APPLAUSE
Gooooooood evening.
Good evening, good evening and welcome to QI where, tonight,
it's a battle of the sexes as QI looks at girls and boys and gender.
Let's hear it... For the girls!
CHEERING
And huddled under the glass ceiling we have sugar and spice, Ronni Ancona.
CHEERING
and all things nice, Sandi Toksvig.
CHEERING
But what about a big hand for the boys.
CHEERING
Slugs and snails, Jack Dee.
CHEERING
And a puppy dog's tail, Alan Davis.
CHEERING
Vive, of course, la difference.
Let's here our gender-specific buzzers. Sandi goes...
OPERATIC SINGING
Ronni goes...
HARP PLAYS
Jack goes...
WOLF WHISTLE
And Alan goes...
'ALLO, DARLIN'.
AUDIENCE LAUGH
Well, tonight we are on the lookout for outrageous sexism,
so if any of you spot an example of it, you can pull me up short
by using your buzzer or ask one of the boys to do it for you, if you'd like.
HARP PLAYS
Yes, that's an example. You've started. You get points for that.
And, if you're right, you also might get a cuddle.
OPERATIC SINGING
Boys, obviously. All right.
Damn, that was an example, too. Anyway, seconds out, round one.
Who was traditionally dressed in pink and called a girl?
Was it Gok Wan?
LAUGHTER
No, not Gok Wan.
Is it Liberace? A person from history?
No, traditionally a whole class of people.
A whole class of people?
Are the lower classes always dressed in pink so you can spot them?
I don't mean class in that sense.
A group of people who were dressed in pink and called a girl.
A girl as in a girl describing a group of people?
No. But babies. Which babies would you dress in pink? Female babies.
Though boys used to be. Boys were.
Until the 20th century,
the colours were pink for a baby boy and blue for a baby girl.
How could they be wrong for so long?
Or maybe we took a wrong turn.
But I'll give you an example of Dressmaker Magazine from 1900.
"The preferred colour to dress young boys is in pink.
"A blue is reserved for girls as it is presumed paler and the more dainty of the two colours.
"And pink is thought to be stronger."
And as late as 1927 there was a report about Princess Astrid of Belgium
who had been caught out when she gave birth to a girl because,
"the cradle had been optimistically outfitted in pink", the colour for boys.
Isn't that strange when, now, every shop has a whole pink corner devoted to girls? When did this happen?
When did we turn around the other way? Well, that's what I'm saying.
In 1927 they were still talking about pink for boys.
Was it really? Is it something to do with blue being considered
quite serene and it's the colour of the Virgin Mary?
I think that's all part of it. They just thought blue was a natural, pale and female colour.
But even more extraordinary is the word 'girl'.
Right up until mid-15th century...
Boys were called girls? Yes. They were?
LAUGHTER
Well, all children... You're having to rethink everything, aren't you?
Yes. This is the most extraordinary episode yet.
All children were called girls.
Come on, girls. Boy children were called knave girls and,
this is even more confusing for us today,
girl children were called gay girls. Yes.
So you have... I have no problem with that whatsoever.
Gay girls and knave girls. I like pink, see? Pink.
Pink to make the boys wink.
And I think that's right.
I've known boys that have been complete winkers.
It's a marvellous thing, pink.
WOLF WHISTLE Sorry...bit sexist, wasn't it?
Yeah. Jack, I've only just started.
Uh-oh. This is the beginning, my dear.
I'm gonna come down on you like a... ton of bricks, every time.
You wouldn't be the first boy in my life that's done so.
LAUGHTER
They can get a man on the Moon but they can't get one on Sandi.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
The word boy was only lately applied to a male child.
Before, it just meant 'servant'.
So you would say, "Boy!" meaning waiter or servant.
Oh, what the hell went wrong?
It's a very strange thing, isn't it?
Things do change. And the colour pink, everything has to have a pink version; mobile phones...
But is there anything to do with the fact that red used to be the colour for men?
It was a strong Christian colour. So I wonder if pink is like a sibling.
I think it is a mixture of that, yes, that pink was considered
strong and reddish and male and, as you said,
blue, the colour of the Virgin Mary and so on.
I read somewhere that monkeys are attracted to pink.
The females are attracted to pink
because the infant primates have little pink faces.
Oh, that's very good. Did you read that or just see it on a children's television programme?
