Archive for the ‘sex’ Category
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
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
a touchy but important subject 2: sex, family, and bonobos
sounds good
Do bonobos have families? Apparently not, since they aren’t considered monogamous, and monogamy (even failed or disrupted monogamy) and families go together. Don’t they?
First, let’s look at bonobos and child-rearing. It’s accepted that they’re matriarchal, and non-monogamous, and that humans are, by and large, patriarchal and monogamous. And the human family was surely an emergent ‘property’ of monogamous patriarchy. But before we go into further comparisons, let’s compare bonobos and their non-monogamous cousins, chimps.
Intriguingly, the idea of a cuddly-cosy bonobo parental style versus one which is often disrupted by infanticidal impulses from alpha male chimps, needs to be – adjusted, to say the least. According to observations described in a Scientific American article linked below, bonobo parents – that’s to say, mothers – are less likely to intervene when their child is bullied and mistreated by other adults than chimp mothers with their kids. This must be understood in the context of less extreme aggression compared to chimp culture, which has been known to involve infanticide as well as slaughter between chimp troupes.
So why the hands-off bonobo parenting style? More research is no doubt needed, but the article argues for a more protective mothering style among chimps precisely because of the threats both within and beyond the troupe:
one possible explanation is that the constant threat of violence in chimpanzee life could prime chimps to defend other members of their social group, regardless of the situation. In-group bonds are “a really core part” of chimp society… Chimpanzees “can take big risks to protect each other in encounters [with a hostile group]—like leaping over to cover someone who’s being attacked” with their own body.
So, counter-intuitively, bonobo ‘tough love’ might be a product of a more general easy-going, danger-free environment. And as to families, it’s essentially a single-mother situation, with help from others in the troupe, including males. This is especially so with sons, who are philopatric, while daughters disperse to other troupes. Bonobo mothers are generally extremely protective, one might say controlling, of their sons, including encouraging them, even forcing them, to mate with females of the mother’s choosing. All of which makes me wonder about that female-dominated human society which will surely prevail in the millennia to come, if we manage to survive patriarchy.
And if we do, will we become as boringly sexualised as bonobos, while human civilisation crumbles around us? My prediction, FWIW, is – yes and no. After all, today we have pornography as well as astrophysics, palaeontology, biochemistry, quantum computing (almost?) and artificial intelligence – though not all at the same time. And on the sexual side of things, at least in the WEIRD world, we’ve definitely become more permissive, just in the last few decades, and I can’t see such a trend reversing. So some will be more drawn to the sexual side of life, some to the more analytic, and many will have a foot, or other parts of their anatomy, in both camps. It’s all experimentation after all.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520171625.htm
a touchy but important subject: 1 – sex, fun, sin, etc
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.
I recently read a comment somewhere online claiming that meta-analyses of human consumption of pornography have found that it leads to increased aggression (presumably in males?).
The commentator gave no information about this supposed study, so I can’t attest to its veracity, but given the issues around bonobos, sex, violence, patriarchy, matriarchy, the ‘oldest profession’, human sexual repression (and obsessions), to name a few related topics, I’m very much tempted to open this can of worms, though I’m worried that I’ll never see an end to such stimulating research.
I think I’ll start with bonobos. In a 1993 paper, ‘The evolution of sexuality in chimpanzees and bonobos’, Richard Wrangham wrote this:
Bonobos and chimpanzees have three functions of [nonconceptive] sexual activity in common (paternity confusion, practice sex, and exchange for favours), but only bonobos use sex purely for communication about social relationships. Bonobo hypersexuality appears closely linked to the evolution of female-female alliances. I suggest that these alliances were made possible by relaxed feeding competition, that they were favoured through their effect on reducing sexual coercion, and that they are ultimately responsible for the relaxed social conditions that allowed the evolution of “communication sex.”
I think Wrangham was right about the ‘relaxed feeding competition’, the abundance of resources south of the Congo that made for closeness and reduced the hormone-spiked tendency for the largest and/or pushiest males to compete for domination. One can only speculate, but it seems females began to realise the power of bonding, to protect their sisters against the kind of ‘domestic’ chimpanzee abuse described in the first chapter of Carole Hooven’s Testosterone, and written up (not by Hooven) in a Time magazine article ‘Wife Beaters of Kibale’.
