be a herd of hens surrounding it.
Once, when I was doing an experiment, I noticed a commotion in the cage next door, and suddenly, I saw "a lump of something" rushing towards me, and when I walked up, I saw several roosters following me and riding on the fallen rooster.
When I rescued the bottom rooster, I found that it was the handsome rooster, it was dead, but its body was still hot, and just a minute ago, it was still asking me for help.
Maybe other roosters are jealous of it, maybe its ability to unite comrades is slightly worse, and it is not familiar with "chicken love", or it is possible that this society is complicated.
In the world of chickens, there is a strict social hierarchy.
High-status chickens can prioritize resources and manipulate the lives of low-status chickens. Usually, young chickens are particularly aggressive because they can't survive because they are timid, and the ranks are all beaten. And in chickens, same-sex sex is by no means uncommon, especially roosters.
We have a big cage with more than 70 chickens in it. All are roosters, there are no hens, so there will be same-sex rape, and the higher status will force the lower status to have sex. If they do not comply, the high-status chickens will stay next to the feeding bucket and water, and as soon as the chicken passes, they will beat it.
For chickens, bullying other chickens can make them happy, and if they don't bully other chickens, it's not because they have a good heart or don't find an opportunity.
There was a chicken numbered J8, blind in one eye, sent to the special care chicken coop, which was full of old, weak and sick people who did not have the strength to fight.
Who knew that just a few hours after putting it in, J8 fell to the ground with its feet facing the sky, we thought it was dead, and when we checked its health, we found that its anus was full of blood. The sick chickens pecked through its anus while it couldn't resist.
Instead of sympathizing with each other, the weak are sometimes compounded by gender-based violence.
H28 is a one-eyed rooster, in the same room as nine other roosters, it has the lowest status, and all chickens can come and peck at it if they are not happy.
We sympathized with it as a weak person and didn't want to see it bullied, so we added it to a group of experiments where each rooster had a single room, no one could bully them, and there were regular home visits by hens.
Its ugly face is revealed, and H28 is extremely brutal when facing hens who are unable to resist. It plucks the hen's newborn feathers, tears the bare skin on the hen's back, and bites off the hen's crown. The hen was drenched in blood, it enjoyed the hen's terrified neighing, and we had to interrupt the experiment several times.
When I relate to the human world, I often wonder, what should be the hierarchy, violence, ingenuity, or social relations? After dividing the ranks, can the strong monopolize all resources? Will the unconstrained create new injustices?
A pair of chickens are mating, and the surrounding chickens will squeeze their heads to watch
Usually when a rooster is mating, the first step is to bite the hen's crown. Because the comb is the sexual organ of the hen, the bigger and redder, the sexier.
And after two years of experimentation, I found out that in fact, every time the fart ran to mate, it was always the chickens. Most of the other roosters are either philosophically strolling or lecturing other roosters to strengthen their social status.
That's when I first realized that in the field of sexuality research, we automatically ignore the majority who don't desire to mate. Just like we mistakenly think that those persistent single aristocrats are helpless compromises in life, even if they seem to live very moist.
A lot of people ask me, why study animal sexuality?
In fact, I prefer to study humans more than animals, but people are a little difficult to figure out.
Speaking of myself, I like to be alone and think. Outsiders' evaluations of me always say that Wang Dake is very lively and cheerful. Only I know that socializing with others is a very consuming process. Even my best friend, we've known each other for over 20 years, every time we talk about it, she says, I didn't know you were such a person.
So why study sexuality? Or because I want to understand people.
In my opinion, what is the essence of the core as a human being? It's the relationship between people. So what is the core relationship between people? It's a relationship related to sex. Sexual relations are by no means just sexual partnerships, the most important sexual relationship is the relationship between parents and children, which is both the result of childbirth and the cause of love.
I hope to explore the laws of human society from animal research, so as to better understand myself and the intimate relationship between people.
