Archive for the ‘patriarchy’ Category
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
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
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
a closer look at bonobos, enfin
As this blog is called what it is, I’ve decided to read the entire, long, Wikipedia article on bonobos to get a more subtle and comprehensive feel for their society and how it shapes their individuality – though of course I’ll continue to write on completely different subjects. What I’m finding so far is that there are nuances, as you would expect, and as we find in human societies. And of course it would be the same with other social species – a member of the normally less dominant gender will, through proven capabilities or particular personality traits, be given a more prominent role than usual, and leadership of or status within the group is not solely based on gender. Ranking may have a degree of fluidity based on behaviour and alliances. Not all males are subordinate and not all females are bosses. Nevertheless, bonobos are definitely matriarchal – just as chimps are patriarchal, also with some fluidity.
It surprised me when I learned, some years ago, that bonobos have a ‘male philopatric’ society. The term conveys a gender distinction – the male stays ‘at home’ for mating and reproduction, while the female moves to another group for that purpose. This occurs in some human societies too. While visiting the Tiwi Islands just north of Darwin, I was told by our islander guide that he had just ‘lost’ his sister, who had moved to another tribal group to marry, meaning that their connection was permanently broken. His culture actually forbade him to have any more contact with her. So the early Catholic Church prohibitions against first, second, third and fourth cousins marrying, as described in Joseph Henrich’s historical account of the WEIRD world, as well as many long-held cultural traditions of Australasia and elsewhere, likely hark back to our hominid ancestors.
In any case, male philopatry doesn’t seem very matriarchal. There are of course good reasons for philopatry (male or female) in general, as well as good reasons for its opposite, male or female dispersal, which inevitably means that these behaviours, their causes and consequences, are widely disputed. I think I’ll return to this issue in another post.
A particularly interesting feature of bonobo culture, fairly recently recognised, is co-operation between two separate groups, or troupes. This was in the Congo’s Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, which may, I think, represent a space between ‘the wild’ and ‘captivity’, and so may influence behaviour. From Wikipedia:
Over two years of observation, researchers witnessed 95 encounters between the groups. Contrary to expectations, these interactions resembled those within a single group. During these encounters, the bonobos engaged in behaviours such as grooming, food sharing, and collective defense against threats like snakes. Notably, the two groups, while displaying cooperative tendencies, maintained distinct identities, and there was no evidence of interbreeding or a blending of cultures. The cooperation observed was not arbitrary but evolved through individual bonds formed by exchanging favors and gifts. Some bonobos even formed alliances to target a third individual, demonstrating a nuanced social dynamic within the groups.
This contrasts importantly with the deadly clashes between groups of chimpanzees observed by Goodall and others.
Bonobos engage in tongue-kissing, the only non-human creatures observed to do so, at least thus far. And this brings us to sex, a difficult topic to write about, even in a blog nobody reads, given so many cultural and religious tabus swirling around it in human society. So, best just to be descriptive, without making comparisons to H sapiens.
Bonobos aren’t monogamous, and they engage in sexual activity from an early age. It is mostly masturbatory, and indiscriminate, with the possible exception of mothers sexually engaging with adult sons. Heightened sexual activity often occurs when rich food sources are found, in which the masturbatory sex often occurs in large groups, increasing generalised bonding. Female masturbation is helped along by the fact that their clitorises ‘are larger and more externalised than in most mammals’. Well, here, comparison with humans is instructive:
… while the weight of a young adolescent female bonobo “is maybe half” that of a human teenager, she has a clitoris that is “three times bigger than the human equivalent, and visible enough to waggle unmistakably as she walks.
All quotes here are from Wikipedia, unless otherwise stated. The most common sexual combo is female-female. Their face-to-face, body-to-body interactions are referred to as genito-genital (G-G) rubbing, which is often accompanied by loud noises, hopefully of pleasure.
