Archive for the ‘feminism’ Category
feminism’s battles in Australia and elsewhere…
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.
Always look on the bright side….
Okay, trying to stay positive, or push myself into positive mode, what about female leadership on the world stage in these torrid times?
Here in Australia, we’ve had one Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, from 2010 to 2013. It seems, like many of these recent female leaders, she was on the conservative side, for a Labor PM. Most ‘notorious’ at the time was her opposition to same-sex marriage, a view she later changed – after her stint in office. The Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act was finally passed in 2017, during Malcom Turnbull’s period as PM (Turnbull was more liberal than the Liberal party generally). It had been a long struggle beginning in 2004 when the Howard government passed an amendment to the Marriage Act (1961), explicitly excluding same sex unions from being recognised as marriages. I see it as a minor victory for the Bonobo Sisterhood, though I suspect that change will occur through a multiplicity of such minor victories.
Globally, currently we have Sanae Takaichi, PM of Japan, Giorgia Meloni, PM of Italy, Judith Suminwa, PM of the DRC, Mia Mottley, PM of Barbados, Mette Frederiksen, PM of Denmark, Evika Silina, PM of Latvia, Inga Ruginiene, PM of Lithuania, Brigitte Haas, PM of Liechtenstein, Sara Zaafarani, PM of Tunisia, and that’s not a full list – for example Mexico’s current political leader is their President, Claudia Sheinbaum – they don’t have a parliamentary system. Many of these are ‘firsts’ in terms of female leadership in their countries. Never a female leader in the USA of course, and I wouldn’t hold my breath… Canada has had one PM, Kim Campbell, and she didn’t last six months. I think it’s gonna be a long long time… It will take many generations, not years, to recognise the full value of female leadership. And it will need to be collective, not just one female surrounded by pushy male ‘minions’. As I’ve written before, slowly slowly catchee monkey…. a very appropriate term for the bonobo sisterhood, and its brotherly friends.
The big worry at present is that the most powerful and dangerous countries – the USA, Russia and China in particular, seem to be the furthest from female leadership (ok, leaving aside the Middle East). This is hardly coincidental of course. If we can weather the storms created by these macho, bullish nations over the next century or so – a big ask, admittedly – we just might start inching towards a bonobo humanity….
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elected_or_appointed_female_heads_of_state_or_government
bonobos and me: a personal exploration
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
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
more or less sad thoughts on female leadership
Have there been any female dictators? I’m thinking of the more or less modern era, so ruling out Catherine the Great and … I can’t think of any others. And of course some might want to argue that Thatcher was a bit of a dictator, but….
As for the males, whether we’d want to call Putin, Xi, Erdoğan, Nazarbaev, Aliyev, Khamenei, Lukashenko, Kabila, Castro, Kim Jong-Un, Htin Kyaw, Hun Sen, etc, dictators or some other things (and the list here covers only a small number of candidates), is a question. There’s no hard and fast definition, obviously. In any case there are no females on this list, and if I made it twice as long that would still be the case.
There is of course the case of Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh, who was Prime minister from June 1996 to July 2001 and again from January 2009 to August 2024. Her story is an extraordinarily complex one, in a nation that has experienced massive division and violence. From Wikipedia:
Except for her husband, children and sister Sheikh Rehana, Hasina’s entire family was murdered during the 15 August 1975 Bangladeshi coup d’état which saw the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Hasina, Wazed and Rehana were visiting Europe at the time of the assassination. They took refuge in the house of the Bangladeshi ambassador to West Germany; before taking up an offer of political asylum from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India.
Clearly Hasina’s family were heavily involved in Bangladesh’s extremely divided and violent politics, and it seems her own position shifted over the decades from leftist reformism to something more punitive and survivalist. And needless to say, like Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel and just about any other female political leader of the last century, she would have been surrounded by ambitious males, and might have felt that more than a pinch of male ruthlessness might be required to stay on top. Not enough to prevent Gandhi and Bhutto from being murdered, however.
Politics, and life in general, seems to be a little less nasty in Scandinavian countries, however, as Rutger Bregman describes it in his hopeful book Humankind. As of early 2026, northern Europe has female Prime Ministers in Denmark, Iceland, Latvia and Lithuania, and Iceland also has a female President. These are nowadays the sorts of countries that would never tolerate a wannabe dictator like Frump, and I think you would find, overall, a relationship between female leadership (especially backed up by female advisors and other females in government) and a more generally contented and humane society. This is just starting to happen in a world where it has virtually never happened before.
