I’ve always had an interest in France, its history and its literature, having done a BA in French language and literature, decades ago, for some reason. Stendhal and Beauvoir are a couple of my heroes. I even stayed in Paris for a week a few years back – bien exotique pour moi. But whenever I read about French politics, I just felt confused. They have a President and a Prime Minister, but which, if any has seniority? Have any of them been female? I knew that, in spite of a prominent female intelligentsia, France has had a reputation as a rather chauvinist nation, but I’ve never made much effort to dig deeper.
So, as I’m just finishing off Cecil Jenkins’ A brief history of France, which, being brief, hasn’t managed to unconfuse me, I’m going to use this post to educate myself a bit more, while keeping bonobos – that’s to say dominant women – in mind, wherever I can find them.
France is currently experiencing its Fifth Republic, constituted in 1958 under then President Charles de Gaulle. The Constitution of 1958 still operates, apparently. From Wikipedia,
The constitution provides for a separation of powers and proclaims France’s “attachment to the Rights of Man [sic] and the principles of National Sovereignty as defined by the Declaration of 1789”.
Whenever I think of the ‘Rights of Man’ and 1789 I think of honorary bonobo, Olympe de Gouges, playwright, political activist, humanist and author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, whose moderate opposition to Robespierre and the radicals led to her execution during the Reign of Terror.
The first thing I should say about the current French political system is that it seems brain-befuddlingly complex to me. Cutting to the chase, the President has, these days, a considerably more powerful position than the Prime Minister, whom he’s responsible for appointing. There has of course never been a female President, hardly surprising for a nation that didn’t even allow women to vote until after the Second World War. At least there have been a couple of female Prime Ministers, Edith Cresson (1991-2) and Elisabeth Borne (2023-Jan 2024), neither of whom managed to last a year.
French state politics seems based on a key, controversial concept – dirigisme. Often associated with de Gaulle’s post-war government, and the ‘Trente Glorieuses’, a thirty-year period of largely state-managed growth following WW2, dirigisme is an odd amalgam of authoritarianism and something like socialism, which has seen France benefit from some of the most generous health and welfare benefits in the world. I can well remember my shock when riots broke out last year because of a proposed raising of the pensionable age by the Macron/Borne government, from 62 to 64 (the original plan was to raise it to 65). I found it hard to believe that any wealthy, healthy nation could maintain such a low pension age. In Australia, the age is now 67, and rising. It should also be noted that, according to the New York Times:
Macron sought to gradually raise the legal age when workers can start collecting a pension by three months every year until it reaches 64 in 2030 (!).
Such generosity seems scarcely credible to other WEIRD world countries, surely, remembering that increased longevity means many pension payouts for upwards of 30 years. They do have some kind of pay-as-you-earn scheme, but it doesn’t seem to be as comprehensive as Australia’s superannuation system.
So, Presidential elections are held every five years (reduced from seven in 2000!), and Emmanuel Macron won the last election in 2022, defeating the less than bonoboesque Marine Le Pen in a run-off second vote. So Macron will have been Prez for ten years at the end of his term, which seems a bit much.
So the run-off system clicks in when no candidate gets a majority – 50%+ – in the first round, which will be commonplace when there’s a large field and a diversity of public views/ideologies out there. My own personal view is that the two or three candidates with the most votes should get together and form a collaborative governmental team, but that’s no doubt way too idealistic. However, bonobos come close to managing it, according to Wikipedia:
At the top of the hierarchy is a coalition of high-ranking females and males typically headed by an old, experienced matriarch who acts as the decision-maker and leader of the group.
Ah, if we could only achieve the emotional maturity of bonobos, what a wonderful world it would be.
So the Presidential elections in France don’t involve anything so pesky as an Electoral College, and they don’t pit one I-alone-can-fix-it guy against another, instead they have any number of I-alone-can-fix-it guys, but someone has to get that 50%. And then there’s the legislative election, the last of which was held in June 2022, shortly after the Presidential election, and that’s the way it has been since 2000 – in other words they’re also held every five years, and candidates are elected as députés to the National Assembly, the Parliament’s lower house. There are no less than 577 of them, including eleven who represent, surely rather vaguely, the ‘French overseas’. This presumably multi-party crowd makes for interesting decision-making, or not. And finally there’s the upper house, the Senate (at least it’s not the House of Lords, which should’ve been killed off by now – how many female lords are there?), which consists of 377 six-year term senators. I would say ‘don’t ask’, but I suppose these long terms at least reduce the cost of more regular elections. I just wonder how this rabble of almost a thousand politicians ever gets things done. Then again I’m in favour of more collaborative government, with lots of involvement, so I should be careful what I ask for…
So who/what are the main French parties? Australia has the Liberals (actually conservatives), the Nationals (rather more conservative, and in coalition, sometimes fractious, with the Libs), the Labor party (generally centre-left, and currently in government), the Greens (further left), and a semi-connected group of independents, with a large proportion of women. Currently, 44.5% of Australian federal parliamentarians are women. In France, the percentage as at 2017 – I can’t find more recent figures – was 38.8%.
The French parties are a little more numerous – on the more or less extreme right is Marine le Pen’s National Rally (RassemblementNational), then there’s the more centre-right Les Republicains, and in the centre is Macron’s party, Renaissance (formerly La Republique en Marche!). On the centre left is the Parti Socialist, with LaFrance Insoumise (rebellious France) on the radical and greener side. In the last elections, the ‘old guard’ leftist and rightist parties, i.e the Republicans and the Socialists, performed very poorly,
Pretty straightforward, but I’m trying to work out how it all comes together, particularly relating to the President (currently Macron), the Prime Minister (Gabriel Attal) and the president of the National Assembly (Yaël Braun-Pivet, the first woman to hold the position) and their respective powers. In Australia, there’s no President, and the Prime Minister leads the lower house as the head of government, though there’s a Speaker, chosen from among the governing party MPs, who keeps order in the house (and maybe that’s the role of the National Assembly prez). Anyway, the role of the French PM is nothing like that of our PM, in that he (Gabriel is male) is appointed by the President and ‘is the person who controls the government of France day-to-day’ (Wikipedia), presumably leaving the President to hob-nob with other world leaders and promote the country overseas.
So it sounds like the French President, like the US President, doesn’t have to lower himself by sitting in the parliament, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous opposition members and back-benchers. And he gets to dump his PM, it seems, whereas our PM can only be dumped by a full party vote.
Anyway, that’s enough of this sujet for now – I’m sure I haven’t fully worked it out but it’s been fun trying… and I’ve note an occasional ‘first female’ along the way. Vive les bonobos en humaine – it may take a thousand years, but it will happen.
Canto: So we haven’t focussed on bonobos for a while – I’d love to be able to answer the question, How did bonobos become female dominant?
Jacinta: Yes, were they always that way? That would mean, presumably, that they were female dominant at the time of their split from chimpanzees, somewhere between one and two million years ago (a rather vague time-frame, for me), which would then raise the question – how did chimps become male-dominant?
Canto: Haha, a question we don’t ask ourselves, we’re so used to being male-dominant. I seem to recall that one reason, or theory, is that bonobos have evolved in a region that’s densely vegetated, plenty of fruit and nuts, not so much hunting as gathering, which doesn’t require so much physical strength and aggression.
Jacinta: Which is interesting – we humans are evolving, at least in the WEIRD world into a post-industrial species, where manual labour is being replaced by mechanisation, robotics and such, requiring less of the physical strength of old-fashioned factory work. Australia, for example has become, internally, a service economy, exporting raw materials such as iron ore and coal, and importing finished products. There are few labour-intensive jobs these days, and testosterone levels are dropping, happily.
