feminism’s battles in Australia and elsewhere…
monogamy and equality – birds do it better
So, according to various internet sources (let’s keep it vague), ‘81% of Australian women and 52% of men agree that men and women are not treated completely equally’, and ‘roughly two-thirds of Australian women (and about one-third of men) explicitly identify as feminists’, which all sounds quite good…? What about those two-thirds of men? Some might think it’s not their place to comment or have a view, feminism is a women’s issue. Some might even feel awkward about being feminist, as if they’re betraying their own gender, or some might call themselves egalitarian, favouring neither gender. Which raises the question – what exactly is feminism? Is it female ‘rights’? Is it female supremacy? Is it some other thing? Think of its opposite, masculinism, what is that, apart from sounding repulsive?
If we’re thinking equality, you won’t find too much of it in the mammalian world. It’s for the birds, you might say, but then – we’re exceptional aren’t we? We can make equality happen? And perhaps in Australia we can learn from our unique marsupials, who… well, here’s a quote:
Marsupial biology features unique genetic sex-determination mechanisms and social sex ratios rather than human-style social “gender equality.”
See if you can make sense of that. Is it that ‘gender equality’ is just a human idea, rather than anything found in reality? I think, though, that we’re moving closer to realising that equality today than we’ve ever been before. Nobody of any sense seriously doubts that women are on average just as intelligent as men, just as inventive, just as… well, anything. What stands in their way is history, tradition and the structures built upon that tradition, structures that are slowly crumbling under the weight of actual knowledge of female capability.
Having written the above earlier in the day, I’ve since been informed by two female friends that male violence against women (globally but also Australianly) is increasing….
AI (never lies) tells me this is true:
Recent data from the Australian Institute of Family Studies via the Ten to Men study indicates that reported lifetime intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration by Australian men has increased from 25% (in 2013–2014) to 35% by 2022, with approximately 120,000 men newly starting to use intimate partner violence each year. [1]
So this is ‘intimate partner violence’, which is quite sickening. Could it be that women, becoming more prepared to stand up for themselves, are reporting this violence more? That’s probably part of the story, but the last lines of the quote seem to suggest that there really is a backlash, with men trying to assert, or re-assert, dominance. One has to wonder where it will end. Did bonobo females have all these problems before they ‘once and for all’ achieved dominance?
That may sound like a joke, but bonobo sisterhood surely relied on seeing male violence and acting collectively against it, while human domestic violence occurs behind closed doors. This is a huge factor that has long troubled me but that I haven’t raised much in my writing, simply because I can’t see us living the open lifestyle of bonobos, the closed capsule of the family home being so central to human family life. Indeed the ‘nuclear family’ doesn’t really exist for bonobos, and that’s a lesson I wish we’d learn. I’ve written elsewhere how, as a teenager suffering under the effects of my parents’ disastrous marriage, I discovered The Children of the Dream on our bookshelves – the many books in our house were one vital means of escape from the marriage carnage. That book told of kibbutzim, a more communal system of child-rearing, and general caring and sharing. Though there are obvious differences, the similarity to bonobo-style openness, with many adult role-models, many and varied playmates, and a broader sense of community, was inspiring, at least to me, long before I knew anything of bonobos.
So maybe the long view should be taken. As women continue to impress, intellectually, politically and in other spheres (I particularly love their soccer skills!) there will be an inevitable backlash, and this may go on for centuries, if our species survives. But, as they say, the cat has been let out of the bag, and we’re never going back to the ultra-patriarchy that fuelled virtually all ancient civilisations, and still fuels a few modern states. We know too much, surely.
fascinating Denisovans
So, to take a rest from current political and macho horrors, I’d like to focus on Denisovans, because it seems we’ve gone well beyond a finger-bone’s worth of evidence, and I’ve not been paying attention….
A recent New Scientist video has rather shocked me, as well as inspiring me with the evidence lately uncovered. So it starts with the claim, or fact, that only 50,000 years ago, there were four other species of humans living on Earth – Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis, the Denisovans (no formal name agreed upon, apparently) and one other….? All will be revealed? Is it Homo longi? Homo naledi perhaps?
So there’s now evidence from a heap of artefacts – over one thousand – that the Denisovans lived in south-west China for more than 100,000 years. These artefacts were discovered in Bianfu Cave, Yunnan province, by far the largest trove of Denisovan material found so far.
So the situation 100,000 years ago, according to the video, was that H sapiens were mostly still in Africa, though some had ventured beyond the Mediterranean and into the Middle East. Neanderthals were well established in Europe and western Asia. The huge territory of eastern Asia seems then to have been dominated by Denisovans. And yet… the only DNA evidence is from that finger bone…?
