Archive for the ‘feminism’ Category
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
tracing the history of patriarchy…
before pants were invented…
I’ve been wondering what to write next, whether I should limit myself to gender and feminist issues or to go wherever my very flighty mind takes me – to neutrinos, say, or dark matter and dark energy, all of which fascinates me but which I feel I should leave to experts, but what am I expert in? – this blog used to be called ‘An autodidact meets a dilettante’, and I wrote it in dialogue form, to satisfy my masculine and feminine personae, but then I decided, sort of, to focus more on feminism and the possibility of female supremacy, but I’ve never been able to keep to the script. And so…
Yesterday I was all set to have a go at particle physics, but I was at a friend’s house and she got me watching a video from a regular vodcaster (I think that’s the term), whose videos go under the title ‘Breaking Down Patriarchy’. Of course she knew that I’d be interested, and while watching I thought to myself, yes, I should stick to this topic – because it’s kind of endless and inexhaustible.
The presenter is a United Stater (not her fault) named Amy McPhie Allebest, and although it seems she is a Mormon, or was at least brought up as such and still retains her Christianity if not that particular take on Christianity, she presents the case against patriarchy in a highly intelligent, reasoned and humane way. In fact her calm approach sets a fine example for a ‘bonafide’ humanist like me (I was a member of the South Australian Humanists for years, and gave a number of talks to the group, including one on the rapid decline of Christianity in Australia), as I sometimes get a bit nasty – for example in recent pieces criticising an ‘evolutionary psychologist’ and his take on the evolution of human patriarchy and its supposed naturalness.
The argument goes, as one Breaking Down Patriarchy video points out, that the ancestral development of bipedalism altered the configuration of the lower limbs and pelvis, including the birth canal, so that offspring tended to be born at an earlier and more vulnerable stage of life, requiring more maternal care. And more paternal care? Of course, mothers did the breast-feeding, but child-minding and protecting could have been shared – as happens with bonobos. In fact bonobos aren’t monogamous at all, so it tends to be all in for the child-rearing. So again I raise the question – when, if ever, did we become ‘naturally’ monogamous?
Meanwhile, there was hunting, and gathering. It had long been thought that there was a fairly strict division of labour, on gender lines, but this is now being questioned, as well as the issue of which activity brought more nutrients to the group. On this question, a documentary, referenced below, provides striking data. Men and women in neolithic China, and in Malta at a similar period, were ‘of equal status’ – they ate the same foods, and, whether or not hunting was all-male and gathering was all-female (it’s unlikely), the usual claim that the hunting was more ‘important’, both in terms of the nutrients and of the status it provided, is now being debunked. It’s worth noting that my bonobo mates ate a mostly frugivorous diet, with absolutely no ill effects as far as I’m aware. Their ‘hunting’ was opportunistic – if some small animal or rodent happened by, it would be chased and seized, by either gender, and shared. Claims that hunting conferred greater status for men, as in the hunter-gatherers of Namibia, have been more or less debunked, unsurprisingly, considering that most of the food consumed wasn’t obtained through hunting.
This documentary, ‘Gender Revolution: The real role of ancient women’, also raises questions about ancient cave art, which often depicts tasty mammals. Early discoverers of these works ‘naturally’ assumed the artists were male, a typically 19th century view (for good measure the doco-makers cited Chaz Darwin’s typically Victorian view that men have evolved to be smarter than women). We can probably never be sure who created this art (examination of accompanying handprints doesn’t really answer the question, though I was fascinated by the fact that the female hand narrows toward the wrist more than the male hand – in my case, it’s true!), but it certainly isn’t safe to assume they were all men. Again, assumptions that neolithic and earlier hunters were men is based on a much later patriarchal society that kept women in domesticity and valued their ‘softness’ and physical weakness. It may be that we’ll never be certain about the status of women in the varied, scattered neolithic and bronze age societies. Bones from a bronze age site in China have revealed that the women’s diet was deficient in particular nutrients, suggesting separation and status imbalance, as well as an increase in sexual dimorphism. Bronze age sites in Europe have revealed a similar diet imbalance based on gender. The bronze age, dating from around 4,000 years ago was a period of much more elaborate burials, especially for males. Male corpses are always found at the centre of family burials, indicating their centrality and status in life.
Different climatic conditions seem to have affected different gender-based behaviour, tasks and diet. A period of climatic stabilisation marked the beginning of the Holocene, some 11,700 years ago, and the beginning of stable agriculture and animal husbandry. But this leads to struggles for the best agricultural land, the best herds, and so on. So, the story goes, the age of warfare begins, and to a large extent it still continues.
