Posts Tagged ‘bonobos’
professor Dave insists…
chimps is me
There’s a science promoter in the USA who calls himself ‘Professor Dave’, and who has, in recent times, been trying to give another science communicator and general ‘vodcaster’, if that’s the term, Sabine Hossenfelder, a very hard time, calling her, rather meaninglessly to my mind, a ‘fraud’. Hossenfelder, whose videos covering a whole variety of topics besides physics I generally enjoy, has, it seems, chosen to ignore him, which I think is the best approach.
Recently this Professor Dave (I suspect he uses this moniker to indicate that he has more expertise and authority than your average bloke, but ‘really’ he’s just like any Tom, Dick or Dave) has tried upping the ante by collecting six physicists to whip Hossenfelder into shape, or perhaps just to whip her. Hopefully she’ll just keep ignoring it all.
Hossenfelder is a German theoretical physicist who has written a couple of books and co-written another, and has an impressive Wikipedia profile, referenced below. It makes no mention of fraudulent activities, proven or suspected.
I’m not inclined to investigate Professor Dave’s background, but I have no reason to believe he’s not a real professor, though probably not of physics, as he has spent much of his time debunking creationists and flat-earthers, as explained in an interview he did on the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast recently. I’ve also heard him on a vodcast with Gutsick Gibbon (aka Erika, a favourite science communicator of mine), criticising and mocking creationists.
I have no idea why Prof Dave is so obsessed with Hossenfelder, and why he has gathered such a team to ‘expose’ or ‘debunk’ her, and I have no appetite for listening to this six-person attack. I do, of course, wonder at the purpose of it all. Modern theoretical physics/astrophysics is, I know, a highly contested field, and has been for quite some time. I don’t pretend to have any expertise whatsoever in the field, though I’ve read books by Leonard Susskind, Sean Carroll and Lee Smolin – and I’m regularly in the Einsteinium League on brilliant.org, so there you go.
So I’m writing this, though of course nobody will read it, just to get my irritation with this bloke off my chest, and because surely enough is enough with this Hoffenfelder-bashing – and just to give an idea of how low Prof Dave is prepared to go, he describes her as ‘a disgusting fraud peddling propaganda for fascist oligarchs’. Does one laugh or cry?
With this kind of introduction I’ve chosen not to listen to the 3.5 hour video attacking Hossenfelder. I did write a comment to Prof Dave, basically saying WTF in a polite way, and he responded by describing me as a moron – how did he know? And that, of course, I should listen to the video that he curated. Well, as much as I’m interested in physics, and science generally, I’d rather cut my dick off.
All of this stuff makes me think of my favourite topic – bonobos. I do wonder how many of these Hossenfelder-bashing physicists are female, because my impression of Prof Dave is that there’s nothing of the bonobo in him, he’s very much of a chimp, a wannabe alpha male chimp at that. Insulting people comes as second nature to him. As mentioned, he called me a moron. Of course I’m not a moron, but much more importantly, I’ve never called anyone else a moron in my life. Well, maybe as an adolescent, but then people grow up.
Finally, I want to go back to Prof Dave’s bizarre claims about Hossenfelder’s peddling ‘fascist propaganda’, which I read for the first time today. This is more than just repellently ludicrous stuff, it’s quite unhinged and raises questions about the man’s mental health. More importantly, it makes me worry for Hossenfelder’s safety. I believe she resides in Germany, and would certainly have no interest in visiting the US, especially in these times.
Vive les bonobos!
References
on sex, consent, offspring and bonobos
So all this Epstein/Maxwell/Trump stuff has been dominating the news, even here to some extent, and it obviously raises questions more generally about sex, power and all that pabulum. In my novel In Elizabeth, published centuries ago, I described how the main character, Danny, was, on his 16th birthday, asked by his 14-year old girlfriend, Anne-Marie (let’s call her), if he wanted to have sex with her. A gift. She was the most beautiful girl Danny had ever seen, and she assured him that she had done it before. So they did it, on Anne-Marie’s parents’ double bed. The whole thing lasted only a few minutes, with the removal of as few clothes as possible, and was interrupted by her little brother, whom she was baby-sitting. “Ummm, I’m telling mum’, he said. Fortunately, he was talked out of it, and yes, this was autobiographical.
I had no idea at the time whether what we were doing was legal or not, and frankly couldn’t have cared less. I should also say that my sex life was pretty well all downhill from there.
