Consent. This concept, which has regularly found itself at the heart of social controversies since the beginnings of MeToo, appears, at first, to be specifically human. In contrast to the ideal of a society in which relations between men and women evolve as much as possible towards equality, we tend to oppose nature as marked by brutality and the law of the strongest, including in copulation.

But this is not so. The latest advances in ethology highlight a disturbing fact: Consent, understood as the explicit acceptance given by the female to the male prior to sexual intercourse, is the norm for the vast majority of species. This means that forced intercourse is relatively rare among our animal friends.

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