This female bonding, as Wrangham and other researchers such as De Waals have claimed, is highly sexualised. I recall De Waals saying that the behaviour is at times ‘pornographic’, and so regular and time-consuming as to become ‘boring’, presumably for the viewer.
So what about human hypersexuality, and is it linked to pornography? We might get to the thorny question of what pornography actually is later. There’s no doubt that hypersexuality is frowned upon, especially by the patriarchal religious institutions that have dominated ‘western culture’ for millennia – and of course there’s no effective male counterpart to the term ‘nymphomaniac’, though it seems to me that this term has rather lost currency. In any case we’re living through an era fraught with concerns about sex, power and consent, and shifting attitudes about female and male roles, both within families and in the broader community. And sex itself can be gentle, rough, fast, slow, elaborate, basic, intense or humdrum. And so on. It’s surely also something that many people experience less than they’d like to, for a wide variety of reasons.
As I’ve written before, the first intellectual figure to influence me, when I was barely into my teens, was Sigmund Freud. It’s probably fair to say that I discovered Freud at about the same time that I discovered masturbation. Two connected Freudian terms stuck in my head, ‘polymorphous perversity’ and ‘sublimation’. The idea, or my interpretation of it, was that we were first ‘sexualised’ by the discovery that we could manipulate our genitals while thinking of an attractive neighbour or classmate, experiencing thereby a pleasure nowise comparable to anything experienced before, and that we’ve managed somehow to harness this energy and pleasure by channelling it into productive output. This second part of the theory struck me as a bit suss, but on reflection so did the first part. I never experienced polymorphous perversity, just plain old ‘perversity’, if that was the name to be given to my genitally-based delirium. And the fact that I, for one, wasn’t able to ‘sublimate’ these sensations into keeping up with my schoolwork or pondering the nature of the universe, made me feel something of a failure, and even, perhaps, a non-polymorphous pervert.
But I’m being too hard on myself – after all, I was exploring Freud at this time, as well as reading encyclopaedia articles on British history as well as on Einstein, Hitler and Albert Schweitzer, and masturbation was a bedroom secret. Unlike the bonobo situation, and that, of course, is the point. I couldn’t exactly go into breakfast and share with the family how invigorated and beneficent I felt, after a good wank.
Again, as I write, I feel I’m stepping into territory where angels fear to tread. Some years ago I read Jared Diamond’s little book, Why is sex fun? I don’t think it taught me anything new, and I understood why it didn’t need to be long. On the other hand, a work with the title – Why is sex so problematic for humans? – could easily run to several large volumes.
An easy target for blame is surely religion. I was shocked recently when the government of our nearest neighbour, Indonesia, unanimously passed a law declaring sex outside marriage a crime requiring imprisonment (presumably only for humans). The unfathomable stupidity of such legislation is beyond belief, and I had thought that Indonesia was a moderate Moslem country – though one might fairly argue that moderate Islam is as much a contradiction in terms as moderate Catholicism. The proportion of women in Indonesia’s parliament is at its highest at around 22%, but it would need a majority (which will never happen in a Moslem country) for any real change to occur.
Anyway, the topic I began with, and which I seem to be avoiding, was pornography. But actually I’m not avoiding it, I was going to use it, and prostitution, as an entree into sexual behaviour, in the WEIRD world, more generally, and in trying to find a healthy way of balancing our needs and aims in a future more feminist society – for it will become more feminist, of that I’m certain.
So, look forward to more of this waffle.
References
Carole Hooven, Testosterone, 2020
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/6/indonesia-passes-legislation-outlawing-sex-outside-marriage
on certain ejected fluids
Some years ago I read Bonk: the curious coupling of sex and science, by the popular science writer Mary Roach, having read one of her previous books (Stiff – and no, it wasn’t because I thought it’d be about sex), and of course I found it compelling, but I recall being disappointed at the lack of information in some areas, one of which has come back to me thanks to a YouTube video recently watched. The colloquial term is ‘squirting’, sometimes also referred to as female ejaculation. What’s that about, and is it just urine, with a few womanly additives? That’s what I want to explore today.
