Archive for the ‘feminism’ Category
the ultra ultra ultra male god we’re still dealing with
Can’t kill me, nya nya
A few years back I was trying to be more sociable by attending meet-ups, using the meet-up app, but it didn’t seem to work for me, given me. One perhaps promising meet-up was organised by an elderly intellectual, on philosophical topics. He would choose the topic, then send us a screed of viewpoints and questions related to it, which I found more or less apropos. So I went to a couple of these meet-ups, which were interesting enough, except that, as often in these situations, a minority hogged the limelight, and I’ve never been much of a limelight-hogger – though actually I found that one of my great pleasures of becoming a teacher, somewhat late in my working life, was that it was more or less set up for the teacher as limelight-hogger, which I have to say I found most satisfying. I’d had very little experience before then of actually being listened to, and I found it quite a treat.
Anyway, getting back to the elderly intellectual, he was generally good at sharing that wonderful limelight thing, and encouraging diversity of opinion, so it struck me as interesting that at one point he became firm, and, apropos of nothing, said that he wouldn’t tolerate criticism of religion. It had become clear to me that he wasn’t a religious person, and I later learned that he had a PhD in physics, which wasn’t at all surprising given the tendency of his conversation. So why this remark? The new atheism movement, with its ‘four horsemen’, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, had run its course by this time, not without having an influence on myself. I had never been religious, but the movement reawakened me to the baleful influence of one religion, Christianity, upon Europe and its global empires – the ‘civilised world’ that Darwin had in mind when he wrote his Voyage of the Beagle.
But more recently, the Abrahamic religions, as they’re called, have bugged me mostly because of their patriarchy, because of its clear conviction that the One God, never seen, never manifest, but ever-present, must be male. Which of course emerged from an ultra-patriarchal society, and helps to maintain that patriarchy to this day. I’ve gone on about the Catholic Church, known simply as The Church, which more or less controlled the whole of Europe for 1300 years, with its six-tiered hierarchy of maleness:
- the Father-Son godly duo
- the Papas, or Popes
- The Cardinals
- the Archbishops
- the Bishops
- the Priests
And even beyond them, the various all-male Catholic orders, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Jesuits and no doubt others I happily know nothing about. Of course there were Nuns, and some feisty ones, for better or worse, but they were generally imbued with the pride of their own celibacy and would often be more furiously puritanical than their cock-bothered brethren, as history has shown.
It seems to me that this patriarchal nature of Judaism and Christianity and Islam, all of a piece, is a weak spot that the four horsemen of new atheism didn’t exploit sufficiently. Where were the horsewomen? Where are they now?
I’d argue that the maleness of the so-called Abrahamic god should be the real target. To me, it’s painfully obvious why this ever-invisible, omniscient, omnipotent god was as male as male can be. It’s because he was constructed some 2600 years ago from two male gods then popular in the region of ancient Canaan (Yahweh and El/Elohim) – I’ve written about this in a two-part blog piece referenced below – by a society as ultra-patriarchal as it’s possible to be, IMHO. A society which sold females into marriage, in exchange for a dowry – from the age of ten, and even younger, without their having any say-so whatsoever. And once that deal was sealed, and the youngster handed over to her often much older husband, she was titled a ‘woman’, which adds extra horror to the story in John 7:53 – 8:11 (apparently a later interpellation, but that’s irrelevant) of the ‘woman taken in adultery’. Jesus supposedly saved her from being stoned to death, but how many others suffered that fate? And how many innocent girls, more or less raped by their unchosen husbands, suffered or died in childbirth?
The number of insults to women presented par inadvertence in the Bible is impossible to enumerate. It starts, of course, with the creation of the first woman as the male’s help-mate out of a supernumerary rib, a woman who promptly becomes the reason for the poor innocent man’s fall from the Macho God’s grace. But I won’t go on with the many proofs of the god’s maleness – because what is more interesting, and disturbing about the belief in ‘our Father, who art in heaven’, is how oblivious many believers seem to be about this fact.
Example – in glancing back at my two blog pieces on the origin of the god called God, I reread a very long comment to Part 1, by ‘Anonymous’, the only comment I received. It was a generally reasonable comment about not taking the Bible literally, that it was full of stories that one might reflect on and learn from and so forth. Fine. As ‘Anonymous’ says, you can take what you want from it and leave the rest. Fine. And ‘Anonymous’ inserts one brief line, which perhaps I overlooked at the time:
If you see G-d as very male that’s what you see.
I respectfully disagree. I see this god as very male because the Bible uses the male pronoun to refer to him almost 7000 times, and never once refers to him using the female pronoun. And of course because I know that the stories about him were written by people who lived within an ultra-patriarchal framework. And these things matter, and they have consequences to this day, as we know from anti-feminist remarks still being made by Bible Belt Old Testament literalists and Young-Earth Creationists and the like.
‘Anonymous’ doesn’t refer to his or her own gender, but I think I can guess.
I’ve added to my references a hilarious-horrific essay on Godly masculinity, just for fun.
References
On the origin of the god called God, part one – on the Judean need for a warrior god
on the origin of the god called God, part 2: the first writings, the curse on women, the jealous god
The Masculinity of Christ in the Face of Effeminate Christianity
Claudine at school – a bonoboesque novel?
This is the Penguin edition I’m reading
I’ve been aiming for reading 40 books a year – maybe just because nobody seems to read books anymore. I go to cafes here in the pleasantly middling city of Adelaide, with me book, and notice a few tables with people sitting alone, reading, or maybe just looking, but not at books, at their phones. I don’t know how bookshops survive these days and I can only assume they won’t survive for much longer. Someone close to me buys me books on special occasions – my birthday, Christmas – but she orders them online – delivered from some massive warehouse, I imagine. The next step will no doubt be to eliminate the paper book – a terrible waste of trees, ink and the like, when we have ipads and their successors. And then of course reading itself will be eliminated, the whole tome being plugged into our frontal cortex, complex metaphors, hyperbole, onomatopoeia and all.
Anyway, it’s December and I’m a bit behind on my 40 books – I’ve gotta read 6 books this month! So, one book I’ve chosen is something decidedly racey – a novel (I almost exclusively read non-fiction these days) by the French author Colette, published in 1900 under the name of Willy, her first husband. It was Colette’s first novel, and it’s a doozy – sexy, witty, and enormously self-assured. My paperback copy has been languishing on my bookshelves… well, having just blitzed through the first 60 pages, I happened to glance at the inside front cover, where I found my name written, and the date of purchase, July 1982 – that’s 42 years ago (!), and well before I began my French degree in 1986. I’m thinking now of getting a collection of her works in the original – I couldn’t think of a more stimulating way of brushing up on la belle langue.
So though I’m trying to rush through Claudine à l’école, it’s really worth lingering on, like anything delicious. So far, it’s a world of women – schoolgirls of around fifteen, and their school-teachers, some of them not much older, and the forbidding senior mistress who turns out be rather drawn to her juniors. And of course there are a few male masters to drool over, in a mocking, superior sort of way. I recall reading about how Willy urged Colette to make the content a bit more steamy, and I like to think she was happy to comply. Anyway, time to read a bit more….