It's certainly true that, if you dress a baby in pink, mothers,
when picking them up, if it's not their own child,
will tend to have a pink-dressed baby facing them
when they hug it and a blue-dressed baby facing outwards.
Thrown out the window.
Or just facing outwards.
All that information you've got, Stephen, and you're so unlikely to use it.
I saw a thing that said they'd tried an experiment with chimps, I think.
And they gave them dolls and trucks or engines to play with
and the boy ones all wanted to play with the trucks and engines
and the girl ones played with the dolls. How weird's that?
That is odd. It is very strange. I've got two daughters and a son.
My son's the last one and, when he was born, I thought,
"There are going to be no guns whatsoever."
So we had no horrible toys and, honestly, he was about two,
and a toilet roll immediately became a machine gun. It is the most...
You can't fight it, can you? No. And he likes blue.
Not with toilet rolls, no.
Depends on the war. Don't hope out for much hope.
But pink, do you know what the traje de luces is?
The what? The traje de luces. I thought you'd been unwell.
The suit of lights. A South American thing, is it? No.
It's a thing a matador wears that is often pink.
The matador's suit, the suit of light
And the lining of his cape is pink.
AUDIENCE GROAN
That's a painful moment. Something's going to be pink in a minute.
LAUGHTER
Tear me a new one.
AUDIENCE: OOOH!
Yes, pink is a strange colour, too, because it doesn't exist
on the spectrum, so it's an extra-spectral colour.
Aren't girls more inclined towards the red end of the spectrum?
I think that's true. Berries, foraging.
Yes, having a little look on the savannah and boys running off towards the blue sky.
Is that not some reason why?
Yes, I've heard something similar. Foraging for lipsticks.
On trees in primal times.
Do you know that they've done studies
of the hunter-gatherer societies
and 9/10's of the food is provided by the women
and 1/10 is provided by the men?
So the women go, "Oh, we'll get some berries."
And the men come back, "Honestly, that bison was this close."
"Yeah, yeah, have your berry dinner."
Well, we saw one, so...
It sort of counts.
We'll get him.
You got any berries?
Well, the truth is that pink used to be the colour for boys
and boys used to be called girls anyway.
So, with all this confusion, what's the best way to get a girl?
'ALLO DARLIN'! Usually works.
LAUGHTER
V.G. V.G. If you need any more than that, they're not interested.
Is it to do with swimming badges?
Swimming badges? Swimming badges.
Yes, well, you know how some people can swim
and they are fantastically fast but they haven't got a lot of stamina
and then some people can swim and they're not very fast
but they've got fantastic stamina.
And boy sperm are the ones who... boy sperm swim fantastically fast
but they die pretty quickly and girl sperm take an awfully long time...
Can I just... There's a flaw in your argument.
Girl sperm - we don't have sperm at all.
I was listening and I...
Yes, there are lots of theories about it. Do you know any others?
Is it something to do with diet?
Diet is the current one, yes.
For example, calories.
If you had a higher calorie intake before being impregnated,
out of 100, 56 had boys.
So you don't want to have cream cakes just before?
If you want a girl, no.
Also, women who ate at least one ball of breakfast cereal a day
were 87 per cent more likely to have boys than those who ate no more
than one bowl a week, which is quite...
Oh, darling, that's tosh! That's put out by Kellogg's.
What do they know?
It does look rather extraordinary. Ridiculous!
Women who had boys ate about 400 calories more daily than those who had girls on average.
But those people who had Coco Pops had chimpanzees. I don't...
LAUGHTER
A very bizarre one.
I do not know whom this would benefit commercially.
Women infected with hepatitis B virus
are 1.5 times more likely to give birth to a male.
It's not a good reason to get it.
No. We're certainly not encouraging it.
But there is one certain way, which is embryo selection,
which in America and Thailand, in particular, is very popular.
It costs about US18,000.
Wow. A friend of ours had a baby in Thailand - an English couple.
And the Thai women said to her,
"If you look lovely when you're pregnant, you have girl.
"If you look tired and ugly, dress badly, you will have boy."
She said, "What do you think I'm going to have?" "Boy."
That's outrageous! And she did.
Oh, my God, it works! They are a different species, boys and girls.
I was walking along the High Street with my two girls and my son,
and my son suddenly went "Hah!"
for no reason. And the girls and I turned to him and went, "What?!"
There was probably a secret agent round the corner.
I don't know. Is that puzzling?
Ronni and I were talking about how wonderful boys are
cos they live in this very clear world about themselves.