Another feature of this period of stabilisation as opposed to mobility was that women began to give birth more frequently, becoming, to a greater degree, ‘perpetual mothers’, increasingly domesticised. Reducing breast-feeding periods, thanks to the development of specialised meals such as porridges for children, led to increased post-natal fertility and more children – and more suffering and death for mothers. Common-marriage systems came into being, as fathers sought to maintain control of their children – essentially their property – into the next generation.
Patrilocality has also become a proven feature of bronze age societies. This prevented inbreeding, and is also a feature of bonobo and chimp societies. It’s been argued that this is another blow to female independence and status, as they have to establish themselves in a new group, presumably with more or less zero status to start with, and yet this still doesn’t prevent bonobo females from being dominant. I’ve watched a video which followed one of these young females as she nervously sought to be accepted by these bonobo strangers, but it didn’t really address the issue – presumably, once accepted by the females, she was able to contribute to their group domination of the males. The simple answer seems to be that sisterhood is powerful… and the males are just too egotistical to form similar brotherly bonds…?
It’s intriguing, and worth pursuing….
References
women and the future
8,000 years ago….
My previous post reminded me of some pieces I wrote (about a year ago), which I’ll reference below. I’m quite proud of these pieces – it seems indignation can bring out the best…
By the way, what happened to evolutionary psychology? To judge from Ryan Ellsworth’s efforts, it was a questionable enterprise, especially in trying to cement patriarchy into our biology. I would guess that it was never a ‘field’ that attracted female intellectuals. Here’s a passage from Ellsworth in his critique of a book by Susan Block called The Bonobo Way, which I criticised (his critique, not the book) in my earlier piece. Obviously I’m still fuming!
Block refers to babies to care for, and reputations to protect, but does not seem to understand the significance of these two things for understanding human sex differences in sexual desire. Perhaps she privately does, but to acknowledge the significance of these forces on the evolution of human sexuality would severely compromise her arguments, as it demands recognition of the fact that women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men. To argue that females are as interested as males in sexual variety is to buy into a sexist worldview wherein the male is the typical specimen of the species by which to compare females (Saxon, 2012). Although ostensibly parading under the guise of liberation, such a position is no less sexist or anti-feminist than is the oppression of women’s sexuality.
One has to read this passage a couple of times to let it sink in. Or at least I did – smarter people might’ve recognised the bullshit straight away. It’s there in the first two sentences (okay, the second sentence takes up most of the passage). The first sentence states as fact that there are ‘human sex differences in sexual desire’. So that must be why it’s okay to call men ‘studs’ and women ‘sluts’, or as Ellsworth puts it, we must recognise the fact that ‘women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men’. And it would seem to follow that if they have such desires they should be ostracised and shamed. Ellsworth even tries to argue that to suggest that women might have such pluralist desires is sexist because it (sort of) turns them into men, stripping them of their identity as caring mothers or potentially caring mothers, which is their evolutionary role.
Evolutionary psychology doesn’t seem to have lasted long, which I think is a good thing. It seemed to be wanting to find an evolutionary explanation for what many might find to be shifting social-psychological phenomena, and I don’t think that works. For example, in the WEIRD world we’ve shifted from larger families to smaller, often single-parent families, and family roles have changed. Marriage isn’t so essential to the reproductive process as it was, and of course it only came into being relatively recently, and as for monogamy, we have no idea whether that was practiced by humans, say 200,000 years ago. None of this has to do with evolution in a Darwinian sense – we often describe society as having ‘evolved’ in the last couple of centuries, but this nothing to do with the Darwinian concept.
So, back to monogamy. It’s seen as the norm for we humans, especially when it comes to bringing up children. And yet, neither chimps nor bonobos are monogamous, and clearly they manage to reproduce, and their offspring are just as well-adjusted as their parents. So when and why did we or our ancestors become so, and will we ever cease to be so? Ellsworth claimed in his essay that there have never been any successful or lasting matriarchal societies, but absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, and of course it would not be of interest to him to mention the controversial but undeniably thought-provoking finds at Çatalhöyük suggesting plenty of goddess-worship. As I’ve often pointed out, the double male god-worship that constitutes Christianity was both born of and a template for thousands of years of patriarchy, still championed by the Catholic Church, so it’s intriguing to wonder about the society around Çatalhöyük, a mere 9,000 years ago. Believing in females with godly powers just doesn’t fit with a male-dominated society, and even those who argue against evidence that the undoubtedly remarkable society that created Çatalhöyük was matriarchal tend to argue for gender egalitarianism, which is remarkable in itself (though I’ve read anthropological studies on some Australian Aboriginal societies that have come to similar conclusions).