Canto: Yes, if we can take the long view – a very difficult thing for humans – we can see that only a couple of centuries ago women couldn’t get a decent education, couldn’t participate in government or be workplace bosses – though there were always the rare exceptions – but now the gates are opened and the trickle to the top is happening. In a thousand years or so – not so long in evolutionary time – we might have achieved a bonobo-style humanity.
Jacinta: Well on that sort of happy note, let’s see if research has told us anything about bonobo femdom. The quickest click-research brings up this, from the Max Planck Institute:
Some researchers suggest that bonobo female dominance is facilitated by females forming coalitions which suppress male aggression. Others think of an evolutionary scenario in which females prefer non-aggressive males which renders male aggressiveness to a non-adaptive trait.
That’s from ten years ago, and I doubt if we’ve gone much beyond those very reasonable speculations, with both of those developments, female coalitions and less aggressive males, creating a synergistic effect.
Canto: Well, looking more closely at that fairly short article, they suggest that female attractiveness – by which they don’t mean looking like Taylor Swift or FKA Twigs, but displaying sexual receptivity through behaviour or sexual swellings, seems to soften up the males somehow:
If females display sexually attractive attributes, including sexual swellings, they win conflicts with males more easily, with the males behaving in a less aggressive way.
Which is the opposite of male chimp behaviour, so why, and when, the difference?
Jacinta: Well, the article mentions two changes – subtle differences, no doubt, in female sexuality and in male mating strategies over a million or two years. And, okay, that doesn’t tell us anything much. As to when, obviously these are changes that developed gradually. Emory University, in Atlanta Georgia, which has done a whole-genome comparison of chimps and bonobos, makes a more specific claim for the divergence:
Chimpanzees and bonobos are sister species that diverged around 1.8 million years ago as the Congo River formed a geographic boundary and they evolved in separate environments.
Canto: But is it likely that genomic comparisons will tell us much about these subtle – or, ok, not so subtle, differences in behaviour? I mean, comparing the genes of Taliban Afghans and Aussie radical lesbians isn’t going to tell us much, is it? It seems to me to be largely a cultural shift.
Jacinta: Well, the Emory website, I must say, has the most interesting little article I’ve found for a while, and it relates to diet, which we’ve looked at before, and hormone production, which we haven’t, because it’s a bit sciencey for us dilettantes. Let me quote at length from the site, as I think this will provide us with a sense of direction for our own future research, if you can call it that:
The whole genome comparison showed selection in bonobos for genes related to the production of pancreatic amylase — an enzyme that breaks down starch. Previous research has shown that human populations that began consuming more grains with the rise of agriculture show an increase in copies of a closely related gene that codes for amylase.
“Our results add to the evidence that diet and the available resources had a definite impact on bonobo evolution,” Kovalaskas says. “We can see it in the genome.”
Compared to chimpanzees, bonobos also showed differences in genetic pathways well-known to be related to social behaviors of animals — as well as humans. Bonobos had strong selection for genes in the oxytocin receptor pathway, which plays a role in promoting social bonds; serotonin, involved in modulating aggression; and gonadotropin, known to affect sexual behavior.
“The strong female bonds among bonobos, in part, may be mediated by their same-sex sexual behaviors,” says co-author James Rilling, professor and chair of Emory’s Department of Anthropology. “Our data suggest that something interesting is going on in the bonobo pathways for oxytocin, serotonin and gonadotropin and that future research into the physiological mechanisms underlying behavioral differences between bonobos and chimpanzees may want to target those specific systems.”
Canto: Yes, that’s a most interesting finding, and one to follow up – pathways for serotonin, oxytocin and gonadotrophin, think SOG. And think not testosterone. And of course it’s not about opening up these pathways artificially, with, I don’t know, hormone supplements and such, but engaging in and encouraging behaviour that takes us along those pathways….
Jacinta: Haha I think oxytocin comes first, even if it wrecks the acronym. Looks like we need a crash course in endocrinology.
Canto: Or a crash course in how to raise our levels of, or expression of, those hormones? Over the next million years or so? With lots of orgasm-inducing touchy-feelies?
Jacinta: Well I can’t see that happening for as long as we have anti-sex religions dominating many nations. I seem to remember there were a few ‘free love’ cults back in the hippy days, but things have dulled down since then. You’d think there’d be a return, what with the mechanisation of labour, and the growth of the service economy. What better service can we offer our fellows than body rubs? Mind you, the Japanese seem to be leading the way there – a notably non-religious people. And yet, still far too patriarchal….
Canto: Interesting that Japanese teams have led the way in bonobo studies. Let’s hope they’re spreading the news among their countrywomen.
Jacinta: Well the sex video industry in Japan, and its sex industry generally, is enormous, though doubtless very exploitative. I presume it’s being driven by men rather than women – not exactly the bonobo way. A country that forces its few female politicians to wear high heels is far from being female-dominant. At least that was the case in 2019, when there was a backlash against this grotesque policy. I presume it has changed, but it isn’t clear.
Canto: Well, this has been interesting. We need to look more at endocrinology and happiness, or at least pleasure-inducing practices, in future… meanwhile, Vive les bonobos!
Confidences about passionate love are only well received between schoolboys in love with love, and between girls devoured by curiosity, by tenderness seeking an outlet – perhaps already drawn by the instinct which tells them this is the important business of their lives, and the sooner begun the better.
Stendhal, Love (De L’Amour)
There’s no doubt that we humans have cultural difficulties, depending on culture, and/or subculture, about the kind of sex bonobos engage in. In the WEIRD world we’re gradually becoming okay with female/female and male/male sex, but bonobos also openly (they don’t have bedrooms) engage in child/child, adult/child and old/old sex combos. I should add that this is mostly, and for the kids, exclusively, mutual masturbation. Some of these combos are so unacceptable to the WEIRD that I feel like a criminal in even raising the matter. We’re still generally critical of non-monogamous sexual behaviour, especially for women, though in my recent reading of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The World: a family history (and in viewing many Korean historical dramas), I’ve learned of countless potentates keeping hordes of concubines, and even of powerful women maintaining a stream of male and female lovers. However, for most of us in the WEIRD world, monogamy, whether serial or ‘till death us do part’, has become so culturally normative that any sexual feelings outside of that norm elicit a sense of guilt and betrayal. Simone de Beauvoir describes the problem in The prime of life:
I had surrendered my virginity with glad abandon: when heart, head, and body are all in unison, there is high delight to be had from the physical expression of that oneness. At first I had experienced nothing but pleasure, which matched my natural optimism and was balm to my pride. But very soon circumstances forced me into awareness of something which I had uneasily foreseen when I was twenty: simple physical desire. I knew nothing of such an appetite: I had never in my life suffered from hunger, or thirst, or lack of sleep. Now, suddenly, I fell a victim to it. I was separated from Sartre for days or even weeks at a time…
S de Beauvoir, The prime of life, pp 54-5
Beauvoir is no doubt typical, in sexual terms, of women of her time – and perhaps still today, almost a century later – in the WEIRD world. Losing her virginity (a thought-provoking term in itself) in her early twenties as a ‘function’ of her first serious relationship with a man (Jean-Paul Sartre), opens up something of a mine-field for her. Beauvoir says nothing about her sexual feelings or urges before this time, though she must surely have had them. Then again, my perspective on such things comes from the late 20th century, hers from the early 20th century. I’m also male, which may or may not make a difference. My own experience, which I doubt is particularly exceptional, is that sexual arousal came early, too early to put a reliable number on it. Three years before Beauvoir’s birth, Sigmund Freud published Three Essays on the theory of Sexuality, in which he described infantile sexuality in broad terms, including thumb-sucking. All of which suggests that sexuality may be an ill-defined and elusive concept. Returning to Beauvoir, she describes a period of separation from Sartre:
I had emancipated myself just far enough from my puritanical upbringing to be able to take unconstrained pleasure in my own body, but not so far that I could allow it to cause me any inconvenience. Starved of its sustenance, it begged and pleaded with me: I found it repulsive. I was forced to admit a truth that I had been doing my best to conceal ever since adolescence: my physical appetites were greater than I wanted them to be. In the feverish caresses and love-making that bound me to the man of my choice I could discern the movements of my heart, my freedom as an individual. But that mood of solitary, languorous excitement cried out for anyone, regardless. In the night train from Tours to Paris the touch of an anonymous hand along my leg could arouse feelings — against my conscious will — of quite shattering intensity. I said nothing about these shameful incidents. Now that I had embarked on our policy of absolute frankness, this reticence was, I felt, a kind of touchstone. If I dared not confess such things, it was because they were by definition unavowable. By driving me to such secrecy my body became a stumbling block rather than a bond of union between us, and I felt a burning resentment against it.