The USA, that benighted country, has never had a female monarch as yet (I explained in a previous post that the country’s federal system is essentially an elected monarchy), but both Hilary Clinton (2016) and Kamala Harris (2024) came closer to being the first than any other females. Clinton actually won the popular vote by a large margin, and Harris’ loss dumbfounded many, most especially my good self, because Trump’s clearly criminal behaviour during and after the 2020 election, and his long criminal record, should have disqualified him from running, as well as rendering him a losing candidate. But then, it’s the USA we’re talking about.
Frump is now eighty going on nine, and angling to be an eternal dictator, which is very likely to happen. Another eighty years should not be a problem for this eternal child. Sadly, as a mere mortal, ageing naturally, I won’t live to see it. Still, there will be elections, perhaps, and claims about term limits, but can any of this compete with high finance and crypto-currency? I very much doubt it.
But really, there are congressional elections in November, which Frump is trying to find a way to subvert, which of course is interesting to observe from a relatively safe place here in Australia. I suspect he’s determined to use his monarchical powers to declare massive overseas and internal interference, and to bring about military intervention. Elections will be suspended, martial law will be declared, and nuclear readiness will be directed, mostly at China, but there will be others in league. Will this be the time for Australia to gain the ascendancy?
Sorry, I funtasise. I was talking about female leadership. I don’t really understand how Frump became the USA’s king again, after all the previous shite, but since most people in that country are acting as if this is all normal, we have to expect a long if not eternal rule. Here in Australia we’ll be forced to speak New Yorkinese, and women will be forced underground together. This, if we can somehow manage it – but we excel in sorority – is where we can regroup, and foregather, and, seeded by a generous handful of male sisters, plan a massive return to prominence…
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh_Hasina
Rutger Bregman, Humankind: a hopeful history, 2019
https://www.councilwomenworldleaders.org/current-women-head-of-state-and-government
Female leadership? It needs to find strength in numbers
Sanna Marin, current PM of Finland. The Scandinavians so often set the example
I live in Australia, thankfully, far from the madding crowd of male thugs and bullies in charge of such scary northern hemisphere oligarchies and/or dictatorships as Russia, Iran, the USA, China, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Burma, Uzbekistan and Trump’s Venezuela, to name a more or less random few. It really is demoralising to find, as I pass my 70th birthday, that so much of the world is in such a mess, with so little good news to turn to.
Where do our future hopes lie? Not so much in individual female leaders – Japan’s first female PM, Sanae Takaichi, has views described by Wikipedia as ‘conservative or ultra-conservative’, and she apparently wants to be seen as Japan’s ‘Iron Lady’, as she’s a big fan of Margaret Thatcher. Oh dear. At least she has a pro-Taiwan foreign policy. Italy’s first female PM Giorgia Meloni, another ‘right to far right’ leader, was involved in fascist politics in her youth. It almost seems as if female political leaders can’t be trusted, or popular, unless they come from a solidly conservative – that’s to say, male-dominated – part of the political world. Then again, New Zealand has had Jacinda Ardern (PM from 2017 to 2023), and we in Australia had our first and only female PM Julia Gillard (2010-2013). Both were Labour Party leaders. And I think it’s fair to say that Gillard in particular was given a really rough ride because of her gender. Ardern, on the other hand, benefitted, I would think, from being the third female Prime Minister of her country. Their second female PM, Helen Clark, held the post for nine years. This has paved the way, in New Zealand at least, for female leadership being something slightly approaching ‘the new normal’. Another approach has been that of Australia, where I live. It now has 22 women in the Cabinet, the core governing body of our federal system. That’s 55% of the total. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher only ever had one other woman in the cabinet in her 11-year tenure as PM – a Baroness who spent two years in the House of Lords. Currently, 50% of Britain’s Cabinet are women – a record for the country. Gradually, creepingly, the numbers are rising for women in government positions throughout the WEIRD world, and just look at those countries that eschew female political empowerment. They are invariably the world’s worst.
As for the power of the purse, or wallet (or crypto-wallet?) which is massive in that same WEIRD world, that power is still held overwhelmingly, and I do mean overwhelmingly, by men. I could provide the gory details, but surely everyone knows how true this is. Even though my own knowledge of crypto-currency is less than zero, I’m certain that it’s more or less entirely controlled by men, simply because I’m not a complete idiot.
Anyway, leaving that mysterious realm aside, female political empowerment in the future could be a weapon against the Puddings and Frumps of the world. Imagine if the current President of Ukraine was a woman, with a largely female cabinet, how that would play out in terms of global politics and alliances.