A skull was found way back in 1933 in Harbin, China, and:
Confirmed via ancient protein and mitochondrial DNA analysis in 2025, this 146,000-to-309,000-year-old fossil provides the first clear look at the face of our ancient human cousins. [AI overview]
This Harbin cranium, which is suggestive of a very sizeable form of human, was given the name ‘Dragon Man’, which is apparently where the term Homo longi comes from, and was for quite some time difficult to place among human types. To quote Wikipedia:
The Harbin cranium was initially hypothesized to belong to the same species as the Denisovans, and subsequent proteomics and mitochondrial DNA analyses confirmed its Denisovan affinities.
The Harbin cranium is broadly anatomically similar to other Middle Pleistocene Chinese specimens. Like other archaic humans, the skull is low and long, with massively developed brow ridges, wide eye sockets, and a large mouth. The skull is the longest ever found from any human species.
There have been other more or less confirmed Denisovan discoveries from throughout the East Asian region, but the Bianfu Cave find, with over a thousand artefacts, has obviously been most impactful. The science writer Michael Marshall, who has visited the Bianfu site, points out that Denisova cave, where that first tiny specimen was found, would probably mark the very northern border of this species’ range, so ‘Denisovan’ might be a misnomer.
Some 64,000 fragments of bone have been discovered at the Bianfu site, as well as about 1000 artefacts, and all of this largely by chance as the area was being quarried for entirely different purposes, so I imagine some material was lost in that process – which makes you wonder how many ancient sites have been destroyed through mining and other activities. Anyway, Denisovan bones and teeth from the Denisovans from around 150,000 years ago have been identified, and stone artefacts from as early as 190,000 years ago. It seems from pollen and other samples that the area around the site was fertile, suggesting a temperate climate, and the bones of deer, early forms of cows, sheep and goats, even hyenas and rhinos, mostly mature adults, have been found, suggesting that they were hunted rather than scavenged by these human ancestors, not with massive weapons, it seems, unless those were of perishable material, such as bamboo.
So, the connections between the Neanderthals, the Denisovans and H sapiens are yet to be thoroughly worked out, but it seems, from the little DNA, and also proteins that have been recovered, that those other species are more closely related to each other than to us. But the inter-breeding that we now have so much evidence of when we genetically test populations around the globe raises questions about the ‘species’ concept – a concept that seems more a handy rule of thumb than anything hard and fast. And it does seem, as Michael Marshall suggests, that H sapiens managed to move ahead, in terms of innovation and technology, through sheer force of numbers.
Marshall also pointed out that, from the finds so far, the Denisovans were the largest of the three species. But then, we need more evidence from more sites… And let’s hope we find such evidence, as what we’ve found so far is very, very intriguing…
References
Always look on the bright side….
Okay, trying to stay positive, or push myself into positive mode, what about female leadership on the world stage in these torrid times?
Here in Australia, we’ve had one Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, from 2010 to 2013. It seems, like many of these recent female leaders, she was on the conservative side, for a Labor PM. Most ‘notorious’ at the time was her opposition to same-sex marriage, a view she later changed – after her stint in office. The Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act was finally passed in 2017, during Malcom Turnbull’s period as PM (Turnbull was more liberal than the Liberal party generally). It had been a long struggle beginning in 2004 when the Howard government passed an amendment to the Marriage Act (1961), explicitly excluding same sex unions from being recognised as marriages. I see it as a minor victory for the Bonobo Sisterhood, though I suspect that change will occur through a multiplicity of such minor victories.
Globally, currently we have Sanae Takaichi, PM of Japan, Giorgia Meloni, PM of Italy, Judith Suminwa, PM of the DRC, Mia Mottley, PM of Barbados, Mette Frederiksen, PM of Denmark, Evika Silina, PM of Latvia, Inga Ruginiene, PM of Lithuania, Brigitte Haas, PM of Liechtenstein, Sara Zaafarani, PM of Tunisia, and that’s not a full list – for example Mexico’s current political leader is their President, Claudia Sheinbaum – they don’t have a parliamentary system. Many of these are ‘firsts’ in terms of female leadership in their countries. Never a female leader in the USA of course, and I wouldn’t hold my breath… Canada has had one PM, Kim Campbell, and she didn’t last six months. I think it’s gonna be a long long time… It will take many generations, not years, to recognise the full value of female leadership. And it will need to be collective, not just one female surrounded by pushy male ‘minions’. As I’ve written before, slowly slowly catchee monkey…. a very appropriate term for the bonobo sisterhood, and its brotherly friends.
The big worry at present is that the most powerful and dangerous countries – the USA, Russia and China in particular, seem to be the furthest from female leadership (ok, leaving aside the Middle East). This is hardly coincidental of course. If we can weather the storms created by these macho, bullish nations over the next century or so – a big ask, admittedly – we just might start inching towards a bonobo humanity….
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elected_or_appointed_female_heads_of_state_or_government
sorry about this….
Okay so it’s hard to try and focus on a bonoboesque humanity when the current global political situation, dominated by extremely rich and brutal white men, hits me in the face every day. Is it just a phase we’re going through? Will it have to get worse before it gets better? Something nuclear, to wake us up to what we’ve become?
