We still live in an age of the gender binary, but it’s also a time of mass gender confusion, debate and renegotiation disputing the gender binary. And that’s a great thing. Assumptions and shibboleths about gender (and sex and sexuality) are being defended and challenged, and language is being recast – think about the sudden transformations of pronouns people are using to refer to themselves. Language matters, and with respect to gender and sexuality I have come to the conclusion that we need to be very careful indeed when we make unwarranted comparisons about common ‘male’ and ‘female’ traits among humans and nonhuman animals. Among other things, there is a whole lot of exaggerated anthropomorphism that tickles our curiosities and satisfies our quixotic yearnings but reinforces erroneous stereotypes about male and female.

Among my favourite examples are prostitute hummingbirds, baboon harems, and mallard duck gang rape.

Some wit thought that when male and female hummingbirds have sex, and the male ‘gives’ something, like a twig for a nest, to the female, the male is in effect paying the female for sex. And that’s what prostitution is all about, isn’t it? The idea that sex work involves a complex network of relationships, and that humans who have sex can also give each other presents without this in itself constituting sex work, is apparently not relevant here. The point is that males pay females for sex (and that this payment is the only reason females allow males to have sex with them), and that there are strong enough cross-species similarities to justify such language flourishes.