Posts Tagged ‘bonobos’
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
childbirth, population, bonobos
A BBC pic from June 2021. This woman supposedly gave birth to ten, five by caesarian section, a new world record apparently. But it was all faked, it seems.
Given the craziness of that outlier nation of the WEIRD world, the USA, with its religious anti-intellectualism (in some states) and those states’ consequent ‘every sperm is sacred’ approach to abortion, I’m taken back to my childhood reading of the Guiness Book of Records, an extremely popular work published annually from 1955. My edition would’ve been from the 70s, but today’s internet may have rendered the collection virtually obsolete, methinks. Anyway, I recall being fascinated by the most grotesque facts, including – of course – the woman who gave birth to the most children. I don’t recall the number in my edition, but presumably this was the woman, and the number:
The greatest officially recorded number of children born to one mother is 69, to the wife of Feodor Vassilyev (b. 1707–c.1782), a peasant from Shuya, Russia. In 27 confinements she gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets. Although this seems to be a statistically unlikely story, numerous contemporaneous sources exist which suggest that it is true. The case was reported to Moscow by the Monastery of Nikolsk on 27 February 1782, which had recorded every birth.
My heart goes out to this woman, especially considering that, after all this enormous suffering, she isn’t even given her own name. Perhaps they didn’t bother giving names to women in Russia in them days – though to be fair, Catherine II, aka the Great, was Empress at the time.
Anyway, I remain extremely skeptical that any woman (okay, her name was Valentina), never mind her children, would survive such trauma (are the dates given above those of Feodor or his victim? – it’s unclear), and as for the husband, who went on to have a second wife (at the same time??!!) who gave birth to 18 kids via 8 confinements, what can be said…?
Happy to be a skeptic. Anyway, such records, fact or fiction, are unlikely to be repeated, partly because no woman, even in the most ultra-patriarchal remnants of the world, would put up with being so put-upon. As for kids these days, we’re learning to put quality before quantity methinks. Remember The population bomb? Apparently, this and other doomsday tracts of the late 60s and early 70s led to significant pressure for men and women to be sterilised in India in the following decade or so, as well as China’s One Child policy. But Ehrlich’s doomsday scenario, which he later described as a warning rather than a prediction, never eventuated, though it may have had some small influence on humanity’s slowing growth rate. My own view, when I consider the negative population growth of South Korea and Japan, and Australia’s fairly stable population in recent times, is that this is hardly a bad thing. If countries want to boost their populations, there’s always immigration, which, IMHO, has been a massive boon here in Oz. If nations prefer to be insular, along with negative growth, that’s surely their problem. I’m sure they’ll manage.
In any case, in the WEIRD world, especially among the relatively well-off, we’re having fewer children. Contraception and other resources are helping us to plan our families, if we’re making them.
Anyway, let’s forget about humans for a mo, and focus on a much more interesting species – bonobos:
Females bear one infant every five years or so with a gestation period of around eight months. One fascinating and unique behaviour recorded in bonobos happens during birth: other females have been known to gather around the pregnant bonobo and assist in the birth, similar to human midwives.
Bonobos’ low birth-rate is one reason they’re struggling as a species, so breeding in captivity, or in enclosed spaces within their own native regions, has become important. Another reason they’re struggling, though, is the same reason their non-human primate relatives are struggling. The behaviour of humans. Bonobo numbers are very hard to calculate, but here’s how Wikipedia puts it:
Conservation status. The IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List classifies bonobos as an endangered species, with conservative population estimates ranging from 29,500 to 50,000 individuals.
Let’s say 40,000 bonobos. The World Population Clock currently puts the human population at just under 8.2 billion. That means we outnumber bonobos by about 205,000 to one. We’re crowding out so many other primates, not to mention wild mammals in general, and even insects. But considering how excellent an example bonobos set, not only at childbirth, but during child-rearing, feeding time, the whole shebang of collective behaviour, all ultimately resulting from females taking power, we should be doing more than just safeguarding them, we should be taking note of this bonobo sisterhood at a time of unprecedented, and largely man-made, global crisis.