When my son was about six, he had a friend over and his friend said,
"What's it like having two mummies?"
He said, "It's marvellous. If one of them's poorly, you've still got one to do for you."
Excellent child!
Excellent child. I like.
"Do for you"! They're gloriously self-centred, aren't they?
There are other theories. Aristotle thought the diet of the mother
and the sexual position used at conception made a difference.
He was half right, it seems, with the diet.
Anaxagoras thought boys and girls come out of testicles.
So you would tie off the testicle you didn't want the gender.
They're just making it up as they go along. Based on nothing at all.
The Talmud suggests aligning the bed north-south before sex
and then you get a boy.
Why don't they just all wait and see? That's the best way, you're right.
The French thought wearing boots to bed might help having a boy.
What have the boots got to do with it? I've no idea.
It does seem most strange.
Nowadays, you'll find that if you've got the football on during, you'll have a boy.
Oh, yes. That works. That would, wouldn't it? Yeah. Definitely.
If you've got the football on, you'll be lucky to be having sex at all.
LAUGHTER
That's a woman who's lost the will to live.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to get the football on without it being noticed.
You don't always need the sound on...
if you know who's playing. If you're working...
LAUGHTER
If you're working the remote while you're doing the business...
We've all heard the rustle of a magazine from the other end some time.
Oh, dear.
"Are you reading a magazine?" "No, no, no."
LAUGHING
Anyway, sex selection is a tricky business.
French folklore suggests wearing your boots in bed,
but modern research suggests it's much more to do with diet.
Why don't we have more women as guests on QI, you may well ask?
I know this.
Oh, sorry. No, no, after you.
Is it because women are just not funny? Ohh!
IN DEEP SOUTH ACCENT: Now, that's right. But we're good at other things.
We're good at raising kittens and knitting cakes.
I've heard this a lot.
I've heard that women aren't funny and I think there's a truth in this.
I think that there is a scientific, possibly, relationship between
a sense of humour and the male sex organ.
People are always laughing at mine. Well, there you are, you see!
LAUGHTER
Is this to do with the fact that people always say
there aren't as many female comedians as there are men?
Because you know what?
There are loads of female comedians.
It's just that we don't see them,
because they're systematically rounded up and kept in a pen just outside Harwich.
Harwich? Yes, Harwich. But you can go and see them and adopt them online.
You can go and visit them, and you can feed them lines, and you might get a joke back sometimes.
And then sometimes some of them escape and they disguise themselves as male comedians.
But you can always tell which ones are the male comedians
- the ones with the beards. Just like Life Of Brian.
Bill Bailey. Nearly a woman.
But you know, it's really rare to be allowed to sit next to a female comedian.
Are they worried that our cycles will suddenly synchronise or something?
I'm in disguise. I'm Rory Bremner.
WOLF WHISTLE
Is it cos once you get them started they don't shut up?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Whoa.
What do we do about it?! I say!
But recent studies appear to have shown an interesting thing,
which is that women laugh more but they laugh less at women.
Women laugh more at men.
Audiences generally laugh more at men.
But women themselves do more laughing.
I don't know. I suppose men are more willing to make prats of themselves.
Yes. The really, truly great female comedians do make prats of themselves.
Lucille Ball, people like that.
And there's a strange division that girls have either got to be fey and look slightly stupid
or they can be, like myself, not terribly attractive, wear a pink jacket...
Now stop it. There's an interesting thing if you think about...
Goldie Hawn, for example. Played ditzy
and is one of the most successful Hollywood producers of all time.
Yes, very smart but played stupid.
But, just as Sandi says, as a woman, they want to categorise you more.
Yes. What is she doing here?
Is she doing the fat, man-hater thing? Is she doing the fey...?
In the early days of modern stand-up in the '80s,
almost all female comedians, the subject was being a woman.
Whereas male comedians, their subject was not being a man.
In other words, women were treating themselves as if there were
a minority when, in fact, they're 51% of the population.
Women don't have the history in comedy.
In the era of the great silent comics,
we were all being tied to railway tracks while they were all being...
Happy days.
LAUGHTER
I think it was Germaine Greer who said, "There are only two things
"that women don't do as well as men, and that's design dresses and cook."
Which is kind of an amusing thing.
Actually, almost all the great chefs are men
and all the great couturiers are men,
and yet one thing we used to think about women is,
"Put them in the kitchen and make them design dresses."
According to the American study, if we had more women on the show,
the panel would laugh more but the audience would laugh less, perversely.
