a bonobo humanity?

don’t worry, bonobo-human males can still be tough guys…

So, back to the essay by Ryan Ellsworth, which bears the mocking title, ‘Dr. Strangeape, or How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bonobo‘.

As for loving the bonobo, an animal I’ve written about many times, I’m reminded of when I first learned about these creatures, on ABC radio’s Science Show back in the eighties. The reporter finished the segment semi-facetiously saying ‘Vive les bonobos! I want to be one!’ I’ve never quite been the same since.

And going back further in my history, to my childhood and teen years, feeling trapped by my parents’ loveless and somewhat toxic marriage, I read, or at least skimmed, Bruno Bettelheim’s Children of the Dream, which told of a more open system of child-rearing in which, or so I imagined, one could choose one’s own parental figures and protectors, within some kind of ‘open field’ of role models and playmates. A sense of entrapment and yearning…

The point I’m making here is that, for me, bonobos are a touchstone, just as the potential of the kibbutzim was a touchstone in my youth. And however one thinks of agriculturalism, the development of enclosed nuclear families behind walls of ownership, has proven disastrous for some as well as being a boon for others, in terms of inheritance, both genetic and material. 

 But let’s return to Ellsworth’s critique. Take this intriguing passage: 

Block refers to babies to care for, and reputations to protect, but does not seem to understand the significance of these two things for understanding human sex differences in sexual desire. Perhaps she privately does, but to acknowledge the significance of these forces on the evolution of human sexuality would severely compromise her arguments, as it demands recognition of the fact that women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men. To argue that females are as interested as males in sexual variety is to buy into a sexist worldview wherein the male is the typical specimen of the species by which to compare females (Saxon, 2012). Although ostensibly parading under the guise of liberation, such a position is no less sexist or anti-feminist than is the oppression of women’s sexuality.

Eh what? As to women having reputations to protect, I’m reminded of the women who were stoned to death for adultery in early Judaeo-Christian days, while the men received little more than a finger-wag. That would surely have made a difference to women’s overt behaviour. That ‘women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity equal to men’ says nothing about the actual desires of women – surely an individual thing – and everything about societal pressures within patriarchy. And Ellsworth’s claim here that suggesting females might be as interested in sexual variety as males is sexist because males have been doing it (with impunity) for generations – and so this is the ‘natural’ pattern for males but not for females – is, to me, a mind-bogglingly sexist argument. He has surely got to be kidding. 

So before I go on with this analysis, let’s be clear about something. The reason that bonobos are something of an inspiration – for me at least – is that they are female dominant, and they are less violent than chimps. The sex thing is, for me, the cherry on top, while I also recognise that the sexual activity – mostly mutual masturbation – and the reduction in violence, and greater empathy, are intimately connected. 

And they’re our closest living relatives, so we can learn, by studying how they came to differ from chimps, and trying to understand how humans came to be so chimpishly patriarchal, lessons for our future. 

While things are changing, we live in an extremely patriarchal society. There are some 195 nations recognised currently, and 18 of them have a female head of state. That’s less than 10%, and this is likely a record for female leadership. Another source of power is wealth, a much murkier issue, but I don’t think it would be unreasonable to claim that 99% of the world’s wealth is in the hands of men. A world ‘turned upside down’ in terms of these figures, however delicious to contemplate, isn’t going to happen in the lifetimes of any of our great-great-great-great grandchildren. But that’s only a couple of hundred years, at most. Who knows how many thousands of years it took for patriarchy to become the human norm?

We can look, though, at so-called hunter-gatherer societies. I say ‘so-called’ because I’ve been told that this is now a much-contested term. Writers and researchers such as Bruce Pascoe and Bill Gammage have focussed on Australian Aboriginals’ understanding and treatment of their land to provide a much more nuanced picture of their lifestyle, though this has become politically contested here to a tedious degree. It may also be reasonable to assume that the blanket term ‘Aboriginal culture’ is too facile, given their multitude of language groups, and the variety of environments upon which they depended. In any case there is a standard view that ‘men’s business’ and ‘women’s business’ were/are separate but complementary. And hunter-gatherer groups or tribes in Africa, some still extant, are generally regarded as egalitarian, suggesting that this was the norm for all humans before what we term ‘civilisation’, the building of civil structures, both material and in terms of operational hierarchy.