Much later, after this novel was published, a fellow teacher, who had read it, questioned me about this sex scene. Was it really true, she asked, looking mildly disturbed. That was perhaps the first time I ever considered the ethics or legality of the situation. Even so, I didn’t bother to look into it. As to Anne-Marie, very shortly afterwards, she abandoned me for a much bigger kid who, seeing her beauty, kept forcing me into ‘play fights’ in which, of course, he bested me. I was never built to be an alpha (though my studies have taught me that the alpha doesn’t have to be the biggest). I never saw Anne-Marie again. I hope she did all right, she was nice.
So now I’m looking into those legalities, and I’ve learned about Romeo and Juliet clauses. AI again:
In Australian states with Romeo and Juliet clauses, also known as close-in-age exemptions, consensual sexual activity between teenagers of similar ages is not criminalised, even if they are below the general age of consent. These clauses exist to recognize that adolescent sexual development is a natural process. The specific age differences allowed under these clauses vary by jurisdiction, but generally allow for a maximum age gap of two years.
the legislation in all states and territories states that children and young people below the age of consent are not considered by law to have the capacity to consent, even if the other requirements for consent appear to be met (e.g. understanding what activity they are agreeing to, voluntarily agreeing to or suggesting sexual activity without being coerced or intimidated, communicating their agreement)
So, considering that both Anne-Marie and I were under 17, we didn’t have the legal capacity to consent to what we both consented to, but since there was no sexual assault involved, the act, which occurred a little over 53 years ago, would not be pursued in criminal or civil terms due to statute of limitations provisions. And yet we did both consent, being really quite capacious for our age, if not quite legally.
Again, the age of consent in Germany is 14, but understandably there are conditions attached, relating to age differences and any sign of coercion. But what I remember reading, and I do hope it’s true, is that sex education is a vital part of their school curriculum. This of course should be a feature of every country’s education system, as well as the availability of contraceptives.
This isn’t an issue for bonobos of course. Humans can get pregnant all year round, unlike other apes and animals generally. Can’t something be done to make us less fertile? And while we’re at it, to make us less combative and more bonobosexual? Wouldn’t it be great if such a word caught on. Join the bonobosexual club. Mutual masturbation is their theme, and they seem to be built for it. Meanwhile, in those parts of humanity turned backward by religion, it’s a crime to have any sex outside of marriage, that weird invention.
Not a problem in Elizabeth, though, the town of my youth. The problem there was ignorance, or innocence. Young teens following their instincts, then getting pregnant. A massive, life-changing experience. That was in the seventies, and I can only hope that teachers and parents are now educating their kids about rumpy-pumpy consequences.
Anyway, out of all this, the mystery of our unique proneness to pregnancy (the Guinness Book of Records claims the highest number of births to one individual is 69, in 27 confinements – as if – and there are claims almost as unbelievable), is something I’d like to explore. Bonobos and chimps generally give birth to no more than five or six little ones in a lifetime. It’s all to do with hormones, pheromones and being ‘in season’. Why are human animals so different? When did that happen? What about Neanderthals, and earlier hominins?
To be continued, perhaps…
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
more on bonobos, sex and ‘evolutionary psychology’
don’t worry, bonobo-human males can still be tough guys…
So, back to the essay by Ryan Ellsworth, which bears the mocking title, ‘Dr. Strangeape, or How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bonobo‘.
As for loving the bonobo, an animal I’ve written about many times, I’m reminded of when I first learned about these creatures, on ABC radio’s Science Show back in the eighties. The reporter finished the segment semi-facetiously saying ‘Vive les bonobos! I want to be one!’ I’ve never quite been the same since.
And going back further in my history, to my childhood and teen years, feeling trapped by my parents’ loveless and somewhat toxic marriage, I read, or at least skimmed, Bruno Bettelheim’s Children of the Dream, which told of a more open system of child-rearing in which, or so I imagined, one could choose one’s own parental figures and protectors, within some kind of ‘open field’ of role models and playmates. A sense of entrapment and yearning…
The point I’m making here is that, for me, bonobos are a touchstone, just as the potential of the kibbutzim was a touchstone in my youth. And however one thinks of agriculturalism, the development of enclosed nuclear families behind walls of ownership, has proven disastrous for some as well as being a boon for others, in terms of inheritance, both genetic and material.
But let’s return to Ellsworth’s critique. Take this intriguing passage:
Block refers to babies to care for, and reputations to protect, but does not seem to understand the significance of these two things for understanding human sex differences in sexual desire. Perhaps she privately does, but to acknowledge the significance of these forces on the evolution of human sexuality would severely compromise her arguments, as it demands recognition of the fact that women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men. To argue that females are as interested as males in sexual variety is to buy into a sexist worldview wherein the male is the typical specimen of the species by which to compare females (Saxon, 2012). Although ostensibly parading under the guise of liberation, such a position is no less sexist or anti-feminist than is the oppression of women’s sexuality.
