There have of course been some women who have been inspired by bonobos, but mostly they’re ignored as any kind of model, and I think the main reason is that we don’t really accept that we are primates. Remember those dismissive ‘so you think your granny was a gorilla?’ type comments of the nineteenth century? I’ve heard similar comments in my own time during my teaching days, from Middle Eastern students particularly, and when we look at what we’ve achieved, with our skyscrapers, our global trade networks, our spaceflights, our knowledge of genetics and neurophysiology and particle physics and the immune system, and on it goes, how can we think of ourselves as primates and close cousins of those hairy, dumb arse-scratchers lumbering about for grubs and hooting out nothings in the treetops? Surely the idea that we can actually learn from them is – well, a hoot?
And yet. What interests me about bonobos – and I must say I was stunned and thrilled beyond belief when I first learned of their existence in the eighties – is that they adopted, so to speak, a female-dominant society (or social life if you thing ‘society’ is a purely human thing, too sophisticated for such beasts) because of the environment they found themselves in, at the time of the Congo River’s formation.
Here’s the thing. There are bonobos living in the forests south of the Congo River. It’s actually very difficult to know how many, and of course they’re very much on the endangered list, due entirely to Homo sapiens. North of the Congo, and spread out from the east coast to the west-central region of sub-Saharan Africa, are four sub-species of chimps, who out-number the bonobos by around ten to one – probably, but again it’s very hard to get accurate numbers with these beasts. All of those sub-species are male-dominant, so it’s surely reasonable to assume that it’s bonobos who have made the change to a matriarchal society – through ‘sisterhood’, given that they’re individually slightly smaller than the males. They hang out together, mutually masturbating more than males do – though it’s okay, males do it too. Unfortunately, that’s probably not how female humans will become dominant, which they definitely will. I write this with the confidence of someone who won’t live long enough to be proved wrong, or right, if that makes sense.
For the arc of the human universe is long, but it bends towards matriarchy….
Bonobos became female dominant, I surmise, not only due to the sex thing (and we humans are really really backward and effed-up when it comes to that stuff), but because brawn, in their environment, became less and less important than brain, and for us, co-operation, as we face a future in which we are going to have to be the planet’s custodians, as our technology, and our impact on the land, the sea and the air, is going to be more and more of a factor in determining our planet’s very survival as an eco-system. And women, in general, co-operate better than men. They just do.
And I’ll finish with a point that I’ve made before. People, especially women, who are sceptical of my feminist optimism say ‘but what about this female politician, or that female influencer, or my bloody awful mother’, as if this is a solid argument against matriarchy. No, it’s what philosophers call a ‘category error’. In this case, it’s confusing individuals with systems. I’m talking about a matriarchal system. That system would change individual women as much as it changes men. And you won’t know about it till it happens.
Meanwhile, Vive les bonobos.
References
https://www.bonobos.org/blog/how-many-bonobos-are-left-in-the-wild/
Diane L Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood, 2022