Where and when would you find the most violent women in history?
Basildon?
Basildon.
I was going to say first day of the sales.
Well, there've been lots.
There's a wonderful woman called Princess Khutulun,
who was the niece of Kublai Khan, the great Mongol leader.
And Marco Polo says she was the fiercest of all the warriors.
Niece of Kublai Khan, and he reckoned she should get married,
so she said, "Fair enough. I like being a soldier,
"but I will wrestle any man who wants to marry me and if he wins,
"he can marry me and if he loses, he has to give me 100 horses."
And she ended up unmarried with 10,000 horses.
And much do we love her. Wow! But, I mean, Amazons and...
Yes, and the Amazons were a mythical race of warrior women.
Xena the Warrior Princess. Yes.
She was tough. She may have been madey-uppy, though, Alan, I hate to say.
That was a documentary.
I'm not going to be the one to destroy your...
Doesn't Gaddafi have Amazons? He calls them Amazons...
We're in the right continent.
It's Benin. Benin? Yeah.
Hardest women in the world? Yeah.
It was called Dahomey before,
and the army of Dahomey in the 19th century protected the king,
and they were extraordinary. There they are.
They were very extraordinary women.
They had to be nominal wives of the king, although they were celibate.
D'you not think they look like the wild card on Britain's Got Talent?
They were chosen for their aggression.
The husband could actually nominate his wife if his wife was a nag,
which seems rather unpleasant.
But they carried a type of switchblade that was capable of cutting a man in two. Eugh!
Oddly enough, some people saw their plight as tragic, that they had
to surrender their womanhood, turn into men and despise women.
Others said they were venerated. When they walked through the streets,
they were accompanied by slave girls ringing a bell, and men had to avert their eyes.
That might be a better life. It's like the eunuchs. Eunuchs...
You speak for yourself, Alan.
Don't you sometimes wish?
I quite like the idea of the slave girl walking ahead of me and ringing a bell.
Recent statistics have been rather astonishing.
Female violent crime in this country has risen
over the last three years by 25% Is that to do with alcohol?
Well, yes, probably. Because drunk women have 50% more testosterone coursing about their blood.
They're drinking the wrong thing!
LAUGHTER
Alcohol causes the stimulation and production of female...
Women have testosterone, just as men have, you know, lady things.
Oestrogen and so forth. Lady things!
Nipples.
Nipples, yeah, we have nipples.
The basic human form is female, isn't it?
You start out with two Xs and then you get one broken one.
That's your basic model. Basic model is female.
If you want any of the extras...
Add-ons. Add-ons.
Sunroof. It's gonna cost you.
Leather steering wheel, whatever...
Yeah, let's talk about cars for a minute. We got there in the end.
But that's right.
2% fall for boy violent crime
and a 25% rise in girl violent crime.
So, there are boys all over Britain going,
"Leave it, it's not worth it!" Exactly.
"You know what she's like. She starts..."
Girl bullying is not nice, is it? No.
If you wanted to be, you are very good at mental torture,
it has to be said.
Especially now with the mobile phone.
They just keep texting you until you break down.
In the classroom, suddenly girls go...
"What's happening?" "Texted me."
I arrived in this country at the age of 14.
I'd been thrown out of school in the United States
and I arrived with a very thick New York accent.
I was sent to boarding school and for six weeks nobody spoke to me.
Jeez! Six weeks. I know. It's like a therapy for me, this programme.
I thought, "I have to change my accent,"
and then one night we were watching Brief Encounter with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.
I thought, "I'm going to speak like that,"
and that's why I sound like I'm trapped in a black-and-white film.
But it was all to do with bullying.
You had your own fair share of bullying at school, Stephen.
Yeah, well, sort of.
But I found a very useful one was, if you were physically bullied,
was to say, "No, no, no, don't, you'll give me an erection."
LAUGHTER
It worked incredibly well.
That is brilliant.
Really, really useful.
You could try it.
I won't take responsibility.
Yes, the fighting women of Dahomey were the bodyguard of the 19th-century kings of Benin.
Henpecked husbands used to volunteer their wives for the job.
Now we're off to China.
What does "Nushu" mean to Chinese women?
Well, nun shu is writing.
Is it something to do with writing? It is.
Nushu is a very particular kind of writing.
It's from Jiangyong County in Hunan province.
It was invented entirely by women for women.
Lady writing? It's lady writing. Only ladies can understand it.
