monogamy: a virtue or a curse? Natural or invented? Alternatives?
Kibbutz kids of yore
I read somewhere recently, from some feminist source, that pornography is anti-feminist, presumably because it largely involves women being available to the more or less insatiable lusts of men. It reminded me of the late Frans de Waal’s comment that bonobo sexual activity seemed to him to be at times ‘pornographic’. And yet bonobo society is matriarchal, while chimp society, which is less sexually inclined, is patriarchal. These two species are equally closely related to us, more closely than any other species. So, what to make of it all…?
One interesting line of thought worth exploring here (and it neatly takes me away from the minefield that is pornography) is that we humans consider ourselves to be a monogamous species, which is not the case for bonobos and chimps. But are we monogamous by nature, and if so so, how did this come about? They say that the course of true love never runs smooth. Is that because it’s a straight-jacket we’ve invented to torture ourselves with?
One might say that monogamy is for the birds. 90% of bird species are monogamous, compared to only 5% or so for mammals, and I’m not sure if H sapiens are in or out of that 5%. And to complicate matters further, some 25/30% of primates are considered monogamous. In any case, and surely unsurprisingly, the naturalness or otherwise of human monogamy is a highly contested issue.
When I was young, stuck with parents in an apparently loveless, strife-torn marriage, I came across a book called Children of the Dream, by Bruno Bettelheim, which told a story of children brought up in a kibbutz, with multiple adult role-models to choose from and multiple kids to play with and learn from. I didn’t read it carefully, it was just the idea that fascinated me, that set me dreaming. Now I realise that bonobo society has a similar openness, with a rich variety of playmates and role models. And let’s not shut our eyes to all that mutual masturbation.
Do bonobo youngsters actually know who their biological parents are? Does it matter, if you’re taken care of, cuddled, fed and mucked around with in a spirit of fun by a variety of carers and oldies? In any case, bonobo mothers certainly know who their kids are, and work hard in their best interests, as various sources, including the Leakey Foundation, inform us:
…for bonobos, sex really is often a family affair. What’s more, rather than being an embarrassing hindrance, motherly presence greatly benefits bonobo sons during the deed.
Bonobo mothers … seem to make a war out of seeing their sons successfully make love. They’ve frequently been observed to form coalitions with their sons to help them acquire and maintain high dominance rank, protect their sons’ mating attempts from interference by other males and even interfere in the mating attempts of other, unrelated males. The new research, published in Current Biology, shows that these strategies pay off. Males who had a mother present in their social group engaging in these behaviours were about three times more likely to produce offspring than males whose mothers were no longer part of the group.
So, it seems that bonobo society, while not monogamous, is very much concerned with the production of offspring, at least as far as their own male children are concerned. No mention is made, however, of daughters. Presumably that’s because bonobos are male philopatric. The females move to other troupes when they reach breeding age – and presumably they are precisely the ones that mothers encourage their male children to mate with. This would avoid inbreeding – the whole purpose of philopatry, presumably – but how do they know? It appears to be something instinctive (if that explains anything), based perhaps on familiar and unfamiliar scents. A little bit of research tells me that this is a fiendishly complex topic with a variety of costs and benefits, so let’s return to monogamy.
One argument for human monogamy is the extended childhood and dependence of offspring. So, social monogamy has evolved, with, eventually, parent-children units domiciled separately from other such units. Over time, such units come to seem natural, so that the kibbutzim would seem to be an experiment ‘against nature’.
So my question – is monogamy a good or bad thing? – boils down to the parents, some of whose children are terribly damaged, others extraordinarily gifted (not from the same parents, evidemment). In general, it has worked – except when it hasn’t, and sadly we don’t get to choose our parents.
My interest in this issue, as I’ve stated more or less at the outset, has to do with child-rearing. It seems to me that among bonobos, it’s much more of a communal thing than it is for humans, and it surely reduces the problem of what we call ‘badly-adjusted’, or simply damaged, kids. Nowadays, in the WEIRD world at least, the ‘family unit’ has become a bit more multifactorial than mum, dad and a small handful of kids. I won’t go into all those factors, but what it means for the kids surely depends on the wider society’s acceptance of such variety, as well as the example it sets for those kids. Ultimately, it’s all about care, teaching, love, fun and other such precious intangibles.
References
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/philopatry
Leave a Reply