Losing our religion is another way we can boost the eternal feminine. Christianity, which is fading fast in Australia, involves the worship of a double male father-and-son act, and in its Catholic form, the next tiers of power are the ever-male Popes or Papas, the ever-male cardinals, the ever-male archbishops, the ever-male bishops and the ever-male priests. How delightfully aberrant. It’s my view that Protestantism was the first step away from that patriarchal religion, and towards atheism.
And then there’s Islam, the most patriarchal of all the world’s long-standing religions, all of which are patriarchal.
The growth of feminism in our global politics and economy, a slow but steady development – would that it were so much quicker – will lead to the increasing isolation of these rogue macho states. Take for example supposedly secular China, which surely has little excuse for its machismo. It has had no women in its 24-member politburo since October 2022, and has never had a woman in its 7-member Standing Committee, the elite body that essentially runs the country, when it’s not a dictatorship, which it arguably is today. But then, Xi PingPong is 73, and Mr Pudding almost a year older, and Frump is 80, I believe. They’ll all be dead soon enough, and the odour of machismo that hangs over the northern hemisphere, like that of a never-cleaned toilet, may just start to fade a little….
a more feminist future…. ?
On the patriarchy matriarchy feminism masculinism front, I watched a while back a video, apparently one of a series, by a young woman who presented, with amusing confidence, an anti-feminist position. I didn’t pay too much attention to her spiel (and thankfully I can’t find the video now to reference it!), but I noted a lot of approving comments, all from males. One even happily highlighted Aristotle’s view that women are naturally inferior, in terms of rationality, to men. Presumably this allowed him to believe that, whatever his own level of ‘rationality’, it was superior to that of the four billion or so females that inhabit the planet. I should mention that Aristotle also believed that slaves were naturally less rational than free Athenian citizens. Presumably female slaves were doubly dumb.
I’ve just finished reading Darwin’s The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, and I found it hard to take in the end, as in the final pages he expatiated on human sexual selection. Basically he was claiming that males select females for their physical appearance while females select males largely for that rationality thing, which explains why men have evolved to be smarter than women. So, I try to make allowances for Darwin, like Aristotle, being a creature of his time and his culture, as I am of mine…
Having read Darwin’s Origin of species a couple of times, and now his Descent of man, I’ve noted the great number of references he has to others in his field of interest – breeders of livestock, pigeon fanciers, ornithologists, zoologists, botanists and so forth, with whom he has corresponded. Not long ago I came across a collection of his correspondence, here in Adelaide’s reference library – a whole shelf of heavy tomes of the stuff. And in my own reading of these references, I’ve never found a single female. That’s Victorian England for you – not so different, perhaps, from ancient Athens, as far as the status of women is concerned.
Things have changed though, in the WEIRD world, in the last 150 years, and Darwin has been proven wrong about the female intellect. And it stands to reason – male dogs and cats aren’t smarter than their female counterparts, and female bonobos aren’t intellectually superior to the males they manage to keep in their place via a powerful sisterhood. Male gorillas may be bigger and tougher than the females but there’s no evidence that they’re smarter.
Having said all that, I’m still holding out for a female-dominant human world, as they have other qualities that we need more than ever in the current climate. Yes there may have been some not so admirable female leaders in recent years (the only period in which female political leadership has been allowed), but none have been as disgusting as Putin or so absurd as Trump, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to assess current female leadership without recognising that they’ve achieved their position within a largely patriarchal framework. That framework, it seems to me, is more competitive (and thus warlike) and less collective than that of matriarchy. Not that the difference is huge – I’m a big fan of women’s soccer, and of course it’s hugely competitive, but you don’t get quite the brutalism and the confrontations with referees that are fairly common in the men’s game. Time may tell a different story, but I doubt it.
But returning to the young woman who’s presenting an anti-feminist series of videos, my guess is that she’s been shaped, as I’ve been, by childhood experiences. My own childhood was shaped by a dominant and largely competent female parent, who was the major breadwinner, as she moved up the scale from a registered nurse to a sister to an assistant matron of a hospital and then, after further training, to a nurse educator, while my father remained an unskilled labourer, often unemployed. My mother also ran the house, getting my siblings and I to do set chores – even assigning sections of the back garden for each of us to tend. The house was filled with books, though she wasn’t a big reader, and my father not at all. The marriage wasn’t a happy one, though they were still together – only just – when I left home at about nineteen.
So, though I had clashes with my mother, and in many ways it wasn’t a happy childhood, it was definitely due to her that I and my siblings are very much on the feminist side, which makes me speculate about the anti-feminist woman on Youtube. It seems highly likely that for her, the father was the dominant parent, and competently so, and the mother, not so much. This is wild speculation of course, but – well, perhaps not so wild.