So, while female-female masturbation is the most practised sexual behaviour of the species, enhancing bonding against any male threats, male-male masturbation is also a regular thing:
The most common form of male–male mounting is similar to that of a heterosexual mounting: one of the males sits “passively on his back [with] the other male thrusting on him”, with the penises rubbing together because of both males’ erections
Clearly sexual activity is encouraged and valued as the most essential feature of bonobo society, and is practised in a variety of ways – penis-fencing, rump-rubbing, genital massaging, oral sex (among males) and, as mentioned, tongue-kissing. Adult-child sex is more common in males than females, though there’s no penetration. Is this because they’re avoiding pain, or because they know the connection with pregnancy? The general scientific consensus is that non-human species engage in sex based on instinct, hormones and such – that’s to say, more or less unconsciously without being aware of possible or likely consequences. I’m not entirely convinced, especially re our closest relatives, but how can this be tested? In any case, regardless of all this sex play, bonobo birth rates are no higher than those of chimps.
Unsurprisingly bonobo social relations are just as complex as those of chimps, and perhaps also humans, with personal animosities, rivalries and close friendships within and between genders, and the fact that infanticide in bonobo society hasn’t been observed isn’t proof that it hasn’t happened – after all, we’ve only known of the existence of bonobos for a little under a century. Still, bonobos are definitely different, and in what I would call an inspiring way. You could say that sex becomes a feel-good strategy, but also a way of diminishing any sense of male ownership of offspring. As Wikipedia puts it:
The strategy of bonobo females mating with many males may be a counterstrategy to infanticide because it confuses paternity. If male bonobos cannot distinguish their own offspring from others, the incentive for infanticide essentially disappears. This is a reproductive strategy that seems specific to bonobos; infanticide is observed in all other great apes except orangutans. Bonobos engage in sexual activity numerous times a day.
Anyway, enough of sex, let’s explore violence. Chimps, as mentioned, tend to be hostile to those not in their own troupe, and even patrol their own borders, looking for trouble. Very West Side Story. And yet, to my surprise, bonobos, are more violent in general.
In the wild, among males, bonobos are more aggressive than chimpanzees, having higher rates of aggressive acts, about three times as much. Although, male chimpanzees are more likely to be aggressive to a lethal degree than male bonobos which are more likely to engage in more frequent, yet less intense squabbling. There is also more female to male aggression with bonobos than there is with chimpanzees. Female bonobos are also more aggressive than female chimpanzees, in general. Both bonobos and chimpanzees exhibit physical aggression more than 100 times as often as humans do.
All of this sounds interesting, but ‘aggression’ might be a little more difficult to define than we think. In humans, for example, accusatory or bullying language, or the sharing of images, can be used aggressively without anything physical occurring. It has even been known to cause the victim to commit suicide. We have subtler and often more effective ways to make others suffer, and ‘non-physical’ aggression may have a physical, even deadly, impact. It is also a way of getting around laws prohibiting physical violence.
In any case, surely a major reason for the supposed greater physical aggression of chimps and bonobos, and doubtless other apes, compared to humans, is how we ‘count’ aggression. Is carpet-bombing physical aggression? Nuclear warfare? The wholesale slaughter of the Jews and the Congolese? The massacres of the ‘Crusades’? How can we not count remote, push-button slaughter, or starving people to death behind walls, or burning them to death in buildings, as physical aggression? Methinks there’s need for a rethink.
So let’s turn to something less controversial. Like all the great apes, bonobos pass the self-awareness mirror test, and it’s clear that the variations in their vocalisations have meaning, though whether they rise to the standard of a proto-language is a matter of definition. They also use many meaningful hand gestures.
A famous example of a bonobo being taught to communicate using a keyboard, and to respond effectively to whole sentences, is that of Kanzi:
Kanzi’s vocabulary consisted of more than 500 English words, and he had comprehension of around 3,000 spoken English words… Kanzi is also known for learning by observing people trying to teach his mother; Kanzi started doing the tasks that his mother was taught just by watching, some of which his mother had failed to learn….
Kanzi was also taught how to make simple stone tools, though he found a method of making them in his own bonoboesque way. There seems no doubt that effective rapport between bonobos and humans will benefit both species.
Finally, there’s the ecological importance of bonobos. They’re essentially one of the two apex species of their region, the other being elephants. Both species are frugivorous, and their ecological role is vital:
It is estimated that during its life, each bonobo will ingest and disperse nine tons of seeds, from more than 91 species of lianas, grass, trees and shrubs. These seeds travel for about 24 hours in the bonobo digestive tract, which can transfer them over several kilometers (mean 1.3 km; max: 4.5 km), far from their parents, where they will be deposited intact in their faeces. These dispersed seeds remain viable, germinating better and more quickly than unpassed seeds. For those seeds, diplochory with dung-beetles (Scarabaeidae) improves post-dispersal survival.
