Just kinky, or downright “femme fatale”?

We all know that St Andrews itself is home to some serious kinky action, but St Andrews researchers have published results of a study that suggests that cultural stereotypes may influence how we view animal sexual behavior. 

Anthropomorphism – making animals seem like us – is a common problem for animal behavior researchers. The effects can be quite obvious – giving animals human-like emotions for instance – or using human cultural conventions or stereotypes to describe behavior. The “traditional” view of the sexes, men being dominant, strong and aggressive vs. women as submissive, weak and passive are often applied to animals, however it would seem that this aged view is looking completely wrong (as we at St Andrews now know).

Emily Burdfield-Steel, a member of the research group, said, “Our work suggests that scientists are not immune to cultural stereotypes and we need to think carefully about the words we use and what they convey.” The most obvious example where such stereotypes are wrong is sexual cannibalism, in which it is the females that are active, killing or eating males before or during sex. Each to their own, ya know?

Researchers have compared the language used to describe sexual cannibalism, surveying scientific literature and recording the words used to describe males and females, and discovered that females are more likely to be described with active, negative words and males with reactive words. For example, females were described as “aggressive”, “voracious” and “rapacious”. Use of these words suggests that researchers risk perpetuating a negative stereotype of sexually aggressive females, akin to that of the femme fatale.

Although this stereotyping is in reference to insects and spiders, cross your fingers that the femme fatales of St Andrews don’t start chomping on their boyfriends. Just yet.

Image courtesy of bbc.co.uk