Ibid, pp 55-6
These are complex emotions and sensations which surely lie at the heart of any relationship that purports or intends to be monogamous. One might claim that Beauvoir is over-thinking the relationship – you can have these thoughts and sensations and still remain faithful to the One. Another might claim that there’s no shame in these sensations, and if you act on them with others, why should that compromise your Main Squeeze relationship?
But there’s another factor at issue, and that’s the idea that we humans should have risen above these sordid sexual urges, and have at our best:
I learned with my body that humanity does not subsist in the calm light of the Good; men suffer the dumb, futile, cruel agonies of defenseless beasts. The face of the earth must have been hellish indeed to judge by the dark and lurid desires that, from time to time, struck me with the force of a thunderbolt.
Ibid, pp 56
There’s much to unpack and critique here, especially in the light of bonobo sexual and relational practices, which, it needs to be said, are neither dumb nor futile. Beauvoir is clearly referring to humans, rather than simply men, and she also apparently refers to ‘cruel agonies’ in reference to the actors as well as those acted upon. But of course, she’s describing an overheated emotional state within the context of a well-buttoned civil society. It’s ye olde standard contrast between cultured humans and brute beasts, which the anthropology, palaeontology and primatology of the 20th and 21st centuries have done so much to fuzzify. It’s perhaps worth noting that just as Beauvoir was struggling with her sexual demons in the Paris of the late 1920s and early 1930s, a new species of primate, very closely related to H sapiens, was being identified and investigated, a species whose sexual behaviours have gradually caused the cognoscenti, a very tiny proportion of the population even of the WEIRD world, to reflect upon the role of sexuality in both bonobo and human culture.
Again, it’s worth reflecting on how human culture, especially in the long period when religion held sway in the proto-WEIRD world, outlaws and debases ‘brute beast’ sexuality. Take this passage from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, describing the ‘saintly’Alyosha:
Boys pure in mind and heart, almost children, are fond of talking in school among themselves, and even aloud, of things, pictures, and images of which even soldiers would sometimes hesitate to speak. More than that, much that soldiers have no knowledge or conception of is familiar to quite young children of our intellectual and higher classes. There is no moral depravity, no real corrupt inner cynicism in it, but there is the appearance of it, and it is often looked upon among them as something refined, subtle, daring, and worthy of imitation. Seeing that Alyosha Karamazov put his fingers in his ears when they talked of “that,” they used sometimes to crowd round him, pull his hands away, and shout nastiness into both ears, while he struggled, slipped to the floor, tried to hide himself without uttering one word of abuse, enduring their insults in silence. But at last they left him alone and gave up taunting him with being a “regular girl,” and what’s more they looked upon it with compassion as a weakness.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p 18
This captures well, though par inadvertence, the hypocrisy of Christian civilisation – or, not just Christian, but every civilisation that seeks to repress the most natural urges, generally via religion. Alyosha’s saintly aversion to ‘that’ makes him a ‘regular girl’ among these rough-house schoolboys, but to apparently enlightened readers it characterises him as something akin to the Sacred Virgin, the ideal woman of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. We need to work harder at leaving all that silliness well behind us. We need more outlets for our tenderness and our kindness, whether sexual or otherwise, and so, Vive les bonobos.
I recall a while back reading, in Australia’s premier science magazine, Cosmos, that some 6000 species have been found to engage in homosexual activity, so far. I’ve read similar claims on other scientific sites, and I can’t help but wonder, what does that even mean? Do cats, rats and bats know that what they’re doing is frowned upon by the Catholic Church, and by Islamic governments worldwide? More interestingly, do any of these creatures have any clear idea of what they’re doing? Do they actually know whether they’re male or female? Or that they’re actually engaging in ‘sex’, ‘masturbation’ or whatever?
Mammals can apparently differentiate between males and females of their own species primarily via odour – pheromones and such. This of course is very different from having a concept of maleness and femaleness, though it does help mightily in terms of reproduction, which is what it’s all about from an evolutionary perspective. It also makes me wonder – do some male cats smell more thoroughly male than others? Do some female pigs have an almost-male odour? Is there a spectrum of male-to-female odours given off by male/female cats/dogs/pigs/humans/bonobos? Do vets, who, for example, treat a lot of dogs, take a whiff and think ‘wow, this dog is so male.’? More importantly, do, say, female dogs scent a difference between mucho male dogs and mildly male dogs?
Getting back to all that homosexual activity detected in innumerable species, clearly it’s not about reproduction, but it’s not likely to be all about gender confusion either. In bonobos, as in humans, it’s mostly about good dirty fun, and as to species further removed from us, maybe we should mind our own business.
Amongst humans, at least in some parts, there’s an obsession with where we place ourselves in the growing list of sex/gender categories available. And of course in other parts there’s a refusal to accept more than two categories. And then there’s the most sensible option, to me, of accepting gender fluidity and not getting too obsessed with labels. I might call this the bonobo option, but then again, bonobos are generally described as female dominant….
So I’ve been looking at some research into the social system of bonobos and what we can learn about what they might know about femaleness, maleness and who should dominate who. For example, it’s been ascertained that female bonobos dominate males through group (female-female) bonding, but what happens in dyadic (one-on-one) interactions between males and females?
In a March 2022 paper entitled ‘Dominance style and intersexual hierarchy in wild bonobos from Wamba’, researchers ‘tested whether female intersexual dominance is dependent on female coalitions or whether it still arises when only dyadic interactions are considered’. The researchers were testing a prediction – that in these dyadic interactions, female dominance would disappear or be reduced, and this is in fact what they found. Considering that there’s a slight, and apparently narrowing, dimorphism in favour of males, this shouldn’t be surprising. Interestingly, an earlier (2006) study of captive bonobos found no clear dominance hierarchy. Its conclusion:
The dominance style of bonobos may be loose and differentially expressed in diverse groups or in the same group, along with shifting conditions.
As I’ve written before, bonobo society isn’t matriarchal to the degree that chimp society is patriarchal – the differences are more subtle. What’s important, to me at least, is that bonobos aren’t predominantly patriarchal, and this marks a difference in their behaviour, both within and between troops. That difference is a positive one, less violent and more caring and sharing. More loving, one might say. It’s what, as the song goes, the (human) world needs now.
It’s been claimed that bonobos engage in sex in all varieties, but it seems to me that there’s only one variety that counts – an encounter that leaves both, or all, parties, feeling better, happier and more relaxed. This doesn’t mean that we all end up lying around in a sexual stupor, which of course doesn’t happen with bonobos. As with every other species, they have to ‘make a living’, to feed themselves and their families, and to multiply, or at least replace themselves. And we humans aim for much more, to deeply understand our bodies, our history and our universe, to endlessly expand the horizons of knowledge and invention. We also aim to be better in our treatment of each other and the planet we depend upon. War, aka male ultra-violence, is very much still with us. Those females who have engaged in it have done so within the context of a violently male world. Human patriarchy has been so historically dominant that it’s almost beyond us to imagine a human world without it. That’s why the example of bonobos, our so-close relatives, is so precious to me, and why it’s so exasperating that so few people I meet know the first thing about them.