It’s hard to propose humanism, when humans have become the planet’s greatest problem. But it’s worth bearing in mind that those problematic humans are a small minority, with way too much power, because of the breakdown of checks and balances, the very much widened rich-poor gap, and the lack of any means to remedy the situation. About two years ago I read Rutger Bregman’s hopeful book Humankind, and now I can’t help feeling sorry and sick about how far we are from that vision. The USA might partially get there if it stopped being the USA, if the more enlightened and humane states on the east and west coasts managed to gain independence, but unfortunately they’re not making plans… They should, though. Desperate times require desperate measures, and at such times those measures become rational.
However, I’m having some difficulty with talking up a bonobo humanity in today’s global environment. We’re so very far away from that ideal. Is anybody listening? (Well, they’re not listening to me but that’s not their fault. Virtually nobody reads blogs these days, and I wouldn’t have a clue how to promote my views in any other way..)
So I watch and listen helplessly to the horrors surrounding me, or I switch off and switch on to interesting scientific developments, new discoveries (for me) in music, or cute animal behaviour, hoping it’s not AI-generated. Or I take a walk by the Torrens River, or around my new and leafy neighbourhood, amazed at all that energetic green regeneration after the skeletal bareness of autumn and winter.
A few conversations recently have been quietly pushing me away from global politics, to focus on the local scene, but that’s no more heartening. We are, as my most recent post noted, experiencing something of a move toward reactionary politics, a politics of selfishness, it seems to me, a product of the empowerment of the super-rich, now more super in their richness than has ever been seen before, and it’s likely happening as much in Australia as anywhere else. I dare not look into it for fear of being stamped on.
I enjoy listening to physicists, palaeontologists and other specialists bubbling on about the discoveries and challenges in their fields, seeming to leave the politico-economic world far behind. I wish I had the talent, the focus, the energy and the funds to do that, but I’ve always been too ‘all over the place’, and now too old, to specialise, so I just tend to try and deal with what the world throws at me, a world of tech giantism, AI confusion and financial corruption on a scale more massive than has ever been known in human history. It wears me out. I think I’ll stop here.
One nation – not so bonobo
I’ve been focussing on global politics, sort of, when I’ve been focussing on politics of late, but what about Australia, my home, and where I’ll be stuck for the rest of my life? – not that I’m complaining. A few glances today, for the first time in a while I’m shamed to say, tells me that everyone, or everyone who posts online, seems to be obsessed with the rise of One Nation, at a time when all the Yank pundits are getting hopeful about MAGA’s decline. I’m hearing about it also at the English conversation class I’m helping to supervise, so …
Headlines include ‘Why is the populist right surging in Australia?’, ‘One Nation is back on top as the most popular political party in Australia’ [One Nation was never anywhere near that position], and ‘Shock poll upending Australian politics’. It all sounds very heady, but I don’t really trust the websites that seem to come up instanter when I start my web search. It always pays to check how old these pieces are – and in fact I’m struggling to find anything recent on youtube. In any case, no federal election is expected for at least another year.
However… as in the USA, wealth has come more and more to dominate politics here, and wealth is rarely on the side of the kind of humanism I’ve long espoused. It’s going to be on the side of the already-rich and exploitative, and of those who can be easily bought. It’s all very depressing.
But what, actually, are One Nation’s policies? No doubt they’re much like Fats Frump’s policies in the US – self-aggrandisement, racism, and various versions of exploitation. And the fact that the party is led by a woman isn’t going to lead to anything pro-bonobo. One Nation’s website tries to be sophisticated – for example it tries to present its ‘policy’ on climate as some kind of reasoned denialism:
We know that the majority of people believe in man-made global warming caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. This belief is reinforced by media coverage of events like forest fires and droughts, but government policy needs to rest on the evidence and there is a growing concern about the evidence on which the claims of man-made global warming rests.
It is just too easy to allow our memories, often unreliable, to accept the often repeated claims that it has never been hotter. Given the economic costs, we believe we need to listen to the evidence.
There is of course no growing concern about the evidence. Greenhouse gas levels are increasing – CO2 levels are at more than 428ppm, higher than at any time in the past 2 million years, and it takes no time at all to get that information from reliable, scientific websites. But One Nation makes a policy of disregarding that evidence. It has other ‘interesting’ policies, on abortion (no mention of women there), on COVID-19 and no doubt other vaccinations, on oil and gas (more of course, and nothing about solar), and on firearms (oh dear). No mention of an immigration policy, which is doubtless a wise move. The devil is in what they won’t disclose.
The party achieved peak popularity in mid-2026, and has likely declined alongside Frumpism in the US, but it still has a substantial following, and is doubtless influencing our major right-wing party, the Liberals, to move further in that direction. We live in a much more connected world these days, so I’m guessing that the US mid-terms will affect One Nation’s standing here. The trouble is, I’ve come to be very sceptical of claims that Frump will be badly beaten in the mid-terms. I was listening to all the talk before the 2024 US election, and it led me to believe that the Democrats would win. I also found it ridiculous and shocking that Frump would be allowed to participate in that election, but that’s the USA for you. It’s all a bit depressing….