So according to popular YouTuber Rena Malik MD, squirting is ‘the emission of fluid from the urethra, during sexual arousal or orgasm, that occurs in some women’. The urethra (I’m writing as a none too sexually experienced male here) is the tube through which urine from the bladder leaves the body, and it ranges in length from about 3.8cm in women to about 20cm in men, and most of that male length is external, and is sometimes called the penis. Malik also educates me about the Skene’s gland. These glands are located ‘around and beneath the urethra and are homologous to the male prostate gland’, so these different glands start to emerge in embryonic development. Again according to Malik ‘the theory is that during sexual arousal these Skene’s glands fill with fluid, then during orgasm the pelvic floor muscles contract, putting pressure on the spongy tissues of the urethra’, causing fluid to be ejected. The question again is, what precisely does this fluid consist of? And one ‘issue’, if you can call it that, is that if it’s just pee, with a few additives, why don’t men pee when their urethra/penis is aroused or manipulated? And we must thank the universe that they don’t.
There appears to be more mystery around these matters than there should be, given their centrality to a sexually satisfying and mind-expanding life. So what do we know?
This, I’m finding, isn’t an easy topic to research. I mentioned female ejaculation, which Malik describes as something quite separate from squirting, while others seem to disagree. A 2015 paper, ‘Nature and origin of “squirting” in female sexuality’, the abstract of which is posted on PubMed, concludes with this:
The present data based on ultrasonographic bladder monitoring and biochemical analyses indicate that squirting is essentially the involuntary emission of urine during sexual activity, although a marginal contribution of prostatic secretions to the emitted fluid often exists.
This accords with my guess, and it also, perhaps, provides a clue to why it’s an exclusively female experience. And here I have to admit that my research comes from viewing Japanese sex videos, in which women are induced to squirt by manual manipulation, often vigorous, of the upper wall of the vagina, near where both the clitoris and the urethral opening sit. It’s not hard to imagine that such vigorous pressure, on both the urethra and the clitoris, by a male or female sex performer with savour faire, can produce the required result. And clearly, males just aren’t anatomically open to such an experience. And of course it doesn’t always require manual manipulation, as my scientific researches have found. Some women are able to squirt through standard sexual intercourse, or by the use of a vibrator or some such device. And presumably some are not. After all, every set of female and male genitalia is as anatomically unique as is every human face. We’re just not looking closely enough!
Now, in inquiring into this, I’ve found commentators claiming that ‘it’s definitely not urine’. They must surely be going not by the look of the fluid – it certainly looks like pee – but by smell and, dare I say, taste. I’ve never tried the taste test myself, and I must admit to being slightly averse to sniffing pee, but I do know that pee can come in slightly different colours and this is obviously due to variations in its chemical composition due to diet, illness and the like. And it would seem obvious to me that ‘squirt’ varies similarly, but also due to the ‘marginal contribution of prostatic secretions’ above-mentioned.
So, are squirting and female ejaculation the same things? Off the top of my head I would say it’s just semantics. An ejaculate (noun) is, arguably, something you ejaculate (verb). It could be vomit, or blood, or, common amongst dictatorial types, verbal diarrhoea. And so I disagree with Dr Malik when she says that ‘ejaculation and squirting are two different things’, though I think she’s trying to make the distinction between what women sometimes release during sex/masturbation, and the semen released by men. In fact she’s fallen for the patriarchal myth, or just the patriarchal way of putting things, that only males ejaculate. Then again, maybe it’s me that’s trying to preserve the term in its broadest sense. Most dictionaries define ejaculation specifically in terms of semen, and describe its broader use as ‘dated’. So I don’t know if I’m an old fuddy-duddy or a post-modern feminist seeking renovation of a patriarchalised term. Enfin, je m’en fous de tout ça!
One more point. It’s often claimed that squirting is a more or less involuntary occurrence. It’s said to happen unexpectedly, causing a degree of shock and embarrassment. Women just can’t control themselves, as we all know, while men ejaculate by means of freely-willed effort. It almost takes us back to the days of Aristotle – men are the seed-bearers, women the mere receptacle. It’s enough to make me piss myself laughing.
All in all this is a most stimulating topic. I might try to get a handle on the g-spot next, so to speak.