As an undergraduate, I studied biology, and by my senior year, I really didn't want to be a coion that rotated repeatedly in a grand framework, with tubes of DNA and bottles of cells.
In my spare time, with a romantic longing for love, I wrote the heartbreaking "Birds Cheating" report, found my mentor from a reference on a review of extramarital affairs in birds, hit it off, and came to the Oxford Department of Zoology.
When I first started studying zoosexuality, I always thought about animals from a human perspective. For example, if mainstream human society has been patriarchal for a long time, I would infer that this may be the case in the animal kingdom, but this is not the case.
In the past, I thought that the strong established order and the weak were eliminated, but then I found that this perspective was too narrow, the weak were not willing to be eliminated, and they had many ways to survive.
The fringed sandpiper is a special waterfowl, and males come in three forms, black is the "landlord class", white is "vagabond", and there are "pretenders" who look similar to females.
The right to mate always belongs to the landlord class. Because the pretenders resemble females, they are not expelled when they break into the territory of the landlord class, and even arouse the love of the landlord. These pretenders will find the right time before revealing the stuffing, find the female to mate as quickly as possible, and then retreat all over.
There are also fish, smaller fish, when the big fish mate, rush in to discharge sperm, and then immediately run away.
Initially, I abhorred this practice because I substituted myself for a strong, rule-abiding side and disgusted by other people's dishonest behavior. But at some point, a thought hit me:
If one day I become a natural weakling, how would I be treated by the world? If I am squeezed by the rules to have no room for survival, will I steal?
In the years of studying animality, I began to re-examine the strengths and weaknesses.
Whether it is a weak male under the traditional power balance, or a weak female under the power inequality between the sexes, how should they resist?
Starting in 2017, I volunteered at the Oxfordshire Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre for 3 years, receiving SMS and mail hotline enquiries. In the process, I came into contact with many cases of sexual assault, and to my surprise, most of them were committed by acquaintances.
Such cases usually take place in a closed environment, there are no witnesses, and because they are acquaintances, the aggressor often says that the victim is voluntary, which makes it difficult to obtain evidence and the conviction rate is extremely low. In a 2013 report by the British government, the conviction rate of rape reports was only 6.7%.
Compulsive behavior also occurs in the animal kingdom and is widespread. Under such circumstances, some female animals have evolved a whole system to prevent sexual assault and birth, which has achieved a reversal of power to a certain extent.
The first trick: beat the male with the intention of rape to death, and eat him if necessary.
But this only applies to creatures whose females are larger than males, so that they can resist violently; Or exist in a matriarchal society led by female elders, whoever dares to rape will be expelled by the patriarch.
For example, the mother scorpion likes to eat male scorpions, and male scorpions cannot suppress the urge to mate, and can only take risks. However, to reduce the risk of being eaten, male scorpions inject female scorpions with small doses of venom.
The second trick: close the genitals.
The genitals of the female thin-horned bug have a small door, and when a male she does not like, she closes the door and refuses to mate.
The third trick: hire a bodyguard.
When the hen is sexually harassed, she will actively seek her husband's help. But pinning one's own safety on others is ultimately unreliable, and males are often passive, or run to pursue other females, or gluttonous and misguided.
The fourth trick: rape does not let the sperm succeed.
Female ducks are often forced to have sex in the water, and over time they have evolved their reproductive tract into a cis-spiral shape, complex like a maze, with several levels to prevent the male genitals from entering. If the male duck has been hindered and still puts the sperm in a fertilizable position, the female duck can squeeze out the sperm through vaginal contraction.
The fifth trick: selective abortion. Bats have a special way of abortion, which can make the fertilized egg unable to implant or even be reabsorbed by the mother.
Studying the confrontation between the sexes between animals allowed me to see the power of females. But what happens in the animal kingdom cannot be fully extrapolated to human society.
For a long time, I didn't have a sense of the moment.
Our society has a very extensive atmosphere of survival of the fittest, good grades can be admitted to a good school, and then find a good job, excellent can get resources, not excellent will be eliminated.