Finally, what does the term ‘One Nation’ actually mean? That we all should be ‘one’ somehow? All ‘united’? As what? Patriots, presumably? Nationalists? I’m not a nationalist myself, or an anti-nationalist. Australia, under that name, became a British colony because – well, because they stuck a British flag in the ground at Sydney Harbour and said it was British. And later, because it was all too hard to govern this massive land from the other side, they ‘made’ it a separate country. And virtually all countries have these peculiar, ad-hoc histories, most of them far more blood-stained than that of Australia. I’m not proud or ashamed of Australia’s history – I wasn’t there after all, I didn’t help to make it what it is. If circumstances had been a little different my family might have stayed in Scotland and I’d now be trying to work out whether Scotland is or should be a separate country. We’re thrown into this world, as one famous philosopher put it, and for me, the best way to deal with it is to get along as well as we can with those we’re thrown together with. We’re all just trying to make the best of our lives, and we all need help in that. It’s a human thing, not a national thing.
Bonobos, by the way, are quite good at all that stuff.
References
https://www.onenation.org.au/climate
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/carbon-dioxide-levels-increase-record-amount-new-highs-2024
Patriarchy: a tough nut to crack
We all know who wears the panties on this planet
I’ve just finished rereading The Bonobo Sisterhood, and was amused and bemused by this passage:
The current patriarchal laws gaslight women into not believing what they know to be true. Recall Heidi Schreck sitting in her car, thinking something like ‘stay alive’ while a boy removed her panties. At that moment she knew something to be true, and in Bonoboland her truth will be acknowledged and acted upon, either in the moment if her cry is heard or afterward.
Diane L Rosenfeld, The Bonobo Sisterhood, p225
Of course there’s nothing amusing about date rape, which so many women have experienced, and which is dealt with at some length in the book, along with the male privilege and male solidarity that often facilitates such behaviour, but on this occasion I was struck by the word ‘panties’. Girls wear panties. Even grown women wear panties, apparently. Males never wear panties, even when they’re children. I’m presuming Rosenfeld used the term inadvertently, but it’s that very inadvertence that resonates. It’s an infantilising term, that’s so commonplace that we’re generally oblivious to its effect. But it’s important to make the connection. Children are under our control. They need to do as they’re told, to realise what’s good for them – it might hurt them at first, but they’ll finally recognise that it’s all for their own good…
Panties are pretty, underpants are boring, jocks are manly (they’re an Aussie term, not sure if they’re globally recognised). A lot of the names for clothing have underlying gendered and sexual connotations, some of which are subtle, others, like ‘panties’, not remotely so. Why do men have shirts while women are stuck with blouses? Why do women wear stupid shoes, aka stilettos, while men have Cuban heels or whatever? Like petticoats, it’s all a bit petty. And of course patriarchy is at the bottom of it all, and it’s telling that Rosenfeld, so clearly onto feminist issues, should make that slip … (slip for a female undergarment – sexist or not?)
Who wears the pants? The men of ancient Greece and Rome, all ultra-patriarchs, wore skirts and dresses, which they called robes or togas. Trousers probably started with horse-riding among the Asiatic nomads, males generally, though hopefully women too. And think of tights and slacks, socks and stockings, bloomers and knickerbockers, which somehow became knickers; ties and scarves, hats, caps and bonnets, all with their shiftingly genderised elements. And nowadays, for good or ill, we’ve gone beyond or underneath clothing, with trans and cis, shemales, bitches, butches, incels, alphas, betas, sluts and studs, to name a few. Language does seem to have its downside.
Which brings me back to those language-free, and clothing-free, primates that I like to go on about. You see how we’ve mucked things up a bit with all that paraphernalia. With bonobos, what you see is what you get. And what do they see, or sense? A backside to die for? A wet dream of pink bits? The sexy scent of those fabulous pheromones? A boner to… well, you get the idea. And even without the sexual stuff – though the sexual stuff is pretty central – bonobos have something which could almost be called a policy. No-one left behind. Yes, I’ve mentioned a bit of female-on-male discipline, which very effectively sends a message to the odd uppity male, who always seems to learn his lesson, but the contrast with their chimp neighbours north of the Congo and elsewhere, is stark. And I mean really stark. Here are the facts on chimp aggression, from Wikipedia:
Dominance Aggression: Adult males fight for social status and access to fertile females using charging, biting, and displays (like branch-shaking), which rarely result in death due to submission rituals.
Coalitionary Aggression: Multiple males or females gang up on a single rival to gain rank or improve mating opportunities.
Intercommunity Warfare & Raiding: Neighboring groups regularly patrol borders, ambush loners, and engage in coordinated lethal attacks. Famous instances include the Gombe Chimpanzee War (1974–1978) and ongoing civil strife among the massive Ngogo Chimpanzee Community in Uganda’s Kibale National Park.