Women were not educated formally at all.
Over centuries, they developed a secret code,
which was actually a phonetic writing, unlike Chinese characters.
They uncovered all these books, How To Poison Your Man.
Well, kind of. When one of them married, they would be given a book
by these secret female friendship groups
and they would each write in the book and leave a lot of blank pages
so that they could write their secret thoughts down.
The men could never read it, only other women would.
Very sly, isn't it? That's like our culture, really.
There's loads of words that women know
that men don't have a clue about, like "sorry".
I... "Fidelity".
Ohh! "Responsibility".
"Commitment". We have a secret language in this country.
It's called an instruction manual. Ah, yes.
If you want to hide something on your computer from a man,
put it in a folder marked "instructions"
and he will never open it.
It's like a secret language.
APPLAUSE
'ALLO DARLIN'! Sexist!
Sexist, you're right. So, points against.
They would send them, because they couldn't take them
to their women friends very often, for what reason?
Horrible gruesome reason. Because of their feet. Their bound feet.
Yes, tell me about foot binding.
Were they called lotus flowers? When they were very young.
Five years old. They used to break all the bones in the foot,
and they would bend it right round underneath the foot...
Three inches was the idea.
They'd be like little... They'd become stumps like a hooves.
They'd be jammed into this, and many of them would rot,
die of gangrene. This went on for almost 1,000 years.
How ironic to come up with a writing system called Nu Shu.
It was a bit.
APPLAUSE
It was a bit grim. They would write in tapestry, messages to each other.
That's right. The Bayeux Tapestry is actually not about the Battle of Hastings at all.
It's a complex soup recipe.
There are other separate languages, aren't there?
In Africa... I'm trying to think whether it's the Bantu or the Zigua people.
When women go to...
Say you and I got married, Stephen. Yes.
The contingency is a remote one.
I would no longer be allowed to use any syllable that was in your name.
It's the language of respect that women have to use. Wow.
So, say I wanted a stevedore over for a fry-up.
Hey!
You couldn't say... Just to please you.
You'd have to say "edore" and "up".
You couldn't say...
I'd have to say a docker coming over for breakfast.
I couldn't use any of the syllables that are in your...
Is that how Ronnie Barker got started?
Of course, there was Pig Latin as a secret language,
where you take the first syllable and put it at the end
with an "ay" on the end.
Yes, I remember. So "quite interesting" would be whitekay...
Itequay interestingay.
Yes, exactly. Esyay.
Yes. Oh, you scholar!
LAUGHTER
Plenty more where that came from.
LAUGHTER
The Germans have something called Loffelsprache, which I think is something like "spoon speak".
And the French have Louchebem. And there's Pileshki.
And the Japanese have Ba Bi Bu Be Bo,
which is their amusing nonsense language.
But those are nonsense languages where you apply a very simple rule
and it sounds very quickly nonsense.
There's a very camp sort of High Church one
where they call Holy Communion haggers commagers and that sort of thing.
And they go, "Ooh, Jessica Christ!"
LAUGHTER
Teenagers sound the same in every language, I have noticed. Teenagers?
Yeah. You could say "uegh".
In any language, that means "yes". "Uegh," "Oui".
"Would you like some more croissant?"
"Ouegh." Uegh.
It's always the same. If you ever you say to a teenager, "Look at me,"
they can look everywhere else apart from at your face.
And then when they do eventually concede to look at you they go...
LAUGHTER
That's very true indeed.
Anyway, the women of Jiangyong had a secret language all of their own.
And talking of secrets,
what does your granny have in common with a killer whale?
HARP PLAYS
Yes, Ronni.
They've both got stomachs full of plastic bags that they've eaten by mistake.
My granny is actually being hunted by the Japanese for research purposes at this very moment.
Did they base Free Willy on her?
The thing is, the Japanese always use the excuse of hunting whales
- they say it's research.
What else do they need to know about a whale?
Can't they get another book out? Or watch a David Attenborough programme?
What they mean is, "We want to research how it tastes in a sandwich."
If it's my Scandinavian granny,
it would be the ability to take a single herring
and stretch it into a meal for four.
Oddly enough, you made reference to some particular stage that women
go through which grannies tend to have gone through. The menopause.
Flushes and things. Flushes. The menopause.
Orca in the menopause? Well, oddly enough...
Is that why she's jumping out the water? "Ooh, it's hot in there."