So, what about sex? Is it really necessary to curb our sexual drives in order to build civilisation, as Freud essentially argued? After all, the ancient Romans were great civilisation builders while enjoying open and vigorous sex lives – at least for males. Even today the slut/stud dichotomy holds sway, though it’s slowly changing. And the fact that there’s a massive not-so-underground industry called ‘pornography'(surely a questionable term) seems a testament to our hypocrisy over sex, though this is a minefield I’m reluctant to explore. I will say that the dangers of the sex industry seem to me like the dangers of drug use, all the more problematic when driven underground. It’s a horny issue – I mean a thorny one, which I’ll write about soon, when I’ve boned up on the subject a bit more.
testosterone guru – aka the ugliest human on the planet?
I’ve written about testosterone before, here,here, here, here and here (!), but as I’m currently getting just too many ‘testosterone crisis’ pieces on my YouTube feed, I feel the need to return to the fray, with bonobos in mind, of course.
So, there’s nothing particularly wrong about men wanting to boost their testosterone levels, I suppose, but I just think that the focus is wrong. The focus should be on health. If you eat well, exercise daily, sleep effectively (and sleep routines can vary with individuals), and avoid too much stress, your hormone levels will tend to take care of themselves. It’s likely true that testosterone levels have reduced in the WEIRD world in the past few decades, but this doesn’t amount to a crisis. In the same WEIRD world, at least since the sixties, male machismo has become more a focus of derision as female empowerment has become a focus for – well, women. In that period, and especially since the 80s and 90s, physical work has become mechanised, or transferred to non-WEIRD countries – I worked in about five different factories from the 70s to the 90s, all of which have since shut down, as Australia has virtually ceased to be a manufacturing nation.
So men are mostly not doing physical work like they used to. Even so, we’re all living longer. And it’s worth looking at a couple of ‘longevity hotspots’ such as Tuscany, Okinawa, Switzerland, Singapore, and last but not least, here in Australia. Forget looking at the testosterone levels in these regions, look at how they live and the challenges they face. But let me first use a bonobo quote which I may have used before, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Mate competition by males over females is common in many animal species. During mating season male testosterone levels rise, resulting in an increase in aggressive behavior and masculine features. Male bonobos, however, invest much more into friendly relationships with females. Elevated testosterone and aggression levels would collide with this increased tendency towards forming pair-relationships.
It would be interesting to research the apparent fall in testosterone levels in WEIRD nations, to see if there are any links to increased sucking up to women. Or just an increased role in family life, as opposed to the old mostly-absent, hard-working father scenario. Certainly, with the better angels of our nature prevailing, males aren’t dying so much in wars, or limping along in the aftermath, and factories are generally safer or being removed to less affluent parts of the world. I recall reading that, in northern Italy and in Sardinia, the high life expectancy for men is pretty well equal to that for women. Key to this appears to be an active life both physically and socially. Take this blurb from the Visit Italy website, which closely resembles what I’ve learned from an essay on Okinawan society:
Scholars believe that this phenomenon [longevity] is due to a constellation of factors, not only genetic. This is where lifestyle comes into play: a set of practices aimed at a happy, active and inclusive existence. Social relations also seem to be surprisingly decisive when it comes to longevity.
Here people, even when very old, continue to be an integral part of the community and participate in social life. Family ties, in particular, are absolutely solid; there is no room for loneliness or even absolute rest.
Gardening, looking after grandchildren, and cooking are all activities taken very seriously by Sardinian nonni [grandparents], who continue to have as much weight in the family dynamics as their children and grandchildren. Being together and being useful at all ages: could this be one of the secrets to a long life?
Caring and sharing – isn’t this the bonobo way?
And testosterone bullshit goes both ways – it makes you more ‘manly’, whatever that may mean, or it makes you stupid, responding with ‘brute’ violence to situations that require greater (feminine?) nuance. But what makes a person more or less ‘masculine’ according to social norms of masculinity (which are changing, especially in the WEIRD world) involves a huge array of determining factors, including hormone levels of course, but far from confined to them. Focussing more or less solely on testosterone is just dumb male shite.
Humans are evolving, I hope, to become more like bonobos. I’m not against competition and aggression, in its place. I like watching competitive sports, especially soccer, and I’ve enjoyed watching the women’s game progress rapidly in recent years. Unsurprisingly, I’ve noticed that women’s soccer is just as aggressive but with much less of the biffo and play-acting and referee-confronting that you find in the men. There’s also less crowd violence. It just seems ‘unseemly’ to even imagine crowd violence, which generally involves males, at a women’s soccer tournament. Some interesting psychology to unpick there. Bonobos and chimps don’t play sport of course, but they do come close to it, especially as youngsters, chasing each other to get the ‘ball’, whatever it might be, in quite a rough and tumble way. This kind of competitive rough-and-tumble is a feature of cubs and pups and calves etc in thousands of mammalian species, and is set to continue, encouraged and regulated by watchful adults. It’s neither a male nor a female thing. The manufactured testosterone crisis, on the other hand, seems all about ‘maleness’, a tedious fiction that even some women are buying into. What’s most funny about all those ‘boost your testosterone levels’ videos by men is the way these ‘influencer’ guys are built. Truly, I’d rather be dead than look like that!
In my view they just need to be educated about bonobos. Vive les bonobos! Would that we could all be as happy and sexy and caring and sharing as them!
A few months back I read The picture of Dorian Gray for a reading group, and the book irked me, to say the least, with its effete Oxbridge elitism, its occasionally crass descriptions of women, and its obsession with sin, which I prefer to believe had already become an outmoded concept in Wilde’s time. I like to identify as a working-class high-school drop out with a chip on his shoulder, a type who finds aristocratic poseurs highly expendable, and my scorn was hardly likely to diminish on learning that Wilde, a tragically broken man at the end of his short life, turned to the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, that richly resplendent monument to sexual hypocrisy, for reasons unknown, but presumably having something to do with eternity. Did he actually believe in a heavenly afterlife, in which forgiven sinners would be supplied with translucent wings while having their genitals erased? Heaven really does sound like a place where nothing ever happens, at least nothing the old, pre-dead or at least pre-disgraced Wilde would’ve had much interest in. Of course lions would lie down with lambs – boredom is a universal trait.
Of course, it’s impossible to transport yourself to a world of ‘typical’ 19th century values. Human society, at least in the WEIRD world, has been rapidly transforming in the past few centuries, unlike bonobo society, which was surely as female-dominated and sexually active in the 1500s as it is now. Atheism was hardly recognised as a word in Shakespeare’s time, and nobody would’ve admitted to holding such a belief. Homosexuality, however, under a variety of names, has been a feature of life in virtually all cultures since history has been written, and of course before. Simon Sebag Montifiore, in his BIG book The world: a family history, provides some orifice-opening examples (sans illustrations, unfortunately). Yet even in pre-medieval times, in non-Christian regions, homosexuality, particularly among men, appears to have been looked upon with disdain if not contempt, presumably due to the warrior expectations surrounding the gender. Think chimpanzees.
I’ve mentioned the hypocrisy of the Church, so thoroughly exposed in recent decades, with its all-male ‘celibate’ clergy and its bizarre and unworkable public attitude to sex, contraception, abortion and the limited role of women within its profoundly hierarchical structure. It’s frustrating to see how unwilling it is to reform itself, but heartening to note how little political clout it has in the WEIRD world compared to previous centuries, and how Christianity in general is fading quite rapidly, outside of the USA. It appears to be making headway, though in a small way, in some Asian countries, I think largely because it offers community – a microcosm of mutual support in troubled and often dangerous times. And many of these new Christian groups are more supportive of gender differences, alternative lifestyles and the like. These are the green shoots I like to see – though I might just be imagining them – that might be harbingers of a bonobo world, a world in which the word ‘queer’, in sexual terms, will have become meaningless.