Infanticide and Cannibalism: Males and females occasionally kill and consume infants from rival groups or within their own community to eliminate competition or speed up a mother’s return to fertility.
Sexual Coercion: Males frequently chase, hit, and bite estrous females to control mating access.
This is a truly stark contrast to bonobo behaviour, just as human patriarchal behaviour, in terms of numbers slaughtered alone, dwarfs that of chimps. But then, we’ve still managed to out-number them, by a huge margin. We doubtless need to produce fewer kids, and to look after them better. Like bonobos…
We have a lot to learn.
References
Diane L Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood, 2022
bonobos and me: a personal exploration
Yes, it’s me, why not?
So yes, like everyone, I was born into a patriarchal society, but it’s always complicated. The first society we start with and have to negotiate is family. We were more nuclear than most nuclear families (don’t worry, I’m not talking about radiation and fallout), because we left my native Scotland for Australia when I was five, leaving behind all grandparents, uncles, aunts and so on, never to be seen again, at least by me.
We came via ‘assisted passage’, as skilled migrants. My mother was the skilled one. South Australia was in need of nurses, and my mother heeded the call. She was always the decision-maker. I don’t know how she did it with three young kids, my older brother and sister and myself, but she took up a job as a nursing sister, and then as an assistant matron of a hospital in Gawler, and later still as a nursing teacher/lecturer. My father was an unskilled labourer, often out of work. It wasn’t a happy marriage – my mother did a lot of shouting, and I always worried that my father, who’d been an amateur boxer in his youth and was impressively muscle-bound, would lose it and go for her, but that never happened, though he’d sometimes threaten – ‘I’ll put your head through that wall’ was a favourite line of his. My mother, though, did occasionally throw things at him, including a pot of something, soup I think, from the kitchen. I don’t know if it was hot or cold.
I was always embarrassed and shamed by these noisy rants. People walking by could surely hear them. And as I got older, the thought of running away from home would seem more and more enticing. The transition from primary to high school was another trauma. The school’s headmaster was a rabid authoritarian who chilled the atmosphere whenever he showed up or spoke into the PA systems installed in every classroom. He haunted the school corridors in black ceremonial robes, which earned him the nickname ‘batman’, and I came quickly to despise him for his self-importance and ridiculously fearsome temper. He picked me out for a couple of dressing-downs, because he knew that I had the top IQ score for entry into the school, which was streamed into classes by those scores, and I wasn’t living up to my ‘potential’. By this time, at around fourteen, my anti-authoritarianism was at its height, and my school results were declining, as I took pleasure in reading everything but the prescribed texts.
Of course it was also that time of life when sex was rearing up its enflamed head. I would make a list in my mind of the prettiest kids in my school or elsewhere, male or female. I took pride in thinking in these ambisexual terms. I played with the thought that some girls would be better off as boys, and vice versa. I imagined kissing boys, just because I knew it was ‘wrong’. And once, when attending a wrestling match, of all things, with a friend, I got an erection from watching his handsome profile as he intently watched the muscle-bound ogres in the ring. Again, this didn’t make me feel ashamed or confused, it made me feel somehow superior and aesthetically enlightened. However, as the boys became hairier and less pretty young men, I gave up on bisexuality, rather sadly and wonderingly.
I’ve written in my novel In Elizabeth about my first sex, on my 16th birthday, granted to me by my girlfriend of a few weeks, who was experienced in these matters, so she told me, though a year or so my junior. It was short, furtive and uneventful, and it seemed to me that kissing her beautiful face was much more of a thrill. But what happened shortly after this event had much more to do with our primate cousins.
Due to all the domestic strife I was spending much of my spare time away from home, hanging out with other kids, mostly older, at the parks around the local shopping centre. I wasn’t exactly accepted by these kids, but I hung around the fringes, feeling vaguely despised because I knew nothing about car engines and other esoterica. I was an obsessive reader of Thomas Hardy novels at the time, but somehow I didn’t think…
However, my new girlfriend was very interested in these boys, some of whom she vaguely knew, and she wanted me to introduce her… Of course I agreed, though I knew, I just knew, that this would be disastrous.
So we duly arrived at the park one early evening, and I could see that the sight of Edwina, my putative girlfriend, caused some arousal. One of the lads, gigantically proportioned compared to me, and a solid thick-thighed defender in the local soccer team which I also played for, began to niggle and jab at me, which then led to a kind of long, one-sided wrestling match which, of course, left everyone amused except myself. And so ended the beginning of my sex life.
So alpha maledom was never within my purview. And looking back at that scene, I can’t help but think of chimpanzees – very basic (with apologies to chimps). I would ever be the subordinate male, wishing and hoping but never really expecting. I should also point out that, from age five to fifteen, I was the smallest kid in my class, male or female. Size does matter, they say.
