She's been called “the Dr. Ruth of wilderness, jungle and ocean.” She’s a lovely woman, with sultry, hooded eyes, a quick smile and a hearty laugh. A Stanford- and Oxford-trained biologist, she has a bestselling book, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation (Metropolitan Books, 2002), and she’s now got her own television show. But if you ever get the chance to speak with Olivia Judson, by all means go somewhere private. You see, when Judson, ’91, discusses her work, precision mandates that she’ll say such things as: “The male lime mite is 200,000 times smaller than the female, and spends its entire life inside her mouth making and regurgitating sperm.”
You should have seen the look on the face of the waiter at the Peninsula Creamery when he picked just that moment to deliver my Belgian waffle.
For Judson, aka Dr. Tatiana, such moments have become common. Her sassy, funny, award-winning book on evolutionary biology is a worldwide hit that has been translated into 12 languages so far. The staid journal Science called it “witty, racy, informed, entertaining, and instructive,” and it was a 2003 finalist for the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.
Using an advice-to-the-lovelorn format featuring letters from creatures great and small, Judson explores sex and procreation among birds, bees and a startling array of asexual, bisexual, double-penised and hermaphroditic creatures. It turns out, according to Dr. Tatiana (a pseudonym that grew out of a joke between friends), that the need to find and seduce a mate is among the most powerful forces in evolution. Perhaps no activity has generated a more “ecstatic diversity of tactics,” not to mention equipment.
Take this poor dear, for instance. “I’m a spotted hyena, a girl,” writes one ersatz correspondent—“Don’t Wanna Be Butch in Botswana”—to Dr. Tatiana. “The only trouble is, I’ve got a large phallus. I can’t help feeling that this is unladylike.” Dr. Tatiana replies drolly that spotted hyenas are hardly known for their “tea-drinking, cake-eating, genteel” manners to begin with. Moreover, “The penis has been reinvented more often than the wheel” and such an organ is normal for hyena ladies. She elaborates on a slew of even more bizarre set-ups, such as the paper nautilus octopus. The male of that species actually fires off his penis, which goes on to live independently inside the female.
Judson’s fun, funny, accessible format has been embraced by educators trying to engage students in the fascinating and complex world of evolutionary biology. Last fall at Stanford, students in Professor Bruce Baker’s freshman seminar on animal sexual behaviors were assigned Judson’s book. “It’s wonderfully funny, but it doesn’t stray from the science,” explains biologist Baker, himself an expert on what he calls the “Casanova and caveman” sexual behavior of male fruit flies. Indeed, the book contains more than 60 pages of notes and scientific references that Baker says are perfect for freshmen learning to use original scientific literature. Judson, who is both British and American, received her PhD in biological sciences at Oxford in 1995 and is a research fellow at Imperial College, London.
To bring the saucy Dr. Tatiana to an even bigger audience, Britain’s WAG TV and Canada’s Exploration Production have produced a TV series of three hourlong episodes for Discovery Canada, Channel 4 U.K. and Discovery Health U.S. to air early in 2005. In the all-singing, all-dancing “musical science documentary” Judson plays a white-leather-clad Dr. Tatiana visited by “bugs,” who discuss their myriad mating dilemmas.
But will U.S. broadcasters really be ready for the sordid details of, for example, the incestuous lesser mealworm beetle male, who staggers about on six stumpy legs trying to seduce his sisters? “It’s possible that the U.S. broadcasters will get cold feet,” Judson, 34, admits. The U.S. version could be “a shadow of that shown in the U.K. and Canada.”
After Stanford, Judson’s transformation into animal sex-advice diva began when she found herself miserable at Oxford on a Fulbright fellowship, researching birds. “It was ghastly. I didn’t have a good temperament for fieldwork. You miss a season, you miss a year’s work.” The Economist magazine in London had put out a call for science writing interns, and she began writing freelance stories for the magazine. On one particularly intriguing assignment regarding exploding honeybees, she wrote up the story in an agony-aunt format.
A book contract followed quickly, although it would take her four years to finish. Sex Advice to All Creation “was a beast of a book to write,” she explains. ”It sums up a lot of academic work, but not in an academic voice.”
One of the myths Judson lustily debunks is that males are promiscuous and females chaste. “In most species,” Dr. Tatiana explains, “girls are more strumpet than saint.” Judson hasn’t had much time for research recently, but she does have an intriguing list of questions about which she says much is speculated but little has actually been studied. Among the most fascinating: do other species have sex for fun? “We know they have sex outside of the breeding season, but one can’t very well ask them, ‘Well, how was that?’”
As one might expect, Judson has received some pretty interesting feedback since her book was published, including letters asking Dr. Tatiana for advice on how to woo Olivia Judson. While filming her television show, she was once asked for a date by a man in a praying mantis outfit, indicating his poor understanding of zoology. (Female praying mantises bite the heads off males immediately after mating.) The last official word on her dating status was: available—but don’t expect her to signal that by using the midwife toad’s technique of stroking a caller on the snout.
And a potential beau had better be prepared for some frank talk. “For me, it’s so normal to talk about sex. I sometimes forget how weird some of it seems if you don’t know anything about exploding penises,” she admits. Good luck even flagging down a waiter for the check after a remark like that.
Read a November 2009 update on this story.
JOAN O'C. HAMILTON, ’83, is a frequent contributor to Stanford.