Eh what? As to women having reputations to protect, I’m reminded of the women who were stoned to death for adultery in early Judaeo-Christian days, while the men received little more than a finger-wag. That would surely have made a difference to women’s overt behaviour. That ‘women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity equal to men’ says nothing about the actual desires of women – surely an individual thing – and everything about societal pressures within patriarchy. And Ellsworth’s claim here that suggesting females might be as interested in sexual variety as males is sexist because males have been doing it (with impunity) for generations – and so this is the ‘natural’ pattern for males but not for females – is, to me, a mind-bogglingly sexist argument. He has surely got to be kidding.
So before I go on with this analysis, let’s be clear about something. The reason that bonobos are something of an inspiration – for me at least – is that they are female dominant, and they are less violent than chimps. The sex thing is, for me, the cherry on top, while I also recognise that the sexual activity – mostly mutual masturbation – and the reduction in violence, and greater empathy, are intimately connected.
And they’re our closest living relatives, so we can learn, by studying how they came to differ from chimps, and trying to understand how humans came to be so chimpishly patriarchal, lessons for our future.
While things are changing, we live in an extremely patriarchal society. There are some 195 nations recognised currently, and 18 of them have a female head of state. That’s less than 10%, and this is likely a record for female leadership. Another source of power is wealth, a much murkier issue, but I don’t think it would be unreasonable to claim that 99% of the world’s wealth is in the hands of men. A world ‘turned upside down’ in terms of these figures, however delicious to contemplate, isn’t going to happen in the lifetimes of any of our great-great-great-great grandchildren. But that’s only a couple of hundred years, at most. Who knows how many thousands of years it took for patriarchy to become the human norm?
We can look, though, at so-called hunter-gatherer societies. I say ‘so-called’ because I’ve been told that this is now a much-contested term. Writers and researchers such as Bruce Pascoe and Bill Gammage have focussed on Australian Aboriginals’ understanding and treatment of their land to provide a much more nuanced picture of their lifestyle, though this has become politically contested here to a tedious degree. It may also be reasonable to assume that the blanket term ‘Aboriginal culture’ is too facile, given their multitude of language groups, and the variety of environments upon which they depended. In any case there is a standard view that ‘men’s business’ and ‘women’s business’ were/are separate but complementary. And hunter-gatherer groups or tribes in Africa, some still extant, are generally regarded as egalitarian, suggesting that this was the norm for all humans before what we term ‘civilisation’, the building of civil structures, both material and in terms of operational hierarchy.
Okay, back again to Ellsworth. He argues that Block ignores or downplays the political side of bonobo sex:
If Block had examined the political side of sex, it would have become clear that among bonobos sex is a mechanism of achieving and maintaining status, and a means of social manipulation wielded mainly by females. Most noncopulatory sexual behavior in bonobos takes the form of genito-genital rubbing between adult females, with subordinate females using their sexual receptivity to curry favor from higher-ranking females, most often in the context of feeding. Note that selection pressures for variety and quantity of reproductive partners are not the same as those for nonconceptive sexual activity such as genito-genital rubbing, as female bonobos display discriminative mate choice around the time of ovulation.
Ellsworth seems to ignore that bonobos also engage in this sexual activity for pleasure, just as humans do in the post-contraceptive, post-Catholic WEIRD world. And I’m not ignoring the fact that bonobo females engage in all that genito-genital rubbing to create bonds within the female community which, inter alia, keeps uppity males in their place. And, yes, females display discriminative mate choice, not only for themselves but also for their offspring, as Martin Surbeck cutely describes in a New Scientist article:
If your mum gets too involved in your love life, spare a thought for bonobos. Females of these great apes, which are closely related to chimpanzees, help their sons with hook-ups, guard the young lovers while they mate, and even haul rival males off females mid-sex.
Interesting to note that it’s their sons’ sex lives that concerns them, not their daughters’. Shades of the old patriarchy?
But Ellsworth, I think, downplays the pleasure-bonding aspects of bonobo sexuality in favour of the political – a typically male bias. Both are important, but it’s surely better to mix your politics with wankery than warfare, another reason for considering bonobos as an archetype and exploring why humans went the way of patriarchy – and extreme patriarchy at that. Anyhoo, let’s consider this passage:
….. maybe in some respects bonobos are similar to humans in sexual behavior, but not in the ways that Block intends to convey, and the differences are far greater than the similarities. If we do wish to focus on similarities, the most apparent and basic of all is that in both species sexual behavior is not a public good, but a commodity.