So I’m hoping the term bonoboesque will catch on, but it’s unlikely, both for its intrinsic clunkiness (and yet there is beauty…) and for the fact, more to the point, that I’m the world’s worst promoter of anything. Whateva, I’ve never read anything as bonoboesque as this novel. If bonobos could speak…
So, I’m wondering, does Colette continue in this vein? She was a prolific writer, beginning with four Claudine novels, all of which were immensely popular and provided a good income – for Willy. After disentangling herself from him she struggled to survive as a part-time actor and music hall performer, before turning to journalism in the 1910s. During this time she caused admirable scandals with onstage and offstage love affairs with various men and women. And, of course, she wrote. I’ve been hunting desperately through my unkempt bookshelves for Ripening Seed, (Le Blé en herbe), which I’m sure I’ve got somewhere in one of those old paperbacks, priced in shillings and pence… Anyway, she wrote a couple of dozen novels at least, of which La Vagabonde, Chéri, Sido and Gigi are among the best-known, if not the best – but what would I know?
Any way, reading about all the squabbles and squeezes of the school-girl Claudine, her frenemies, rivals, whipping-girls and other assorted victims, I fantasise about bonobos having language. After all, they’re a boisterous lot – without the occasional deadliness of their chimp neighbours, for sure, but I suspect not quite always as lovey-dovey as they’re portrayed. And yet, for the most part, it’s a world of inclusiveness and happy endings, and without the shock value of female-on-female pleasure that Colette brought to her fin de siècle readership. Bonobos are a million years ahead of that curve.
So while it may be that Claudine at school was deliberately aimed at scandalising and titillating, while bonobos only do what comes naturally, it’s far more honest and natural in its sensuality than just about any other work of its time, surely. And still has lessons, in that regard, for us today – though Claudine does have something of a cruel streak at times, which bonobos… I don’t know, are the primatologists missing something – or am I?
So, when I’ve look such things up lately, I’ve encountered an ‘AI Overview’ at the head of my enquiry. Ominous, but oh well, let’s go with it.
AI OverviewBonobos are generally less violent than chimpanzees, but they can still be aggressive:
Less violent than chimpanzeesBonobos are less likely to commit murder, infanticide, and cannibalism than chimpanzees.
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More frequent but less intense squabbling
Bonobos are more likely to push, chase, and bite other males than chimpanzees, but these interactions are less intense.
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Male bonobos are more aggressive than female bonobos
Male bonobos are about three times more likely to be aggressive than chimpanzees.
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Female bonobos prefer aggressive males
Female bonobos may prefer to mate with aggressive males.
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Bonobos may fight when groups come togetherTwo groups of bonobos may engage in serious fighting when they come together.
All of which is a bit confusing – male bonobos are three times more aggressive than chimps, except in the case of murder, infanticide and cannibalism. That’s a bit unclear, to say the least. Bonobos, I’ve always heard, don’t engage in those acts at all. And so how does an AI measure aggression, to work out that male bonobos are three times more aggressive than chimps? And female bonobos may prefer to mate with aggressive chimps – but then again, they may not? Still, I suspect there might be some truth here – there may be a bit more squabbling than is generally admitted. Which doesn’t much alter my view of bonobos as role models – it just makes them more human.
In any case, having read about half of Colette’s first novel, I find that, unsurprisingly, Claudine is something like a bonobo in a chimp world, humanly speaking. The big bosses are male – the school inspectors and the like – and the female schoolmistresses kowtow to them, while lording it over the schoolgirls, excepting the much petted school pets. There’s a lot of petty nastiness going on, much of it perpetrated by Claudine herself, but she maintains her popularity for all that. In the end it seems a lot more complicated than the descriptions I’ve read of bonobo society. Then again, so is bonobo society, I’m sure.
References
Colette, Claudine at school, 1900
Bonobo cruelty – AI overview, Google
The Bonobo Sisterhood – some comments
Chrystul Kizer self-portrait
Recently I finally acquired a copy of The Bonobo Sisterhood, by Diane Rosenfeld, which, for obvious reasons, I’ve been keen to read. However, having read two thirds of the book, I must say that I find it something of a let-down. Firstly, it’s very US-based, which sorely tests my anti-US bias, shameful though that is. Second, it concentrates almost solely on individual male sexual violence – certainly an important topic, but not so much a part of my own focus, which is political, economic, legal and military power, among other things. It’s also somewhat aggressively black-and-white, often giving the impression that most if not all males are potential violators and/or sexual predators, which, when I think of my own social circle, strikes me as absurd. A great deal of the writing focuses on women’s self-defence, which, again, I’ve never given much thought to. None of the women in my admittedly narrow circle go in for self-defence training, though most have been into physical fitness, yoga, pilates and the like. They clearly don’t feel the need for it, which might suggest that this is more of a US problem. Then again, my little microcosm may be atypical.
To be fair, The Australian Bureau of Statistics does make for grim reading on male violence,
In the most recent incident of physical assault by a male (September 2023):
For women
- 87% knew the perpetrator
- 70% experienced the incident in a residential location
- 63% experienced anxiety or fear
For men
- 42% knew the perpetrator
- 74% experienced the incident in a non-residential location
on pornography and bonobos
NOT party hardcore, but you get the idea
I’ve already mentioned, and I’m still troubled by, a claim I read that watching pornography makes people more violent. The claim was almost as brief as this brief description, and included no references. Was it the consumption of pornography that made people more violent, and what exactly is pornography anyway? One doesn’t have to be a porn addict to know that there’s hardcore and softcore porn, that there’s woman-on-woman porn, men-on men-porn and hetero-porn. There’s presumably sado-masochistic porn, various role-play type porn, elder porn and, sadly but inevitably, its illegal opposite, child porn. And then, there are bonobos, whose sexual proclivities, I seem to remember the late Franz de Waals saying, border on pornography.
I’ve written on this topic before, in a rather hesitant way, and have avoided it in the couple of months since. So I’m going to try to be bold. In an article from way back in 2009, entitled ‘Does bonobo porn turn you on, ladies?’ – which completely avoids the actual issue, it’s reported that women are aroused by ‘bonobo porn’ but claim that they aren’t. There is no account of how such arousal is measured, and the idea that anything bonobos do could possibly influence or interest women, or even humans apparently, is treated as absurd.
Why such stupidity? Well, the fact that it’s a US article explains a lot.
Bonobo sex is predominantly female-to-female, and that is key to the female dominance of the species, just, as, some day, not in the near future, it might be key to female dominance in humans (maybe once we get AI and its attendant machinery to do all the work).
It’s also quite different from pornography, which, somewhat like prostitution, is primarily for the gratification of those, mostly men, who aren’t able to achieve – let’s call it sexual fulfilment – by virtue of their personal charms. They might indeed be overly aggressive types, or physically unattractive, or painfully shy, or impoverished, or disabled in one way or another. And there are gazillions of them out there, surely.