Of course there’s much to be pessimistic about. Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iran, South Sudan…. The Wisevoter website lists 32 countries that are currently in ‘conflict’, though history tells us that it seems to have always been thus, and indeed it was even worse ‘back then’. In the more internally peaceful WEIRD world I inhabit, a lot of the citizenry’s violent inclinations have found expression in social media platforms, which would seem to involve words rather than deeds, but nonetheless create self-contained but relational spaces of self-righteousness which militate against bonoboesque caring, sharing and becalming. The concern is that these social media bubbles of discontent and rage may become over-heated and burst into real violence against the physical embodiments of largely fantasised ‘evil’, as in replacement theory, vaccination mind control, an international Jewish conspiracy, etc etc. We may need to examine, culturally and perhaps governmentally, the algorithms that tend to spread and reinforce toxic misinformation, as evidence is brought more clearly to light about real and present damage. It seems that there may be a connection between the seemingly harmless creation of certain mathematical sequences (algorithms) and the strange forms of belief that imprison the susceptible. But then, you can lead a horse to water, as they say, and humans are always free to refuse an education in critical thinking.
I’ve used the word ‘free’ in that last sentence, but we’re not free. Something in the strange beliefs that organisations like the Church have imposed on us for millennia – that it’s a sin to enjoy sex outside of an aptly named concept called ‘wedlock’, and that children born outside of that concept are not legitimate human beings, and a variety of other sex-related ‘sins’ – won favour in the neural networks inside our heads, imprinted from generation to generation, at least until the rise of the sciences, and our demotion, more recently still, to the status of a primate among other primates, albeit a fascinatingly and frighteningly successful one.
For those of us who accept this demotion, or, more accurately, accept that our status has been revised and made more meaningful, embedded as it has become with the stuff of all living things within the biosphere that sustains them, the behaviour of our closest kin, chimps and bonobos, as well as other intelligent, social beings far from our line of development, such as cetaceans, some avian species, elephants, bats and rats, might offer lessons for us in community and sustainability. But, in my humble opinion, bonobos most of all, for, I think, obvious reasons.
Our strong genetic links with bonobos means that, as fellow primates, we can look each other in the eye and feel a depth of connection. Their sexual behaviour and family dynamics are clearly more relatable to us than, say, dolphins, so that we’re keen to close the gap in knowledge about how our ancestry connects with theirs. Exactly how and why – and when – did they become female dominant? Can we uncover female dominance in any of our own ancestors or cousins? (It should be pointed out – for those who would favour male-female equality rather than the dominance of one sex, that such equality rarely if ever exists in the world of social mammals). And, considering how dangerous male violence and militarism has become in the world of nuclear weaponry, the example of a bonobo social world of mutual care, limited exploitation and empathy is surely needful as we tackle problems we have created for ourselves and other creatures due to our rapacity. In some ways, in the WEIRD world, we’re becoming just a little bit more like bonobos, but we need to go further in that direction, with all our amazing knowledge and inventiveness.
Any how, vive les bonobos.
References
The picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, 1891
The world: a family history, by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Francisco Lopez, one of the world’s lesser known dictators – unless you’re Paraguayan (see references)
Canto: So there’s now Putin’s macho invasion of Ukraine, Trump & co’s macho trampling of US democracy, such as it is, Hamas and its macho terrorist attack in southern Israel, and Israel’s massive macho response, Xi’s macho politburo and his assault on female empowerment, and the usual macho claptrap in Iran, Afghanistan, Burma, Syria, Yemen, etc etc, etc, so how’s your bonobo world going?
Jacinta: Well, my teensy-tiny part of the world is going okay, and hopefully that tiny-teensy patch south of the Congo River is too, for now. And patches of the WEIRD world are making slow progress, from century to century.
Canto: So you’re taking the long view. How admirable. Seriously, it’s the only way we can maintain any optimism. When the internet suddenly became a big thing in everyone’s life, I was excited – so much useful knowledge at our fingertips without having to visit libraries, subscribe to science magazines, buy books and so on – I didn’t really pay much attention to the social media aspect and its dangers, which have become so overwhelming in the USA, but probably here as well for all I know. I often hear – it’s repeated so often it’s almost as if I comprehend it – that so-and-so has been ‘radicalised by social media’. But what does that really mean?
Jacinta: Well, I think it starts with the fact that people want to be with like-minded people. They like to be part of an ‘in-group’. People who really deserve the ‘intellectual’ title are actually in a tiny minority. They’re generally more independent-minded and suspicious of any in-group thinking.
Canto: And yet, bonobos are real groupies, aren’t they? Isn’t that a problem for you?
Jacinta: I’m not pretending we should be like bonobos in all ways, but, since we’ve been focussing on free will, and the lack thereof, our recognition of this lack should make us more compassionate, from an intellectual perspective. And bonobos are the compassionate, and passionate apes, presumably not coming at it from an intellectual perspective. What they’ve become ‘instinctively’, we need to become from a more knowledge-based, intellectual perspective.
Canto: Way to become more sexy, by just giving it more thought.
Jacinta: It doesn’t require that much thought, just an open-eyed – and certainly more female-centred – view of what macho violence has done and is still doing.
Canto: What about the ‘problem’ of female self-obsession, fashion-consciousness, and general ‘femininity’ – highlighting the decorative over the functional?
Jacinta: Like the ‘problem’ of male dressing tough, or business-like or sporty-casual or whatever, these are minor differences which are already changing with greater equality. Visit any Aussie pub. Anyway, looking decorative rather than functional has often to more to do with status than gender. Though there’s still a way to go.
Canto: I’ve noted that human society, at least in the WEIRD world, seems to be divided into right or left wing obsessionalism. What do you make of this?
Jacinta: Taking the long view, it’s a passing phase..
Canto: Well if you take the long view everything’s a passing phase. Nations are a passing phase, and now everyone’s obsessed with borders and the status of immigrants, as if migration hasn’t been a thing since humans came into being and before – ask any bird-dinosaur.
Jacinta: So, such terms as neo-Marxism or neo-fascism seem laughable to me. It’s largely macho stuff. We’re more about wanting to get on with people, recognising our different backgrounds and influences and trying to find common grounds rather than ideological grounds for grievance. And what are those grounds? The desire to be heard, accepted, even loved. Youse men are too interested in besting, in winning. Of course, I’m generalising – there are male-type females and vice versa.
Canto: Well, I can’t disagree. But isn’t that competitive spirit good for capitalism as well as war?
Jacinta: Ah, capitalism. There are info-wars out there about whether capitalism is good or bad. To me, it’s either, or it’s both, because it’s much more than some political ideology. Birds do it, bees do it, even the fungi in the trees do it. It’s more than just human nature.
Canto: So, you mean capitalising?
Jacinta: Yes, and you can do it in a dumb way – say, by basing much of your diet on one or two species, hunting and gathering them to extinction, then heading towards extinction yourself because you can’t change your culinary ways. Moving to an agricultural lifestyle was a smart but risky thing to do, and was best done gradually, as with any change of diet….
Canto: But this has nothing to do with capitalism as we know it.