Diplochory means two-phase seed dispersal, using more than one vector or carrier.
Anyway, I think that’s more than enough info for one post. The Wikipedia article on bonobos makes for a very solid book chapter, with 178 references, so far. And it ends nicely with informing us all of the annual World Bonobo Day, established in 2017. No prizes should be given for guessing the date!
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2021
creeping towards matriarchy?
Khasi, India – a matriarchy of over a million
Listening to stuff about the macro world of general relativity and the micro world of quantum mechanical physics and their complete separateness and apparent incompatibility, about which I know so little, has taken me scurrying back to bonobos and how exactly they came to be matriarchal, which might be a simpler question, or at the very least a less mathematical one. I’ve doubtless been here before, but it’s an important question to dwell on, I think, at a time when ‘macho man’ Putin is running out of non-nuclear options and Trump’s bully-boy bullshit is becoming more tediously unhinged and unpopular – if that isn’t just wishful thinking.
The most obvious, if partial, explanation is that bonobos aren’t big meat-eaters, or perhaps more importantly, hunters, as they inhabit a densely forested region of the southern Congo, enough to provide a rich frugivorous diet, with the addition of the odd small animal that happens to wander into their territory. The various sub-species of chimps inhabit mostly savanna regions and eat quite a lot more meat, mostly caught by males. That’s to say, they actively hunt. Yet even as I write this I’m a bit skeptical – it all sounds too neat. Bonobo females aren’t as strong as the males, though the difference isn’t great. They’ve become dominant due to group relations. That’s to say, female-female relations. And how that came about is a bit of a mystery – at least to me. The sharing of mothering duties? All that mutual masturbation? More research required.
AINL (Artificial Intelligence Never Lies) covers much the same ground as me. Bonobos are matriarchal because of sexually modulated female bonding, which overcomes the slight difference in size, and because of environmental/ecological (and so dietary) factors. But of course this doesn’t explain why this sexualised female bonding came about. And, as ever, I’m primarily interested in how we humans can move in that direction, given, for example, that we’ve long abandoned hunting for our own food, and with the human world becoming more mechanised, we’re abandoning the need for physical labour. The male-female divide is closing fast, methinks. I’m not even sure of my own gender anymore.
Still, there are those who seem to argue that the human norm is, and must be, patriarchy. Others send a confusing message. Take this 2019 article from Medium.com (linked below) with the forbidding (and depressing) title ‘Bonobos and the myth of matriarchy’. No, it doesn’t argue that bonobo matriarchy is a myth – instead it seems to argue that, pace bonobos, no human societies have ever been fully matriarchal, so…. let’s stop trying….? Perhaps not, as the last line is – ‘Be a bonobo.’ Which is ridiculous. I want to be a human, in a matriarchal society, or at the very least, a far less patriarchal one. And there’s no doubt that, in the WEIRD world, we’re going in that direction, at a snail’s pace from the perspective of one life (my own).
Interestingly, in the same year, 2019, another article reports fulsomely on six current matriarchies – in China, Costa Rica, Kenya, Ghana, Indonesia and India. Are they ‘full’ matriarches? Are there any ‘full’ patriarchies? That game can be played endlessly. Lions used to be described as patriarchal, but then it was pointed out, or discovered, that it was the females who made the decisions, while the head male was there to defend the pride (from what I’m not sure – who’s going to attack a pack of lions? Other lions maybe).
Anyway, it wouldn’t bother me if there was no such thing as a ‘total’ matriarchy, in humans or other species, I’d just like to see humans as more matriarchal than patriarchal, with more – substantially more – political and financial power in the hands of females rather than males. High hopes, eh? Maybe in a century or two, if we survive.
References
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/g28565280/matriarchal-societies-list/
a wee piece on monogamy
So, back to the question of monogamy. Is Homo sapiens a monogamous species? If they are, how long have they been so? We know that neither chimps nor bonobos are monogamous (it’s very rare in primates generally), and we know very little – almost nothing – of the social lives of those extinct species that fill in the gaps between ourselves and Pan paniscus. Nor do we know anything much about the social lives of our own species going back 50,000 years and more. A fairly standard view, it seems to me, is that the rise of agriculture and the stable settlements that were part of this change promoted monogamous ‘ownership’ just as it promoted land ownership. But, as Joseph Henrich argues in The weirdest people in the world, powerful or large-scale landowners could also become large-scale people-owners too, in terms of wives and slaves. Polygyny was an elitist cultural thing, even if it has faint links with our gorilla ancestors.