Okay, back again to Ellsworth. He argues that Block ignores or downplays the political side of bonobo sex:

If Block had examined the political side of sex, it would have become clear that among bonobos sex is a mechanism of achieving and maintaining status, and a means of social manipulation wielded mainly by females. Most noncopulatory sexual behavior in bonobos takes the form of genito-genital rubbing between adult females, with subordinate females using their sexual receptivity to curry favor from higher-ranking females, most often in the context of feeding. Note that selection pressures for variety and quantity of reproductive partners are not the same as those for nonconceptive sexual activity such as genito-genital rubbing, as female bonobos display discriminative mate choice around the time of ovulation.

Ellsworth seems to ignore that bonobos also engage in this sexual activity for pleasure, just as humans do in the post-contraceptive, post-Catholic WEIRD world. And I’m not ignoring the fact that bonobo females engage in all that genito-genital rubbing to create bonds within the female community which, inter alia, keeps uppity males in their place. And, yes, females display discriminative mate choice, not only for themselves but also for their offspring, as Martin Surbeck cutely describes in a New Scientist article:

If your mum gets too involved in your love life, spare a thought for bonobos. Females of these great apes, which are closely related to chimpanzees, help their sons with hook-ups, guard the young lovers while they mate, and even haul rival males off females mid-sex.

Interesting to note that it’s their sons’ sex lives that concerns them, not their daughters’. Shades of the old patriarchy? 

But Ellsworth, I think, downplays the pleasure-bonding aspects of bonobo sexuality in favour of the political – a typically male bias. Both are important, but it’s surely better to mix your politics with wankery than warfare, another reason for considering bonobos as an archetype and exploring why humans went the way of patriarchy – and extreme patriarchy at that. Anyhoo, let’s consider this passage: 

….. maybe in some respects bonobos are similar to humans in sexual behavior, but not in the ways that Block intends to convey, and the differences are far greater than the similarities. If we do wish to focus on similarities, the most apparent and basic of all is that in both species sexual behavior is not a public good, but a commodity.

Again Ellsworth is keen to focus on the political over the pleasurable, making a false either/or distinction. But he doesn’t speculate anywhere in the essay about why bonobo females became dominant – he’s too interested in claiming why they cannot in any way be seen as a model for humanity. The essay pushes this argument with monotonous regularity, combined with ridicule. Frans de Waal, on the other hand, offers this, in Bonobo, the forgotten ape:

Bonobo society offers females a more relaxed existence. Females control the resources, dominate the males, and have little to compete over aside from their sons’ careers. The rich forest habitat of the bonobo evidently permits such an organisation. Our ancestors, however, adapted to a much harsher environment.

Frans de Waal, Bonobo, the forgotten ape, p 135

This more plentiful and relaxed environment is worth speculating on in our post-industrial age – at least in the WEIRD world. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, in my own youth I worked in several factories – Simpson-Pope, Wilkins Servis, Atco Structures, Tubemakers of Australia, and Griffin Press. They have all since closed down – not, I hope because of me. They’ve become obsolete, or mechanised, or shipped offshore. Hard, physical labour is becoming rarer in our modern society, in which brain work is much more valued. The rich, post-industrial habitat of WEIRD human society offers females a more relaxed existence. Females can control the resources, dominate the males, and have little to compete over aside from their sons’ and daughters’ careers. 

Interestingly, it’s been found that bonobo males engage in lots of fighting for hierarchical positions and the attention of the females – just not in as deadly a way as chimps.

And meanwhile, there’s that sex thing…. 

References

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300115

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2203749-bonobo-mothers-stand-guard-and-chase-off-rivals-while-their-sons-mate/

Frans de Waal & Frans Lanting, Bonobo: the forgotten ape, 1997

https://www.science.org/content/article/bonobos-hippie-chimps-might-not-be-so-mellow-after-all