Fish

Fish are used as a comparative example in the book’s account of biological reproduction, not as characters in a narrative. Their role is analytically important: external fertilization can leave the parents with similar reproductive functions, and care of the eggs may fall to either parent or to neither. This variability complicates any attempt to treat female biology as a sufficient explanation for women’s social subordination.

Reproduction and the Limits of Parental Roles

The account begins by distinguishing two aspects of reproduction: the continuation of a species and the creation of new individuals. In higher forms of life, these aspects can divide, and the book emphasizes that the egg’s structure does not itself determine how the division will proceed. The female’s relation to the egg can loosen; where the maternal connection is weaker, birth may require less labor and the relation between parents and offspring may be less differentiated.

Fish make that loosened connection especially clear. Water carries eggs and sperm together, and fertilization is usually external. The account says that fish do not mate in the usual sense; at most, some come into contact as stimulation. The female releases ova and the male releases sperm, giving them comparable roles in fertilization, with no necessary reason for either parent to recognize the eggs as its own.

Care After Fertilization

That similarity in fertilization does not produce a single pattern of care. Some fish abandon their eggs, which develop without parental assistance. In other cases the mother prepares a nest or watches over the eggs after fertilization. The book also describes species in which the father assumes care: after fertilizing the eggs, he drives the female away when she tries to consume them, then defends the eggs from approaching threats.

Paternal care takes several forms in the account. Some fish make a protective nest from air bubbles coated with an insulating substance; others incubate eggs in the mouth or, like the seahorse, in folds of the stomach. These examples make parenthood a set of variable activities rather than a role automatically fixed by which parent produced the egg.

The comparison extends beyond fish. The male midwife toad carries strings of eggs wound around his feet, while in birds the egg develops within the female and is more closely connected to her; the female usually incubates it and cares for the young, although the male often helps build and protect the nest. Together, these examples place fish within a broader account of differing relations between reproduction and care.

Sexual Difference and Individual Activity

The book contrasts the fish’s reproductive pattern with a broader account of male behavior across animals. Even fish and cetaceans that live in schools may separate from the group and become aggressive toward other males when in heat. The text presents male sexuality as more indirect and active: the male moves toward the female, seeks contact, and bridges the distance between desire and its satisfaction. This general contrast concerns sexual behavior, whereas fish’s external fertilization and varied parenting show that reproductive roles do not yield one uniform arrangement of care.

A further qualification appears in the discussion of animal couples and maternity. Male individual advantage does not always confer superiority within a species; sometimes the female regains another kind of autonomy through maternity, while in other species the sexes live largely separate lives or share care of a habitat. The examples resist treating animal relations as one universal hierarchy, and the book cautions that the human case cannot simply be reduced to an animal one.

Biological Evidence and Human Social Situation

Fish contribute to the larger argument that biological data matter without dictating a fixed social destiny. The book treats the body as an important element of a person’s situation, but rejects the claim that biology alone explains why woman is made the Other or permanently assigned a subordinate role. It asks instead how nature is taken up through history and what human societies have made of the female body.

That distinction becomes consequential in the discussion of reproduction and work. The burdens associated with maternity vary with social arrangements: repeated pregnancies and unsupported child care make them heavier, while control over reproduction and social assistance can make them more manageable. The book also connects women’s domestic confinement to the absence of control over fertility and to unequal divisions of household labor. Fish do not serve as a direct model for human society; their varied reproductive and caregiving patterns instead help show why biological sex by itself cannot settle questions about social roles.

Comparative Significance

The fish examples are concrete counterevidence to a single, inevitable link between femaleness, fertilization, and exclusive maternal care. External fertilization makes the parents’ immediate reproductive functions comparable; subsequent care may be absent, maternal, or paternal. That range sharpens the book’s distinction between biological facts and the meanings and institutions built around them.

The comparison also has limits that the argument explicitly preserves. Human social life cannot be inferred directly from animal behavior, and women’s situation involves economic, social, psychological, and historical conditions as well as reproductive biology. Fish therefore function not as a blueprint for human relations but as evidence against biological determinism: reproductive processes are real, yet their social consequences are not self-explanatory or inevitable.