a bonobo humanity?

On the patriarchy matriarchy feminism masculinism front, I watched a while back a video, apparently one of a series, by a young woman who presented, with amusing confidence, an anti-feminist position. I didn’t pay too much attention to her spiel (and thankfully I can’t find the video now to reference it!), but I noted a lot of approving comments, all from males. One even happily highlighted Aristotle’s view that women are naturally inferior, in terms of rationality, to men. Presumably this allowed him to believe that, whatever his own level of ‘rationality’, it was superior to that of the four billion or so females that inhabit the planet. I should mention that Aristotle also believed that slaves were naturally less rational than free Athenian citizens. Presumably female slaves were doubly dumb.

I’ve just finished reading Darwin’s The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, and I found it hard to take in the end, as in the final pages he expatiated on human sexual selection. Basically he was claiming that males select females for their physical appearance while females select males largely for that rationality thing, which explains why men have evolved to be smarter than women. So, I try to make allowances for Darwin, like Aristotle, being a creature of his time and his culture, as I am of mine…

Having read Darwin’s Origin of species a couple of times, and now his Descent of man, I’ve noted the great number of references he has to others in his field of interest – breeders of livestock, pigeon fanciers, ornithologists, zoologists, botanists and so forth, with whom he has corresponded. Not long ago I came across a collection of his correspondence, here in Adelaide’s reference library – a whole shelf of heavy tomes of the stuff. And in my own reading of these references, I’ve never found a single female. That’s Victorian England for you – not so different, perhaps, from ancient Athens, as far as the status of women is concerned.

Things have changed though, in the WEIRD world, in the last 150 years, and Darwin has been proven wrong about the female intellect. And it stands to reason – male dogs and cats aren’t smarter than their female counterparts, and female bonobos aren’t intellectually superior to the males they manage to keep in their place via a powerful sisterhood. Male gorillas may be bigger and tougher than the females but there’s no evidence that they’re smarter.

Having said all that, I’m still holding out for a female-dominant human world, as they have other qualities that we need more than ever in the current climate. Yes there may have been some not so admirable female leaders in recent years (the only period in which female political leadership has been allowed), but none have been as disgusting as Putin or so absurd as Trump, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to assess current female leadership without recognising that they’ve achieved their position within a largely patriarchal framework. That framework, it seems to me, is more competitive (and thus warlike) and less collective than that of matriarchy. Not that the difference is huge – I’m a big fan of women’s soccer, and of course it’s hugely competitive, but you don’t get quite the brutalism and the confrontations with referees that are fairly common in the men’s game. Time may tell a different story, but I doubt it.

But returning to the young woman who’s presenting an anti-feminist series of videos, my guess is that she’s been shaped, as I’ve been, by childhood experiences. My own childhood was shaped by a dominant and largely competent female parent, who was the major breadwinner, as she moved up the scale from a registered nurse to a sister to an assistant matron of a hospital and then, after further training, to a nurse educator, while my father remained an unskilled labourer, often unemployed. My mother also ran the house, getting my siblings and I to do set chores – even assigning sections of the back garden for each of us to tend. The house was filled with books, though she wasn’t a big reader, and my father not at all. The marriage wasn’t a happy one, though they were still together – only just – when I left home at about nineteen.

So, though I had clashes with my mother, and in many ways it wasn’t a happy childhood, it was definitely due to her that I and my siblings are very much on the feminist side, which makes me speculate about the anti-feminist woman on Youtube. It seems highly likely that for her, the father was the dominant parent,  and competently so, and the mother, not so much. This is wild speculation of course, but – well, perhaps not so wild.

It’s the free will/determinism thing again. Trump’s grandad was Friedrich Drumpf, but someone was inspired to switch it to something nominatively determining, and the rest is a horrible history. I’ve read a biography of Putin, and I’ve heard much of the early childhood of Trump, all enough to explain what terrible tragedies they are for the rest of the world – but their success in obtaining leadership has also much to do with the psychology, if I can describe it so, of the countries they’ve come to dominate. With Trump’s country it’s libertarianism, ‘the land of the free’, where anyone can apparently become a billionaire if they work hard enough, or are super-smart or super-bold, etc. In Russia – well, its autocratic history is long, and is well described by Orlando Figes in The story of Russia:

 The Russian autocratic tradition had many roots but the Mongol legacy did more than most to fix the basic nature of its politics. From the 16th century, the first tsars of Muscovy drew upon the Mongol imperial tradition, adapting it to their own purposes. Beginning with Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) they justified their claim to an imperial status not just on the basis of their spiritual descent from Byzantium but also on the basis of their territorial inheritance from Chingiz Khan.

Orlando Figes, The story of Russia, p51

The tsars maintained this largely bogus tradition to the end, and Putin, after a period of bolshevik turmoil, and the hopes of Gorbachov’s perestroika, has effectively resurrected it:

Here was the fundamental weakness of the Russian aristocracy. The most senior boyar clans – those who were closest through marriage or royal favour to the Moscow court – formed an oligarchic ruling class, which at times, when the grand prince was weak, might direct his government. But their wealth and power came from him. They kept them only for as long as they retained his protection. It was a system of dependency upon the ruler that has lasted to this day. Putin’s oligarchs are totally dependent on his will.

Ibid, p52

So, Russia and China have never come close to anything resembling democracy, in spite of glasnost and the brutally suppressed Tiananmen Square protests – their long, brutal histories have made such a transformation highly unlikely – but then, the future is long – at least we hope so.

A lot of those hopes, for me, lie in a greater – and greater and greater – role for women in government. First, inevitably, among democracies, so that the ultra-male oligarchies and dictatorships will be shamed and bewildered by the people they’re dealing with, and then…

Well, it’s a pleasant dream…

References

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to sex, 1871, in Darwin: the indelible stamp, ed James Watson, 2005

Orlando Figes, The story of Russia, 2022