So it’s quite wrong, I think, to compare bonobo sex with porn. They don’t do it for display or reward, nor for love in the almost hopelessly complicated human sense. To try to define what they do it for might even seem arrogant. The main thing is that they do it, and many clear benefits ensue.
Then again, maybe I’m complicating matters. Mutual masturbation, which bonobos mostly indulge in, is pleasurable, and has evolved to be so, for many species. It also involves a brief intense expenditure of energy, generally followed by a state of mild, pleasant, temporary exhaustion. In these mutual exchanges, this would surely also involve a sense of gratitude.
I should also point out, to the anti-porn feminists and those who ‘dis’ porn (is that the right slang word?), that even if it’s true that watching porn makes people more violent, the most obvious reason would be that they’re not getting what those porn performers are getting. I seem to remember The Rolling Stones calling it ‘satisfaction’.
And yet there are serious downsides to being a female pornstar or prostitute in our still very horribly patriarchal society. It’s the old slut/stud dichotomy – how long will that one take to die? So it’s clear that the women in porn are being exploited and generally looked down upon in a way that the men are not. And that their time in the business is way shorter than that of the blokes. For some reason, thoughts of this kind take me back to my youthful interest in arthouse films. I’m thinking in particular of the harem scene in Fellini’s 8½, in which the debonaire and breezy bachelor Guido, played impeccably by Marcello Mastroianni, turns martinet when one of his nest of female companions resists the rule about having to move ‘upstairs’ to retirement, having turned the venerable age of thirty. The fact that this scene has stuck with me for nigh on fifty years is telling. Plus ça change…
Yet, change does happen, it’s just that our lives are so short in the vast scheme of things that we tend to live in an eternal present. Australia, where I’ve lived most of my life, wasn’t even a concept 300 years ago. Nor was the USA, or even the internet. And while we berate Middle Eastern nations/cultures for their treatment of women, our own culture has only recently woken up to their obvious superiority… oh, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
So compare all this to bonobos, our dumb female-dominant cousins. Of course, they only indulge in the lazy pleasures of mutual masturbation because they haven’t the smarts to indulge in all our high-falutin pleasures – such as exploring and defining gravity, making music, inventing deities, playing chess, bush-walking, racing each other under endless permutations, creating fashion trends, falling in love, identifying species, dancing, building bombs and spacecrafts, playing the stock market, and of course, yodelling. And that’s just the beginning….
Yet even with all that brain-building work and complex play to distract us, our erogenous zones are still a bothersome delightful drawcard, and so, failing willing partners, we have pornography, prostitution and masturbation sans mutuality.
So a website has come to my attention that provides a unique twist to this dilemma, if such it is. It almost turns the patriarchy on its head, if only by sheer force of numbers. The site or venue is called Party Hardcore, and it is based, I believe, in Germany, that most erotische of nations. Word of mouth tells me, though, that such venues exist in many large cities in the developed world. The venues are, essentially, nightclubs in which the patrons are exclusively women. Loud, danceable music plays, and alcohol and possibly other drugs are readily available. There appear to be well over a hundred patrons, becoming increasingly sozzled and smoochy. In the centre of the venue is a raised catwalk with the words ‘Party Hardcore’ printed over its length, clearly designed for the vast English-speaking audience that tunes in (people with video cameras wind through the crowd). A male model of the ‘condom full of walnuts’ type mounts the catwalk and dances and flexes for a few minutes before coaxing a woman or two to come up and join him in a bit of heavy foreplay, much to the amusement of their friends, apparently. Meanwhile, a handful of similarly built males suddenly emerge, sprinkling themselves about the room like an assortment of many-coloured sweets. Much licking and sucking ensues, and then some. In fact, the target audience ranges from pseudo-bored and disdainful wallflowers to gung-ho erotomaniacs wolfing down wobbly bits as if their life depended on it.
How to define such scenarios? Prostitution? Well, the men are no doubt being paid for this service, but I doubt if that’s the main reason they do it, and there’s no straightforward client-professional relationship. Pornography? A very divided matter of opinion. The fact is that, sozzled or not, the women in these venues have agency, and safety in overwhelming numbers.
Which brings me back to bonobos. Their females don’t outnumber the males, but female solidarity has evolved in this species to provide the protection that sheer numbers provides in the Party Hardcore scenario. I don’t expect humans to ever become as sexually ‘obsessed’ or ‘liberated’ (take your pick) as bonobos, but I do have high hopes women will emerge as the dominant gender, as we learn more and more the lessons from our patriarchal history. If such dominance brings about a more sexually relaxed society – and I’m sure it would – without reducing our creative and analytic explorations, and our concern for our fragile biosphere, then…
Anyway, I live in hope.
References
a bonobo humanity?More musings on bonobos, families and the riddle of humanity
ring-tailed lemurs are female dominant and beautiful – just saying
So, returning to bonobos and how they’ve managed to become female dominant, and how they might teach humans by example. In an article from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, from just over a decade ago, it was explained in these terms, at least when it comes to conflict:
It is not female alliances that help females win conflicts. The context of the conflict does not seem to be relevant for its outcome either. Instead, the attractiveness of females plays an important role. If females display sexually attractive attributes, including sexual swellings, they win conflicts with males more easily, with the males behaving in a less aggressive way.
So that’s it, our next female aspirant to political leadership needs to be good-looking, with plenty of sexual swellings. Such swellings would need to be on display at political rallies (which, happily or sadly, don’t really exist in Australia).
But unfortunately, human society isn’t quite that simple – and nor is bonobo society, methinks, though the influence of sexual swellings among naked apes would surely be greater than among clothed ones. And we human males tend not to be attracted to females primarily because of signs of their fecundity, though it can be argued that physical attractiveness and being within a certain age bracket are common factors, with fecundity hiding slyly behind them.
It’s interesting to consider sexual differences between bonobos and humans. Bonobos are definitely not monogamous, and neither are their close cousins the chimps. We humans like to think we’re ‘naturally’ monogamous, but are we? Were Neanderthals? Australopithecines? And how does monogamy relate to male dominance, if at all? It’s worth noting that we’re by no means certain of how humans lived even in the recent past, in evolutionary terms – say, a mere 10,000 years ago. The term ‘hunter-gatherer’, which to many has suggested a clear delineation, with males as the hunters, has been very much in dispute in recent times (see references), and one might reasonably suspect that participation in either activity would depend on the food available in the region, just as is the case with bonobos, whose diet is mostly vegetarian with the addition of small game animals, easily hunted by either gender, and this has been cited as a contributing factor to bonobo female dominance.
In her book The Patriarchs, Angela Saini considers a number of historical examples, some clear-cut, others more murky, of female empowerment in the past. And much of this has to do with class and heritage:
The low status of some women has never stopped others in the same society from having enormous wealth or power in their own right. There have been queens, empresses, female pharaohs, and powerful women warriors for as long as humans have kept records. In the last two centuries, women have reigned as monarchs over Britain for longer than men have. Women have kept slaves and servants, and still do. There are cultures that prioritise mothers, in which children aren’t even seen to belong to the same households as their fathers.