I used to think that I was just going to achieve a result in the future, so I have to do it now. I constantly set goals and plans, including diet, schoolwork, etc., and forced myself to complete them one by one, although sometimes I may be tired.
Since 2017, I have been working on the book Their Sex.
Now, five years later, many people have asked me why I wrote this series. I can tell a slightly different version of the story on different occasions, as if something linearly leads to what happens later.
For example, in order to better understand the literature, write it out in your own words; For example, reflections on monogamy keep me asking what is a reasonable form of marriage; Another example is feeling the plight of women in contemporary society and wanting to resist.
These are all true.
When I was a child, I read a lot of literature, such as Zweig's "Letters from a Stranger Woman", and at that time I brought myself into a male perspective, and when I read it, I thought: Wow, there is a woman who loves me so silently, so much so that she has children, and even until she dies, I don't know she exists. Looking back now, I find it very unbearable.
People are constantly changing and thinking, and writing the book "Their Sexuality" is not to show the "sexual fetishes" of various animals like a curiosity, nor is it the same line of the big coffee's theory, but it nakedly shows my thinking process.
"Their Sex" was named one of the top ten best books of the year in Shenzhen Reading Month 2022
Like there is a chapter in the book about the relationship between parents and children, sometimes with strong manipulation and status inequality.
Three-toed gull mothers usually lay two eggs, one main egg (eldest) and one spare tire egg (second child).
If the eldest and the second eldest are successfully hatched, the eldest will violently peck at the second eldest born a few days later, and the second eldest has no power to fight back, so he can only be driven out of the nest and fall off the cliff to his death. If the eldest hangs up before birth, the parents will transfer their love for the eldest to the second eldest so that the second eldest can grow up safely.
There are also bonobos' lives run by their mothers, and their social status cannot be won by themselves, they can only be linked to their mothers, and they are marginal characters who have no way to speak.
Reflecting on my own relationship with my parents, I am very conscious of understanding that I cannot control each other in the name of "I am good for you".
One winter break, I came back from England to go to Cambodia with my girlfriend. Because I was worried that my parents would not agree, I didn't tell them. I didn't inform them until I left, and they confiscated my passport and prevented me from making it possible.
In the same way, I love my father, whenever he smokes, I feel that he should not smoke, although he may not listen to me, but I know that this is actually a kind of control, just like my parents are worried that I will be in danger when I go to a strange country, but I think that risk is within my control.
Thinking differently, I wondered if I shouldn't have intervened and forced my parents' choices. I'm a little confused about how I can love people and how I can better love someone.
Once, I always wanted to find a big theory to explain everything I came across, and I felt that evolution was the key to explain everything.
In my current opinion, using animal studies to explain the ideas of human society is a failed attempt.
Evolution cannot be used to guide life. Finding oneself from science is like searching for meaning for the sake of finding meaning. Science wants to eliminate accidents, and life is full of accidents.
I tried other ways out, such as slowly finding my own subjectivity in the process of studying philosophy.
These two years have been the happiest period of my life, not deliberately suppressing myself, not forcing myself to do anything, not caring how much carbs and protein to consume. I began to take better care of myself and feel who I really am.
Human beings cannot understand themselves through animals, and there is no other way but to find ourselves from within us.
When I was a doctorate, in the forest on the outskirts of Oxford, there was a big monogamous couple.
The researchers wondered if they would forage separately for food. So at a great distance, two food bases were designed, and the couple was given access control cards, and only one of the bases could enter to find food.
As a result, even hungry, pay more for the flight. The pair of big were also reluctant to forage separately, one side went into the base to eat, and the other waited outside the door. When one of them is full, they fly to the next base together.
Researchers believe that the big couple foraged together for love, not a calculation of benefits. Of course, there may also be other reasons that humans do not know.
But why love, why to live, may also be the ultimate question of human life.
Note: Image provided by interviewee, illustration from Their Sex