So it’s fair to say that monogamy is more a cultural than a natural phenomenon, and so subject to variation. We can see this cultural effect in terms of our obsession with lineage and inheritance, generally along male lines. A culturally created patriarchal monogamy, with various exceptions, increasingly in the modern WEIRD world.
The general acceptance of monogamous norms puts pressure on individuals, as well as affecting their worldview, as they may, often unconsciously, take on the concept of a ‘right partner’, especially for breeding purposes. This goes along with ‘hearth and home’, much like the nest-building of most avian species.
I’m trying not to write this from an anti-monogamy perspective – frankly I’m not sure where I stand on the topic. Laissez faire might be the best description. Nowadays, again in the WEIRD world, we’re more conscious about how we’ve come to arrange things – nuclear families, home-making, and their alternatives, single parents, kibbutzim, two mums, two dads, and so forth, and we can even question the hearth and home arrangements, given our knowledge of bonobos in particular, with their broader supportive communities. Could it be that earlier human communities, those of Homo erectus and their immediate ancestors, were also more communal, in terms of sexual activity and child-rearing? Less possessive and jealous? Will we ever know?
And is our greater consciousness about monogamy having the effect of making us less monogamous? Bucking the trend? Is this really the best way to raise children? Of course it’s still generally seen as the norm, and the best – single-parent homes are ‘broken monogamies’, half-families. But we’re constantly evolving, learning new ways, considering other species – bonobos again. Their kids are so well-adjusted (funny expression, that).
We’re stuck in our own time, and history can’t teach us the future. Keeping options open is surely a key to survival so let’s not condemn other ways, let’s keep on searching and admiring, not just the best in human efforts, glimpses of utopia, but in those of other species….
References
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0140175079900010
Joseph Henrich, The weirdest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020
bonobos – how did they do it, and how should we?
Science is always at its most thrilling when unsettled: it is the process of tackling mysteries, not the habit of accumulating facts.
Matt Ridley
bonobo matriarchy – still a mystery
So let’s switch from the ridiculous to the sublime and get back to bonobos. A recent bonobo video I’ve watched, together with my current reading of Carl Safina’s Beyond Words, which, so far, deals mostly with elephants, has made me wonder about the survival of these fascinatingly intelligent creatures in the wild. The human story of the DRC, where all wild bonobos live, has, since the arrival of white men, been one of horrific slaughter and suffering. The whites have mostly left, with their treasure, having created the boundaries of this new nation, where over 200 indigenous languages are spoken. Its official language, though, is French. It’s the second largest country in Africa, and has ten other mostly white-invented countries on its borders, along with a wee bit of the southern Atlantic. The land is very heavily forested, with bonobos being unevenly spread over an area of half a million square kilometres, bounded by the Congo, Kasai and Lualaba rivers.
The estimated minimum number of bonobos in the wild is between 15 and 2o thousand. Obviously it is hard to ascertain very precise numbers due to the dense terrain. The human population of the DRC is over 110 million. Habitat loss has been a problem, as has the bushmeat trade, hunting for medico-magical cures, and selling as novelty pets. Human depredations, enfin. Safina estimates the effects of such depredations on elephants:
Since Roman times, humans have reduced Africa’s elephant population by perhaps 99 percent. African elephants are gone from 90 percent of the lands they roamed as recently as 1800, when, despite earlier losses, an estimated 26 million elephants still trod the continent. Now they number perhaps 400 thousand (the diminishment of Asian elephants over historic times is far worse).
Bonobos were separated from chimps by the creation of the Congo River, said to be the deepest river in the world. The river is estimated to have formed between 1.5 and 2 million years ago, and this is supposed to have created the separate species. It sounds plausible, but I wouldn’t know.