References
Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/book-incited-worldwide-fear-overpopulation-180967499/
slowly slowly catchy monkey
As we approach the rather significant US election on November 5 (and the fact that they hold their national elections on Tuesdays is very stupid, but one of the least stupid things about their elections in general), I’ve been indulging in absurd fantasies – though I prefer to call them thought experiments – about a future electoral system. ‘Absurd’ isn’t a term I like to use about myself, but I must admit that when I mention this thought experiment, I get a ‘please go away and stop bothering me’ response. So what do I do when nobody wants to listen? I post it on my blog and pat myself on the back.
So my idea is that, perhaps under the influence of some soma-type happy drug, or perhaps just because there’s a near world-wide irritation with male political leadership, at least in the democratic world (let’s not get too optimistic), laws are passed in quick succession banning males from standing for political office and banning males from voting (ok, let’s leave aside for now all the gender-bending categories… if you identify as female you can vote?…but what if you’re pretending to identify…?)
Anyway, in justification of such an absurdity, in the US Presidential elections, which began in 1788-9, 45 separate individuals have been elected, none of them female. Women weren’t given the right to vote until 1920, under the 19th amendment, after decades of heroic struggle. Hilary Clinton became the first woman to stand for election, in 2016, after nearly 230 years of elections! She won, of course, on the popular vote, but that don’t matter in the US of A.
So how would such an impossible scenario go? And, yes, of course I’m going to invoke bonobos.
Well of course there are fascist-style, ‘I alone can fix it’ type women, but they’re far out-numbered by the men of that type, and there are collaborative-style, non-adversarial men, but women are generally better at working together. Just look at the stats, from any country you prefer, on male versus female violence. Just look at the Palestinian and Israeli women’s peace organisations, which have been struggling together for decades, with no male alternative. Just look at the hooliganism associated with men’s soccer games, in some countries, and its absence in the women’s game. Just think of (projected) 30% rules in the various military organisations worldwide, because it’s known that female boots on the ground are more effective at winning hearts and minds, and finding collaborative solutions. Actual peace-keeping.
Of course, banning men from this or that organisation or activity is coercive and won’t happen (to men), but it’s certainly a pleasant thought experiment. An all-female military? Imagine it if you can. You certainly won’t have trouble imagining an all male one. It fact it doesn’t require any imagination whatsoever. Any more than an all-male Presidential system, an all-male Politburo, or an all-male dictatorship.
So while I’m not trying to create a new SCUM manifesto, I do think that cutting down severely on male domination, in politics, finance and every other power-making activity, something that the WEIRD world is oh so gradually doing, is pretty well essential for our long-term survival. And bonobos provide something of a template.
It’s easy to scoff and point out that we’re so vastly superior to our language-deprived, tree-climbing closest rellies. After all, look where patriarchy got us – eight billion plus people, world domination, and geniuses like Donny Trump and Vlady Putin. But today’s human aims – sustainability rather than endless increase, sharing the resources of the biosphere rather than exploiting them, peace, persuasion and preservation rather than domination and destruction, and so on, are obviously more suited to the nurturing sector of humanity than the murderers and blowhards.
So how to give power to the bonobo possibilities within our human natures? By noticing, that’s the first thing. Actually taking note. Not only of how bonobos bring up children, deal with families, and treat (bonobo) strangers with guarded friendliness and peace offerings, but of how similar behaviour in humans, led predominantly by the females, bring about a similar bonding, mutuality and trust. Think of the waste, the desolation created by Putin’s territorial nonsense, by Xi’s pretended ‘need’ to take back Taiwan, by the hapless hope of many ‘Arabs’ and ‘Israelis’ of winning and ridding their world of the other. Think how very male it all is.
Of course, I’m being very idealistic, or at least too impatient. Humanity evolves, and, I’m hoping, in a good way. Yes we’re facing, or I should say creating, huge problems – climate change, over-population, species depletion, the nuclear threat, the lure of fascism, and still, decisions are being made here and there, that are worsening the situation. I don’t quite believe in David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity depiction of humanity’s future, but I do think that, overall, we’re evolving in the right direction. Patriarchy is coming under pressure, and the pressure is very gradually growing. And bonobos, those dumb primates, are putting us to shame in that department.
So – slowly slowly catchy monkey.
