Olivia Judson’s Wild Side

In another lifetime, when Anne and Katie and I were trying to get together funding to start a print science magazine for women in the UK, we all met Olivia Judson. Actually, I had met her the year earlier by way of her book Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, which my father had given me for Christmas. It’s a hilarious book written as a collection of advice columns wherein Dr. Tatiana helps out various hapless folks in the animal kingdom who have odd sex habits our accoutrements. At the time I was a researcher in an evolutionary biology lab at the University of Toronto and spending much too much of my day looking up 1970s articles on male frog chest spines (to aid in holding their mates, er, firmly, while copulating) or the frequency of female sea lions being crushed to death by males trying to mount them as they fled for the sea. Needless to say I loved the book.

When we met her in real live person in London, where she is a researcher at Imperial College, she was filming the TV version of the book. It was weird, a little unsettling (there is something whimsical in TALKING about giant corkscrew animal penises, but rather less in SEEING them) but she looked fabulous, had a great screen presence and it was still a lot of fun. She now has a column at the New York Times, deservedly so, where she gets to remind us about all sorts of lovely things evolutionary in nature...like the potential size of a T. rex penis. In all of her posts, sex-related or not, she manages to sneak in so much delicious basic biology. And you’re sure you’re not learning anything, because it’s just too much fun, but you are. I think the US government - with its truly DIRE science literacy rankings - should hire her to be the National Science Teacher. Because who wouldn’t want to listen to her?

I can tell you for certain that the males of our species certainly do. For when I took a casual glance through some of the recent comments, I tabulated that about 90% of them (with sex identifiable names) were dudes. Sure commenting isn’t the best way to gauge the sex bias of her readership, but still. I mean here is a fabulous woman writing about fun, accessible topics in biology and still...where’s the ladies, ladies?

(And I think this might call for the creation of a new category..like “Women whose eggs we would like to use in IVF if ours turn out to be defunct.” Or something.)