a bonobo humanity?

monogamy and equality – birds do it better

So, according to various internet sources (let’s keep it vague), ‘81% of Australian women and 52% of men agree that men and women are not treated completely equally’, and ‘roughly two-thirds of Australian women (and about one-third of men) explicitly identify as feminists’, which all sounds quite good…? What about those two-thirds of men? Some might think it’s not their place to comment or have a view, feminism is a women’s issue. Some might even feel awkward about being feminist, as if they’re betraying their own gender, or some might call themselves egalitarian, favouring neither gender. Which raises the question – what exactly is feminism? Is it female ‘rights’? Is it female supremacy? Is it some other thing? Think of its opposite, masculinism, what is that, apart from sounding repulsive?

If we’re thinking equality, you won’t find too much of it in the mammalian world. It’s for the birds, you might say, but then – we’re exceptional aren’t we? We can make equality happen? And perhaps in Australia we can learn from our unique marsupials, who… well, here’s a quote:

Marsupial biology features unique genetic sex-determination mechanisms and social sex ratios rather than human-style social “gender equality.”

See if you can make sense of that. Is it that ‘gender equality’ is just a human idea, rather than anything found in reality? I think, though, that we’re moving closer to realising that equality today than we’ve ever been before. Nobody of any sense seriously doubts that women are on average just as intelligent as men, just as inventive, just as… well, anything. What stands in their way is history, tradition and the structures built upon that tradition, structures that are slowly crumbling under the weight of actual knowledge of female capability.

Having written the above earlier in the day, I’ve since been informed by two female friends that male violence against women (globally but also Australianly) is increasing….

AI (never lies) tells me this is true:

Recent data from the Australian Institute of Family Studies via the Ten to Men study indicates that reported lifetime intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration by Australian men has increased from 25% (in 2013–2014) to 35% by 2022, with approximately 120,000 men newly starting to use intimate partner violence each year. [1]

So this is ‘intimate partner violence’, which is quite sickening. Could it be that women, becoming more prepared to stand up for themselves, are reporting this violence more? That’s probably part of the story, but the last lines of the quote seem to suggest that there really is a backlash, with men trying to assert, or re-assert, dominance. One has to wonder where it will end. Did bonobo females have all these problems before they ‘once and for all’ achieved dominance?

That may sound like a joke, but bonobo sisterhood surely relied on seeing male violence and acting collectively against it, while human domestic violence occurs behind closed doors. This is a huge factor that has long troubled me but that I haven’t raised much in my writing, simply because I can’t see us living the open lifestyle of bonobos, the closed capsule of the family home being so central to human family life. Indeed the ‘nuclear family’ doesn’t really exist for bonobos, and that’s a lesson I wish we’d learn. I’ve written elsewhere how, as a teenager suffering under the effects of my parents’ disastrous marriage, I discovered The Children of the Dream on our bookshelves – the many books in our house were one vital means of escape from the marriage carnage. That book told of kibbutzim, a more communal system of child-rearing, and general caring and sharing. Though there are obvious differences, the similarity to bonobo-style openness, with many adult role-models, many and varied playmates, and a broader sense of community, was inspiring, at least to me, long before I knew anything of bonobos.

So maybe the long view should be taken. As women continue to impress, intellectually, politically and in other spheres (I particularly love their soccer skills!) there will be an inevitable backlash, and this may go on for centuries, if our species survives. But, as they say, the cat has been let out of the bag, and we’re never going back to the ultra-patriarchy that fuelled virtually all ancient civilisations, and still fuels a few modern states. We know too much, surely.