Reference
Mary Roach, Bonk: the curious coupling of sex and science, 2008
Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Male nipples and clitoral ripples’, in Bully for brontosaurus, 1991
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
stuff on bonobos, gender and sex
I recall a while back reading, in Australia’s premier science magazine, Cosmos, that some 6000 species have been found to engage in homosexual activity, so far. I’ve read similar claims on other scientific sites, and I can’t help but wonder, what does that even mean? Do cats, rats and bats know that what they’re doing is frowned upon by the Catholic Church, and by Islamic governments worldwide? More interestingly, do any of these creatures have any clear idea of what they’re doing? Do they actually know whether they’re male or female? Or that they’re actually engaging in ‘sex’, ‘masturbation’ or whatever?
Mammals can apparently differentiate between males and females of their own species primarily via odour – pheromones and such. This of course is very different from having a concept of maleness and femaleness, though it does help mightily in terms of reproduction, which is what it’s all about from an evolutionary perspective. It also makes me wonder – do some male cats smell more thoroughly male than others? Do some female pigs have an almost-male odour? Is there a spectrum of male-to-female odours given off by male/female cats/dogs/pigs/humans/bonobos? Do vets, who, for example, treat a lot of dogs, take a whiff and think ‘wow, this dog is so male.’? More importantly, do, say, female dogs scent a difference between mucho male dogs and mildly male dogs?
Getting back to all that homosexual activity detected in innumerable species, clearly it’s not about reproduction, but it’s not likely to be all about gender confusion either. In bonobos, as in humans, it’s mostly about good dirty fun, and as to species further removed from us, maybe we should mind our own business.
Amongst humans, at least in some parts, there’s an obsession with where we place ourselves in the growing list of sex/gender categories available. And of course in other parts there’s a refusal to accept more than two categories. And then there’s the most sensible option, to me, of accepting gender fluidity and not getting too obsessed with labels. I might call this the bonobo option, but then again, bonobos are generally described as female dominant….
So I’ve been looking at some research into the social system of bonobos and what we can learn about what they might know about femaleness, maleness and who should dominate who. For example, it’s been ascertained that female bonobos dominate males through group (female-female) bonding, but what happens in dyadic (one-on-one) interactions between males and females?
In a March 2022 paper entitled ‘Dominance style and intersexual hierarchy in wild bonobos from Wamba’, researchers ‘tested whether female intersexual dominance is dependent on female coalitions or whether it still arises when only dyadic interactions are considered’. The researchers were testing a prediction – that in these dyadic interactions, female dominance would disappear or be reduced, and this is in fact what they found. Considering that there’s a slight, and apparently narrowing, dimorphism in favour of males, this shouldn’t be surprising. Interestingly, an earlier (2006) study of captive bonobos found no clear dominance hierarchy. Its conclusion:
The dominance style of bonobos may be loose and differentially expressed in diverse groups or in the same group, along with shifting conditions.
As I’ve written before, bonobo society isn’t matriarchal to the degree that chimp society is patriarchal – the differences are more subtle. What’s important, to me at least, is that bonobos aren’t predominantly patriarchal, and this marks a difference in their behaviour, both within and between troops. That difference is a positive one, less violent and more caring and sharing. More loving, one might say. It’s what, as the song goes, the (human) world needs now.
It’s been claimed that bonobos engage in sex in all varieties, but it seems to me that there’s only one variety that counts – an encounter that leaves both, or all, parties, feeling better, happier and more relaxed. This doesn’t mean that we all end up lying around in a sexual stupor, which of course doesn’t happen with bonobos. As with every other species, they have to ‘make a living’, to feed themselves and their families, and to multiply, or at least replace themselves. And we humans aim for much more, to deeply understand our bodies, our history and our universe, to endlessly expand the horizons of knowledge and invention. We also aim to be better in our treatment of each other and the planet we depend upon. War, aka male ultra-violence, is very much still with us. Those females who have engaged in it have done so within the context of a violently male world. Human patriarchy has been so historically dominant that it’s almost beyond us to imagine a human world without it. That’s why the example of bonobos, our so-close relatives, is so precious to me, and why it’s so exasperating that so few people I meet know the first thing about them.