It’s the free will/determinism thing again. Trump’s grandad was Friedrich Drumpf, but someone was inspired to switch it to something nominatively determining, and the rest is a horrible history. I’ve read a biography of Putin, and I’ve heard much of the early childhood of Trump, all enough to explain what terrible tragedies they are for the rest of the world – but their success in obtaining leadership has also much to do with the psychology, if I can describe it so, of the countries they’ve come to dominate. With Trump’s country it’s libertarianism, ‘the land of the free’, where anyone can apparently become a billionaire if they work hard enough, or are super-smart or super-bold, etc. In Russia – well, its autocratic history is long, and is well described by Orlando Figes in The story of Russia:
The Russian autocratic tradition had many roots but the Mongol legacy did more than most to fix the basic nature of its politics. From the 16th century, the first tsars of Muscovy drew upon the Mongol imperial tradition, adapting it to their own purposes. Beginning with Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) they justified their claim to an imperial status not just on the basis of their spiritual descent from Byzantium but also on the basis of their territorial inheritance from Chingiz Khan.
Orlando Figes, The story of Russia, p51
The tsars maintained this largely bogus tradition to the end, and Putin, after a period of bolshevik turmoil, and the hopes of Gorbachov’s perestroika, has effectively resurrected it:
Here was the fundamental weakness of the Russian aristocracy. The most senior boyar clans – those who were closest through marriage or royal favour to the Moscow court – formed an oligarchic ruling class, which at times, when the grand prince was weak, might direct his government. But their wealth and power came from him. They kept them only for as long as they retained his protection. It was a system of dependency upon the ruler that has lasted to this day. Putin’s oligarchs are totally dependent on his will.
Ibid, p52
So, Russia and China have never come close to anything resembling democracy, in spite of glasnost and the brutally suppressed Tiananmen Square protests – their long, brutal histories have made such a transformation highly unlikely – but then, the future is long – at least we hope so.
A lot of those hopes, for me, lie in a greater – and greater and greater – role for women in government. First, inevitably, among democracies, so that the ultra-male oligarchies and dictatorships will be shamed and bewildered by the people they’re dealing with, and then…
Well, it’s a pleasant dream…
References
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to sex, 1871, in Darwin: the indelible stamp, ed James Watson, 2005
Orlando Figes, The story of Russia, 2022
why are bonobos so ignored?
There have of course been some women who have been inspired by bonobos, but mostly they’re ignored as any kind of model, and I think the main reason is that we don’t really accept that we are primates. Remember those dismissive ‘so you think your granny was a gorilla?’ type comments of the nineteenth century? I’ve heard similar comments in my own time during my teaching days, from Middle Eastern students particularly, and when we look at what we’ve achieved, with our skyscrapers, our global trade networks, our spaceflights, our knowledge of genetics and neurophysiology and particle physics and the immune system, and on it goes, how can we think of ourselves as primates and close cousins of those hairy, dumb arse-scratchers lumbering about for grubs and hooting out nothings in the treetops? Surely the idea that we can actually learn from them is – well, a hoot?
And yet. What interests me about bonobos – and I must say I was stunned and thrilled beyond belief when I first learned of their existence in the eighties – is that they adopted, so to speak, a female-dominant society (or social life if you thing ‘society’ is a purely human thing, too sophisticated for such beasts) because of the environment they found themselves in, at the time of the Congo River’s formation.
Here’s the thing. There are bonobos living in the forests south of the Congo River. It’s actually very difficult to know how many, and of course they’re very much on the endangered list, due entirely to Homo sapiens. North of the Congo, and spread out from the east coast to the west-central region of sub-Saharan Africa, are four sub-species of chimps, who out-number the bonobos by around ten to one – probably, but again it’s very hard to get accurate numbers with these beasts. All of those sub-species are male-dominant, so it’s surely reasonable to assume that it’s bonobos who have made the change to a matriarchal society – through ‘sisterhood’, given that they’re individually slightly smaller than the males. They hang out together, mutually masturbating more than males do – though it’s okay, males do it too. Unfortunately, that’s probably not how female humans will become dominant, which they definitely will. I write this with the confidence of someone who won’t live long enough to be proved wrong, or right, if that makes sense.
For the arc of the human universe is long, but it bends towards matriarchy….
Bonobos became female dominant, I surmise, not only due to the sex thing (and we humans are really really backward and effed-up when it comes to that stuff), but because brawn, in their environment, became less and less important than brain, and for us, co-operation, as we face a future in which we are going to have to be the planet’s custodians, as our technology, and our impact on the land, the sea and the air, is going to be more and more of a factor in determining our planet’s very survival as an eco-system. And women, in general, co-operate better than men. They just do.