Of course, I’d never heard of bonobos back then. I first heard of them on the ABC radio ‘Science Show’ when I was around thirty years old. The male journalist ended his report saying something like ‘Vive les bonobos! I want to be one!’. They’ve been a kind of leitmotif for me ever since.
I’m rereading Diane Rosenfeld’s The Bonobo Sisterhood, recognising that the book is principally addressed to women, which perhaps disappointed me first time around, as a far-from-alpha male who never made aggressive advances towards a woman (and certainly not towards men!), and whose more or less pathetic advances were likely repudiated due to their pusillanimity. And I can also admit to rejecting advances of women I was attracted to, due to performance anxiety. At least one of those rejections, I felt, was one of the dumbest and costliest of my life. But who knows…
So I don’t know where I’m going with all this, except to say that the battle of the sexes needs to continue, and women need to win. I don’t really believe in equality between the sexes, because I see matriarchy as a far better solution – which of course doesn’t need to disadvantage men, if only they could see what might be in their best interest. The wars going on at present are thoroughly male, as wars tend to be, and feminism seems currently to be struggling, not just in the USA. Female political leadership, spotty though it is, is coming to be taken for granted, as it’s nowhere near commonplace enough to seriously challenge patriarchy. I worry that something truly disastrous may have to happen before we find ourselves taking that positive turn in any big way.
Bonobos managed to take that turn, though, and it doesn’t seem to have been born of disaster. It even may have been born of plenty. We really don’t know quite how, and it’s probably the big question we should be asking. The USA, for example, should be the land of plenty – which it likes to advertise itself to be. For some it is, of course – the rich-poor gap is massive there. Its per capita incarceration rate is the highest in the developed world. Its name for itself – the United States – is a sick joke..
But of course I’m veering off-topic. Bonobos present us with a true society, with no-one left behind unless they’re overly violent, and then they can be forgiven. And they don’t make war with their neighbours, for no good reason. We need to keep focussing on the example they set. I know I’ll keep being inspired.
Reference
Diane L Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood, 2022
Women in charge? One day…?
To start with – ‘Freedom cannot be achieved unless women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression’ – Nelson Mandela
A few years ago I read Australian author Jess Scully’s book Glimpses of Utopia, which looked at hot spots in the world where positive developments were happening, often within otherwise chaotic or brutal situations and regimes. It wasn’t an overtly feminist work, but it was clear that women were behind most of the good stuff. Unfortunately I loaned the book out and it never returned, as happens, so I’m not sure if she wrote about the Palestinian and Israeli women working together to try to reduce the suffering and set an example of peaceful co-existence, or if I read about it elsewhere. …
In any case, Israeli and Palestinian women are still marching and advocating for peace. I’ve written, of course, about the Palestinian situation many times, and ever since, as a child, I read about the slaughter and betrayal of the native people of the so-called ‘new world’ – new, that is, to the European colonists of what is now called North America, I’ve been particularly sensitive to the issue of what is now euphemistically called ‘settler colonialism’. But of course, it has happened, time and time again, here in Australia, and in New Zealand, and throughout the Americas. David Reich, in his ground-breaking and comprehensive book Who we are and how we got here, provides genetic evidence of the rapid spread into Europe of the Yamnaya people and culture from about 5,000 years ago. Intermixing was commonplace and the genetics tend to dispel all notions of hereditary purity, whether in individuals such as the reigning British monarch, or in broader ethnicities, such as the Celts or the Goths or the Jews. A lot of this intermixing was the result of rape and pillage, which can sometimes be identified through complex genomic analysis, and we can consider this with regard to the concept of miscegenation, once frowned upon, but now virtually dismissed as an issue, at least in the so-called developed world.
Women will be at the forefront of this intermixing, whether sexual or otherwise, because they’re more attuned to collaboration than males in general, but we need to socially acknowledge and facilitate female leadership as much more of a priority than ever before. Think of the fact that we’re now living in a world in which some of the world’s most dangerous countries, including if not especially the USA, are now nuclear-weaponised. Russia and China, both of which are more or less unstable oligarchies/dictatorships, have very sizeable nuclear weapons stockpiles, and other not-quite-reliable countries, such as North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel, belong to the nuclear fraternity. All of these countries, of course, are led by males and their male advisors and lapdogs, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable. What will it take, to recognise that female leadership and unity is pretty much the sine qua non of future human survival.
Observe the more brutal aspects of male leadership today. Here’s the latest Wikipedia data on the Putin war on Ukraine:
The casualties in the Russo-Ukrainian war include six deaths during the 2014 annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, 14,200–14,400 military and civilian deaths during the war in Donbas,[1] and between 1,274,000 and 2 million estimated casualties (killed and wounded) during the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 24 February 2022 to June 2026.
Obviously there have been more casualties to October 26, and every expert analyst I’ve listened to has argued that Putin has virtually no chance of winning, even if he orders full-scale mobilisation. Then there’s the nuclear option, and this really worries me.