However, there is no female equivalent to the sexual enslavement, or concubinage, practised in the past by alpha males in a number of human societies. This is highlighted in Joseph Henrich’s landmark work, The Weirdest People in the World, especially in chapter 8, ‘ WEIRD monogamy’, which begins with a quote from a 16th century Franciscan friar, Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, describing Aztec society:
For three or four years the Sacrament of Matrimony was not administered, except to those who were educated in the house of God. All other Indians lived with as many women as they cared to have. Some had 200 women and others less, each one as many as suited him. Since the lords and chiefs stole all the women for themselves, an ordinary Indian could scarcely find a woman when he wished to marry. The Franciscans sought to uproot this evil; but they had no way of doing so because the lords had most of the women and refused to give them up. Neither petitions nor threats nor arguments, nor any other means which the Friars resorted to were sufficient to induce the Indians to relinquish their women, and, after doing so, enter marriage with only one, as the law of the church demands… This state of affairs continued until, after 5 or 6 years, it pleased the Lord that some Indians of their own accord began to abandon polygamy and content themselves with only one woman, marrying her as the church required… The Friars did not find it easy to have the Indians renounce polygamy. This was very hard to achieve because it was hard for the Indians to quit the ancient carnal custom that so greatly flattered sensuality.
It’s interesting to note here the assumption that monogamy is a less ‘sensual’ or ‘carnal’ practice than polygamy. Bonobos are generally regarded as sensual, even sex-obsessed, but their relations can’t be easily described in a ‘mono’ or ‘poly’ sort of way, because there’s no clear sense of ‘ownership’ of others, though there is plenty of bonding, mediated by sexual-sensual activity, and there is also a degree of hierarchy. We too, will aways have that, as particular individuals emerge as ‘leadership material’, but this can be as much a problem as a benefit. The political meme, ‘strong and wrong beats weak and right’, is so often only fully understood in hindsight.
When I think of a bonobo-style human society, this notion of non-ownership, even as regards children, comes prominently to mind. The compartmentalisation of modern WEIRD society into nuclear family units seems particularly problematic for me, and personal, as I was a five-year-old child of immigrant parents, taken from Britain to Australia on the other side of the world, with no further contact with broader family relations, and neighbours who were barely seen or heard. It’s often claimed that this separation into individual family units, physically separated in a built environment, began with agriculture, with the separation between those units growing with further developments – industrialisation, migration, the Church edicts forbidding marriage between cousins to the nth degree (as Henrich describes in his book). The real story, though, is doubtless even more complex.
I suspect we’re just at the beginning of ‘the great unravelling’ of the nuclear family, with an increasing number of single mothers, and fathers, and a host of ‘different’ family or group organisations, some of which are barely discernible on the horizon. I firmly believe that humans will survive the crises we create for ourselves (and indeed the whole biosphere), though not without great damage to the most vulnerable. It will require greater internationalism, and greater understanding and sympathy for all the species we’re connected to – that’s to say all species. There are plenty of horrific ‘hotspots’ of violence, warfare and inhumanity, as well as callous indifference to the suffering that our everyday actions – our food consumption, our mining and undermining operations, our general rapacity – are causing to the most vulnerable of our own species and many others. Our dominance should teach us to care more. With great power comes great responsibility. So many great powers in the past have not cared enough about the damage they’ve done, for it isn’t immediate damage to them.
Enough, I’m waxing melancholic. Bonobos are, it seems, happy with what they are, which they might continue to be if humans don’t wipe them out. Humans want to know more, grow more, be more than what they are. The ‘beginning of infinity’ indeed. I too am caught up in that quest, as I’m only human. Is it an upward spiral or a downward one? That is the question.
References
Still more critique of the PLOS article on women hunting in hunter-gatherer societies
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: the origins of inequality, 2023
Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest people in the world, 2021
It’s not just about female leadership – Sheikh Hasina’s downward spiral
Muhammad Yunus
Bangladesh is in a mesh at the moment, and it’s no joke. The Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, resigned today (August 5 2024) after 15.5 years in office. She’d previously been in office from 1996 to 2001, so, more than 20 years as Prime Minister. Now, the term Prime Minister has a very Westminster-type resonance, and sounds very ‘first among equals’-like, but having heard some quite disturbing things about this leader in the past, and having heard about the recent events leading up to her resignation, I’m minded to take a closer look.
Bangladesh has been an independent nation since 1971, before which it was known as East Pakistan. This wasn’t a peaceful transition, and of course the region has a history going back thousands of years, long before the present, hopefully passing, obsession with nationhood and sovereignty became a thing. That region, above the Bay of Bengal, was itself known as Bengal, or Bangla, and is covered essentially by Bangladesh and the Indian Province of West Bengal.
So, as I write Sheikh Hasina has, it seems, fled to India, and large numbers of young Bangladeshis (commentators are saying they are students) are in the streets of Dhaka, apparently carrying away loot from the Prime Ministerial residence. It seems that we’re witnessing the end of a very long dictatorship. Hasina is the daughter of the first Bangladeshi Prime Minister, which gives it all a bit of a North Korean feel (oh but I’ve just learned he was assassinated in a military coup, along with other members of Hasina’s family). So, like her father, Hasina doesn’t seem to have managed to keep control at the end, as apparently the police have chosen not to take action against the present student protesters (though many have been killed in recent times). So, given the family history, she’s chosen to decamp to India.
So of course there are now some big questions due to the power vacuum. What will be the role of the military, and can all this be succeeded by something more seriously democratic?
So, okay things are happening quickly… the nations’s military has promised to form an interim government and has promised to fulfil student demands and ‘bring peace back to the country’. Reporters are saying that over 90 people were killed the day before Hasina’s departure. The word autocracy is being used – Hasina ‘won’ an election earlier this year, after a boycott by opposition parties.
Protestors, on being interviewed, are inveighing against military rule and demanding civilian-style government. An articulate student protestor has expressed concern about the ongoing treatment of minorities in the country, and has severe reservations about an interim military government, though I suppose there has to be some peace-keeping force to fill the vacuum, at least for a short while. An important point, raised by the DW reporter, and further commented on by the student, is that Hasina fled on a military aircraft, which raises questions about the military’s neutrality. However, there are obvious questions about what would have happened if the students and protesters (hundreds of whom have been killed in recent weeks, according to reports) had gotten their hands on this former Prime Minister.
And the fact is that, despite the perhaps well-meaning promises currently being made by the military, these student-type revolutions rarely turn out well in the end. Democracy is, of course, a Euro-American import to this region, as is the concept of nationhood itself. There is so much religious and ethnic conflict – an online Indian report on the upheaval comes with a baggage of commentary, Indians (especially Hindus) worrying about an influx of refugees (especially non-Hindus), as well as weird commentary about a perfectly functioning democratic state being over-run by the military… You get the impression that the situation is being deliberately misunderstood.