References
David Deutsch, The beginning of infinity, 2011
limerence and bonobos
You know I’ve never met anyone quite like she before
Temptation, New Order
How can I even try, I can never win…
You’ve got to hide your love away, The Beatles
I’m reading Alexis Wright’s dauntingly long book Praiseworthy for a book group, and I was stopped short by this passage:
… in the all-twisting, all-turning immersion of limerence, skyrocketing in an out-of-proportion infatuation that would never be consummated.
Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy, p25
Limerence? I had to look it up. As a lifetime writer and therefore amateur wordsmith, I’m always surprised and a little shocked, at my age, to be confronted by something new in the field. But the shock was even greater on learning the meaning:
Limerence is a state of intense romantic infatuation or obsession with someone else. People experiencing limerence may have intrusive thoughts, feel melancholic, or have tragic concerns for the person they are infatuated with. They may also constantly obsess about whether their feelings are reciprocated
This definition comes from a ‘generative AI’ website, which is pretty hilarious, but I digress. The word was coined by a psychologist, of course, and to me it has huge resonance, both personal and intellectual. In fact I once wrote a novel, Sextet, never published, in which I tried to make comic play of what I might now call ‘polymorphous limerence’, an infatuation with a number of women, each of which might be the ‘one true one’, or not. The central character is ‘bowled over’ by not just one but a number of impressive young women, and feels more or less unworthy of them all. Being tongue-tied and hapless before each of them, but having more faith in his writing than his speech, he decides to send hand-written letters to six potential paramours (a concept completely spoiled by the startlingly swift onset of the internet). Whittling the number down to a mere six is a major task in itself, but anyhow it all falls apart in a tragicomic way (I can’t even remember how it ended).
There’s no doubt though, that I was playing with a theme that has ever fascinated me, the powerful myth of ‘true love’ that’s at the heart of monogamy (well, apart from the arranged/forced marriage type). Which brings me to bonobos.
I’ve often speculated fruitlessly about human monogamy and its origins, considering that neither bonobos nor chimps practice it. Indeed monogamy is a strangely arbitrary ‘system’ of species-furtherance, practised by many bird species, eschewed by many others (though the most recent bird research reveals that their sex and breeding practices are every bit as complex and nefarious as ours). Amongst primates, about 30% of species are monogamous, up from between 3 and 5 percent in the whole mammalian world (10% according to other sites). It’s speculated that human monogamy began with H erectus about two million years ago, but who knows? There’s also a distinction between social and genetic monogamy – but all this is taking me far from the very human concept of limerence, and its apparent absence in our closest living relatives, who certainly seem to be full of fellow-feeling. It seems that concepts of possession, or possessiveness, are key here. Ownership and jealousy play their part, promoted by social expectations, as well as yin-yang perfect fits, and of course for those who are partnerless, loneliness, in a human world that is so much more internal than external compared to other primates (but then I’ve never been a bonobo – maybe next time?).
There’s not much in the way of isolation in bonobo communities. Everyone tends to rub shoulders, euphemistically speaking, with everyone else, so hiding your love away is hardly an option. Also, the plague-paradise of internal thought, so unique to humans among the primates, and perhaps among all living beings, and so much intertwined with language, the language of desire, hope, anxiety, despair, longing and – limerence – is what has brought about our transcendence as a species. Not only the negatives, if such they are, but the positives – the transformative ruminations of Newton, Einstein and Darwin, among so many others (some of them even female). Limerence might be an unfortunate by-product of all that busy neural thought-language activity – but hey, it has often produced great music, and for that humanity will ever be grateful. A limerence shared is a limerence halved, maybe!
References
Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy, 2022
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7416880/
Why some birds mate for life – and why some play the field (and the trees, ponds and rooftops)
The Bonobo Sisterhood – some comments
Chrystul Kizer self-portrait
Recently I finally acquired a copy of The Bonobo Sisterhood, by Diane Rosenfeld, which, for obvious reasons, I’ve been keen to read. However, having read two thirds of the book, I must say that I find it something of a let-down. Firstly, it’s very US-based, which sorely tests my anti-US bias, shameful though that is. Second, it concentrates almost solely on individual male sexual violence – certainly an important topic, but not so much a part of my own focus, which is political, economic, legal and military power, among other things. It’s also somewhat aggressively black-and-white, often giving the impression that most if not all males are potential violators and/or sexual predators, which, when I think of my own social circle, strikes me as absurd. A great deal of the writing focuses on women’s self-defence, which, again, I’ve never given much thought to. None of the women in my admittedly narrow circle go in for self-defence training, though most have been into physical fitness, yoga, pilates and the like. They clearly don’t feel the need for it, which might suggest that this is more of a US problem. Then again, my little microcosm may be atypical.