So, what about sex? Is it really necessary to curb our sexual drives in order to build civilisation, as Freud essentially argued? After all, the ancient Romans were great civilisation builders while enjoying open and vigorous sex lives – at least for males. Even today the slut/stud dichotomy holds sway, though it’s slowly changing. And the fact that there’s a massive not-so-underground industry called ‘pornography'(surely a questionable term) seems a testament to our hypocrisy over sex, though this is a minefield I’m reluctant to explore. I will say that the dangers of the sex industry seem to me like the dangers of drug use, all the more problematic when driven underground. It’s a horny issue – I mean a thorny one, which I’ll write about soon, when I’ve boned up on the subject a bit more.
References
bonobos, chimps, theory of mind, and sex
bonobo mother and child
Jacinta: So how is the bonobo influence faring these days – in Afghanistan, Iran, Trumpistan, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel and Burma, to name a few…?
Canto: Okay, enough goat-getting. I’m still fascinated by how bonobos – more genetically similar to chimps, of course, than to humans – came to be so different. It’s not genetics, so what is it? It can’t just be diet, or habitat. And, my feeling is, if you know how something works, you can build it yourself. Like, if you know how beehives work you can build your own beehive, which we’ve done.
Jacinta: Not quite the same as building a new social system methinks. Though they have tried, haven’t they? ‘Let’s go to the Americas and build a Paraiso en el Nuevo Mundo‘… ‘But isn’t it already inhabited?’ ‘Yeah, we might need a bit of rubbish-clearing to start with’.
Canto: You’d think that our discovery of the bonobo lifestyle, really only a few decades ago, its feminism, its relative pacifism, its great community spirit, not to mention the sex, would be of interest to more than just a few primatologists, especially given the world of warfare, rapine and religious numbskullduggery that so many of us are still trapped within – it makes me scream with frustration.
Jacinta: It seems that the timber of humanity is more crooked than that of bonobos. I reckon we took a really wrong turn a few million years ago, so now we’re lost in the patriarchal jungle and we’ll never find our way back.
Canto: But bonobos are showing us the way don’t you see? And if humans didn’t make life so difficult for them, and their habitat wasn’t so fouled and fenced in by human depredations, they’d be so numerous, such a dominant force in the landscape, they’d put us to shame.
Jacinta: Haha we’re a pretty shameless species I’m afraid. Anyway, aren’t bonobos the anomalous ones? Chimps vastly outnumber them, despite the same human depredations. It be Nature, and what do please Evolution. If they hadn’t been separated into two species by the formation of the Congo River, they’d still be one species, and patriarchal, I’m betting.
Canto: Wow, who’s side are you on? Whether bonobos’ ancestors were patriarchal or not is beside the point to me. The point is, they’re matriarchal now, who cares when it started. And they’re happy, and successful. And we humans want to be happy, or happier, and more successful. So we might learn from bonobos about being less aggressive, less cruel, less exploitative, less competitive, and more caring, more playful, more communal, more uninhibited…
Jacinta: Okay, okay, I get it. But I’m wondering about that aggression, or at least that competitiveness. Hasn’t it been to our advantage as a species? The space race, the battles between competing scientific theories, between political ideologies and the like, haven’t they sharpened the collective human mind? Aren’t bonobos a bit intellectually lazy? I’ve read somewhere that chimps are more consistent toolmakers than bonobos. Or would you rather we lived in some timeless hippy-bonobo nirvana?
Canto: Okay, let’s look at the evidence, or what we have of it. Michael Tomasello et al published a research study in the journal PloS One in 2010, entitled ‘Differences in the Cognitive Skills of Bonobos and Chimpanzees’. Here’s the whole abstract from it:
While bonobos and chimpanzees are both genetically and behaviorally very similar, they also differ in significant ways. Bonobos are more cautious and socially tolerant while chimpanzees are more dependent on extractive foraging, which requires tools. The similarities suggest the two species should be cognitively similar while the behavioral differences predict where the two species should differ cognitively. We compared both species on a wide range of cognitive problems testing their understanding of the physical and social world. Bonobos were more skilled at solving tasks related to theory of mind or an understanding of social causality, while chimpanzees were more skilled at tasks requiring the use of tools and an understanding of physical causality. These species differences support the role of ecological and socio-ecological pressures in shaping cognitive skills over relatively short periods of evolutionary time.