So the latest news is that Muhammed Yunus, apparently a very important figure in Bangladeshi politics and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (I’m on a steep learning curve here!), has returned to the country from Paris and has been sworn in as the interim leader, much to the relief and jubilation of student protestors. Considering that hundreds of students have been killed recently, Yunus, who’s 84 years old, and has no political experience, has his work cut out for him, and the obvious key to his success will be his connections with the right people, those who are invested in democracy, human rights and poverty alleviation. He was awarded the Peace Prize for his highly successful micro-financing systems designed to help the country’s poorest. Hasina’s regime rewarded him by charging him with a vast list of crimes, presumably because he was highly critical of the government’s behaviour.
So, just listening to a student activist being interviewed about Younis and the general political situation – and she points out that the two main political parties, that of Hasina and the main opposition, have great credibility problems, being based on dynastic families who have served themselves rather than the nation, so it may be that, with popular support, Younis will be encouraged to remain until the political corruption is dealt with. At his age, that would be a big ask. The country is very polarised, with no doubt religious as well as political divisions.
So, just gathering more info – students, and the public generally, have been incensed by the former government’s quota system for jobs and benefits. They were particularly outraged by Hasina’s apparently sarcastic comments some time ago about extending the quota to the pro-Pakistan families – that’s to say those who fought against and killed Bangladeshi freedom fighters in large numbers. Protesters had also been activated by the military’s shoot-to-kill behaviour recently, which killed more than 100 students in one day.
So, peace has been restored for the time being, and the arrival of Younis will presumably mean that the Hindus of India will be less concerned about a huge refugee influx (the Indian government has sent a large military force to the border). As to Sheikh Hasina, she has sought asylum in the UK (her niece is a British Labour politician). Her US visa has been revoked, a turnaround from previous friendly relations due to her crackdown on religious extremism and her welcoming of Rohingya refugees into the country in 2007. Hasina’s family background is Moslem – and no matter what her personal beliefs, she would probably have to be seen to be practising in order to retain any credibility in the region. Anyway, it seems that Hasina is currently holed up in India, and Bangladeshi authorities (whoever they may be?) are demanding that she be handed over to them. Interestingly, she has younger relatives in relatively high places in the US, India and Finland as well as in the UK. To quote other commentators, asylum in India (a country that has refused asylum for Afghani and Sri Lankan leaders in recent times) would compromise India’s relationship with a new Bangladeshi government (there have already been requests from the Supreme Court Bar Association in Bangladesh to have Hasina sent back).
So – many issues facing a new administration. How to deal with the massive destruction of buildings and other infrastructure. How to deal with agitprop coming out of Pakistan and India. How to deal with what appears to be the collapse of the banking system, with the mass resignation of high-level staff of the Bangladesh bank, the country’s biggest bank, after protestors stormed their offices. Unsurprisingly there has been a run on bank withdrawals throughout the country.
And Sheikh Hasina has very recently stated that she wishes to return to Bangladesh ‘once democracy has returned’! Her son, who lives in the US, is blaming the Pakistani government and its spy agencies for the unrest, and he too identifies his mother as the person to restore democracy in the country. That’s family for you.
Needless to say, there wouldn’t have been many other women in Hasina’s government, if any. When I talk about ‘a world turned upside-down’ in terms of gender relations I must admit I’m talking about the world I know, the so-called ‘WEIRD world’. There are so many other factors, ethnic, religious, dynastic and so on, that make female dominance unlikely in so many parts of the world at this juncture. Even in Thatcher’s government, in the heart of the WEIRD world, there were no other women in her cabinet. Too much power in the hands of too few, that’s always a bad sign, regardless of gender. As primatologists have pointed out, the most successful alpha males/females are generally those that build alliances and trust – to keep everyone in the same tent, so to speak. Females are better at it, I think, but plenty of males are good at it too. So it isn’t just a matter of gender, it’s about how best to benefit the whole community, to recognise their rights and needs, and to always consider government in terms of help. I’ll be watching this space.
Concerning the future, I suspect things might change…
As we’re just about to have an election in the UK I listened to a vox populi set of interviews, which seemed to take place in traditionally conservative electorates, about who should run the country over the next several years. There were complaints about everything being run down, too many immigrants, too many scandals, they shouldn’t have kicked out Boris Johnson, or they shouldn’t have allowed him anywhere near the Prime Ministership, no they won’t be voting Labour, no the Liberal Democrats are useless, I haven’t decided who I’ll vote for, might not vote at all… And there were plenty of complaints about the general neglect of their particular fraction of London, and plenty of images of abandoned and broken down homes and buildings.
By all accounts, the Tories are set to lose this election big-time, after 14 years of incumbency preceded by 13 years of Labour government. I’ve not been paying too much attention to UK politics, having left the place (Scotland in fact) for the balmy shores of Australia as a five-year-old. I was surprised to learn just this week that voting isn’t compulsory there, which I think is a shame. When a few years ago there was a vote in Scotland regarding national independence, I mentally sided with the ‘no’ vote, as I generally take a ‘together’ view over a ‘separated’ view. But then Brexit happened, which of course was a shambles.
I try to be impartial about politics, but of course I have my hobby horses, e.g. moving towards a bonobo humanity, and that involves change, very much. And the very word ‘conservative’ means wishing to conserve, to preserve, to maintain and so forth. Small government, reduced taxation, minimal involvement. Here in Australia, our former long-standing PM, John Howard liked to say ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. But this, of course, misses the point. Landlines were once an acceptable form of communication – I recall how sophisticated we felt when we had a phone connected in the early sixties – but now we all have ‘smart’ phones, which don’t seem to have made us smarter people. We came to Australia by ship, which now seems quaint. Elly Noether, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, had to work without pay, teaching only male students, and often surreptitiously, because it was widely accepted in the 1910s and 1920s that maths and physics were beyond the ken of women, and that wasn’t so long ago in my time frame (we’ll reach bonobo humanity in about 1000 years). Conservatism generally tends to face backwards, as culture moves forward.
Is it a fear of change? We all fear it, to different degrees. The interviewees were reluctant, mostly, to mention particular issues, though they all seemed to voice a general weariness and dissatisfaction with the current government. Immigration was mentioned a couple of times, and unions once. A different video presented a poll of voters’ main concerns heading into the election, and their dissatisfaction with the current National Health Service (NHS) came out well on top. So, low tax, low government revenue, cuts to the NHS, too bad.
I’ve often thought there’s something wrong or missing about current representative democracies, in which there are two major parties locked in combat for the support of the majority, and I’ve written previously about my issues with adversarial systems in general – for example in the law, in industrial relations, in politics, and even in the media, especially in the US. And with the rise of social media, a sort of bloated juggernaut of disinformation and abuse, the future doesn’t appear to look good for the kind of consensus approach to social issues I’ve always hoped for. The dog-eat-dog world of the USA is no example to follow – a broken system of mutual hatreds. ‘The United States exhibits wider disparities of wealth between rich and poor than any other major developed nation’, according to inequality.org, Quelle surprise.