To be fair, The Australian Bureau of Statistics does make for grim reading on male violence,
In the most recent incident of physical assault by a male (September 2023):
For women
- 87% knew the perpetrator
- 70% experienced the incident in a residential location
- 63% experienced anxiety or fear
For men
- 42% knew the perpetrator
- 74% experienced the incident in a non-residential location
on pornography and bonobos
NOT party hardcore, but you get the idea
I’ve already mentioned, and I’m still troubled by, a claim I read that watching pornography makes people more violent. The claim was almost as brief as this brief description, and included no references. Was it the consumption of pornography that made people more violent, and what exactly is pornography anyway? One doesn’t have to be a porn addict to know that there’s hardcore and softcore porn, that there’s woman-on-woman porn, men-on men-porn and hetero-porn. There’s presumably sado-masochistic porn, various role-play type porn, elder porn and, sadly but inevitably, its illegal opposite, child porn. And then, there are bonobos, whose sexual proclivities, I seem to remember the late Franz de Waals saying, border on pornography.
I’ve written on this topic before, in a rather hesitant way, and have avoided it in the couple of months since. So I’m going to try to be bold. In an article from way back in 2009, entitled ‘Does bonobo porn turn you on, ladies?’ – which completely avoids the actual issue, it’s reported that women are aroused by ‘bonobo porn’ but claim that they aren’t. There is no account of how such arousal is measured, and the idea that anything bonobos do could possibly influence or interest women, or even humans apparently, is treated as absurd.
Why such stupidity? Well, the fact that it’s a US article explains a lot.
Bonobo sex is predominantly female-to-female, and that is key to the female dominance of the species, just, as, some day, not in the near future, it might be key to female dominance in humans (maybe once we get AI and its attendant machinery to do all the work).
It’s also quite different from pornography, which, somewhat like prostitution, is primarily for the gratification of those, mostly men, who aren’t able to achieve – let’s call it sexual fulfilment – by virtue of their personal charms. They might indeed be overly aggressive types, or physically unattractive, or painfully shy, or impoverished, or disabled in one way or another. And there are gazillions of them out there, surely.
So it’s quite wrong, I think, to compare bonobo sex with porn. They don’t do it for display or reward, nor for love in the almost hopelessly complicated human sense. To try to define what they do it for might even seem arrogant. The main thing is that they do it, and many clear benefits ensue.
Then again, maybe I’m complicating matters. Mutual masturbation, which bonobos mostly indulge in, is pleasurable, and has evolved to be so, for many species. It also involves a brief intense expenditure of energy, generally followed by a state of mild, pleasant, temporary exhaustion. In these mutual exchanges, this would surely also involve a sense of gratitude.
I should also point out, to the anti-porn feminists and those who ‘dis’ porn (is that the right slang word?), that even if it’s true that watching porn makes people more violent, the most obvious reason would be that they’re not getting what those porn performers are getting. I seem to remember The Rolling Stones calling it ‘satisfaction’.
And yet there are serious downsides to being a female pornstar or prostitute in our still very horribly patriarchal society. It’s the old slut/stud dichotomy – how long will that one take to die? So it’s clear that the women in porn are being exploited and generally looked down upon in a way that the men are not. And that their time in the business is way shorter than that of the blokes. For some reason, thoughts of this kind take me back to my youthful interest in arthouse films. I’m thinking in particular of the harem scene in Fellini’s 8½, in which the debonaire and breezy bachelor Guido, played impeccably by Marcello Mastroianni, turns martinet when one of his nest of female companions resists the rule about having to move ‘upstairs’ to retirement, having turned the venerable age of thirty. The fact that this scene has stuck with me for nigh on fifty years is telling. Plus ça change…
Yet, change does happen, it’s just that our lives are so short in the vast scheme of things that we tend to live in an eternal present. Australia, where I’ve lived most of my life, wasn’t even a concept 300 years ago. Nor was the USA, or even the internet. And while we berate Middle Eastern nations/cultures for their treatment of women, our own culture has only recently woken up to their obvious superiority… oh, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
So compare all this to bonobos, our dumb female-dominant cousins. Of course, they only indulge in the lazy pleasures of mutual masturbation because they haven’t the smarts to indulge in all our high-falutin pleasures – such as exploring and defining gravity, making music, inventing deities, playing chess, bush-walking, racing each other under endless permutations, creating fashion trends, falling in love, identifying species, dancing, building bombs and spacecrafts, playing the stock market, and of course, yodelling. And that’s just the beginning….
