creeping towards matriarchy?
Khasi, India – a matriarchy of over a million
Listening to stuff about the macro world of general relativity and the micro world of quantum mechanical physics and their complete separateness and apparent incompatibility, about which I know so little, has taken me scurrying back to bonobos and how exactly they came to be matriarchal, which might be a simpler question, or at the very least a less mathematical one. I’ve doubtless been here before, but it’s an important question to dwell on, I think, at a time when ‘macho man’ Putin is running out of non-nuclear options and Trump’s bully-boy bullshit is becoming more tediously unhinged and unpopular – if that isn’t just wishful thinking.
The most obvious, if partial, explanation is that bonobos aren’t big meat-eaters, or perhaps more importantly, hunters, as they inhabit a densely forested region of the southern Congo, enough to provide a rich frugivorous diet, with the addition of the odd small animal that happens to wander into their territory. The various sub-species of chimps inhabit mostly savanna regions and eat quite a lot more meat, mostly caught by males. That’s to say, they actively hunt. Yet even as I write this I’m a bit skeptical – it all sounds too neat. Bonobo females aren’t as strong as the males, though the difference isn’t great. They’ve become dominant due to group relations. That’s to say, female-female relations. And how that came about is a bit of a mystery – at least to me. The sharing of mothering duties? All that mutual masturbation? More research required.
AINL (Artificial Intelligence Never Lies) covers much the same ground as me. Bonobos are matriarchal because of sexually modulated female bonding, which overcomes the slight difference in size, and because of environmental/ecological (and so dietary) factors. But of course this doesn’t explain why this sexualised female bonding came about. And, as ever, I’m primarily interested in how we humans can move in that direction, given, for example, that we’ve long abandoned hunting for our own food, and with the human world becoming more mechanised, we’re abandoning the need for physical labour. The male-female divide is closing fast, methinks. I’m not even sure of my own gender anymore.
Still, there are those who seem to argue that the human norm is, and must be, patriarchy. Others send a confusing message. Take this 2019 article from Medium.com (linked below) with the forbidding (and depressing) title ‘Bonobos and the myth of matriarchy’. No, it doesn’t argue that bonobo matriarchy is a myth – instead it seems to argue that, pace bonobos, no human societies have ever been fully matriarchal, so…. let’s stop trying….? Perhaps not, as the last line is – ‘Be a bonobo.’ Which is ridiculous. I want to be a human, in a matriarchal society, or at the very least, a far less patriarchal one. And there’s no doubt that, in the WEIRD world, we’re going in that direction, at a snail’s pace from the perspective of one life (my own).
Interestingly, in the same year, 2019, another article reports fulsomely on six current matriarchies – in China, Costa Rica, Kenya, Ghana, Indonesia and India. Are they ‘full’ matriarches? Are there any ‘full’ patriarchies? That game can be played endlessly. Lions used to be described as patriarchal, but then it was pointed out, or discovered, that it was the females who made the decisions, while the head male was there to defend the pride (from what I’m not sure – who’s going to attack a pack of lions? Other lions maybe).
Anyway, it wouldn’t bother me if there was no such thing as a ‘total’ matriarchy, in humans or other species, I’d just like to see humans as more matriarchal than patriarchal, with more – substantially more – political and financial power in the hands of females rather than males. High hopes, eh? Maybe in a century or two, if we survive.
References
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/g28565280/matriarchal-societies-list/
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