Again Ellsworth is keen to focus on the political over the pleasurable, making a false either/or distinction. But he doesn’t speculate anywhere in the essay about why bonobo females became dominant – he’s too interested in claiming why they cannot in any way be seen as a model for humanity. The essay pushes this argument with monotonous regularity, combined with ridicule. Frans de Waal, on the other hand, offers this, in Bonobo, the forgotten ape:
Bonobo society offers females a more relaxed existence. Females control the resources, dominate the males, and have little to compete over aside from their sons’ careers. The rich forest habitat of the bonobo evidently permits such an organisation. Our ancestors, however, adapted to a much harsher environment.
Frans de Waal, Bonobo, the forgotten ape, p 135
This more plentiful and relaxed environment is worth speculating on in our post-industrial age – at least in the WEIRD world. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, in my own youth I worked in several factories – Simpson-Pope, Wilkins Servis, Atco Structures, Tubemakers of Australia, and Griffin Press. They have all since closed down – not, I hope because of me. They’ve become obsolete, or mechanised, or shipped offshore. Hard, physical labour is becoming rarer in our modern society, in which brain work is much more valued. The rich, post-industrial habitat of WEIRD human society offers females a more relaxed existence. Females can control the resources, dominate the males, and have little to compete over aside from their sons’ and daughters’ careers.
Interestingly, it’s been found that bonobo males engage in lots of fighting for hierarchical positions and the attention of the females – just not in as deadly a way as chimps.
And meanwhile, there’s that sex thing….
References
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300115
Frans de Waal & Frans Lanting, Bonobo: the forgotten ape, 1997
https://www.science.org/content/article/bonobos-hippie-chimps-might-not-be-so-mellow-after-all
on gender, and bonobos
So there seems to be a lot of noise about gender issues these days, and it has been a topic of much interest to me from pre-pubescent days. I wrote in my novel In Elizabeth about how, even in primary school, I stood at the back of my class line during ‘school assembly’ and surveyed my classmates in terms of ‘likeability’, not so much in sexual terms, though there was probably an element of that. It interested me to think, or feel, that those who attracted me least were the ‘girly girls’ and ‘the boysy boys’, even if I could only judge from the clothes they wore, which may well have been chosen by their parents. But also something in the way they moved, which attracted or repulsed me like no other school-kid.
Later, into my teens, with schooldays happily left behind, I discovered Bowie, and Lou Reed’s Transformer album, and played deliciously transgressive games with lipstick and stockings and a tucked-away penis. It was a phase, you might say, but I do recall that in the pre-pubescent era, I found boys who were just as physically attractive as girls, an attraction that faded with the appearance of facial hair and signs of muscularity. Broken voices might have broken the spell too.
One term that I never had to consider, of course, was the term ‘trans’, a term I’m still not sure that I understand, hence this investigative piece. But before I embark on that prickly issue, here’s a thought.
Do dogs know that they’re male or female? Cats? Birds? Yes, some get pregnant, or lay eggs, while other don’t, and that’s how we distinguish them, as well as anatomically, but… Is it a matter of consciousness, aka the hard problem of philosophy? Of course ‘AI’ provides an answer, which is more or less the one I would give. Gender as we know it is a social construct, as well as an aspect of language, but with other creatures it’s more about biological cues – pheromones perhaps, as well as subtle physiological differences (perhaps not so subtle for them). Chimps/bonobos seem to recognise those of their own sex, not just for sex but for hanging out, for fighting and so on. And it seems that, even with our close cousins, there are girly girls and boysy boys, as Frans de Waal noted in his book Different, particularly in his description of the gender-nonconforming female chimp, Donna, brought up in the Yerkes Field Station in Atlanta, USA:
Donna grew up into a robust female who acted more masculine than other females. She had the large head with the rough-hewn facial features of males, and sturdy hands and feet. She could sit poised like a male. If she raised her hair, which she did more often the older she got, she was quite intimidating, thanks to her broad shoulders. Her genitals were those of a female, however, even though they were never fully swollen. Female chimpanzees, at the peak of their thirty-five day menstrual cycle, sport inflated genitals. But after Donna passed puberty, hers never reached the shiny maximum size that announces fertility. The males were barely interested in her and refrained from mating. Since Donna also never masturbated, she probably didn’t have a strong sex drive. She never had offspring.