Could it be that, in the long long view, nation states will be in the rear-view mirror? Currently, complaints about immigration and ‘illegals’ are commonplace, but national borders, passports and visas are a recent phenomenon, and so many of us think we’re living in a ‘thousand-year reich’ or an eternal present. Of course I’ve no idea what the human planet will be like in a thousand years, but there’s nout wrong with speculating. And hoping. My hopeful expectation is that transnational and international activities and lifestyles will grow, and that both the local and the global will become more rather than less important. It will become increasingly clear that centralised control – powerful national government – is failing distant local regions with their specific issues requiring specialised local expertise. At the same time, more effective global communications will bring about better dissemination of knowledge and ideas, with ‘red tape’ being reduced or bypassed. Sounds a bit utopian I know…
And the human world will have become more bonoboesque. Not only with female dominance, but a reduction if not a complete dissolution of monogamy. Our scientific discoveries and enquiries will proceed apace, underlining what can be achieved through teamwork and collaboration as well as friendly rivalry between teams. Adversarial approaches will be greatly watered down, and elected representatives will work together for the best results, always allowing for input from the represented. Dictatorships will be almost a subject of ancient history… well perhaps not quite ancient, but history. Children will indeed be cared for communally, and a thriving and happy sexuality will be normalised. Education will be respected, and those doing the educating will be held in particularly high regard. An overwhelming proportion of leaders, in all areas – decision-making, research, education, group dynamics, sanctioning – will be female, though males will be well-treated, consulted and respected.
And if there are no nations? Freedom of movement and interaction will be greater than it is today, facilitated by increasingly improved telecommunications and transport. Language barriers will be reduced by effective translation algorithms. The mechanisation of food production will continue to advance, and housing will undergo a revolution corresponding to the dissolution of the nuclear family and a preference for more communal living. Diets will change as we focus more effectively, both on health and the biosphere we share with all other species. The human population will stabilise, as will its calorific intake. Inequalities will not, of course, disappear, but they will greatly reduce, as the community will insist on nobody being left behind or forgotten. Education and community participation will be the highest priority, as we know that exclusion will fuel resentment, ultimately leading to violence… But involvement in communal activities will be so highly prized that few would be willing to turn their backs…
Okay, okay, just kidding. In a thousand years, we might survive, but things’ll be much more fucked than they are today. I’m glad I’ll be outta here…
But then again…
References
Wealth Inequality
Jeanne Julie Eleanore de Lespinasse: an open heart, a closed book?
If I were young, pretty, and very charming, I should not fail to see much art in your conduct to me; but as I am nothing of all that, I find a kindness and an honour in it which have won you rights over my soul forever.
Julie de L’Espinasse, to the Comte de Guibert, 1773
Although I managed to spend a bit of time at a university in my thirties, I think I’m largely self-educated, being reluctant to follow any course set down for me, and allergic to too much discipline, and so I’m always fascinated to hear of historical characters of a similar type – Montaigne, Rousseau and Stendhal come to mind (not that I’m comparing my ‘achievements’ to theirs!), and it’s probably not coincidental that they’re all French, though I’ve no idea what this signifies.
So the other day, finishing Aldous Huxley’s strange, well-meaning but unconvincing utopian novel Island, I wondered at the passing mention of Mlle de Lespinasse, a woman I ‘knew’ from my recent rereading of Stendhal’s Love. So here’s a couple of key passages about her from Wikipedia:
Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse (9 November 1732 – 23 May 1776) was a French salon holder and letter writer. She held a prominent salon in Paris during the Enlightenment. She is best-known today, however, for her letters, first published in 1809, which offer compelling accounts of two tragic love affairs.
Looked down on for her poverty and illegitimate birth, Mlle de Lespinasse had an unhappy childhood marked by neglect. She acquired a basic education at a convent, but she was largely self-educated, an impressive feat given that she was later able to hold her own among France’s top intellectuals.
This second passage in particular captured my heart, so to speak. I wouldn’t say that I was neglected, or impoverished, growing up, and the term ‘illegitimate’ seems quaint if not grotesque in today’s WEIRD world, but I identify with the thrill, and much of the isolation, of self-education. I feel I’ve spent much of my life talking to myself. As for salons, today’s equivalent, if there is any, would be the meet-ups I’ve occasionally been part of, for humanists, skeptics, ‘literature-lovers’ and the like. Somehow, though, they’ve never quite worked for me. I’m not one for ‘holding forth’, and am pretty easily overwhelmed by others.
But let me focus on Mlle de Lespinasse, a rather formal title, and a rather more tragic figure. She died at 43, probably of tuberculosis, exacerbated, it seems, by an impassioned and immiserated spirit, not to mention liberal quantities of opium. One might say that she died of a broken heart. When I was a kid and first heard the notion of a broken heart, I imagined it snapping like a biscuit, and then you fell down dead. But even then it wasn’t quite so silly, it was awe-inspiring in fact, that the heart could be so brittle, so damaged by a love unrequited or rejected. Now of course, I see this sinking, this despair, this death of a highly intelligent and admired woman, confidante of the likes of d’Alembert and Condorcet, as more of a ‘feminist’ issue. In Saint-Beuve’s introduction to her life and letters, he refers to her emotionality:
But of what use is it to become clear-sighted? Did a woman’s mind, great as it may be, ever check her heart? “The mind of most women serves to strengthen their folly rather than their reason!” La Rochefoucauld says that, and Mlle. de Lespinasse proves the truth of it.
Of course this is just another patronising, patriarchal comment, from a world that largely debarred women from being movers and shakers in any political, scientific and enterprising arenas. Partnership with and encouragement of the males who dominated those arenas was all that could be hoped for. It seems that Julie de Lespinasse, along with Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (aka Mme de Staël), her mother Suzanne Churchod (known at the time as Madame Necker), and other salonistes of their time, were all expected to play the purely nurturing role that has been woman’s lot since religio-cultural politics reduced women to vassalage, whenever that might have been – since the rise of agricultural society, at least. The notes to her published letters present a nice example of this nurturing:
In her last hours, already lying on her deathbed, she secured that of La Harpe [to L’Académie française]. “M. de La Harpe”, says Bachaumont in his Memoirs, “was one of her nurslings; by her influence she opened the doors of the Academy to him who is now its secretary. This poet was the last of those whom she enabled to enter them.”
So that would have been in 1776. The novelist Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman elected to L’Académie française, in 1980.