Bonobos have been described as the hippy apes – probably by hippies. They’ve also been lauded for their vegetarianism, but they’re not vegetarian. Their lush environment has promoted a largely frugivorous and nutatarian diet, but the odd small monkey or large rodent-like creature, savagely ripped apart, doesn’t go amiss. What’s most interesting about them, for me, is their matriarchy, developed over those couple of million years, despite a slight, and apparently diminishing, size difference in favour of males. Bonobos are generally more gracile than chimps, and weigh less, on average (they used to be called pygmy chimpanzees). Their lips are more pink and kissable – well, maybe not, their faces are darker at birth, but lighten up with age, though their ears remain much darker than those of chimps. They have longer legs, and are more bipedal, and finally they generally have more high-pitched vocalisations than the guys north of the Congo. But does any of this offer a clue to their matriarchy? And are they really matriarchal? I’ve read articles that have claimed that there have never been any human matriarchies, though this seems to depend on the definition. After all, we can say that we, e.g. in Australia, live in a patriarchy, though it is less patriarchal than it was, a mere two hundred years ago. The change in that time has been social rather than physiological or genetic. Bonobos and chimps have, however, undergone physiological changes, as aforementioned – with respect to each other, and we have no way of knowing which of them has changed most. Interestingly there are four subspecies of chimps, with the possibility of a fifth. What’s the basis of these differences? Presumably they can interbreed, since bonobos and chimps can do so (they’ve done it in captivity and ‘genetic studies show that they have exchanged genes at least twice in the past 550,000 years [in the wild]’ – thanks, AI). And here’s what AI, which I presume is in this case a combination of primatologists, geneticists and such, has to say about the establishment of these subspecies:
Primatologists distinguish chimpanzee subspecies (or populations) based on a combination of genetic differences and geographic distribution. Genetic studies, including genome-wide analysis, reveal distinct populations with unique genetic markers. These genetic differences are often correlated with geographic separation, suggesting that physical barriers like rivers or mountain ranges have historically limited gene flow and led to the evolution of distinct subspecies.
References
Carl Safina, Beyond words: what animals think and feel, 2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo
https://www.bonobos.org/blog/whats-the-difference-between-a-bonobo-and-a-chimp/
Christopher Tyerman, God’s war: a new history of the crusades, 2006
more on ‘evolutionary psychology’, humans and bonobos
bonobo kids have plenty of baby-sitters
So Ryan Ellsworth’s attempt to dismiss the possibility that bonobos can serve as any kind of model for sexual and political behaviour in humans has obviously got my dander up, as this is my third post on the matter, and it has renewed my interest in searching for the origins of patriarchy, and in how we can reduce patriarchal attitudes, at least in the WEIRD world – and especially among the soi-disant intelligentsia.
One important resource I’ll be relying on in this exploration is Angela Saini’s The patriarchs: how men came to rule, but I’ll start again with Ellsworth’s critique of Block, and in effect others who advocate ‘free love’ and other such fantasies through ‘misinterpreting’ bonobo culture, as well as advocating that we [i.e. women] ‘release our inner bonobo’. Of course there seems to be some naïveté in Block’s praise of bonobos, which I find quite forgivable, unlike Ellsworth:
It is egregiously naïve to conclude that, “bonobos reveal that an incredible range of sexual diversity is normal for animals like us” (p. 99, emphasis in original).
The fact is that humans do engage in an incredible range of sexual diversity – though not all at the same time. On the other hand, humans, especially under patriarchal religion over the last few millennia, have sought to stifle sexual diversity with a vengeance, especially among women. And considering that writing to any copious degree has only existed for a few millennia, our sexual practices, dating back to our primate ancestors, are something of a black box – though orgiastic practices get a mention here and there.
Of course one of the obvious barriers to ‘sexual licence’ in humans is clothing – making ourselves ‘decent’, which we learn in childhood, becoming early aware that there are parts of our bodies that it would shock others to see. But would we be shocked if we weren’t told, virtually from birth, that we should be shocked? If we were taught that clothes were solely for decoration and warmth, and were entirely optional? And when did this clothing business start? We can give some sort of vague starting date – say 100,000 years ago – but we also know that Australian Aborigines were shamelessly wearing nothing, or nothing much, when we started wiping them out with guns and germs a little over 200 years ago. So, it was culture wot done it. There seem to have been a mixture of factors – to wrap someone in clothing makes them unavailable to the general public, in sexual terms, and it also becomes a form of decoration, conveying status, or clubbish belonging – business suits, cycling togs, pyjamas (well, maybe not) and haute couture, whatever that may be.