All of this makes me wonder again about early humans and their ancestors, Australopithecus and the like, especially considering that bonobos are clearly matriarchal and chimps are clearly patriarchal. Of course, size matters, pace bonobos, and it has recently been found in a study published last year that both A. afarensis and A. africanus, and especially the former, were more sexually dimorphic than present-day humans. But size matters less in the modern WEIRD world, where brute strength is of decreasing importance. I suppose these days we should be looking more at brain size, or rather brain complexity, and I very much doubt if we found any real difference there, which is doubtless why nobody much studies gender-based brain complexity, whether in dogs, cats or humans (I did once have a university friend who seriously asserted that men were naturally more intelligent – and she spoke of neurological complexity – than women; but she was young, and I let it pass, probably due to shock).
Generally, though, I feel optimistic about the greater empowerment of women in the future (the future is long, and I’m getting old, so I’m not worried about being proved wrong). This in spite of Trump and Putin and the Ayatollahs and the Sudanese and so many other African and Middle Eastern nations/regions. We describe them as living in the past for a reason. And Australia, far from the madding crowd of backward-facing nations, with more and more women in government, both nationally and in my home state, can and hopefully will set a small example that exhausted and disillusioned humanists elsewhere might take notice of…
References
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: how men came to rule, 2023
this is important: bonobos and humans
Wolf Alice – the right stuff
I’ve been listening to the music and watching the videos of Wolf Alice recently – I’ve just discovered them, mea culpa. Just a fantastic band. They often sing about emotional stuff, emotional confusion, as in the song Blush, which is accompanied by a video that adds gender to the confusion, and an extra dose of sadness to the word ‘happy’, which is the song’s refrain.
I won’t pretend to analyse the song, but it’s one of a number of influences lately that have made me think of humanity’s gender issues – issues that don’t seem to be shared by our closest rellies. Tormenting issues.
My novel In Elizabeth dealt with adolescent and later teen issues in a working-class town, mostly in a light-hearted way. But the fact is, it was a period of torment – though sometimes I felt a sort of enlightenment, or superiority, in thinking of things, indulging in feelings, that I sensed were ‘beyond the pale’.
I described my first sex (but what exactly is ‘sex’, is it feelings or acts? The first erection, the first masturbation, the first awareness of the exciting/disturbing physicality of your own body, the first physical attraction to another?) – so here I’m talking about my first act of putting my penis into the vagina of a girl, an act which, I’m not sure, was probably illegal according to the laws of the time, and even of today. It was my 16th birthday, and the girl was a year below me at school, so either 14 or 15, but not a virgin, as she told me. I was beyond words overwhelmed by the occasion, because she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Only a few weeks before I’d spotted her in a school corridor, chatting to girlfriends. Her movements, her smile, her grace mesmerised me, and I recall thinking of a young horse, a filly, free and unself-conscious, untamed, perfect. For days I could barely think of anything else and I kept seeking her out in the school grounds….
So I described my obsession to a school friend, and when I pointed her out, he told me he knew her, her name was Edwina, her family were friends with his, and he suggested ‘putting in a good word to her’ about me. That sounded ridiculous, and I agreed. A couple of days later he came back to me. Edwina said yes, she would be my girlfriend.
The joyful impulses of youth. I described this in my novel, and I described the massive impact of Bowie on me as a 16 year-old, and my youthful questioning of sexuality and gender. I didn’t happen to mention that the boy who got me together with Edwina (very briefly) was very pretty, and I had delicious fantasies about him. Not that I avoided homosexuality – I wrote of some boy-boy cuddles and fantasies, which at least one reader told me she found ‘a bit shocking’.
To be honest, I’m shocked, dismayed, and above all disappointed, that people are shocked. Which seems code for disapproval.
The whole male-female gender stuff is still very much a minefield, and a battlefield. As someone in his 70th year on the planet, I’m hoping I can think about it ‘objectively’, if that word means anything.
The issue is important because for centuries upon centuries we’ve lived in a patriarchal world. I’ve read a lot of history, and much of it has been about men behaving badly. And I mean really really badly. And there are still large regions of the world in which females are automatically considered to be inferior, meaning their lives are heavily circumscribed vis-à-vis men. So gender matters muchly.
So what is it? What do we mean by it? And what does it mean to a bird, a cat or a bonobo?
Bonobos are female-dominant. In order to be so, they must clearly be aware of their gender, though they have no knowledge of the word ‘gender’ – they’re never confused by language like we can be. So they’re driven, or affected, by instinct, to be supportive of their own gender. They know who’s male and who’s female, though there may be degrees of maleness and femaleness, as Frans de Waal pointed out in the case of Donna, the female chimp who hung out with the males and never became pregnant (she finally became the dominant chimp in her troupe – or rather in the Lincoln Park zoo enclosure where she lived – but would this have happened in the wild?)