Jacinta: Ha, I neither know nor care about the dictionary definition of capitalism. Or the political definition, I should say. I’m thinking it in the broadest sense – capitalising on food and other resources, on our smarts, our technology, our history. And we can be synergistic capitalists, or symbiotic capitalists. Isn’t that what trade is all about? And getting back to bonobos, isn’t their sexual play a kind of synergistic capitalism, especially with the females? They’re building bonds that unite the community, especially the females when the odd too-aggressive male starts to cause trouble. Social capital, they call it. We need more social capital.
Canto: Trade alliances seem to be good for maintaining the peace I suppose, but it’s all beginning to fray…
Jacinta: Idiots like Trump, as far as he has any policies, think that closing the borders and shitting on your allies will MAGA, as if isolationism has ever benefitted any nation that wants to progress. How are the Andaman Islanders going?
Canto: Trump just intuits that the idea will resonate with his base, insofar as he thinks at all.
Jacinta: Yes, being born into wealth, but without intellect, by which I mean intellectual curiosity, the kind of mind that tries to ‘rise above the self and grasp the world’, to quote our blog’s motto, he’s purely interested in self-promotion, and his instincts tell him it’s not the curious and the questioning that’ll follow him, but those impressed by his wealth and his bluster. Look at any dictator – they all project this air of extreme self-importance, it’s the first and last, the ‘must-have’ quality.
Canto: And the fact that there are always so so so many dupes for these guys, that’s what astonishes me most. Why is it so?
Jacinta: I think conditions have to be right. There has to be a substantial proportion of the population that are under-educated, but above all suffering, feeling deprived, abandoned, desperate. Smart, successful and well-heeled people seek out their own, and easily slip into the fantasy that most people are like them. They’re not, especially in places like the USA, with its rich-poor gap, its tattered social safety net, its pathetic minimum wage, its massive incarceration rate, its group-think holy rollers and the like. And surely no nation is more deluded about its own superiority than the USA, so vague but persistent appeals to patriotism, which are the sine qua non for dictators (Hitler being the prime example of that) will always play exceptionally well there.
Canto: Hmmm, quite an indictment, but the USA, to be fair, is very diverse, almost like a few countries rolled into one. New York State and the north-east coast seem to be no-go areas for Trump, and California too… that’s my uneducated guess. It’s like the civil war never ended, it’s so divided. United States indeed!
Jacinta: Haha, we should get off this obsession with the US, but indeed, I’ve often thought they’d be better off dividing the place into two, or even three. Or rather, I just wish they’d do it for our entertainment’s sake.
Canto: Okay, so we’ve covered a lot of macho ground – though it often feels like the female Trumpets blow the hardest. But they can’t help it – no free will after all, right?
Jacinta: Well, yes, but that’s not a cause for despair – determinism isn’t pre-determinism. It means working towards a world in which the determining factors are as positive as they can be. But that’s for another time…
Jacinta: So how is the bonobo influence faring these days – in Afghanistan, Iran, Trumpistan, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel and Burma, to name a few…?
Canto: Okay, enough goat-getting. I’m still fascinated by how bonobos – more genetically similar to chimps, of course, than to humans – came to be so different. It’s not genetics, so what is it? It can’t just be diet, or habitat. And, my feeling is, if you know how something works, you can build it yourself. Like, if you know how beehives work you can build your own beehive, which we’ve done.
Jacinta: Not quite the same as building a new social system methinks. Though they have tried, haven’t they? ‘Let’s go to the Americas and build a Paraiso en el NuevoMundo‘… ‘But isn’t it already inhabited?’ ‘Yeah, we might need a bit of rubbish-clearing to start with’.
Canto: You’d think that our discovery of the bonobo lifestyle, really only a few decades ago, its feminism, its relative pacifism, its great community spirit, not to mention the sex, would be of interest to more than just a few primatologists, especially given the world of warfare, rapine and religious numbskullduggery that so many of us are still trapped within – it makes me scream with frustration.
Jacinta: It seems that the timber of humanity is more crooked than that of bonobos. I reckon we took a really wrong turn a few million years ago, so now we’re lost in the patriarchal jungle and we’ll never find our way back.
Canto: But bonobos are showing us the way don’t you see? And if humans didn’t make life so difficult for them, and their habitat wasn’t so fouled and fenced in by human depredations, they’d be so numerous, such a dominant force in the landscape, they’d put us to shame.
Jacinta: Haha we’re a pretty shameless species I’m afraid. Anyway, aren’t bonobos the anomalous ones? Chimps vastly outnumber them, despite the same human depredations. It be Nature, and what do please Evolution. If they hadn’t been separated into two species by the formation of the Congo River, they’d still be one species, and patriarchal, I’m betting.
Canto: Wow, who’s side are you on? Whether bonobos’ ancestors were patriarchal or not is beside the point to me. The point is, they’re matriarchal now, who cares when it started. And they’re happy, and successful. And we humans want to be happy, or happier, and more successful. So we might learn from bonobos about being less aggressive, less cruel, less exploitative, less competitive, and more caring, more playful, more communal, more uninhibited…
Jacinta: Okay, okay, I get it. But I’m wondering about that aggression, or at least that competitiveness. Hasn’t it been to our advantage as a species? The space race, the battles between competing scientific theories, between political ideologies and the like, haven’t they sharpened the collective human mind? Aren’t bonobos a bit intellectually lazy? I’ve read somewhere that chimps are more consistent toolmakers than bonobos. Or would you rather we lived in some timeless hippy-bonobo nirvana?
Canto: Okay, let’s look at the evidence, or what we have of it. Michael Tomasello et al published a research study in the journal PloS One in 2010, entitled ‘Differences in the Cognitive Skills of Bonobos and Chimpanzees’. Here’s the whole abstract from it:
While bonobos and chimpanzees are both genetically and behaviorally very similar, they also differ in significant ways. Bonobos are more cautious and socially tolerant while chimpanzees are more dependent on extractive foraging, which requires tools. The similarities suggest the two species should be cognitively similar while the behavioral differences predict where the two species should differ cognitively. We compared both species on a wide range of cognitive problems testing their understanding of the physical and social world. Bonobos were more skilled at solving tasks related to theory of mind or an understanding of social causality, while chimpanzees were more skilled at tasks requiring the use of tools and an understanding of physical causality. These species differences support the role of ecological and socio-ecological pressures in shaping cognitive skills over relatively short periods of evolutionary time.
Jacinta: Yeah, that is a bit abstract. WTF is the difference between social causality and physical causality?
Canto: Well, it hints of course as to why chimps might be less interested in tool-making, and more interested in how to effectively share in the relative abundance of their habitat – a habitat they had full control of, I suspect, before a species called H sapiens started fucking it up. Says little about intelligence, however defined. Interestingly, the study involved far more chimps (106) than bonobos (34), and fewer female bonobos (13) than males – a bit disappointing, given that female bonobos have become dominant for some reason, but clearly not because of physical strength!
Jacinta: Well, reading further into the article, they did do some experiments in which they evened out the numbers, and I was intrigued by the claim that bonobos were more ‘timid’ than chimps:
Mirroring individual differences observed in theory of mind development in human children, the more cautious and socially tolerant bonobos outperformed chimpanzees on the theory of mind scale. Meanwhile, the prolific tool-using chimpanzee, whose survival is more dependent on extractive foraging, outperformed bonobos in the tool-use and causality scale.
Canto: Yes, apparently human children of the more reflective and less, dare I say, ‘out there’ type, have been found to be better at ‘theory of mind’ tasks. Tasks involving ‘walking in others’ shoes’, might I say. And isn’t that what we need right now? And I’m willing to bet all my worldly goods, that human females outperform males in those tasks.
Jacinta: This has been a contentious issue for some time, and it’s complicated, but yes, it seems that females do better at ToM, as they call it.