And I’ll finish with a point that I’ve made before. People, especially women, who are sceptical of my feminist optimism say ‘but what about this female politician, or that female influencer, or my bloody awful mother’, as if this is a solid argument against matriarchy. No, it’s what philosophers call a ‘category error’. In this case, it’s confusing individuals with systems. I’m talking about a matriarchal system. That system would change individual women as much as it changes men. And you won’t know about it till it happens.
Meanwhile, Vive les bonobos.
References
https://www.bonobos.org/blog/how-many-bonobos-are-left-in-the-wild/
Diane L Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood, 2022
Iran, football, refugees, war…
in the spotlight, but not as they hoped…
There’s an argument going round that we (in Australia) are now at war with Iran because we’re allied to the US. Not that the people pointing this out are happy about it – it’s more like ‘an inconvenient truth’. And AI (never lies) agrees, sort of:
As of March 2026, Australia is peripherally involved in the US-Iran conflict through intelligence sharing, AUKUS personnel, and regional base support, though it has not engaged in direct offensive action. Australian personnel were aboard a US submarine that sank an Iranian frigate, and a base in the UAE hosting Australians was targeted.
So how did bonobos become female dominant? Can anybody tell me…?
girls girls girls
One of the things that pissed me off about the ‘evolutionary psychologist’ who mocked a female writer who found inspiration in bonobos, was that he himself expressed not the slightest curiosity about how this species, the closest one to humans along with chimps, actually became female dominant. He was too busy trying to argue that we had nothing to learn from these apes, and that our ‘psychology’ was patriarchal from the get-go, and presumably always will be.
Anyway, enough of him. Many women have been inspired by bonobos and this will continue into the future. And we know that the principal feature of their dominance is sisterhood. Here’s how the NY Times put it in an article posted last April:
… researchers who tracked six bonobo communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo over nearly 30 years provided the first evidence-based explanation for how female bonobos gain and sustain dominance over the males within their communities. Females, they found, form coalitions against males to tip the balance of power in their favor.
When a male bonobo steps out of line, nearby females will band together to attack or intimidate him. Males who cower in the face of such conflicts lose social rank, while their female adversaries gain it, affording them better access to food, and mates for their sons.
Much is made in the article, and in other material I’ve read, that bonobos are not exactly the peaceful ape they’re claimed to be. But who claims this? My own focus has always been on matriarchy, not at all on peace. In human society, women have been murderers and child abusers – but of course not on anything like the level of men. Bonobo females sometimes have to deal aggressively with uppity males – often targeting the private parts (not so private for non-human primates). Chimp males on the other hand, and even females, have sometimes engaged in infanticide, and whole chimp troupes have been known to wipe out other troupes in all-out warfare.
Bonobos deal with tension between troupes through food-sharing and of course mutual masturbation (producing that sticky stuff that brings folk together). There has as yet been no solid evidence of bonobos killing bonobos, but it may well happen from time to time. So how did they come to be so different after, at most, 2 million years of separation from chimps? The time frame is important, considering the differences between the two species, and some studies argue for less than a million years.
As the article above points out, it’s about coalitions, a Bonobo Sisterhood, as Diane Rosenfeld has argued, most cogently, as a template for human females. So how and why did this sisterhood evolve? My thought on this is that, in the forests of the region south of the Congo, there was an abundant enough food supply, mostly frugivorous, so that hunting and physically overcoming animal resources became surplus to requirements. Physical size and strength was less important – as is the case in post-industrial human societies. That’s why we now allow women into the military and other ‘tough’ forms of employment, at least in more enlightened societies. And along with those changes we have women being ‘trusted’ to run businesses, to head scientific and legal teams, and even to be elected into parliaments and occasionally become Prime Ministers or Presidents. But of course the balance of power, even in the ‘enlightened’ WEIRD world, is still massively in favour of men. But, l’avenir est féminin, my t-shirt proclaims, and l’avenir est long….
And again, for those who are apt to mock the idea that we can learn anything from our ‘dumb’ ape cousins, I’ve been reminded, through an essay just sent to me by a friend, and referenced below, of Kanzi the bonobo, who ‘stunned the world’ with his cognitive abilities. It’s extremely doubtful that he’s a ‘freak’, a Stephen Hawking of the bonobo world, though the fact that he was brought up in captivity, with human carers, must be taken into account.
References
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300115
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/science/bonobos-matriarchies-females.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/science/bonobos-apes-matriarchy.html
Diane Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood: revolution through female alliance, 2023
A bonobo named Kanzi could play pretend, challenging ideas about animal imaginations