a bonobo humanity?

bonobo girls

I often forget the title of this blog, and what I’m supposed to be writing about, so multifarious is my genius (I contain multitudes mate), so let me return, hopefully not too briefly, to bonobos, behaviour, patriarchy, matriarchy, evolution and all that stuff.

In an earlier blog piece, some time ago, I reviewed an essay in a probably defunct journal called Evolutionary Psychology which tried to get stuck into a couple of feminists for promoting a bonobo-type lifestyle. What struck me most about this extremely irritating article was that it had virtually nothing to say about bonobos –  this in an Evolutionary Psychology journal! – and everything to say about the supposed absurdity of the feminist writers. Here’s a classic example:

It is egregiously naïve to conclude that, “bonobos reveal that an incredible range of sexual diversity is normal for animals like us” (p. 99, emphasis in original).

This is, of course, not at all naïve. There are no animals on the planet closer to humans than bonobos, so to describe them as ‘animals like us’, is completely accurate. Elsewhere in his essay, he criticises his targets for not ‘understanding human sex differences in sexual desire’. He doesn’t elaborate on these sex differences. This is because there’s no such thing, any more than there is in bonobos. Of course there are individual differences. Some humans, and no doubt some bonobos, tend to be more randy than others, for all sorts of reasons, to do with up-bringing, neural development, genetics, whatever. Gender does play a role, of course, more in some societies than others. Let’s not forget that the penalty for adultery in early Christian society was to be stoned to death – but only for females (males were barely penalised at all). I say females, not women, since females were more often than not sold into marriage on the payment of a dowry from the age of ten, or even younger. A bit of a dampener for a girl’s promiscuous impulses, I’d say.

It’s my view that monogamy is more a cultural institution than a natural given for humans, and I would cite our closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, both non-monogamous, as evidence. Some six to eight million years separate us from those relatives, and there isn’t much evidence about the sex lives of neanderthals, australopithecines or other hominins – and not much chance that we’ll ever find out about their sexual proclivities. It’s been argued that Australopithecus afarensis at least was a sexually dimorphic species, but there’s a question about the extent of evidence. In any case, though sexual dimorphism might have equated with dominance a million years ago, it’s hardly much of a factor for modern humans. From hunter-gatherers to post-industrial society, physical size has mattered less and less – power has been measured differently. We have evidence, presented by eminent researchers such as Joseph Henrich, that the ruling classes of not so long ago, evolutionarily speaking, tended to monopolise the field, with polygynous systems that left the lower classes bereft of partners. I’m talking male dominance here, of course, something like that of gorillas, with financial and military heft replacing that of physicality. Those upper class polygynous societies were essentially about female enslavement, though there would certainly be nuances – hierarchies among the women, benefits to the more intellectually endowed, even the occasional female ruler. But mostly it would be male dominance, which, in the more ‘intellectual’ cultures, such as those of Athens, Rome, Alexandria and later Baghdad, led to the dogma of ‘feeble-minded women’ (and if you don’t sufficiently recognise your inferiority you might suffer the fate of Hypatia), which has taken centuries to quash, and which in some regions, such as parts of the USA, is still with us.

Modern science has taught us that there is no evidentiary basis for male dominance. It certainly can’t be based on intelligence. Decades ago a young female friend expressed a belief to me that males were on average smarter than females. I was too stunned to respond. Did she think that male dogs and cats were generally smarter than their female counterparts? Her view was a relic of millennia of patriarchy. And recently I read something priceless, a comment on a youtube video presented by an anti-feminist young woman, bizarrely enough. The comments, less surprisingly, were all from approving males. This bloke’s simple remark was ‘They need to realise that power comes with responsibility’. I switched off pretty quickly, but this odd and ridiculous remark kept striking me with its arrogant ignorance, so here’s my response:

Responsibility is indeed important, like the responsibility for nurturing an embryo, then a foetus, then a child, as it grows inside a womb, and for suckling and feeding that child after his birth, guiding his first steps and teaching him his first words. Think of the billions of human infants who’ve been nursed and cared for in this way, just in the last few decades. And then think of our marital system – how many infants, born outside of that system, have been raised by men, rather than women? And within the system, how many women have left the marriage, and its children, compared to men? How many men have been the victims of domestic violence, compared to women? How is it that men sexually abuse or rape women, and this never happens to men, except sometimes at the hands of other men? So, yes, responsibility… there’s nothing more important.

Bonobos make good mothers, helped by other adults, and siblings, male and female. They engage in plenty of rough and tumble stuff, and they can get violent, usually when males get too uppity. A defensive violence, a sisterhood, because it’s a physical environment, much more so than our own, and the males are a wee bit bigger. It would be hard to translate their non-monogamous world into our own, which has become only slightly less monogamous over the last couple of centuries, but their example is, to me, an inspiring one, so vive les bonobos, let’s always manage to keep them in their wild state, so they can keep us thinking of different ways to be, collectively.