Yet even with all that brain-building work and complex play to distract us, our erogenous zones are still a bothersome delightful drawcard, and so, failing willing partners, we have pornography, prostitution and masturbation sans mutuality.
So a website has come to my attention that provides a unique twist to this dilemma, if such it is. It almost turns the patriarchy on its head, if only by sheer force of numbers. The site or venue is called Party Hardcore, and it is based, I believe, in Germany, that most erotische of nations. Word of mouth tells me, though, that such venues exist in many large cities in the developed world. The venues are, essentially, nightclubs in which the patrons are exclusively women. Loud, danceable music plays, and alcohol and possibly other drugs are readily available. There appear to be well over a hundred patrons, becoming increasingly sozzled and smoochy. In the centre of the venue is a raised catwalk with the words ‘Party Hardcore’ printed over its length, clearly designed for the vast English-speaking audience that tunes in (people with video cameras wind through the crowd). A male model of the ‘condom full of walnuts’ type mounts the catwalk and dances and flexes for a few minutes before coaxing a woman or two to come up and join him in a bit of heavy foreplay, much to the amusement of their friends, apparently. Meanwhile, a handful of similarly built males suddenly emerge, sprinkling themselves about the room like an assortment of many-coloured sweets. Much licking and sucking ensues, and then some. In fact, the target audience ranges from pseudo-bored and disdainful wallflowers to gung-ho erotomaniacs wolfing down wobbly bits as if their life depended on it.
How to define such scenarios? Prostitution? Well, the men are no doubt being paid for this service, but I doubt if that’s the main reason they do it, and there’s no straightforward client-professional relationship. Pornography? A very divided matter of opinion. The fact is that, sozzled or not, the women in these venues have agency, and safety in overwhelming numbers.
Which brings me back to bonobos. Their females don’t outnumber the males, but female solidarity has evolved in this species to provide the protection that sheer numbers provides in the Party Hardcore scenario. I don’t expect humans to ever become as sexually ‘obsessed’ or ‘liberated’ (take your pick) as bonobos, but I do have high hopes women will emerge as the dominant gender, as we learn more and more the lessons from our patriarchal history. If such dominance brings about a more sexually relaxed society – and I’m sure it would – without reducing our creative and analytic explorations, and our concern for our fragile biosphere, then…
Anyway, I live in hope.
References
a bonobo humanity?More musings on bonobos, families and the riddle of humanity
ring-tailed lemurs are female dominant and beautiful – just saying
So, returning to bonobos and how they’ve managed to become female dominant, and how they might teach humans by example. In an article from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, from just over a decade ago, it was explained in these terms, at least when it comes to conflict:
It is not female alliances that help females win conflicts. The context of the conflict does not seem to be relevant for its outcome either. Instead, the attractiveness of females plays an important role. If females display sexually attractive attributes, including sexual swellings, they win conflicts with males more easily, with the males behaving in a less aggressive way.
So that’s it, our next female aspirant to political leadership needs to be good-looking, with plenty of sexual swellings. Such swellings would need to be on display at political rallies (which, happily or sadly, don’t really exist in Australia).
But unfortunately, human society isn’t quite that simple – and nor is bonobo society, methinks, though the influence of sexual swellings among naked apes would surely be greater than among clothed ones. And we human males tend not to be attracted to females primarily because of signs of their fecundity, though it can be argued that physical attractiveness and being within a certain age bracket are common factors, with fecundity hiding slyly behind them.