This pattern can potentially be interpreted as suggesting that bonobos are more skilled at solving problems requiring an understanding of social causality, while chimpanzees are more skilled at solving problems relating to physical causality. In contrast, the two species did not differ in the scales measuring their understanding of problems related to spatial comprehension, discriminating quantities, using and comprehending communicative signals and learning from others via a social demonstration. This pattern of findings provides support for the hypothesis that socio-ecological pressures play an important role in shaping the cognitive differences observed between these species.
Long-term observations of wild chimpanzees have suggested that female chimpanzees acquire more proficient tool-using techniques faster than males, and other studies show a similar pattern in captive bonobos. Therefore, it may be that socio-ecological pressures play a more limited role in producing cognitive differences based on sex in these species, but it also suggests that female Panins pay closer attention to others which allows them to learn and solve social problems more quickly and skillfully than males (while both sexes perform similarly in physical cognition tasks).
Canto: That’s intriguing, but it still doesn’t come very close to helping us understand how bonobo females dominate. I’m still waiting for a good hypothesis to explain this apparent turn-around. I’d like to think that there’s a clue in their sexual activities, but since it all seems to be about mutual masturbation…
Jacinta: But maybe it’s because the females are more proficient masturbators. After all, human females are more easily able to achieve orgasm than males, and that’s likely true also for bonobos, and in a social system in which there’s no sexual prudery (and humans have barely any such systems), that achievement might be politically empowering.
Canto: Yes, and this Theory of Mind stuff suggests that bonobos would likely get off on each others’ excitement, the females especially. Creating greater closeness and empathy. But then, there’s masturbatory sex, but also more ‘serious’ sex, directed at producing offspring. I’ve read that dominant female bonobos seek to manipulate things so that there own male offspring have sex, in this procreative sense, with the ‘right’ females.
Jacinta: Yes, that does sound weird. Could bonobos possibly know the connection between sex and pregnancy? Seems unlikely.
In trying to develop a bonobo world with human characteristics, or perhaps more realistically a human world with bonobo characteristics, I suspect it’s best not to start by disparaging the male (human) brain as ‘unevolved’ or distinctly inferior to that of the female – something I heard in an interview with a male psychotherapist recently. Firstly, it make no sense to say that a brain, or a human, or a dog, a dolphin or a donkey is ‘unevolved’. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution, which is about ongoing change to most effectively adapt to a changing environment. And this includes social environments. The Andamanese, a tiny population living on scattered islands in the Bay of Bengal from about 25,000 years ago, and driven almost to extinction in the 18th and 19th centuries by the introduction of measles, influenza, pneumonia, and alcohol, have recovered somewhat and preserve their simple lifestyle via extreme hostility to interlopers, and are no more unevolved than were the ancient Hominins who once lived on the Indonesian island of Flores. It’s true, of course, that evolution can be competitive, and some species – or sub-species or cultures – can win out over others, but to describe this as due to being ‘more evolved’ rather over-simplifies matters. Each species evolves to survive and thrive in its own niche, and may thrive in that way for an eon, but may be swept away by another invasive species, or by relatively sudden climate change, or by very sudden events such as meteor showers or volcanic eruptions.
In the same interview, the psychotherapist described the male brain, including his own, as sick and in some sense mentally unbalanced compared to the female brain. And you can go onto YouTube and other sources to find dozens of mini-lectures and expert opinions on the male versus the female brain.
However, it might surprise people to know that there is no categorical difference between the male and female brain, at least not in the sense there is, usually, between a male and female body. Put another way, if a neurologist with decades of experience was given a disembodied brain and asked about its sex, she wouldn’t be able to say, categorically, whether it was male or female. There are statistical differences – males have, on average, more ‘grey matter’ (individual neurons) while females have more ‘white matter’ (myelinated axons connecting neurons) – but there is great diversity within this frame, which should hardly surprise us. Our brains develop within the womb, subject to the diet and environmental conditions of our mothers, and genetic and epigenetic factors have their role to play. In early childhood neural connections multiply rapidly in response to a multitude of more or less unique conditioning factors, and new connections continue to be made well into adulthood, resulting in more than eight billion tediously unique noggins clashing and combining in tediously unique ways.
So, to me, it’s behaviour that we need to start with. Of course I’m interested in the nervous system and the endocrine system of bonobos, but that’s because I’m first and foremost taken by their behaviour. I’m encouraged by what I see as changes in male behaviour in the WEIRD world, but then I was told recently that male violence against women is actually increasing. Of course these things are hard to measure as not all violence is reported, and the very concept of violence may be disputed, but a quick look at figures for Australia, which surely qualifies as a WEIRD nation, suggests that my sense of things is right:
Experiences of partner violence in the 12 months before the survey (last 12 months) remained relatively stable for both men and women between 2005 and 2016. However, between 2016 and 2021–22 the proportion of women who experienced partner violence decreased from 1.7% in 2016 to 0.9% in 2021–22.
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (Australian Government)
Whatever one might think of these figures, there’s little evidence of an increase in male violence (against females), at least here, in this teeny WEIRD nation. So maybe it’s places like Australia, and New Zealand, far from some of the major global threats, slowly building a multi-ethnic culture (largely proof against the massive social divisions stifling the divided ‘USA’), an oasis of 26 million compared to the bonobo oasis of maybe 20 thousand, a region that still likes to think of itself as ‘young and free’, and prepared to experiment with our politics and culture, maybe it’s here that bonobo-style caring-and-sharing behaviour can start to make some headway (but of course even as I write this it strikes me as ridiculous).
The trouble, of course, is that it’s hard to focus on such a possible future without sex rearing its not-so-ugly head. In human culture we’re obsessed with beauty (both male and female) in a positive way (though bad luck if you happen not to be physically attractive), and obsessed with sex in a much more confused but largely negative way (‘licentiousness’, a very human term, is generally condemned in all societies). Do bonobos distinguish between each other in terms of ‘good looks’? If not, when did we, or our ancestors start to do so? There has of course been much talk of ‘sexual selection’ in anthropology, going back to Darwin, but in bonobo society, where female-female sex predominates but sex, generally in the form of mutual masturbation, occurs among and between all age groups and genders, sexual selection (for breeding purposes) would only occasionally operate. And after all, masturbation is about one’s own erogenous zones, which, like being tickled, are best aroused by another, no matter what they look like. Think of a dog masturbating on your leg.
One might argue that religion has a lot to answer for, in so firmly linking sex to shame and transgression, while another might argue, along with Freud, that sexual sublimation was a necessary prerequisite for human civilisation. I’m still trying to work out my own view on this, but I’d surmise that the link between sex and shame existed in humans long before the Abrahamic religions took it to extremes. And unfortunately, much of the online material on our history of sex and shame contains a lot of bollocks, so I’ve reached a dead end there.
So here’s some guesswork. It may have started with the wearing of minimal clothing to protect the reproductive parts, both from damage and from gawkers – out of sight, out of mind. Perhaps this was initiated by females, but more likely (in the case of female genitalia) by males. On this topic I’ve often read claims that pre-agricultural or non-agricultural societies were less patriarchal, and I’ve even adopted that view myself, but I suspect the difference was only in degree, not in kind.
As to patriarchy itself, consider this. Bonobos and chimps split from each other 2 million years ago, at most. From that time on, bonobos survived and thrived in a relatively circumscribed, densely forested region south of the Congo. Chimps on the other hand are more numerous and wide-ranging (with more varied habitats), and are currently divided into four sub-species, from the west to the east of sub-Saharan Africa, and their number in the wild, though hard to determine with any precision, is generally estimated as about ten times that of bonobos. And all chimps are patriarchal.
The dating of the CHLCA (the last chimpanzee-human common ancestor, and note that bonobos are excluded from this reference) has been a subject of ongoing debate and analysis. Here’s how Wikipedia puts it:
The chimpanzee–human last common ancestor (CHLCA) is the last common ancestor shared by the extant Homo (human) and Pan (chimpanzee and bonobo) genera of Hominini. Estimates of the divergence date vary widely from thirteen to five million years ago.