LAUGHTER
Killer whales are the only animals other than human beings
that have this enormous gap between menopause and death.
In other words, they have a menopause and then a very active and useful and happy life.
They're also matrilineal, so the granny would presumably be in charge.
Yes, and it's thought that it's because - you mentioned this when you talked about hunter-gatherers -
and that it was the women who provided the nutrition.
And it seems that it was often the elder women
who gathered the berries and nutrition,
and so it seems to be a slow human survival thing
that older women are the ones who actually, the grandmothers,
keep the family going and therefore their own genes.
Grannies can be vicious.
The killer whale in captivity can kill its handler
and my granny got thrown out of three care homes.
Wow! What for? I was so proud of her.
Bad behaviour. Couldn't have been prouder.
They kept ringing up and saying, "We need another word."
"Oh, Granny, not again. Try and be pleasant."
It is interesting. When you see a big family,
you see the grandmother and the children and in the middle, the poor mother,
and the grandmother and the children are so alike.
The grandmothers are being childish and bossy and greedy
and the children are being childish and bossy and greedy
and we've got this terrible period in between
when we're not allowed to be either a child or a grandmother.
My mother grew up in Maidstone in Kent during the Battle of Britain
and their entire street of terraced houses was bombed, apart from their house.
I said to my mother, "Why not your house?" She said, "Oh, Granny wouldn't have allowed it."
Excellent.
Maybe then, I think we might all agree what Britain needs is more grannies.
Britain's Got Grannies.
Yeah, Britain's Got Grannies.
Do you not think it would be great if only grandmothers could join the Army?
Do you not think it would be the most fabulous thing?
Because, for a start, if you're going to invade somewhere,
it would take a really long time to organise the coach.
And then you'd finally get there and everybody would need a wee.
All the kit would be all crocheted, wouldn't it?
And then you'd show pictures to the people you've arrived to invade.
You'd say, "Oh, look at my children."
And then you'd think, "Well, let's have a cup of tea while we've stopped. And a bit of a tidy."
by which time your appetite for fighting would have been diminished, I would have thought.
They'd fiddle around with the gun. "Oh, it's not working. Oh!"
And there'd constantly be a draught.
"Oh!" They get so angry at draughts.
"Oh! Ooh!"
LAUGHTER
That's the answer to the world's problems, darling.
Armies of grannies.
Anyway, human females are the only mammals, apart from killer whales,
known to pass through menopause. But what's going on here?
Oh...
WOLF WHISTLE
Yay. Is it half hen, half cock?
It is exactly half cock, yeah.
It is exactly that. It is half hen, half cock.
Is it a freakish accident? It is a freakish accident.
Or done by design?
No, it's not done by any kind of scientist. It's a rare...
I literally guessed that because of the theme of the programme.
There, you see? Using your male intelligence, for once.
Thank you. Oh, I feel so foolish now.
It's called bilateral gynandromorphic hermaphroditism.
I was going to say that. Yeah.
We are dealing with chromosomes again.
All cells on one side of the animal, male, all cells on the right, female. Doesn't happen in humans.
I don't know how that would work. Quite good fun, though, wouldn't it?
It would be fun, yes. If you were at a party, you could stand that way.
Should I wipe my bottom with my lady hand or my man hand?
Gently or roughly?
But a clown fish, did you ever see the film Finding Nemo?
Yes. They're fierce.
I know a bit about them. They have a relationship with that anemone.
That anemone is normally poisonous to other fish
but they are immune to it and they have their babies in there.
And if you try to get near them, they come at you.
They're quite fierce. They are.
Do you know about their gender assignations? Is it variable?
It's up to them. It is sort of up to them, yes.
What happens is you have one female and one dominant male
and the rest are all rather weakly
and not very fit or sexually active males.
And if the female dies, the active male then becomes female
and one of the weakling males becomes the alpha male.
I like it. It's sort of really weird.
Isn't that extraordinary? They are very unusual like that.
Rather splendid. So the story of Finding Nemo and his father would have been very different.
His father would have been his mother by the time he'd got to him.
The whole thing would have been very odd. "Where've you been?"
"Huh?" LAUGHTER
Do you think these animals know that's what's going to happen to them or is it just instinct?
Do they actually... Does he know?
"I hope you don't die because, if you die,
"then I have to have it off with all the other blokes.
"And I'm not into that."
They wake up one morning and go, "Oh no, what's happened to me?
"I've changed." The change. It is a very strange thought.
