Female Lizards: Superbly Manipulative

sireenmalik writes "CNN is running a story, Battle of the sexes winner is a lizard. Now how many of you are being Lizarded like that? Guys take a break from your computers ... find out which 'fancy rocks' your girlfriend is thinking about?!?!? Now you know who really is the boss? ;)"

I took a course in...

[arcadum]

Evolutionary Anthropology which drilled into our heads that *Women* are the most important sex because they determin the fecundity (1.) and are ultimately responsible for the children. 1: Barring things like rape and coersion...

Re:From the article:

[nellardo]

This is the ultimate example of a female having her cake and eating it too...It would be like a human female who marries a short, dumpy rich guy and then has an affair with a muscular 20-year-old to have a handsome son who grows up in a mansion and goes to the best schools."

A cool article, but that author spent entirely too much time thinging about that analogy.

Watch the quote marks - the scientist spent too much time thinking up the analogy. The CNN science reporter had the good sense to pull the sound-bite and put it nice and early in the article.

Me, I'd point out that the incredulous tone of the scientist is just a bit too pandering to believe. It feeds right into multiple contradictory stereotypes - the gold-digging slut trophy wife is one, as is the equally ridiculuous and inaccurate (but more socially acceptable) stereotype of marriage as life-long romance for Happily Ever After.

Lots of animals have exhibited comparable behavior, on both sides of the gender divide. You don't have to go down to obscure lizard species and you don't have to write it off to human perversion/idiocy/unnaturalness. Chimps and bonobos do this. Gorillas do this. Wolves and lions do this. Both genders in a variety of species try to gather exclusive groups of mates under their own control, and both genders "sneak around" outside these ostensibly socially sanctioned constructions.

nothing new here

[rizzo420]

it's commonly known in most of the natural world (natural world being that world not including human beings), that the female is usually the primary individual in most animal relationships. the males always have to compete for the female, but ultimately she decides which one to mate with based on which one "seems" to be the most "fit". that's usually determined by mating rituals and displays. most of these rituals actually prove to the female that they are very fit. so this isn't some completely new discovery, although it seems that this lizard takes it to a new extreme.