Obviously, this was before the chimp-bonobo divergence, and considering speculation by anthropologists that bonobo ‘female power’ might be linked to a more frugivorous diet and less of a hunting-killing lifestyle (due to their restriction to an area rich in fruits, nuts, seeds and small game), it seems likely that the CHLCA was already more patriarchally inclined. Consider also that the genus Homo sapiens, long believed to date to no more than 200,000 years ago, and arising in eastern sub-Saharan Africa, has recently been dated to over 300,000 years from remains found in faraway Morocco. That suggests the traversing of vast regions, and a diet much richer in meat than that of bonobos. So, while the hunter-gatherer term has been passionately disputed by some, it’s generally accepted – and it makes sense to me – that there was some division of labour, as implied by the term, and that it would likely be largely gender-based. So, our history, and our ancestry, has been almost entirely patriarchal.
However, this doesn’t define our future. Patriarchy is breaking down in the WEIRD world, albeit slowly. And there are, depressingly, many forces in opposition to female empowerment, especially in the non-WEIRD world. I’ll focus on that in my next post.
I was going to entitle this post ‘How did bonobos become female dominant?’, but that assumes that they weren’t always so. To assume makes an ass out of u and me, and I don’t care about u, but I have my pride. And speaking of pride, lions live in those groups (of up to forty, but usually much smaller) and malely dominate, even though the women bring home most of the bacon, chevaline (well, zebra), venison, rattus and the occasional long pork, if they’re lucky.
The point is, we wouldn’t consider this a product of leonine (okay, lion) culture. It’s just what lions – male and female – are genetically programmed to do, just as marmosets, magpies (Australian) and macaroni penguins are programmed to be monogamous (more or less). But considering that separating genetic and cultural evolution in humans is a tricky business, the same would surely go for our closest living relatives. We’re generally convinced that the male dominance in most human history is cultural. I’ve often read the claim that the transition to an agricultural lifestyle in many parts of the world from about 11,000 years ago resulted in a more patriarchal society, with the concept of property, including women, becoming essential to power and dominance. This seems plausible enough, though I would assume that the first claims to property relied primarily on brute strength. Male muscularity is different from that of females, and, more importantly, they’re not hampered by pregnancies and child-rearing. And whereas hunter-gatherers (and it now seems the distinction between these lifestyles is by no means cut and dried) tend to migrate along with food resources, some concept of land ownership, based on kinship over time, clearly developed with an agricultural lifestyle. Again, such a fixed lifestyle would have essentially created the notion of ‘domesticity’, which became associated with the female world. And it seems also have encouraged a degree of polygyny as a sign of male social status. And as we left all this behind, in the WEIRD world so fulsomely described in Joseph Henrich’s book, we’re starting to leave patriarchy behind, though way too slowly for my liking.
So, let’s get back to bonobos. I was struck by an observation I read a while ago in some otherwise forgotten piece on bonobos. Female bonobos are smaller than male bonobos to much the same degree as in chimps and humans, but slightlyless so. Considering that the split between bonobos and chimps occurred only between one and two million years ago (and I’d love that margin of error to be narrowed somehow), any reduction in this sexual dimorphism seems significant – and surely genetic. But then genes are modified by environment, and by the behaviour that environment encourages or necessitates. Here’s what I found on a Q&A forum called Worldbuilding:
Bonobos have less dimorphism because they all feed close together and females can almost always protect each other. Male A tries to monopolize female A and gets driven off by female B, C, and D.
Hmmm. There’s something in this, but not quite enough. Why wouldn’t the males bond together to monopolise a particular female? In non-euphemistic human terms this is called pack rape, and it does seem to be confined to humans, though coercive sex, on an individual level, is quite common in other species, and for obvious anatomical reasons it’s always the male who coerces.
This leads to the reasonable conclusion, it seems to me, that for females to have control in the sexual arena – at least in the mammalian world – requires co-operation. And that requires bonding, arguably over and above the bonding associated with ‘girl power’ in WEIRD humans. So here’s how the Max Planck Society explains it:
To clarify why same-sex sexual behavior is so important specifically for female bonobos, we collected behavioral and hormonal data for over a year from all adult members of a habituated bonobo community at the long-term LuiKotale field site in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition to our focus on sexual interactions, we identified preferred partners for other social activities such as giving support in conflicts. We also collected urine to measure the hormone oxytocin, which is released in the body in other species after friendly social interactions, including sex, and helps to promote cooperation.
We found that in competitive situations, females preferred to have sex with other females rather than with males. After sex, females often remained closer to each other than did mixed sex pairs, and females had measurable increases in urinary oxytocin following sex with females, but not following sex with males. Among same-sex and opposite-sex pairs, individuals who had more sex also supported each other more often in conflicts, but the majority of these coalitions were formed among females. “It may be that a greater motivation for cooperation among females, mediated physiologically by oxytocin, is the key to understanding how females attain high dominance ranks in bonobo society,” explained co-lead author Martin Surbeck, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Harvard University.
Now, I know I’ve written about the peptide hormone oxytocin before, somewhere, and suffice to say its role in behaviour and its relation to the general endocrine and neurotransmission systems are extremely complex. Having said that, there will doubtless be strong similarities for its role in humans and in bonobos. And, reflecting on the above quote, what came first, the oxytocin release, or the bonding? Should we encourage more oxytocin doses, or more female-female sex? Doing both sounds like a fine idea.
To tell the truth, I find the willingness to see bonobos as any kind of female model somewhat lacking. They’re ‘jokingly’ referred to as the scandalous primate, and their revolutionary nature is underplayed. Yet their relatively comfortable, largely frugivorous lifestyle in the southern Congo region, where their only real threat is humanity, reflects in miniature the comforts of the WEIRD world, with its hazards of overspending at the supermarket, lazing too long at the beach, or pokies, cocktail bars and ‘Lust-Skin Lounges’ for the true thrill-seekers.
Of course, we got to our ascendant position today through the explorations, calculations and inventions produced by our brains, and the super-brains of our cities, corporations and universities. What can we learn from a bunch of gangly, hairy mutual masturbators dangling about in the Congolese rainforest? Well, we brains and super-brains can still learn a bit more about sharing and caring – as any study of our own history can tell us – and we can certainly learn to stop being so dumb and fucked-up about sexuality, gender and power. Learning lessons from bonobos doesn’t mean getting hairier and improving our brachiation skills, but, well, eating less meat would be a start, given what we know about the environmental damage our current diet is causing. And that’s just one of many lessons we can learn. For me, of course, the most important lesson is the role played by females. How ridiculously long did it take for us – I mean we male humans who have been in control of almost all human societies since those societies came into being – to recognise and admit that females are our equal in every intellectual sphere? This is still unacknowledged in some parts. And although we call this the WEIRD world, the Industrial part of that acronym has lost its machismo essence, a loss Susan Faludi has sensitively analysed in her book Stiffed: the betrayal of the modern man – though I think ‘betrayal’ is the wrong word. After all, men were never promised or guaranteed to be breadwinners and heads of households, they took or were given the role through social evolution, and it’s being taken from them, gradually, through the same process.
Finally, getting back to the question in the title, the answer, for Pan paniscus as surely as for Homo sapiens, is culture, which can affect gene expression (epigenetics), which can ultimately affect genetics. I suspect that the slight diminution in the sexual dimorphism between male and female bonobos, over a relatively short period of time, evolutionarily speaking, might, if they’re left to their own devices (which is unlikely, frankly), lead to a size reversal and a world of male sexual servitude. Vive les bonobos, I’d like to be one, for the next few million years!