Yes, bilateral gynandromorphic hermaphrodites are male on one side and female on the other.
If you think that's bizarre,
what should you do if you meet a nun with hairy hands?
I would assume it's a man on the run. Yes.
Disguised as a nun.
In the 1940s there was a big scare about hairy nuns.
It's something to do with the Second World War. Yeah.
Urban myth now. It's an urban myth.
They thought that Nazis would parachute in... Dressed as...
Yes, basically. Now, look out.
We're expecting them to come as nuns. Beware of nuns.
If you see a nun, check the hands.
Basically, that's right.
People going up to nuns and going, "Halt!" Exactly.
They were told they could be spotted on buses, tubes and trains from the south coast to the Scottish islands.
They were said to be given away when they reached out a hand to pay their fare
or when they had dropped something and stretched to pick it up,
thus revealing the hairiness of their hands and forearms.
In some cases, they may have had Hitler's face tattooed on their arms.
Would they not have covered that up?
You would have thought, wouldn't you?
If she's driving a tank, that's a giveaway.
LAUGHTER
Do you get women with hairy hands? Hairy everything else. Oh, yes.
Really? Well I'm sure.
I don't know any but there must be ladies with hairy hands.
Because the moustaches, as you say, are common enough.
And hairy legs, obviously.
But you're right, back of hand I've not seen.
Have you ever grown a moustache?
I tried to for a thing. Didn't work?
Didn't take? I didn't really like it. Did you try it under glass?
Then I found... I had to do a part recently and they said, "We need a couple of weeks' growth."
And it started to go grey.
That is deeply upsetting, yes.
I was quite unhappy about that.
And then my wife told me that, you have already got a grey pube.
LAUGHTER
I said, "Have I?" She said, "Yes, you have."
Or was that someone else?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Good point, it's a fair point well made. I will check properly later.
But there were other things to test if someone was German. Do you know what these might have been?
Say, if they spoke very good English but you wanted to check whether they were German.
There were English words, particular words that are pronounced oddly.
Words of surnames, here are some, for example. What is the top one?
Fanshawe. Fanshawe. Did you know that was pronounced Fanshawe?
No, I didn't know that at all. Chumley. Chumley, the second one.
Barkly. Mannering as in Captain Mainwaring.
The bottom is Belvoir, is it? The bottom is beaver.
The Vale of Belvoir. I am going to have that if I ever became a Dame or anything.
Dame... and I will say, "No, it's pronounced Beaver."
You could say that about Toksvig.
It's pronounced Beaver.
There was a member of this aristocratic family here,
Tollemache, spelt T-O-L-L-E-M-A-C-H-E. Tollemache.
There was the Tollemache-Tollemache family, double-barrelled, same name.
But, each half was pronounced differently.
So it was pronounced "Toolmake-Tollmash."
The Tollemache-Tollemaches,
they had the longest name in the British Army, one of their number.
Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius
Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache.
But his elder brother, right, Lyulph Ydwallo Odin Nestor Egbert
Lyonel Toedmag Hugh Erchenwyne Saxon
Esa Cromwell Orma Nevill Dysart Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache.
That was his name. The initials spelt out Lyonel the Second.
So, yes, during World War Two,
it was feared that the German paratroopers would be disguised as nuns.
Now, to break down the walls of mutual misunderstanding with a look at general ignorance.
So, dainty fingers and great big mitts on buzzers, if you please.
You are sitting in a dimly-lit bar,
girls and boys with a saucy little poppet.
How can you be sure she's not a bloke?
'ALLO, DARLIN'!
You ask her a question. If she asks you a question back, it's a woman.
No, as in, if you say to a bloke, "Do you know where the post office is?" He will say, "It's down there."
If you say to a woman, "Do you know where the post office is?" She'll say, "Do you want to buy a stamp?"
Trying to be helpful but asking you a question. That's true.
Boys sit with their legs apart, don't they, on bar stools? There are things like that.
We were wondering whether you might say Adam's apple
and we would have forfeited you because women do have Adam's apples.
You probably know you have an Adam's apple. It's not as big.
But on some women it can be quite pronounced.
There's a woman, a girl, a lady person
with quite an Adam's apple there.
It's called a prominentia laryngea,
that the medical name for it and it's around the larynx.
So that's what you look at if you think someone's in drag?
But it's no proof, is the point.
Basically, a good lady boy can imitate almost anything female
in terms of how they hold their legs and, you know, everything like that.
