Archive for the ‘coalitions’ Category
Women in charge? One day…?
To start with – ‘Freedom cannot be achieved unless women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression’ – Nelson Mandela
A few years ago I read Australian author Jess Scully’s book Glimpses of Utopia, which looked at hot spots in the world where positive developments were happening, often within otherwise chaotic or brutal situations and regimes. It wasn’t an overtly feminist work, but it was clear that women were behind most of the good stuff. Unfortunately I loaned the book out and it never returned, as happens, so I’m not sure if she wrote about the Palestinian and Israeli women working together to try to reduce the suffering and set an example of peaceful co-existence, or if I read about it elsewhere. …
In any case, Israeli and Palestinian women are still marching and advocating for peace. I’ve written, of course, about the Palestinian situation many times, and ever since, as a child, I read about the slaughter and betrayal of the native people of the so-called ‘new world’ – new, that is, to the European colonists of what is now called North America, I’ve been particularly sensitive to the issue of what is now euphemistically called ‘settler colonialism’. But of course, it has happened, time and time again, here in Australia, and in New Zealand, and throughout the Americas. David Reich, in his ground-breaking and comprehensive book Who we are and how we got here, provides genetic evidence of the rapid spread into Europe of the Yamnaya people and culture from about 5,000 years ago. Intermixing was commonplace and the genetics tend to dispel all notions of hereditary purity, whether in individuals such as the reigning British monarch, or in broader ethnicities, such as the Celts or the Goths or the Jews. A lot of this intermixing was the result of rape and pillage, which can sometimes be identified through complex genomic analysis, and we can consider this with regard to the concept of miscegenation, once frowned upon, but now virtually dismissed as an issue, at least in the so-called developed world.
Women will be at the forefront of this intermixing, whether sexual or otherwise, because they’re more attuned to collaboration than males in general, but we need to socially acknowledge and facilitate female leadership as much more of a priority than ever before. Think of the fact that we’re now living in a world in which some of the world’s most dangerous countries, including if not especially the USA, are now nuclear-weaponised. Russia and China, both of which are more or less unstable oligarchies/dictatorships, have very sizeable nuclear weapons stockpiles, and other not-quite-reliable countries, such as North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel, belong to the nuclear fraternity. All of these countries, of course, are led by males and their male advisors and lapdogs, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable. What will it take, to recognise that female leadership and unity is pretty much the sine qua non of future human survival.
Observe the more brutal aspects of male leadership today. Here’s the latest Wikipedia data on the Putin war on Ukraine:
The casualties in the Russo-Ukrainian war include six deaths during the 2014 annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, 14,200–14,400 military and civilian deaths during the war in Donbas,[1] and between 1,274,000 and 2 million estimated casualties (killed and wounded) during the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 24 February 2022 to June 2026.
Obviously there have been more casualties to October 26, and every expert analyst I’ve listened to has argued that Putin has virtually no chance of winning, even if he orders full-scale mobilisation. Then there’s the nuclear option, and this really worries me.
This is just about one male who clearly doesn’t care about the suffering he causes, to his own people and others. And then there is Trump, with his regime’s international and domestic attacks upon innocent people. The world is crying out for more female leadership – collective female leadership – but it would only be likely to happen in those countries already on their way to female equality, and there are precious few of them. I like to think Australia is one, but my country has virtually no leverage on the world stage. What will it take to bring about anything close to a bonobo humanity? Will we have to be brought to the precipice? Are we there yet?
References
Jess Scully, Glimpses of Utopia: real ideas for a fairer world, 2020
https://www.vitalvoices.org/barefootwalk/
David Reich, Who we are and how we got here: ancient DNA and the new science of the human past, 2018
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war
back to my big issue: bonobos and us
Time to focus on, and keep focussing on, how a mammal so close to us – no mammal closer, genetically – a highly social mammal like us, with a similar sexual dimorphism to us (though with humans, the individual variations in size and strength are ‘all over the shop’ to use a technical term), became female dominant in the 1.5 million to 2 million years since it became a species apart from its chimp neighbours.
