Fausto-Sterling - Sexing the Body

The Rodent’s Tale 221
FIGURE 8.3: Liberating the female rat. (Source: Alyce Santoro, for the author)
is introduced, the male will no longer inspect whether or not she is in estrous,’’
but just attempts to mount. 126 Even today, most researchers try to
minimize female variability, often using circular test chambers so that the
females have no corners to back into to prevent mounting. Hormone studies
usually employ sexually experienced males, because in inexperienced ones
the precopulatory behaviors, including mounting, depend on the female’s soliciting
behavior. 127 (I can’t stop myself from thinking of this observation as
the rodent variation on the tradition of having older women initiate young
men into sexual adulthood.)
In fact, when experimenters introduced female choice, funny things began
to happen. Doty noted experiments in which females had to want to mate—a
desire expressed by pressing a bar to gain access to a stud male. In such situations
females paced their sexual contacts (and thus those of the males) in a
manner that perhaps more accurately reflected behavior in the wild. Varying
the test situation also affected the results of experiments with pre- or perinatal
hormone exposure. The psychologist Roger Gorski described experiments
in which he first allowed a female rat that had been treated perinatally with
androgens to become accustomed to her test area. According to the O/A
theory, prenatal androgen treatment ought to have suppressed female lordosis—the
measurement of her femininity. Indeed, this is what happened when
the androgen-treated female was simply dropped into a test arena containing
a waiting male. But when Gorski introduced the test male only after letting
the female check out her new cage for a couple of hours, he found that ‘‘most
females exhibited a very high LQ’’ (Lordosis Quotient, a standard measure
arrived at by taking the number of male mounts that induce lordosis and dividing
it by the total number of mounts). The permanent organizing effects of