It’s difficult enough to understand how and why bonobos became female-dominant in a period of one or two million years (a pretty wide margin of error) since their separation from chimps, without trying to understand our broadly patriarchal system, which is clearly undergoing change, not only in the WEIRD world. Still, it’s a fascinating topic, which I feel the need to focus on more exclusively, without being distracted by Trumpism or the possibly coming European holocaust, should Putin be pushed to the brink, or the possible slaughter of Taiwanese people under Xi – and other horrorshow issues.
So, in the non-human primate world, size generally matters, and males are mostly bigger than females. Gorillas and orangutans are at the extreme end of this dimorphism. Interesting in the case of orangutans, as they’re solitary, so there’s no obvious need for gender-based dominance – but then, if you’re going to rape a female, it pays to be as big and strong as possible. But of course, the term ‘rape’ is never used when referring to non-human primates. Forced copulation is the preferred term.
But ‘forced copulation’ isn’t just a euphemism. It’s done to produce offspring, and humans don’t have sex, be it via rape or love or anything in between, just to produce children. And why do orangutans have sex? Do they know they’re doing it to produce children? Does a dog – male or female – rub its genital area intensely on your leg to produce offspring? Silly question. These activities are ‘evolutionary by-products’ – we are stimulated to have sex in order to reproduce, but that stimulation being in itself pleasurable, we just do it regardless, often without a partner. And often, as with bonobos, to promote fellow-feeling – you rub my front and I’ll rub yours. Humans often do it for similar reasons, but not enough, I think. After all, we can mutually masturbate and reflect on the nature of dark matter/energy. We contain multitudes.
I’m generally intrigued, and often disturbed, by the difference between human sexual practices and those of other species. Again we are probably the only species that knows that sex leads to pregnancy. We’re also the only clothed species, and these two facts seem connected. Is there anywhere on this planet where public nudity (above a certain tender age) is not a crime? Clothing and civilisation go hand in hand, and most people are relieved that this so. After all, we’re not animals…
But seriously, civilisation demands clothing. Indeed, we might argue that the greater our level of civilisation, the more vast and varied our vestments should be. Charles Darwin, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, used the word ‘savage’ rather a lot in The descent of man, and it seems clear to me that he could see one coming by her lack of anything resembling a petticoat.
So, enough of the cheap shots. I’m intrigued, and inspired by the fact, and surely this is a fact, that bonobos have used sex to become female dominant, while humans have used violence to become male dominant.
There, I’ve come out with it. I’ve avoided being direct about it till now, in fact I’m not even sure that I was clearly aware of this before writing it. Of course it wasn’t deliberate, but that’s how it happened. So, if we deliberately create, or try to create, a female dominant society, will it have a bonoboesque result? Are we currently trying to create such a society, or is it just happening, like evolution? The WEIRD world is certainly more ‘permissive’ than it used to be – with the inevitable frustrating conservative backlash, which means we need to recognise that the future is long, frustratingly long for us mortals, especially the oldies. And of course there are plenty of ultra-conservative females in powerful positions throughout our world, as well as women who are skeptical of any difference that greater female empowerment would make. Usually they point to one or two female politicians, or bosses, or mothers, who weren’t much chop. That’s a ‘not seeing the forest for the trees’ argument, IMHO.
Obviously I’m not going to be around to experience a female-dominant WEIRD world, and neither is anyone now living. It may never happen, but I think it should, for the sake of humanity and life on this planet. The trouble-makers today are the leaders of Russia, the USA, China, Iran, Israel, Sudan and North Korea, to name a prominent few. Of course they’re all male, and they’d all expect their successors to be male for all eternity, but that won’t happen, at least we know that much.
So, Wolf Alice isn’t an all-female band, but at least they’re not an all-male one, and there’s no doubt that their sole female member, Ellie Rowsell, is also their most prominent member, for a number of reasons. Their song The Sofa, in contrast to Blush, the song I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, seems to me to be happy and life-affirming, and the accompanying video of males, females and kids engaging in fun, skillful, weird and wonderful activities as a backdrop to a floating or rolling sofa occupied by the band members in turn, but mostly by Rowsell, the singer (and intellectual beauty queen), is – well, it’s just nice, in a bonobo sort of way. Here are some of the lyrics:
Hope I can accept the wild thing in me, hope nobody comes to tame her, And she can be free.Sick of second-guessing my behaviour, And what I want to be. Just let me lie here on the sofa…
I’ll be fine, I’ll be okay, I feel kind of lucky right now and I’m not ashamed to sayI can be happy, I can be sadI can be a bitch when I get madI wanna settle down, or to fall in loveBut sometimes, I just want to fuckI love my life, I love my lifeSometimes, I just want to…
Bonobos don’t have sofas, but I like to think to think they have a similar mind-set, if in a more simplified form. Emotionally labile at times, excitable, sexual, and, given their precarious position in the Congo, hoping to maintain their freedom, the threats to which they’re perhaps dimly aware of. .