So, first, are bonobos really a species apart? I’ve heard that bonobos and chimps have inter-bred successfully, as did Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis back in the day. A New Scientist article from 10 years ago reports:
The genetic evidence shows that a little less than 1 per cent of the chimpanzee genome came from bonobos, from one contact between 200,000 and 550,000 years ago and another, more recent one less than 200,000 years ago…. It’s not yet clear whether the two episodes of gene flow happened at low levels over a long time or in discrete pulses.
Clearly, then, being separate species isn’t always a barrier, but I suspect genetic disparity is. For example, can a human successfully breed with a chimp or a bonobo? I’m here to ask the tough questions. The answer, sadly, is no, but they’re free to have deeply loving relationships. Okay, humans have 23 chromosome pairs, chimps and bonobos have 24, end of story, at least until we can work out a way…
But getting back to the big issue, female dominance. An article published in Communications Biology in April 2025 has just the title for me: Drivers of female power in bonobos. In the abstract, the authors found… well, let me quote:
Here we test three main hypotheses explaining intersexual power relationships, namely the self-reinforcing effects of winning and losing conflicts, the strength of mate competition, and female coalition formation. We test these for bonobos (Pan paniscus), one of our closest living relatives, where females have high status relative to males despite male-biased size dimorphism. We compiled demographic and behavioural data of 30 years and 6 wild living communities. Our results only support predictions of the female coalition hypothesis (my emphasis).
So, this study makes clear that female coalitions are absolutely central to female dominance in bonobos. And would be absolutely central, IMHO, to female dominance in humans. A bonobo sisterhood indeed. And I should add that this study – a godsend to me – explores gender-based dominance in many mammalian species, with coalitions being generally key to female dominance where it exists.
This is so important. As I’ve written previously, I get push-back from women who say that this female Prime Minister X, or that female boss Y, or my horrible mother Z is somehow proof that women are, at the very least, no better than men, in terms of leadership. I try to suppress my annoyance at this totally irrelevant response. In an environment of male dominance, it’s not surprising that some women will behave ‘more manlier than men’, in order to gain prominence. Indeed, they may feel that they have no other choice. Again I’ll quote the simple remark made by the African-American novelist Toni Morrison: ‘the problem isn’t men, the problem is patriarchy’, to which I respond, ‘the solution isn’t women, it’s matriarchy. It’s sisterhood.’
So my new resolution, to focus more or less exclusively on this issue (a very tough one to keep to, I admit), has made me decide to reread Diane Rosenfeld’s book, referenced below. The book begins with the problem of male domestic violence in the USA. She’s a lawyer, and has dealt with many domestic violence and domestic abuse cases. So, interestingly, I looked up statistics on male domestic violence in the USA, and was shocked to find a listing of male victims of domestic violence in that country. I twice rephrased my enquiry, and both times it gave me the same men-as-victims results. Conspiracy theories anyone? I would generally not entertain such ideas, but in Frumpistan, tout est possible. When I keep trying, I find the statistics are all over the place, but of course women are more often the victims, especially of the more extreme forms of violence, including, unsurprisingly, murder. In February 2026, the FBI released a report on DV over a five-year period, 2020 to 2024:
Over the five-year period studied, the percentage of violent crimes within domestic relationships increased. Law enforcement reported more than 11,000 domestic violence murder victims and an additional 1.1 million victims of domestic violence. Nearly 75 percent of the victims were female.
Again, I would think it most reasonable to assume that if the violence was extreme, or ended in murder, the perpetrator would be male in far more than 75% of cases.
So this post is a statement of intent. To explore and encourage female coalitions – such as those I’ve read about between Palestinian and Israeli women. Women in difficult and male-dominated regions such as Iran, the Arabic world, China, Turkiye, Russia, and presumably many parts of Africa. I’m making guesses here, to some degree, and hopefully, in researching these countries further, I’ll find some silver linings. I don’t think I’ll be looking at the USA in the near future, at least until Frumpistan is no more.
References
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-07900-8
Diane L Rosenfeld, The Bonobo Sisterhood: revolution through female alliance, 2022