This is just about one male who clearly doesn’t care about the suffering he causes, to his own people and others. And then there is Trump, with his regime’s international and domestic attacks upon innocent people. The world is crying out for more female leadership – collective female leadership – but it would only be likely to happen in those countries already on their way to female equality, and there are precious few of them. I like to think Australia is one, but my country has virtually no leverage on the world stage. What will it take to bring about anything close to a bonobo humanity? Will we have to be brought to the precipice? Are we there yet?
References
Jess Scully, Glimpses of Utopia: real ideas for a fairer world, 2020
https://www.vitalvoices.org/barefootwalk/
David Reich, Who we are and how we got here: ancient DNA and the new science of the human past, 2018
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war
back to my big issue: bonobos and us
Time to focus on, and keep focussing on, how a mammal so close to us – no mammal closer, genetically – a highly social mammal like us, with a similar sexual dimorphism to us (though with humans, the individual variations in size and strength are ‘all over the shop’ to use a technical term), became female dominant in the 1.5 million to 2 million years since it became a species apart from its chimp neighbours.
So, first, are bonobos really a species apart? I’ve heard that bonobos and chimps have inter-bred successfully, as did Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis back in the day. A New Scientist article from 10 years ago reports:
The genetic evidence shows that a little less than 1 per cent of the chimpanzee genome came from bonobos, from one contact between 200,000 and 550,000 years ago and another, more recent one less than 200,000 years ago…. It’s not yet clear whether the two episodes of gene flow happened at low levels over a long time or in discrete pulses.
Clearly, then, being separate species isn’t always a barrier, but I suspect genetic disparity is. For example, can a human successfully breed with a chimp or a bonobo? I’m here to ask the tough questions. The answer, sadly, is no, but they’re free to have deeply loving relationships. Okay, humans have 23 chromosome pairs, chimps and bonobos have 24, end of story, at least until we can work out a way…
But getting back to the big issue, female dominance. An article published in Communications Biology in April 2025 has just the title for me: Drivers of female power in bonobos. In the abstract, the authors found… well, let me quote:
Here we test three main hypotheses explaining intersexual power relationships, namely the self-reinforcing effects of winning and losing conflicts, the strength of mate competition, and female coalition formation. We test these for bonobos (Pan paniscus), one of our closest living relatives, where females have high status relative to males despite male-biased size dimorphism. We compiled demographic and behavioural data of 30 years and 6 wild living communities. Our results only support predictions of the female coalition hypothesis (my emphasis).
So, this study makes clear that female coalitions are absolutely central to female dominance in bonobos. And would be absolutely central, IMHO, to female dominance in humans. A bonobo sisterhood indeed. And I should add that this study – a godsend to me – explores gender-based dominance in many mammalian species, with coalitions being generally key to female dominance where it exists.
This is so important. As I’ve written previously, I get push-back from women who say that this female Prime Minister X, or that female boss Y, or my horrible mother Z is somehow proof that women are, at the very least, no better than men, in terms of leadership. I try to suppress my annoyance at this totally irrelevant response. In an environment of male dominance, it’s not surprising that some women will behave ‘more manlier than men’, in order to gain prominence. Indeed, they may feel that they have no other choice. Again I’ll quote the simple remark made by the African-American novelist Toni Morrison: ‘the problem isn’t men, the problem is patriarchy’, to which I respond, ‘the solution isn’t women, it’s matriarchy. It’s sisterhood.’
So my new resolution, to focus more or less exclusively on this issue (a very tough one to keep to, I admit), has made me decide to reread Diane Rosenfeld’s book, referenced below. The book begins with the problem of male domestic violence in the USA. She’s a lawyer, and has dealt with many domestic violence and domestic abuse cases. So, interestingly, I looked up statistics on male domestic violence in the USA, and was shocked to find a listing of male victims of domestic violence in that country. I twice rephrased my enquiry, and both times it gave me the same men-as-victims results. Conspiracy theories anyone? I would generally not entertain such ideas, but in Frumpistan, tout est possible. When I keep trying, I find the statistics are all over the place, but of course women are more often the victims, especially of the more extreme forms of violence, including, unsurprisingly, murder. In February 2026, the FBI released a report on DV over a five-year period, 2020 to 2024:
Over the five-year period studied, the percentage of violent crimes within domestic relationships increased. Law enforcement reported more than 11,000 domestic violence murder victims and an additional 1.1 million victims of domestic violence. Nearly 75 percent of the victims were female.
Again, I would think it most reasonable to assume that if the violence was extreme, or ended in murder, the perpetrator would be male in far more than 75% of cases.
So this post is a statement of intent. To explore and encourage female coalitions – such as those I’ve read about between Palestinian and Israeli women. Women in difficult and male-dominated regions such as Iran, the Arabic world, China, Turkiye, Russia, and presumably many parts of Africa. I’m making guesses here, to some degree, and hopefully, in researching these countries further, I’ll find some silver linings. I don’t think I’ll be looking at the USA in the near future, at least until Frumpistan is no more.