Frans de Waal, Different: what apes can teach us about gender, pp 50-51
de Waal spends the next half dozen pages describing Donna in terms of sex (physical elements) and gender (behaviour), which again reminds me of schooldays. Donna was big for a female, just as some human females are taller and heavier than the average male, her calling voice was lower than most females’, and she engaged in hooting, swaggering behaviour with other males, though she was never violent. As with humans, male chimps are hairier than the females, but Donna was hairier than most. In spite of her eccentricity, her tendency to hang out with the males and her unusual appearance, she was well-accepted by her troupe.
So was Donna “trans”? de Waal asks this question himself:
Individuals who are born as one sex yet feel they belong to the opposite sex are known as transgender. Transgender humans actually prefer to turn this description around and prioritise their felt identity. They were born as one sex but found themselves inside the body of the other. We have no way of applying this to Donna, however, because we can’t know how she perceived her gender. In many ways – her grooming relations with others, her non-aggressiveness -she acted more like a female than a male. The best way to describe her is perhaps as a largely asexual gender-non-conforming individual.
Ibid, p54
I mentioned schooldays. A fond memory from when I was around nine years old was of a class-mate, a big strapping thunder-thighed girl who would lie on her back on the school’s grassy knoll and urge us to run and jump on her. She’d catch us, rough us up a bit, then toss us to one side ready for the next victim. As the smallest kid in the class I was an easy toss, and I loved it. I found her totally admirable, perhaps also because she was the smartest kid in my class – along with myself of course.
The point here, I think, is acceptance of difference – which is what de Waal’s Different is all about. In some ways the ‘trans’ thing is about our need to categorise, and our obsession with being hard and fast about those categories. I recall my enthusiasm when unisex toilets became a thing a couple of decades ago, but it doesn’t seem to have caught on, really, though I do know of a few people who subscribe to gender fluidity, and ‘men who want to be men’ and ‘women who want to be women’, are types I prefer to avoid, largely because they tend to want to impose those hard and fast categories on others. But in researching ‘gender fluidity’ I again find this human tendency to categorise gets in the way, with ‘gender fluid’ being described as it own category that requires explaining, like some medical/physiological/psychological condition, as if people who are this way worry about being abnormal in some sense, rather than rarely giving it a moment’s thought.
And yet, what with the patriarchy that is still with us, abetted by all the major religions, gender in a general sense is something we need to face. So I will leave transgender and gender reassignment issues, which are purely human ones, for another piece, and focus for now on sex, or gender, and power, which is an issue for all complex social creatures.
de Waal has a chapter in his book, ‘Bonobo Sisterhood’, which compares those apes with their chimp cousins and neighbours. The Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary near Kinshasa, capital of the embattled Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), is home to over 70 bonobos, many of them damaged orphans rescued from poachers and traders. This has made the sanctuary a difficult place for observing the natural life of bonobos, since many of them have experienced injury, separation from parents and other disruptions, including leading pampered lives in human households. One female bonobo who had been brought up with humans was quite bewildered when brought to the sanctuary, where other females greeted her with kisses and presenting of genitals for hoka-hoka, also known as genito-genital (GG) rubbing, a form of female sexual bonding that is key to their collective control of males. Not having been brought up in a bonobo environment, this female took some time to become accustomed to the ‘natural’ behaviour of her kind. Another bonobo had spent his early years in a gorilla enclosure, and was accustomed to making ‘gorilla’ noises and gestures. He was quite bewildered when female bonobos made advances, and didn’t recognise their genital swellings as anything sexual – though he eventually worked it out.
The point here is that there are social cues about sex and behaviour as well as what we might consider natural cues. And, as Donna the chimp has shown us, there may be wide differences in sexual behaviour within species, and it might be well for we humans to note the tolerance within the chimp community shown to Donna’s quasi-male behavioural traits.
de Waal provides a description of bonobos, particularly in contrast to chimps, that I’ll set down here to remind myself, more than anyone, of the difference:
Chimps look as if they work out in the gym every day. They have large heads, thick necks, and broad, muscular shoulders. In comparison, bonobos have an intellectual look, as if they spend time in the library. They have slim upper bodies, narrow shoulders, thin necks, and elegant piano-player hands. A lot of their weight is in their legs, which are long and thin. When a chimpanzee knuckle-walks on all fours, his back slopes down from his powerful shoulders. A bonobo, in contrast, has a perfectly horizontal back because of his elevated hips. When standing on two legs, bonobos straighten their back and hips better than any other ape, so that they look eerily human-like. They walk upright with remarkable ease while carrying food or looking out over tall grass.