So in modern Australia Aboriginal people will be arrested for indecent exposure if they were wear nothing but strings around the waist for carrying dilly bags and such. This reminds me of an Aboriginal man, of impressive physique, who used to walk up and down a busy street near my home wearing nothing but the skimpiest of budgie smugglers – a fascinating clash of manliness and cultural cringe, or something like that.
So, clothing – the fact and the concept – has played a major inhibiting role. There’s also monogamy, which, for most of its history has been about male ownership of females – though, in some societies the very upper classes got away with polygyny, as described in Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest people in the world, and also in Korean historical dramas (though they present a rather tame version for modern susceptibilities).
Ellsworth claims that “Sex differences in promiscuous impulses are minimized in Block’s account”, which is an odd remark, because in order to know whether such sex differences are minimised, or maximised, we need to know what they are. And surely this is more an individual thing than a sex/gender thing. But clearly, Ellsworth is claiming that he knows. It’s funny that, just yesterday, I received a ‘shorts’ video on my feed – presumably ‘shorts’ being a rival to ‘tik-tok’, in which a young woman was admitted to hospital after having sex with 500+ men in one day. According to the video it was all her idea, but she reflected that it was probably ‘a bit much’, as she’d never had sex with more than 29 men in one day before – or was it 59, I’m not sure, and these ‘shorts’ videos disappear as suddenly as they arrive – one day of fame at most. And of course, whether this was promiscuity or an obsession with breaking records is unclear. Anyway, here’s more from Ellsworth, and I’ll make it the last:
Block refers to babies to care for, and reputations to protect, but does not seems 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.
I may have commented on these remarks before, but they’re worth revisiting. Caring for her baby is a mother’s role, but assistance in this task is varied depending on culture. Bonobo females help with birth, supporting both mothers and infants in the post-partum period. Bonobo males also play with and support young infants. The degree to which humans do this is dependent on culture, not to mention class, with wet-nurses and such. As described in previous posts, the pressure in patriarchal societies on women’s sexual behaviour, regardless of their proclivities, has been enormous and often life-threatening. This is all about culture, not evolution in the Darwinian sense.
The sexism in Ellsworth’s paper is obvious to me, and I assume, or hope, that others have pointed this out before me, as it was published back in 2015. Then again, evolutionary psychology doesn’t have a great reputation, so maybe it’s best ignored. Meanwhile, Angela Saini’s work is much more recent and much more interesting, so that will be my focus in the immediate future.
References
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: how men came to rule, 2023
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300115
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020
matriarchy needs work – please consider
dreams dreams dreams
We’ve surely all heard that patriarchy began with agriculture, but I don’t think there’s any solid evidence for this. The Australian Aboriginal societies weren’t agricultural, but according to many early anthropologists and white commentators they were profoundly, even brutally patriarchal. Take this description:
“The treatment which women experience must be taken into account in considering the causes which lead to the extinction of the native tribes. Amongst them the woman is an absolute slave. She is treated with the greatest cruelty and indignity, has to do all laborious work, and to carry all the burthens. For the slightest offence or dereliction of duty, she is beaten with a waddyu or yam stick and not infrequently speared. The records of the Supreme Court in Adelaide furnish numberless instances of blacks being tried for murdering lubras. The woman’s life is of no account if her husband chooses to destroy it, and no one ever attempts to protect or take her part under any circumstances. In times of scarcity of food, she is the last to be fed, and the last considered in any way. That many die in consequence cannot be a matter of wonder …”
George Taplin, The Native Tribes of South Australia, 1878
Just about all of these early descriptions are from men, so I’m a wee bit skeptical here too (and for a very different description, see below)
My interest in this topic – I mean the origins of patriarchy – goes back to the chimp-bonobo contrast. What brought about this patriarchal-matriarchal divide on opposite banks of the Congo River between one and two million years ago? If it was essentially an environmental divide, with the bonobos benefitting from an abundant, largely frugivorous food supply, could it be that Aboriginal societies, divided by more than 200 different languages, might also be divided by more or less fruitful environments, where gathering was more or less key and hunting more or less incidental, leading to different cultural norms? Aboriginal people have been generally defined as nomadic, but they also had their own tribal lands and sacred places, the nomadism simply referring to a lack of fixed dwellings.