So, vive les bonobos, and thank you Wolf Alice, you’re good.
Okay, so this is a chimp, but you get the idea…
women and leadership in Australia, etc
Australia currently has a Labor government with a larger number of women in the cabinet than at any time in its history…. but before I go into that – why Labor and not Labour, the general English (ie British) spelling? It’s a minor issue, but I’m torn between a dislike of the USA and its fulsome jingoism, and a preference for simplified spelling (labor, color, etc). Apparently, back in the 1880s, the trade union movements that went on to form the Labour/Labor party were enamoured of a number of US texts such as Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking backward. The USA had over time adopted the simpler spelling, perhaps largely due to the impact of the 1828 Webster dictionary of American English, while Australian spelling, at least of that particular word, had/has been equivocal. Theories vary, but some have pointed out the usefulness of distinguishing between Labor, the party, and the labour movement in general, with its appropriately labourious (actually laborious) spelling.
But back to women. There are 23 members of the Federal Cabinet, including the PM and Deputy PM. Twelve of them are women, and I vaguely wonder whether the leaders, such as Albanese, Marles, Wong and, say, Plibersek, tried to arrange it so that they would just manage to have more women than men, to create some kind of record for the books. Margaret Thatcher apparently had no women at all in her cabinet in eleven years as British PM, and the new, first-ever female PM in Japan, Sanae Takaichi, is apparently a big Thatcher fan. She has, at least, appointed two women to her cabinet, which has rather disappointed the media there. The USA’s Congress is currently 28.65% female (155 women in House and Senate), and a significant majority of them are Democrats. Their numbers are way up compared to 30 and 40 years ago.
So Australia is at the forefront of creeping changes in the political empowerment of women. I should also mention that the current leader of the Liberal opposition is a woman, Sussan Ley, and that our PM, Anthony Albanese, was brought up in a single-parent family, which very much helps to explain his faith in female leadership.
Female political empowerment, in Australia as elsewhere in the WEIRD world, has been slow, too slow from the perspective of one lifetime, but steady. We had our first and only PM, Julia Gillard, from 2010 to 2013, and before that we had female state leaders, starting with Rosemary Follett in the ACT in 1989, then Carmen Lawrence (WA) and Joan Kirner (Victoria) in 1990. In 2001 Clare Martin became Chief Minister in the Northern Territory, and in 2007 Anna Bligh became Premier of Queensland. In 2011 Kristina Keneally became the first female Premier of NSW and Lara Giddings became the first female Premier of Tasmania. Finally, in 2015 Annastacia Palaszczuk became Queensland’s second female Premier.
From all this, one might think female leadership has become run-of-the-mill here, and that ‘patriarchy’ is over, but that’s definitely not true. Of the six current state Premiers, only one, Victoria’s Jacinta Allan, is female, and that’s a fairly standard situation, though interestingly the Northern Territory’s most recent three Chief Ministers have been women. My home state of South Australia is the only state that has never had a female Premier.
There’s also the question of economic power. The mining sector, which is of course male-dominated, is the most fundamental sector in our export economy. Domestically, there’s a persistent gender pay gap, and a lower participation in the workforce vis-à-vis women, with men holding more senior positions. Business leadership and related wealth generation continues to be overwhelmingly male. AI (never lies) tells me that ‘men have approximately 40% more net wealth than women’, but, though I know I should worship the never-lying god, this time I’m skeptical. Wealth is surely about far more than salary. The world’s, and Australia’s, wealthiest are not ‘paid’, their financial worth is not so easily measured. And they are overwhelmingly male, without a doubt – but I value my life too much to try and uncover the murky details.
Of course, if we think in terms of centuries – not a long time in the scheme of things – women have come a long way, all over the WEIRD world. From being largely barred from universities in the early 20th century, they now head departments, even in the so-called ‘hard sciences’. They’re prominent in the judiciary, and in law generally, and in medicine, journalism, the media, the arts and so on. In fact the changes have been so great in the last couple of lifetimes, I’d love to see how things are in 2225, if humanity is still kicking….
Perhaps by then we’ll have realised how vitally important female leadership is for the survival of just about everything that lives on this planet.
References