Frans de Waal, Different: p 109
There’s more, and you get the impression that de Waal is very much captivated by the species. He even argues that their anatomy is closer to Lucy, our Australopithecus ancestor, than is any other of the great apes. It’s true that they’re more arboreal, due to the environment in which they’re confined. They’re also more group-oriented than chimps and more neotenous, according to de Waal. That’s to say, they preserve childhood or juvenile traits into adulthood – as do humans, with our love of play of all kinds. Their sensitivity may be attested to by a poignant story related by de Waal. A group of bonobos were sent to the Hellabrunn Zoo in Munich in the 1930s, just around the time that they were recognised as a separate species. Their uniqueness was noted by the first experts who studied them – ‘The bonobo is an extraordinarily sensitive, gentle creature, far removed from the demoniacal Urkraft [primitive force] of the adult chimpanzee”. But, as de Waal relates:
Sadly, the Hellabrunn bonobos died on the night in 1944 when the World War II allies bombed Munich. Terrified by the noise, they all succumbed to heart failure. That none of the zoo’s other apes suffered the same fate attests to the bonobo’s exceptional sensitivity.
Ibid: p 111
It seems to me – no doubt many would disagree – that bonobo sensitivity bears some relation to their matriarchal and more generally bonding culture. As de Waal and others point out, bonobos really are very very sexual, and it has nothing to do with reproduction, the rate of which is no greater than chimps. And it really is a ‘make love not war’ mind-set, with sexual closeness, especially among females, acting against serious violence, though they can be as rough-and-tumble in their play as their chimp cousins. de Waal, in his bonobo chapter, describes how reluctant the scientific community were to accept both bonobo matriarchy and bonobo sexual enthusiasm. I find this community’s reluctance, even today, to emphasise the matriarchy and sexuality of this closest relative of ours, to be a source of great frustration. Bonobos deserve our attention – and will repay it in spades – not just by the fact that they’re matriarchal but in the way they’ve become matriarchal, in spite of a slight sexual dimorphism in the males’ favour. Diane Rosenfeld’s The Bonobo Sisterhood is a start, but it requires the attention and activity of both females and males to move us in the right direction. Et ça va prendre beaucoup de temps, malheureusement.
References
Frans de Waal, Different: what apes can teach us about gender, 2022
Diane Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood, 2022
https://www.bonobosisterhoodalliance.org
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
All we are saying, is give bonobos a chance….
Just following on from my last post, one of the difficulties humans have in comparing their society, or their plethora of societies, to bonobos is the fact that – we’re human. Being inside that particular species, we don’t really see ourselves as a species at all, in spite of all the efforts of Darwin and so many others.
This is a perhaps deceptively important point. When we think of chimps and bonobos, we think of a species of primate, vaguely considered as existing in troupes, with certain general characteristics such as male philopatry (the males stay put, while the females leave for other troupes around adolescence), and alpha males in the case of chimps, alpha females in the case of bonobos, and some kind of ever-changing pecking order. And generally, that’s about it. After all, we don’t have to live with these beasties.
And that’s not how we see humans – we see them as individuals. Family, friends, enemies, politicians, philosophers, comedians, teachers, lovers, heroes and villains. And that’s why, I think, that so many people take the individual view when the idea of a female-dominated, bonoboesque society is mooted. Margaret Thatcher was an inhuman monster. My mother treated me like shit. I hated my female boss at Woollies.
But on learning more about our closest living relatives, and primates generally, which I’ve done, unfortunately not directly but through observant primatologists such as Jane Goodall, Birute Galdikas, Frans de Waal and Dian Fossey, among many others, you soon learn that they too are individuals with a variety of quirks and sensibilities. But of course these individual proclivities are contained within the broader social structure – male dominance and greater violence for chimps, female dominance and more sex and less violence for bonobos.
I wish I could get this across to people. Is it the sex that bothers them? A while back I read a sentence on some website saying that some study of studies found that viewing pornography made people more violent. No references were given, but it occurred to me that, even if that were true, it seems not unreasonable to surmise that people who watch a lot of porn are not themselves having lots of sex other than masturbation, and not the mutual masturbation beloved of bonobos. By the same token it seemed to me that the porn performers would not be made more violent thereby – they’d be too busy recovering and looking forward to the next bonoboesque scene. Of course there is sado-masochistic porn, just as there is soft porn, female-female porn, male-male porn, and the kind of sexual amusement parlours I’ve described in a previous piece.
And there are also feminists that are anti-porn, or there were, back in the day. What such women, if they still exist, think of female-on-female porn is a question. It seems to me that all these varieties of porn exist because there’s a market for them, just as prostitution is described as the world’s oldest profession, and still going strong. Perhaps in a matriarchy this would still be the case, but with the majority of clients being female. Or perhaps, if we were to combine human matriarchy with bonoboism, prostitution of all kinds would be rendered obsolete. After all, Frans de Waal did describe bonobo behaviour as positively pornographic at times.