Not hands or feet. Well, some women, as you say, have large hands and large feet.
A dainty lady boy can easily fool and often has.
LAUGHTER
As you know to your cost.
An expensive night, that one!
Moving on, the truth is that without undressing them or testing their DNA,
you can't be sure what sex someone is so be careful out there.
Why are men better than women at reading maps?
WOLF WHISTLE
They're not, I would say. They are not better.
Oddly enough. I was so trying...
Your one attempt to be decent backfired horribly.
Is it to do with the brain, spatial awareness. Testosterone.
Isn't it? It's to do with the grey matter and white matter in the brain.
MRI equipment has shown, oddly enough, that in a test group
of men and women with average IQ scores amongst the two genders roughly equal. Don't be absurd! Hey!
LAUGHTER
How on earth are they finding...
When given intelligence tests,
men use 6.5 times more grey matter than women.
Women used nine times as much white matter.
Grey matter is central to processing information and plays a vital role
in aiding skills such as mathematics, map reading, intellectual thought.
White matter connects the brain's processing centres central to emotional thinking,
use of language, the ability to do more than one thing at once.
I know they're all cliches, you know, words, emotional thinking,
multi-tasking, women are better at,
but it does seem that the evidence indicates that this is the case.
I'm so sorry.
Is it the white matter that makes you think it's OK to wind the window down and ask the way?
Yes, because that's also the superiority in language, which seems to be a female thing.
You prefer to ask, where a man would prefer to look at visual cues, spatial cues.
The only reason I don't ask is because you always get the idiot, don't you?
When you stop and ask, "Do you know the way to Tesco?"
"Uuuuhhhh..."
And they say, "In two miles you come to a bridge, a mile before that turn left."
LAUGHTER
I once stopped in Ireland, I stopped an elderly man.
I was lost and asked him the way and I said,
I can't remember the names of the places,
I said, "Do you know the way to Duncannon?"
And he said, "Did you not want to go to Castlereagh?"
"No, I want to go to Duncannon."
He said, "It's a pity because I know the way to Castlereagh."
LAUGHTER
That is very Eccles, isn't it? Superb.
It does seem that men are better than spatial awareness problems
and women are better at vocabulary problems.
And finally, one last fanfare to unfairness.
What is unfair about the prize money at Wimbledon?
WOLF WHISTLE
They only give it to you if you are really, really good at tennis.
APPLAUSE
Very damnably unfair. Nothing. Not any more.
CLAXON SOUNDS
No, it's very unfair. Is it still unfair?
Women get more money for playing than men.
Per set, you mean. Yes, the men play a lot more tennis and get less money,
When it started in 1884, the ladies' champion won a 20 guinea silver flower basket. Aah!
While the men got a 30 guinea gold trophy.
By 2006, 625,000 for Amelie Mauresmo who played 142 games,
versus just £30,000 more for Roger Federer who played 202 games.
The best women were earning more than the best men
because they are shorter matches allowed them to compete
in both doubles tournaments as well as the singles.
The rate per game told the story.
2005, the final eight women earned an average of £1,432 per game
against the men's 993.
How much do they win now if they win. It is equal for first prize.
The women's champion gets the same prize as the men's champion
but the men's champion plays a lot more tennis.
But, to be fair, the women have got to come off and make the tea as well.
You women get more from sponsorship, oddly enough.
And also, half a million, that's not that much when you think
50% will go to tax, 15% will go to their agent
then they've got to buy all their balls and they've got to buy
the sticky stuff to wrap round the racket, that's very expensive.
So do the men. They've also got to get a travel card to zone six.
They're left with about £1.50 after all that.
Anyway, now that male and female tennis players get the same prize money,
it is arguably unfair to men who work harder and longer for less money over all.
Which brings us to the end of our hard work and the gleanings of our genders.
Oh, my goodness me.
Let's discover who's wearing the trousers here.
Well, my heavens, the winners are the ladies team with, between them, plus eight.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
It breaks down as three for Ronni and five for Sandi.
But the boys, I'm afraid have come last with minus five.
APPLAUSE
That's all from this edition of QI,
so it's good night from Ronni, Sandi, Jack, Alan and me.
Hopefully the real winner tonight has been mutual understanding and respect.
I leave you with this thought from Canadian feminist Charlotte Whitton.
"Whatever women do, they must do it twice as well as men to be thought half as good.
"Luckily, that isn't difficult." Goodnight.
APPLAUSE