Mirroring individual differences observed in theory of mind development in human children, the more cautious and socially tolerant bonobos outperformed chimpanzees on the theory of mind scale. Meanwhile, the prolific tool-using chimpanzee, whose survival is more dependent on extractive foraging, outperformed bonobos in the tool-use and causality scale.
This pattern can potentially be interpreted as suggesting that bonobos are more skilled at solving problems requiring an understanding of social causality, while chimpanzees are more skilled at solving problems relating to physical causality. In contrast, the two species did not differ in the scales measuring their understanding of problems related to spatial comprehension, discriminating quantities, using and comprehending communicative signals and learning from others via a social demonstration. This pattern of findings provides support for the hypothesis that socio-ecological pressures play an important role in shaping the cognitive differences observed between these species.Long-term observations of wild chimpanzees have suggested that female chimpanzees acquire more proficient tool-using techniques faster than males, and other studies show a similar pattern in captive bonobos. Therefore, it may be that socio-ecological pressures play a more limited role in producing cognitive differences based on sex in these species, but it also suggests that female Panins pay closer attention to others which allows them to learn and solve social problems more quickly and skillfully than males (while both sexes perform similarly in physical cognition tasks).
bonobos, an outlier in the primate world, and yet…
any excuse for a nice bonobo pic
In trying to develop a bonobo world with human characteristics, or perhaps more realistically a human world with bonobo characteristics, I suspect it’s best not to start by disparaging the male (human) brain as ‘unevolved’ or distinctly inferior to that of the female – something I heard in an interview with a male psychotherapist recently. Firstly, it make no sense to say that a brain, or a human, or a dog, a dolphin or a donkey is ‘unevolved’. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution, which is about ongoing change to most effectively adapt to a changing environment. And this includes social environments. The Andamanese, a tiny population living on scattered islands in the Bay of Bengal from about 25,000 years ago, and driven almost to extinction in the 18th and 19th centuries by the introduction of measles, influenza, pneumonia, and alcohol, have recovered somewhat and preserve their simple lifestyle via extreme hostility to interlopers, and are no more unevolved than were the ancient Hominins who once lived on the Indonesian island of Flores. It’s true, of course, that evolution can be competitive, and some species – or sub-species or cultures – can win out over others, but to describe this as due to being ‘more evolved’ rather over-simplifies matters. Each species evolves to survive and thrive in its own niche, and may thrive in that way for an eon, but may be swept away by another invasive species, or by relatively sudden climate change, or by very sudden events such as meteor showers or volcanic eruptions.
In the same interview, the psychotherapist described the male brain, including his own, as sick and in some sense mentally unbalanced compared to the female brain. And you can go onto YouTube and other sources to find dozens of mini-lectures and expert opinions on the male versus the female brain.
However, it might surprise people to know that there is no categorical difference between the male and female brain, at least not in the sense there is, usually, between a male and female body. Put another way, if a neurologist with decades of experience was given a disembodied brain and asked about its sex, she wouldn’t be able to say, categorically, whether it was male or female. There are statistical differences – males have, on average, more ‘grey matter’ (individual neurons) while females have more ‘white matter’ (myelinated axons connecting neurons) – but there is great diversity within this frame, which should hardly surprise us. Our brains develop within the womb, subject to the diet and environmental conditions of our mothers, and genetic and epigenetic factors have their role to play. In early childhood neural connections multiply rapidly in response to a multitude of more or less unique conditioning factors, and new connections continue to be made well into adulthood, resulting in more than eight billion tediously unique noggins clashing and combining in tediously unique ways.
So, to me, it’s behaviour that we need to start with. Of course I’m interested in the nervous system and the endocrine system of bonobos, but that’s because I’m first and foremost taken by their behaviour. I’m encouraged by what I see as changes in male behaviour in the WEIRD world, but then I was told recently that male violence against women is actually increasing. Of course these things are hard to measure as not all violence is reported, and the very concept of violence may be disputed, but a quick look at figures for Australia, which surely qualifies as a WEIRD nation, suggests that my sense of things is right:
Experiences of partner violence in the 12 months before the survey (last 12 months) remained relatively stable for both men and women between 2005 and 2016. However, between 2016 and 2021–22 the proportion of women who experienced partner violence decreased from 1.7% in 2016 to 0.9% in 2021–22.