References
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-07900-8
Diane L Rosenfeld, The Bonobo Sisterhood: revolution through female alliance, 2022
a few reflections on the great dying…
This is a self education piece. Or maybe that applies to all my writing. Anyway, it’s about the great dying at the end of the Permian period, a couple of hundred million years ago. I’m trying, not too successfully, to get my head around eras and periods and epochs and such, so… the Permian-Triassic extinction event, aka ‘the great dying’, was the biggest event of its kind in the planet’s history, resulting in the wiping out of 90% to 96% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrates, not to mention lots of insects. It also, apparently, marked the boundary between the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic eras.
So why these different names? Apparently because the Palaeo- and Mesozoic eras span hundreds of millions of years (the Palaeozoic lasted from 541 to 252 million years ago), while the Permian period started about 299 million years ago and ended tens of millions of years later, 252 million years ago, bringing in the Triassic, which ended 201 million years ago, with the start of the Jurassic. Anyway, I’ll have to make a wall chart. So, hundreds of millions versus tens of millions. But surely there are other reasons? What do these terms actually mean?
Oh, but first, the great dying. It was caused by a relatively sudden global warming. Our Earth was very different then, with much or all of the land forming one super-continent, Pangaea. In the north, a sudden eruption of volcanic activity filled the atmosphere with methane, sulphur dioxide (SO2) and carbon dioxide – the precise levels and rates of change are still under dispute, and the Wikipedia article on the event is I think the longest piece I’ve ever seen from them.
No more trilobites after that, sadly – what pets they would’ve made….
So we’re now in the Phanerozoic eon? Aren’t periods and eras enough? It’s horrible, but apparently – I have to get this straight – there are four established ‘hierarchies’ of geologic time, at least for now. Well, actually, one hierarchy of four. Eons, sub-divided into Eras, subdivided into Periods, sub-divided into Epochs, which could then be subdivided into my birthdays, but no that’s probably too personal…
Sorry, the great dying. Methane (CH4) and CO2, the two greenhouse gases we’re most concerned about today (nitrous oxide, N2O, comes in third), due to abundance combined with individual effects… okay, here’s Wikipedia:
The scientific consensus is that the main cause of the extinction was the flood basalt eruptions that created the Siberian Traps, which released sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide, resulting in euxinia (oxygen-starved, sulphurous oceans) elevated global temperatures, and acidified oceans. The level of atmospheric carbon dioxide rose from around 400 ppm to 2,500 ppm with approximately 3,900 to 12,000 gigatonnes of carbon being added to the ocean-atmosphere system during this period. (References removed).
It’s certainly very thought-provoking that this massive life-annihilating event, which lasted only a few tens of thousands of years, occurred a mere 252 million years ago on our approximately 4.6 billion-year-old planet – pretty late in the day, really. Has everything under the surface of our planet ‘stabilised’ since then? I wouldn’t bet on it. As to that measure of atmospheric CO2, shifting from 400 to 2,500 ppm, it’s worth comparing to the ‘recent’ levels, before the industrial revolution – about 280 ppm – and currently (about 430 ppm, and gradually rising, of course).
The whole extinction event lasted about 100,000 years, and involved an overall rise in temperature of about 8 degrees celsius, and an increase in ultraviolet radiation, which significantly affected plant growth. Much of the detail is necessarily speculative, but there seem to have been more intensive El Nino events, and, in amongst it, a massive extra-terrestrial impact, which created the Araguainha crater in what is now Brazil, and which caused a massive release of methane. Ozone layer destruction was also a factor. Increased ultraviolet radiation led to plant mutation and death, which, it’s speculated, led to increased fungal growth. Uncertainty abounds, however – land masses were completely different from what they are today, and different studies in different parts support everything, it seems to me, from overall gradualism to pulses of extinction followed by relative stability – but the last (million!) years of the Permian seem to have been the worst.
Examinations of marine versus terrestrial extinctions haven’t arrived at much consistency either. It has to be admitted that arriving at ‘the truth’ from examining such altered landscapes and seascapes is a near-impossible task. In any case, some believe that the two extinction types were asynchronous, others disagree, and both camps of course have evidence to back up their positions. It may be that both camps are correct due to global differences in temperature and atmospheric conditions. In any case, marine organisms suffered most, especially those with calcium carbonate skeletons. Ocean acidification due to increased CO2 made producing those skeletons more difficult. Another strong risk factor was endemism – being found only in specific regions.
Wikipedia goes into extreme detail on all the types affected – conodonts, ammonoids, bryozoans and foraminifera, among many others. I’ve looked up images of them, or of their fossilised remains, in memoriam. I think the key to this is to expect the unexpected – which is precisely something we cannot do, but we can, through knowledge, through a better understanding of our planet and the dangers to it, from within and without, and how we might avert those dangers – anthropogenic global warming being the most obvious – we can reduce the ‘degree of unexpectedness’. That’s one of the many things science is good for.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_event