I don’t know, maybe I’m just a few hundred years before my time. But by then, surely bonobos will have gone extinct in the wild, and their behaviour in captivity will have been modified to be suitable for viewing by children.
Sigh…
References
a world turned….
https://www.ttbook.org/interview/women-who-revolutionized-primatology
a world turned….
Australia knocks Denmark out of the World Cup – time for a hug
Often, in my usually brief discussions with women on the concept of a ‘bonobo humanity’, I get, first of all, ‘What are bonobos?’, and second, ‘But we’re not bonobos’, and third, ‘This female [boss/politician/influencer] was a disaster’. So, in this post, I want to write about this third response.
A thought experiment. Men are banned from running for political office of any kind, and also from voting. And, somehow the world’s richest people – say the top twenty, are all women (though they may not all be multi-billionaires – it just might be a more sharing human society). In other words, forget about female x or y who’s reached the top in an essentially patriarchal society. Think more about a world in which care and concern, and collaboration, and yes a bit more of lovey-dovey sex, has become the norm, and men are mostly happy about not having to make all (or any of) the decisions.
Okay, perhaps that’s going a bit far, but if you consider that the bonobo world is in some ways an inversion of the chimp world, then it might be worth considering what would be an inversion of the current human world, horrendously complex though it obviously is. And for me the obvious transformation would involve gendered power relations.
Do I see it happening? Not globally, of course, but human society is both highly fragmented and yet more inter-connected, technology-wise, than ever before. The Scandinavian countries, observed from my distance, which is about as far away as one can get, seem the most likely pioneers of this New Order, with Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark ranking as the least machismo nations by some August Body or other (what’s the female version of machismo? – apparently we’re still working on it), but there are any number of nations vying for the title of most patriarchal.
Perhaps we need to look at what the ingredients need to be, to bake a female-dominated society. One ingredient would surely be female solidarity. Here’s a nice solidarity statement that says all the right things:
Women supporting women is a powerful concept that helps foster success and empowerment. Women are more successful in all facets of life when they support one another. Building a community or a tribe of supportive women boosts morale and creates opportunities for growth and collaboration that lead to a more harmonious and inspiring environment. Mutual support among women is essential for overcoming cultural and systemic hurdles, promoting gender equality, and providing a sense of companionship, healing, and encouragement.
Read this and think bonobos. Don’t worry so much about ‘gender equality’ – genders are no more equal than people are. Just think about how female gender support can create a generally better environment for all, humans and non-humans alike, and as we think more on this, and as the evidence grows that female, as opposed to male, empowerment generally leads to more group ‘companionship, healing and encouragement’, without reducing our ability to innovate and problem-solve, female leadership might just become the order of the human planet, with the assent, if at times grudging, of cantankerous males.
So, when you think of female leaders you consider to be ‘disastrous’, or simply not much chop, think of all the male leaders, particularly in what we broadly term ‘politics’. Have there been any female Genghis Khans? (the Mongol invasions have been estimated to have killed nearly 40 million – but who was counting?). How about Mao Zedongs? (whose ‘Great Leap Forward’ in 1958-62 led to the deaths of some 45 million of his own countrywomen, and men – someone has been calculating), or Adolf Hitlers? (whose war-mongering and racism resulted in 15 to 20 million deaths in Europe), or Joe Stalins? (the numbers for him are hard to calculate as they include deaths from forced collectivisation as well as mass executions, gulag neglect, and more or less avoidable famines). Then there was Leo Victor, aka Leopold II of Belgium, whose atrocities in the ‘Congo Free State’ as it was grotesquely named at the time, have left a legacy from which the region has never recovered, as recent extreme crimes and punishments have shown.
Would female leaders have been just as bad, as even some females are prepared to argue? Well, I would point to bonobos as compared to rather more murderous chimps – but we’re not bonobos, are we?
So the point is not to become bonobos but to note that women are in general less violent than men, more co-operative, and – well they have other features that are more attractive than men, just as bonobos, in their social behaviour, have features that are more attractive than chimps. I’ve written about women’s soccer as an example. Opposing teams in the women’s game can be tough and testy with each other – I’ve seen it – but I’ve never seen anything like the bad behaviour I’ve observed in the men’s game, while group hugs in the women’s game are much more frequent and demonstrative. It’s just something in women’s nature – or is it socialisation, it’s hard to pick it all apart. The point is to utilise these better natures, however begotten, for a better world.
And yes, we can learn from bonobos!
