a bonobo humanity?

Just following on from my last post, one of the difficulties humans have in comparing their society, or their plethora of societies, to bonobos is the fact that – we’re human. Being inside that particular species, we don’t really see ourselves as a species at all, in spite of all the efforts of Darwin and so many others. 

This is a perhaps deceptively important point. When we think of chimps and bonobos, we think of a species of primate, vaguely considered as existing in troupes, with certain general characteristics such as male philopatry (the males stay put, while the females leave for other troupes around adolescence), and alpha males in the case of chimps, alpha females in the case of bonobos, and some kind of ever-changing pecking order. And generally, that’s about it. After all, we don’t have to live with these beasties.

And that’s not how we see humans – we see them as individuals. Family, friends, enemies, politicians, philosophers, comedians, teachers, lovers, heroes and villains. And that’s why, I think, that so many people take the individual view when the idea of a female-dominated, bonoboesque society is mooted. Margaret Thatcher was an inhuman monster. My mother treated me like shit. I hated my female boss at Woollies. 

But on learning more about our closest living relatives, and primates generally, which I’ve done, unfortunately not directly but through observant primatologists such as Jane Goodall, Birute Galdikas, Frans de Waal and Dian Fossey, among many others, you soon learn that they too are individuals with a variety of quirks and sensibilities.  But of course these individual proclivities are contained within the broader social structure – male dominance and greater violence for chimps, female dominance and more sex and less violence for bonobos. 

I wish I could get this across to people. Is it the sex that bothers them? A while back I read a sentence on some website saying that some study of studies found that viewing pornography made people more violent. No references were given, but it occurred to me that, even if that were true, it seems not unreasonable to surmise that people who watch a lot of porn are not themselves having lots of sex other than masturbation, and not the mutual masturbation beloved of bonobos. By the same token it seemed to me that the porn performers would not be made more violent thereby – they’d be too busy recovering and looking forward to the next bonoboesque scene. Of course there is sado-masochistic porn, just as there is soft porn, female-female porn, male-male porn, and the kind of sexual amusement parlours I’ve described in a previous piece. 

And there are also feminists that are anti-porn, or there were, back in the day. What such women, if they still exist, think of female-on-female porn is a question. It seems to me that all these varieties of porn exist because there’s a market for them, just as prostitution is described as the world’s oldest profession, and still going strong. Perhaps in a matriarchy this would still be the case, but with the majority of clients being female. Or perhaps, if we were to combine human matriarchy with bonoboism, prostitution of all kinds would be rendered obsolete. After all, Frans de Waal did describe bonobo behaviour as positively pornographic at times. 

I don’t know, maybe I’m just a few hundred years before my time. But by then, surely bonobos will have gone extinct in the wild, and their behaviour in captivity will have been modified to be suitable for viewing by children. 

Sigh…

References

a world turned….

https://www.ttbook.org/interview/women-who-revolutionized-primatology