Some, perhaps most, anthropologists have found that Aboriginal culture is generally divided upon gender lines:
Diana Bell in her book “Daughters of the Dreaming” reported, after spending many years living with Aborigines in Central Australia, that there was no patriarchy or matriarchy but “Under the Law, men and women have distinctive roles to play but each has access to certain checks and balances which ensure that neither sex can enjoy an unrivalled supremacy over the other. Underlying male and female practice is a common purpose and a shared belief in the Dreamtime experience; both have sacred boards, both know songs and paint designs that encode the knowledge of the dreaming.” This was not as predicted by Gimbutas but is [a] more gender balanced society.
Some rituals are performed by both men and women. She tells of how men, grateful for being shown a woman’s dance, promptly return the favour by painting up their own boards and bodies and showing the women one of their own dances. In these dances they were exchanging ritual knowledge of the country and its Dreaming painted on their bodies and their boards and spelt out by the patterns their pounding feet make upon the earth. At one point the women picked up the male boards displayed and danced with them while the men called out approvingly “they are your dreamings now”. But this does not mean that there is not secret knowledge, private to each gender. In such displays, something is always held back, kept for people of the same gender.
Jani Farrell Roberts, Aboriginal women and Gimbutas, c 2000
If this is a reasonably accurate account of pre-colonial Aboriginal practice, we may be looking at societies that can’t be easily pigeon-holed as patriarchal or otherwise, which is difficult for me, as I’ve tended to argue that gender equality is kind of unnatural, like measuring the two genders on a balance of scales or a see-saw. The scales will either tip in favour of patriarchy or matriarchy, so we need to go for matriarchy as the more humane approach, based, just for starters, on all we know about history.
And bonobos.
As to history, most of it is about men, because it’s overwhelmingly been men who’ve started and fought in wars that have transformed human society. Let’s mention a few instigators, as well as slaughterers via policy – Genghis Khan, Kim Il Sung, Adolph Hitler, Ivan the Terrible, Pope Urban II, Napoleon Bonaparte, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Leo Victor (Leopold II of Belgium), Timur….
There’s plenty others, no doubt, but why make ourselves sick? How about the women warriors and presiders over slaughter?
Let’s see – Artemisia I of Caria, Boudicca, Fu Hao, Cleopatra, Isabella of Castille, Wu Zhao, uh, Margaret Thatcher…
It’s a struggle to find anyone who caused human suffering on anything like the level of the males. Maybe they just weren’t given enough power, but I doubt that. Whatever the case, I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that 99% of the human slaughter that has occurred throughout history has been at the hands of only one gender.
Having said that, humanity doesn’t seem to be getting the message, what with Xi, Putin, Trump, Kim Jung Un and co. Planetrulers.com claimed that there were 57 dictators worldwide in 2022, all of them male (though they really should have included Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s dictatorial Prime Minister .
So the history is bleak, as is much of the present, and the worst of it is that this can drive a sense of fatalism, or ‘what’s the use’-ism, so…
What can we do? Of course, the internet has the answer, sort of. We certainly have no option but to take the long view, and work work work, even if it’s just talking, arguing, making the obvious points. Sometimes even to women – I’ve written, ages ago that Margaret McMillan, the prolific and highly regarded Canadian historian, on giving a Q and A after a talk about the history of war, was asked whether more women in leadership might make a difference to that tendency towards warfare that has so characterised our history. Sadly, she rattled off the usual extremely dumb response – sorry Margaret but I get so tired of it – that this and that female leader was just as bad as the men. Of course! That’s because it’s not at all about individual men and women – it’s about matriarchy versus patriarchy. It’s bonoboism versus chimpism. It’s about changing the overall structure of society. And that is, of course, Very Big. A very big task. A very necessary task, though, in my humble opinion. Not because we won’t survive without matriarchy – I have no idea whether we will or not – but because we, and the environment we so dominate, will be so much better off without patriarchy. That’s something I’m entirely convinced about.
I’d ask everyone to just think about this, just for starters.
References
http://www.witch.plus.com/7day-extracts/aboriginal-women.html
Diane Bell, Daughters of the Dreaming, 1983