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (Australian Government)
Whatever one might think of these figures, there’s little evidence of an increase in male violence (against females), at least here, in this teeny WEIRD nation. So maybe it’s places like Australia, and New Zealand, far from some of the major global threats, slowly building a multi-ethnic culture (largely proof against the massive social divisions stifling the divided ‘USA’), an oasis of 26 million compared to the bonobo oasis of maybe 20 thousand, a region that still likes to think of itself as ‘young and free’, and prepared to experiment with our politics and culture, maybe it’s here that bonobo-style caring-and-sharing behaviour can start to make some headway (but of course even as I write this it strikes me as ridiculous).
The trouble, of course, is that it’s hard to focus on such a possible future without sex rearing its not-so-ugly head. In human culture we’re obsessed with beauty (both male and female) in a positive way (though bad luck if you happen not to be physically attractive), and obsessed with sex in a much more confused but largely negative way (‘licentiousness’, a very human term, is generally condemned in all societies). Do bonobos distinguish between each other in terms of ‘good looks’? If not, when did we, or our ancestors start to do so? There has of course been much talk of ‘sexual selection’ in anthropology, going back to Darwin, but in bonobo society, where female-female sex predominates but sex, generally in the form of mutual masturbation, occurs among and between all age groups and genders, sexual selection (for breeding purposes) would only occasionally operate. And after all, masturbation is about one’s own erogenous zones, which, like being tickled, are best aroused by another, no matter what they look like. Think of a dog masturbating on your leg.
One might argue that religion has a lot to answer for, in so firmly linking sex to shame and transgression, while another might argue, along with Freud, that sexual sublimation was a necessary prerequisite for human civilisation. I’m still trying to work out my own view on this, but I’d surmise that the link between sex and shame existed in humans long before the Abrahamic religions took it to extremes. And unfortunately, much of the online material on our history of sex and shame contains a lot of bollocks, so I’ve reached a dead end there.
So here’s some guesswork. It may have started with the wearing of minimal clothing to protect the reproductive parts, both from damage and from gawkers – out of sight, out of mind. Perhaps this was initiated by females, but more likely (in the case of female genitalia) by males. On this topic I’ve often read claims that pre-agricultural or non-agricultural societies were less patriarchal, and I’ve even adopted that view myself, but I suspect the difference was only in degree, not in kind.
As to patriarchy itself, consider this. Bonobos and chimps split from each other 2 million years ago, at most. From that time on, bonobos survived and thrived in a relatively circumscribed, densely forested region south of the Congo. Chimps on the other hand are more numerous and wide-ranging (with more varied habitats), and are currently divided into four sub-species, from the west to the east of sub-Saharan Africa, and their number in the wild, though hard to determine with any precision, is generally estimated as about ten times that of bonobos. And all chimps are patriarchal.
The dating of the CHLCA (the last chimpanzee-human common ancestor, and note that bonobos are excluded from this reference) has been a subject of ongoing debate and analysis. Here’s how Wikipedia puts it:
The chimpanzee–human last common ancestor (CHLCA) is the last common ancestor shared by the extant Homo (human) and Pan (chimpanzee and bonobo) genera of Hominini. Estimates of the divergence date vary widely from thirteen to five million years ago.
Obviously, this was before the chimp-bonobo divergence, and considering speculation by anthropologists that bonobo ‘female power’ might be linked to a more frugivorous diet and less of a hunting-killing lifestyle (due to their restriction to an area rich in fruits, nuts, seeds and small game), it seems likely that the CHLCA was already more patriarchally inclined. Consider also that the genus Homo sapiens, long believed to date to no more than 200,000 years ago, and arising in eastern sub-Saharan Africa, has recently been dated to over 300,000 years from remains found in faraway Morocco. That suggests the traversing of vast regions, and a diet much richer in meat than that of bonobos. So, while the hunter-gatherer term has been passionately disputed by some, it’s generally accepted – and it makes sense to me – that there was some division of labour, as implied by the term, and that it would likely be largely gender-based. So, our history, and our ancestry, has been almost entirely patriarchal.
However, this doesn’t define our future. Patriarchy is breaking down in the WEIRD world, albeit slowly. And there are, depressingly, many forces in opposition to female empowerment, especially in the non-WEIRD world. I’ll focus on that in my next post.