What duck sex teaches us about humans, incels, and feminists | Richard Prum

Richard Prum: According to aesthetic evolution, animals are agents in their own evolution; that is, through their choices, they end up shaping their own species. One of the implications of this idea is a new perspective on what happens when mate choice is infringed or violated by sexual violence or by coercion in animal species. One prominent example of this, from our own research, is on duck sex.

Ducks are unusual among birds in having both a typical mate choice situation—where males and females pair up on the basis of display and preferences—and simultaneously other individuals that force copulations on female ducks as they approach reproduction. So what that means is that as the eggs are being laid, females have to defend themselves from forced copulations by males.

Now “forced copulation” is the word that biologists use now, but for over a century biologists used the word “rape” in biology. Now that was abandoned back in the 1970s in response to the feminist movement and Susan Brownmiller and her work Against Our Will, proposing and articulating a specifically social context for rape in humans. This led to the creation of a euphemism, “forced copulation,” in biology. Unfortunately, articulating sexual violence in the animal world with these euphemistic terms has led to scientists losing track of the fact that forced copulation is against the will of the ducks.

And by taking the aesthetic perspective and trying to understand what it is that individual females—in this case ducks—want, we have arrived at a new perspective on what it means when they don’t get what they want. So in some ways, using socially sensitive euphemisms has led to imprecision or fuzziness in the science.

In the case of duck sex, what we find is that males can force themselves on females because they’re among the few birds that still have a penis. And what we find in ducks is, as a result of female resistance and male sexual violence, we find a co-evolutionary arms race between male capacity to force and female resistance.

In this case, it takes place in the form of a genital arms race: the males evolve more elaborate and more elaborately armed penises, and the females evolve convoluted vaginal morphologies that exclude the penis during forced copulation. So among the many weird things of duck penises is that they’re counter-clockwise coiled.

Well, the female vagina (in ducks that have high rates of resistance) actually coils in the opposite direction, so they have literally evolved an “anti-screw” device in their vaginal tract that obstructs the intromission of the penis during forced copulation. What that means is that what that tea party Senate candidate Todd Akin from Missouri said about women “have a way of shutting that whole thing down” in reference to rape is actually true of ducks.

But in a way that exposes something fundamentally new and interesting about evolutionary biology, which is that sexual autonomy matters to animals. Freedom of choice is not merely a political concept discovered by suffragettes and feminists in the 19th and 20th centuries, but is actually an evolved feature of the social and sexual lives of other species, especially in ducks.

How does this work? Well, if the female mates with the male she prefers—that is, she gets the green head and the “quack, quack, quack” that she likes—and then her male offspring will share those traits and be sexually preferred by other female ducks who have coevolved those same aesthetic preferences.

But if she’s forcibly fertilized, then her male offspring will either inherit a random trait or one that she specifically rejected, which means that her offspring will be less attractive to other females. So anything the female duck can do to prevent forced fertilization, through physical resistance or behavior, will evolve because she will be rewarded with more grandkids.

So what this means is that aesthetic norms, the shared ideas about what is beautiful among ducks, gives female ducks the evolutionary leverage to advance their freedom of choice in the environment.