References
https://modernminds.com.au/journal/latest/women-for-women-why-do-we-need-our-tribe-to-grow
bonobo issues
Something I encountered in S J Gould’s book Life’s Grandeur, added to other little encounters in my readings and researchings, has caused a few concerns. In trying to promote bonoboism, of a kind, the last thing I’d want to do is limit humanity’s intellectual pursuits, curiosity, adaptability and general gung-ho cleverness. As if I had the power haha. So whenever I read or hear something that might suggest that bonobos aren’t as smart as chimps I get worried.
Anyway, my reading, as usual, took me on some internet journeys, in one of which I found that the average chimp brain volume is 398 cc while that of bonobos is 348 cc. Remember of course that bonobos used to be known as pygmy chimps, and the average difference in overall size between the two species pretty well corresponds to the difference in brain size, and, as smart corvids and other birds remind us, size isn’t always an indicator of such things.
But there are other worries. I’ve gotten the impression that chimps are very much tool-users, bonobos perhaps not so much. But now, on consulting the literature more closely, I’m finding that maybe this isn’t so, and so I’m losing the point of this post. But of course there are differences, behaviourally, and so cognitively, between the two species, which would be worth exploring, for our future’s sake.
A scientific article, linked below, going back to 2010, and not fully available to amateurs like me, has this to say in its abstract:
Our observations illustrate that tool use in bonobos can be highly complex and no different from what has been described for chimpanzees. The only major difference in the chimpanzee and bonobo data was that bonobos of all age–sex classes used tools in a play context, a possible manifestation of their neotenous nature. We also found that female bonobos displayed a larger range of tool use behaviours than males, a pattern previously described for chimpanzees but not for other great apes. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the female-biased tool use evolved prior to the split between bonobos and chimpanzees.
As to their ‘neotenous’ (i.e. eternally childlike) nature, I’m wondering. Are they really any more childlike than chimps? Apparently, that’s the consensus. A more recent piece in Current Biology by Isabel Behncke, ‘Play in the Peter Pan ape’ (Peter Pan being the boy who never grows up) looks into this issue of bonobo neoteny, and play, noting that there’s a ‘small cluster of species in which adult play occurs, such as elephants, primates, social carnivores, cetaceans, parrots and corvids’. These are all highly social species, with otherwise little in the way of evolutionary connection. They do have other connections, though, apart form sociality – longevity, and neural complexity.
Behncke, in studying bonobos in the wild, argues that bonobos are more neotenous and playful than chimps, and one of her reasons for this corresponds with my own thoughts, happily. They live in a relatively abundant calorific habitat, and ‘play is energetically expensive and dwindles in conditions of resource scarcity’. Hence all those videos featuring pets at play. Hence, also, our own playful nature – sport, art, music, salons and pub chit-chat. Even our scientific explorations can be considered a form of play, at a stretch.
And then there’s sex, that Big Issue that humans beat themselves up about. Bonobo play is less solitary than that of chimps, and more sexual. I also would note that the development of tool use, which has, as mentioned, been more associated with females than males, in both bonobos and chimps, is surely associated with play. But much play between bonobos is genital-based. ‘Chasing’, especially around a solitary object such as a tree, and genital-grabbing is common, which of course can be potentially painful, but according to Behncke virtually never results in serious injury. This often happens between members of different troupes, and Behncke points out here a vital difference between the two tightly related primates. Chimps exhibit hostility between troupes, with ‘wars’ sometimes ending in wipeouts, as Jane Goodall and others have reported. Of the often fatal injuries sustained, mutilated genitals are high on the list.
So, about the sex. But first, it should be noted that communal or paired play is often about trust. The ‘hanging’ game, for example, is often played between an adult and a juvenile bonobo, in which the adult lets the child dangle from her arm, from a more or less high tree branch. Like bungee jumping, without the elasticity, but with much of the thrill. Also, play (and sex) occurs with a multitude of partners, with attendant advantages:
Play-partner diversity is important when thinking about adaptability: playing 100 times with the same individual requires less variation and adjustment of behaviour than playing 10 times with 10 different individuals. Playing with individuals of different sizes, personalities and sex requires learning about contextual-dependent behaviour: with whom and when a bite is appropriate, a chase over a push, a gentle tickle rather than a stomping slap, and so on.
So, much of this research has assured me that we’re on the right track in becoming more bonoboesque humans, in spite of Trump, Putin, Musk and other throwbacks. I’m hoping that even the USA will have a female President some time in the 21st century, and if they progress even further along the bonobo line, they might scrap their worthless semi-monarchical Presidential system altogether…
Okay, maybe in the 22nd century…
Sorry, never really got round to the sex.
References