"Biologically speaking, if something bites you it's more likely to be female"
About this Quote
The line lands like a pub-ready one-liner, but it’s built out of evolutionary accounting. Desmond Morris is doing what he’s always done: translating human folk wisdom into animal-behavior math, then letting the bluntness sting. “Biologically speaking” is his permission slip to sound impolite. It frames the claim as statistical, not moral, and shields him from the obvious backlash: you’re not supposed to joke about women being the ones who “bite.”
The intent is comparative, not condemnatory. Across species, females often bear the higher energetic costs of reproduction, and that can make them more selective, more defensive, and more likely to deploy aggression when threatened or when resources and offspring are at stake. In mosquitoes, only females bite because they need blood proteins to produce eggs; males don’t. Morris compresses that messy diversity into a memorable rule-of-thumb, swapping a nuanced distribution of behaviors for an image you can’t forget.
The subtext is a quiet critique of how we gender aggression. We code violence as masculine, yet some of the most consequential forms of biological “taking” (blood-feeding, nest defense, maternal protection) skew female. Morris also smuggles in a broader point about perception: what we label “nurturing” or “passive” in females is often a strategic, hard-edged set of behaviors shaped by evolutionary pressures.
Context matters: Morris, as a mid-to-late 20th-century popular ethologist, helped mainstream the idea that human social life can be read through animal behavior. That project is seductive and risky. The aphorism works because it’s vivid, contrarian, and just true enough in key examples to feel like an x-ray of nature’s politics.
The intent is comparative, not condemnatory. Across species, females often bear the higher energetic costs of reproduction, and that can make them more selective, more defensive, and more likely to deploy aggression when threatened or when resources and offspring are at stake. In mosquitoes, only females bite because they need blood proteins to produce eggs; males don’t. Morris compresses that messy diversity into a memorable rule-of-thumb, swapping a nuanced distribution of behaviors for an image you can’t forget.
The subtext is a quiet critique of how we gender aggression. We code violence as masculine, yet some of the most consequential forms of biological “taking” (blood-feeding, nest defense, maternal protection) skew female. Morris also smuggles in a broader point about perception: what we label “nurturing” or “passive” in females is often a strategic, hard-edged set of behaviors shaped by evolutionary pressures.
Context matters: Morris, as a mid-to-late 20th-century popular ethologist, helped mainstream the idea that human social life can be read through animal behavior. That project is seductive and risky. The aphorism works because it’s vivid, contrarian, and just true enough in key examples to feel like an x-ray of nature’s politics.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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