So I’m currently learning more of Julie de Lespinasse, as she was known, and I’m nervous about my experience of her being filtered through the notes to her letters by “
So I’ve read the first letter in the 1809 collection, addressed to the Comte de Guibert, one of the two men who most occupied her passionate and guilt-ridden thoughts, the other being the Marquis de Mora. Obviously these weren’t your Mellors the gardener types. Guibert was an ambitious army officer, later a General, and Mora was a tubercular semi-invalid. Both were quite a bit younger than Julie (I can’t help thinking of la nouvelle Héloïse), who was forty at the time of the first letter, in 1773. It’s a bit hard to make sense of this letter, being a bit in medias res – she writes a lot of ‘him’ – Mora? – and of ‘you’, and seems almost terrified of her own thoughts – what she thinks and what she should think, as one passion rises and the other falls. Here’s how the letter ends:
But tell me, is this the tone of friendship, the tone of confidence? What is it that is drawing me?Make me know myself; aid me to recover myself in a measure; my soul is convulsed; is it you, is it your departure, what is it that persecutes me? I can no more. At this moment I have confidence in you, even to abandonment, but perhaps I shall never speak to you again of my life. Adieu, I shall see you to-morrow; possibly I shall feel embarrassed by what I have now written to you. Would to heaven that you were my friend, or that I had never known you! Do you believe me? Will you be my friend? Think of it, once only; is that too much?
That is the question – is it too much? I try, and largely fail, to imagine receiving such a convoluted letter, from a person I admired but didn’t love, in the romantic sense. What would a bonobo do? No, that’s not a joke question – I mean of course, what would a ‘bonobo-ised’ human do? I think he would offer comfort, hugs and kisses, but not eternal, undivided devotion. That may not seem enough, but then a bonobo-ised Julie de Lespinasse wouldn’t be placing all her hopes in one individual – especially not a male.
So I may or may not continue reading these letters, and reflecting on what they reveal about human need and pain in an individual surrounded, it seems, by gifted admirers. Sad but uplifting too. It’s a privilege to ride along with someone who feels so much.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Julie_Éléonore_de_Lespinasse
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c005633001&seq=65
touching on women, the principal carriers of bonobo humanity
that book again…
So I feel I’ve been skating around the edge of the bonobo world lately, not getting the message across, and not even quite sure what the message is. Clearly their sexual openness is sort of intimidating to many humans, but it’s also clear that this openness is profoundly connected to their culture of greater caring and sharing than exists in chimp culture, or our own. It slightly annoys me when commentators suggest we should look past the sexual activity to the bonding and helping and mutuality that goes on, as if we (very literally) buttoned-up humans can have one without the other, but having said that, I too am nervous about focussing on frottage, outside of Max Ernst.
So now I’m going to focus a bit more on the sexual side, and not just in reference to bonobos. Some years ago I read Jared Diamond’s little book Why is sex fun? (though I was pretty sure I knew the answer). Erogenous zones are hypersensitive, even more so when stimulated by another – like tickling, only different somehow. And with concealed ovulation, adult humans, like bonobos and dolphins, are sexually receptive for most of the time. This isn’t the case with chimps, so for bonobos this is an intriguing case of relatively recent evolution. Diamond’s book didn’t speculate too much, but looked at two extant theories:
“Many-fathers” theory says that concealed ovulation allows women to have sex with many men and create paternity confusion, which then decreases the chances of infanticide. “Daddy-at-home” theory says that women entice men to be around, provide and protect, by allowing them to have sex regularly. By combining both, we reach the conclusion that concealed ovulation arose at a time when our ancestors were promiscuous to avoid infanticide (“many fathers theory”) but once concealed ovulation evolved, the women chose monogamous relationships with more dependable cave-men (“daddy-at-home theory”).
Much of this is less than relevant to today’s WEIRD human world with its contraceptives and prophylactics, but ‘permissive’ sex has still to overcome the barriers of religion, and, for women, discrimination.
In any case Diamond completely missed the possible role of sex in bringing people together, in creating alliances, and the kind of overall cultural harmony that appears to subsist in bonobo society. This cultural harmony, which transcends the mother-child bond or the supposedly ideal development known as the nuclear family, has been the main attractant for me vis-a-vis bonobos, because I was brought up in what is called, by cliché, a ‘toxic family situation’, bearing in mind Tolstoy’s clever dictum that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This situation was most salient for me in the late sixties and early seventies, the ‘hippy era’, when free love was touted, along with the death of the nuclear family. The hope that this idea gave me in my teen years was almost unbearably painful, but it all fizzled out. I didn’t learn about the bonobo lifestyle until more than a decade later, in the mid to late 80s, but that was rather too late, and a whole species out of reach…
But that’s just my personal situation. Bonobos still offer an example for our species in general, as we socially evolve, very slowly and in piecemeal fashion, out of patriarchy. But what exactly is this example, if it isn’t sexually modulated empathy, which is so far from a species that is so compartmentalised, un-neighbourly, sexually repressed, competitive, materialistic and personally hubristic as ours?
Of course, the hope surely lies with the greater empowerment of the human female, who, by and large, hasn’t quite the intensity of the above-mentioned traits than the male. Or am I just pissing in the wind? Of course, there are outrageous and apparently obnoxious females on the political scene, especially in the USA, when a lot of reportage focuses on the outrageous and obnoxious. But I believe, and fervently hope, that women are better at operating co-operatively and below the radar. For example, I’ve written before about Arab and Israeli women getting together to lobby against injustice and to promote sexual freedom, amongst other things (okay, sexual freedom is probably low on their list of priorities right now), a particularly difficult task considering the status of women in Moslem cultures, and their apparently feverish fear of homosexuality, especially among the lower classes. The Haifa Women’s Coalition, for example, based in that coastal northern Israeli city, suffers from the sorts of cultural tensions no bonobo would ever have to deal with, such as a concern about being dominated by Ashkenazi Jews, and a fear of backlash re ‘abnormal’ sexual preferences. Sigh, if we could only just give in to and celebrate sharing our basic primate primacy.
I could go on about the backlash against female empowerment in China, Russia, Burma, the Middle East, etc etc, the product of power politics that I like to hope are ultimately ephemeral – given a 1000+ year time-line for a bonobo humanity – which reminds me, I need to save my pennies to be cryopreserved – I really really want to see that future.
Meanwhile, I’ve noted, rather belatedly, that others have been discovering and basing some writings on bonobos, one way or another. Two recent examples, The bonobo gene: why men can be so dumb, is apparently a light-hearted account by an Aussie TV sports producer, Steve Marshall, of toxic masculinity and the male appendage. It’s clearly not about science (what could this bonobo gene be?), but anything that mocks the jocks can’t be a bad thing. More intriguing to me, though, is The bonobo sisterhood: revolution through female alliance, by Diane Rosenfeld, which sounds like it’s tactfully avoiding the sexual stuff. We’ll see – I’m definitely going to grab myself a copy.
Taking the long view on a future bonobo humanity is of course the only way to stay hopeful. In spite of the situation in Israel-Palestine, in Ukraine-Russia, in Afghanistan, Syria, South Sudan, Burundi and so on, the human world is far less overtly violent than it was centuries and millennia ago. Reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s rather too whirlwind a world history (The World: a family history), amongst countless others, will tell you that. Even with a nuclear holocaust currently hanging over us (I recently encountered someone who fervently favours a nuclear strike – and strong male leadership – to stop Putin), and our slowness in handling the global warming crisis, I can’t seriously envisage a future human wipeout. The fact is, it often takes shocks at our own cruelty and stupidity to bring about anything like bonoboesque reform. It took two World Wars and all the barbarity they entailed to get us to become more global in our concerns, to take more seriously the concept of universal human rights and united nations, though these are still not taken seriously enough. Worse before it gets better? I can only hope not.
