a bonobo humanity?

Yes, it’s me, why not?

So yes, like everyone, I was born into a patriarchal society, but it’s always complicated. The first society we start with and have to negotiate is family. We were more nuclear than most nuclear families (don’t worry, I’m not talking about radiation and fallout), because we left my native Scotland for Australia when I was five, leaving behind all grandparents, uncles, aunts and so on, never to be seen again, at least by me.

We came via ‘assisted passage’, as skilled migrants. My mother was the skilled one. South Australia was in need of nurses, and my mother heeded the call. She was always the  decision-maker. I don’t know how she did it with three young kids, my older brother and sister and myself, but she took up a job as a nursing sister, and then as an assistant matron of a hospital in Gawler, and later still as a nursing teacher/lecturer. My father was an unskilled labourer, often out of work. It wasn’t a happy marriage – my mother did a lot of shouting, and I always worried that my father, who’d been an amateur boxer in his youth and was impressively muscle-bound, would lose it and go for her, but that never happened, though he’d sometimes threaten – ‘I’ll put your head through that wall’ was a favourite line of his. My mother, though, did occasionally throw things at him, including a pot of something, soup I think, from the kitchen. I don’t know if it was hot or cold.

I was always embarrassed and shamed by these noisy rants. People walking by could surely hear them. And as I got older, the thought of running away from home would seem more and more enticing. The transition from primary to high school was another trauma. The school’s headmaster was a rabid authoritarian who chilled the atmosphere whenever he showed up or spoke into the PA systems installed in every classroom. He haunted the school corridors in black ceremonial robes, which earned him the nickname ‘batman’, and I came quickly to despise him for his self-importance and ridiculously fearsome temper. He picked me out for a couple of dressing-downs, because he knew that I had the top IQ score for entry into the school, which was streamed into classes by those scores, and I wasn’t living up to my ‘potential’. By this time, at around fourteen, my anti-authoritarianism was at its height, and my school results were declining, as I took pleasure in reading everything but the prescribed texts.

Of course it was also that time of life when sex was rearing up its enflamed head. I would make a list in my mind of the prettiest kids in my school or elsewhere, male or female. I took pride in thinking in these ambisexual terms. I played with the thought that some girls would be better off as boys, and vice versa. I imagined kissing boys, just because I knew it was ‘wrong’. And once, when attending a wrestling match, of all things, with a friend, I got an erection from watching his handsome profile as he intently watched the muscle-bound ogres in the ring. Again, this didn’t make me feel ashamed or confused, it made me feel somehow superior and aesthetically enlightened. However, as the boys became hairier and less pretty young men, I gave up on bisexuality, rather sadly and wonderingly.

I’ve written in my novel In Elizabeth about my first sex, on my 16th birthday, granted to me by my girlfriend of a few weeks, who was experienced in these matters, so she told me, though a year or so my junior. It was short, furtive and uneventful, and it seemed to me that kissing her beautiful face was much more of a thrill. But what happened shortly after this event had much more to do with our primate cousins.

Due to all the domestic strife I was spending much of my spare time away from home, hanging out with other kids, mostly older, at the parks around the local shopping centre. I wasn’t exactly accepted by these kids, but I hung around the fringes, feeling vaguely despised because I knew nothing about car engines and other esoterica. I was an obsessive reader of Thomas Hardy novels at the time, but somehow I didn’t think…

However, my new girlfriend was very interested in these boys, some of whom she vaguely knew, and she wanted me to introduce her… Of course I agreed, though I knew, I just knew, that this would be disastrous.

So we duly arrived at the park one early evening, and I could see that the sight of Edwina, my putative girlfriend, caused some arousal. One of the lads, gigantically proportioned compared to me, and a solid thick-thighed defender in the local soccer team which I also played for, began to niggle and jab at me, which then led to a kind of long, one-sided wrestling match which, of course, left everyone amused except myself. And so ended the beginning of my sex life.

So alpha maledom was never within my purview. And looking back at that scene, I can’t help but think of chimpanzees – very basic (with apologies to chimps). I would ever be the subordinate male, wishing and hoping but never really expecting. I should also point out that, from age five to fifteen, I was the smallest kid in my class, male or female. Size does matter, they say.

Of course, I’d never heard of bonobos back then. I first heard of them on the ABC radio ‘Science Show’ when I was around thirty years old. The male journalist ended his report saying something like ‘Vive les bonobos! I want to be one!’. They’ve been a kind of leitmotif for me ever since.

I’m rereading Diane Rosenfeld’s The Bonobo Sisterhood, recognising that the book is principally addressed to women, which perhaps disappointed me first time around, as a far-from-alpha male who never made aggressive advances towards a woman (and certainly not towards men!), and whose more or less pathetic advances were likely repudiated due to their pusillanimity. And I can also admit to rejecting advances of women I was attracted to, due to performance anxiety. At least one of those rejections, I felt, was one of the dumbest and costliest of my life. But who knows…

So I don’t know where I’m going with all this, except to say that the battle of the sexes needs to continue, and women need to win. I don’t really believe in equality between the sexes, because I see matriarchy as a far better solution – which of course doesn’t need to disadvantage men, if only they could see what might be in their best interest. The wars going on at present are thoroughly male, as wars tend to be, and feminism seems currently to be struggling, not just in the USA. Female political leadership, spotty though it is, is coming to be taken for granted, as it’s nowhere near commonplace enough to seriously challenge patriarchy. I worry that something truly disastrous may have to happen before we find ourselves taking that positive turn in any big way.

Bonobos managed to take that turn, though, and it doesn’t seem to have been born of disaster. It even may have been born of plenty. We really don’t know quite how, and it’s probably the big question we should be asking. The USA, for example, should be the land of plenty – which it likes to advertise itself to be. For some it is, of course – the rich-poor gap is massive there. Its per capita incarceration rate is the highest in the developed world. Its name for itself – the United States – is a sick joke..

But of course I’m veering off-topic. Bonobos present us with a true society, with no-one left behind unless they’re overly violent, and then they can be forgiven. And they don’t make war with their neighbours, for no good reason. We need to keep focussing on the example they set. I know I’ll keep being inspired.

Reference

Diane L Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood, 2022