Meanwhile, I must get hold of that book…
References
the thirty percent rule, or whatever, revisited: bonobos, anyone?
cold land, warm heart
So I wrote about the 30% female empowerment rule, or target, put forward by some UN body, some time ago, and it’s time for another look, given the extreme macho activities of recent years, such as Putin’s war on Ukraine and ‘the West’, Xi’s relentlessly anti-female government, the horrors of Hamas and the Israeli government, MAGA brutalist absurdity, and the anti-female governments of – well, they’re too numerous to mention. Clearly, all Islamic governments are male-dominant, as are most South American and African governments, given their largely patriarchal societies….
I of course am more interested in a 70% rule, or a bonobo humanity, a world turned upside-down. Not likely, but wouldn’t it be interesting if some ‘small’ but advanced nation, like Australia, or New Zealand, or Taiwan, or one of the Scandinavian nations, performed such an experiment. After all, bonobos are a small community, and they’re putting the human world to shame, or they would be, if it wasn’t for the dolorous fact that we’re too far up ourselves to pay attention.
I’m always a little reluctant to address the fact that bonobo female dominance, and their less aggressive, more caring and sharing social behaviour, is mediated largely through kissing and-a hugging and mutual masturbation. Sex is always a touchy subject – even if it’s only yourself you’re touching. The Catholic Church, with its all-celibate, all-and-ever male clergy, continues to lead the way, in the WEIRD world, in terms of misbegotten attitudes to sexuality. Not only does it have a five-tiered edifice of celibate male bureaucratic authority (Popes above cardinals above archbishops above bishops above priests), but it insists upon promoting a ‘virgin mother’, essentially sexless, voiceless, compliant and devoid of any identifiable character, as the ideal woman. And yet, this disastrously misogynist organisation is holding up better than its protestant offshoots, a situation sorely in need of analysis in some future blog pieces.
Another setback for women’s rights and sexual freedom comes from the world’s largest Moslem nation, Indonesia, which I seem to recall once prided itself on being a ‘moderate’ nation by comparison to those of the Middle East. In late 2022 its parliament unanimously passed a law criminalising sex outside marriage throughout its numerous islands and cultures, which seems to me as dumb as banning ice-cream and lemonade. Not very bonobo. Which makes me wonder – how the fuck did Indonesia become Islamic? It’s a long way from Mecca, methinks. But that’s a story for another day.
Today I’m writing about advancing on the paltry 30% rule, or target, which I seem to remember was part of the UN platform… but never mind, must’ve been a dream. The UN has 17 ‘sustainable development goals’, and goal 5 is ‘gender equality’. An admirable goal of course, but I should remind everyone that in the mammalian world there’s very little gender equality. Mostly, when it comes to social mammals, it’s male dominance, while some mammals, like bonobos, squirrel monkeys, marmosets, tamarins and lemurs (amongst primates) are female-dominant. That’s one of many reasons why I favour female dominance over equality. The main reason, though, is that female dominance is generally not simply an inversion of male dominance – it tends to create a very different kind of social structure, one that, it seems to me, is worth striving to achieve (this is most obviously the case for bonobo culture, and it’s significant that they are our closest living relatives, along with chimps).
But of course we’re a long way from anything like equality, never mind female dominance. Here’s some commentary from the UN website on goal 5:
On average, women in the labor market still earn 23 percent less than men globally and women spend about three times as many hours in unpaid domestic and care work as men.
Sexual violence and exploitation, the unequal division of unpaid care and domestic work, and discrimination in public office, all remain huge barriers. All these areas of inequality have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic: there has been a surge in reports of sexual violence, women have taken on more care work due to school closures, and 70% of health and social workers globally are women.
At the current rate, it will take an estimated 300 years to end child marriage, 286 years to close gaps in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws, 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace, and 47 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments.
Fortunately, like most people, I plan to live forever, so it’ll be interesting to see if we can do better than those estimates. However, I’m man enough to admit that I’d rather not see it happen through men killing each other off in wars, a scenario that seems a bit real these days. One thing we can try to be optimistic about, I suppose, is that ‘current rates’ are never static. But it’s hard to deny that the current scenario is gloomier than it has been for a while. The UN’s future scenario re the pace of change is more or less duplicated by that of the World Economic Forum, which estimates that it will take ‘131 years to close the [gender] gap’. In a report published 6 months ago, it made these points:
- Gender equality recovers to pre-pandemic levels but pace of progress has slowed
- Gender parity in economic participation and opportunity drops from 2022 levels, while political empowerment makes only slight gains
- Iceland remains the most gender-equal country, followed by Norway, Finland, New Zealand and Sweden
Australia, by the way, isn’t in the top ten, and neither is the USA nor Canada, nations we tend to compare ourselves with. It’s a surprise to me that Nicaragua and Namibia are 7th and 8th, which says much about my own biases.
Of course, the real problem is our very long historical tradition of patriarchy. Going back several hundred years, before the scientific revolution initiated by the likes of Kepler, Galileo and Newton, the proto-WEIRD world, of Jews, Christians and Moslems, all worshipped essentially the same ultra-male god, and the Christians, the most numerous of the three sects, raised up, as their ideal female, a ‘virgin’ mother, sexless, voiceless, and symbolically passive. Even before that, the ancient Greeks, Romans and Mesopotamians forced their women under veils and kept them enclosed, but the Abrahamic religions cemented patriarchy and faith together into a kind of powerful ontological force that only gradually began to crack apart with the scientific and philosophical enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries – though this enlightenment has been largely ignored by the Islamic world.
Science is the intellectual force that religion is struggling to contend with. I’ve written, years ago, about the falsity of Steven Jay Gould’s concept of NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria), a rather pretentious term arguing for completely different spheres of concern for science and religion. Galileo, that devoutly Christian scientific pioneer, might’ve approved, but he almost lost his life because the then Pope, Urban VIII, and the Bible itself, differed with him on celestial matters. And even today, if you care to press the requisite keys on your device, you’ll be flooded with creationist propaganda and other anti-science ‘Christianity’.
Anyway, that’s why I encourage anyone, including myself, to consider the science of primatology, our human heritage, and our primate cousins the bonobos and chimps, and the lessons to be learned.
References
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/
https://karger.com/fpr/article/91/1/48/144017/Female-Power-A-New-Framework-for-Understanding#
https://www.weforum.org/press/2023/06/gender-equality-is-stalling-131-years-to-close-the-gap/
https://bonobohumanity.blog/wp-admin/post.php?post=9879&action=edit
a bonobo world 29: the 30% rule and Myanmar