It’s interesting to consider sexual differences between bonobos and humans. Bonobos are definitely not monogamous, and neither are their close cousins the chimps. We humans like to think we’re ‘naturally’ monogamous, but are we? Were Neanderthals? Australopithecines? And how does monogamy relate to male dominance, if at all? It’s worth noting that we’re by no means certain of how humans lived even in the recent past, in evolutionary terms – say, a mere 10,000 years ago. The term ‘hunter-gatherer’, which to many has suggested a clear delineation, with males as the hunters, has been very much in dispute in recent times (see references), and one might reasonably suspect that participation in either activity would depend on the food available in the region, just as is the case with bonobos, whose diet is mostly vegetarian with the addition of small game animals, easily hunted by either gender, and this has been cited as a contributing factor to bonobo female dominance.
In her book The Patriarchs, Angela Saini considers a number of historical examples, some clear-cut, others more murky, of female empowerment in the past. And much of this has to do with class and heritage:
The low status of some women has never stopped others in the same society from having enormous wealth or power in their own right. There have been queens, empresses, female pharaohs, and powerful women warriors for as long as humans have kept records. In the last two centuries, women have reigned as monarchs over Britain for longer than men have. Women have kept slaves and servants, and still do. There are cultures that prioritise mothers, in which children aren’t even seen to belong to the same households as their fathers.
However, there is no female equivalent to the sexual enslavement, or concubinage, practised in the past by alpha males in a number of human societies. This is highlighted in Joseph Henrich’s landmark work, The Weirdest People in the World, especially in chapter 8, ‘ WEIRD monogamy’, which begins with a quote from a 16th century Franciscan friar, Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, describing Aztec society:
For three or four years the Sacrament of Matrimony was not administered, except to those who were educated in the house of God. All other Indians lived with as many women as they cared to have. Some had 200 women and others less, each one as many as suited him. Since the lords and chiefs stole all the women for themselves, an ordinary Indian could scarcely find a woman when he wished to marry. The Franciscans sought to uproot this evil; but they had no way of doing so because the lords had most of the women and refused to give them up. Neither petitions nor threats nor arguments, nor any other means which the Friars resorted to were sufficient to induce the Indians to relinquish their women, and, after doing so, enter marriage with only one, as the law of the church demands… This state of affairs continued until, after 5 or 6 years, it pleased the Lord that some Indians of their own accord began to abandon polygamy and content themselves with only one woman, marrying her as the church required… The Friars did not find it easy to have the Indians renounce polygamy. This was very hard to achieve because it was hard for the Indians to quit the ancient carnal custom that so greatly flattered sensuality.
It’s interesting to note here the assumption that monogamy is a less ‘sensual’ or ‘carnal’ practice than polygamy. Bonobos are generally regarded as sensual, even sex-obsessed, but their relations can’t be easily described in a ‘mono’ or ‘poly’ sort of way, because there’s no clear sense of ‘ownership’ of others, though there is plenty of bonding, mediated by sexual-sensual activity, and there is also a degree of hierarchy. We too, will aways have that, as particular individuals emerge as ‘leadership material’, but this can be as much a problem as a benefit. The political meme, ‘strong and wrong beats weak and right’, is so often only fully understood in hindsight.
When I think of a bonobo-style human society, this notion of non-ownership, even as regards children, comes prominently to mind. The compartmentalisation of modern WEIRD society into nuclear family units seems particularly problematic for me, and personal, as I was a five-year-old child of immigrant parents, taken from Britain to Australia on the other side of the world, with no further contact with broader family relations, and neighbours who were barely seen or heard. It’s often claimed that this separation into individual family units, physically separated in a built environment, began with agriculture, with the separation between those units growing with further developments – industrialisation, migration, the Church edicts forbidding marriage between cousins to the nth degree (as Henrich describes in his book). The real story, though, is doubtless even more complex.
I suspect we’re just at the beginning of ‘the great unravelling’ of the nuclear family, with an increasing number of single mothers, and fathers, and a host of ‘different’ family or group organisations, some of which are barely discernible on the horizon. I firmly believe that humans will survive the crises we create for ourselves (and indeed the whole biosphere), though not without great damage to the most vulnerable. It will require greater internationalism, and greater understanding and sympathy for all the species we’re connected to – that’s to say all species. There are plenty of horrific ‘hotspots’ of violence, warfare and inhumanity, as well as callous indifference to the suffering that our everyday actions – our food consumption, our mining and undermining operations, our general rapacity – are causing to the most vulnerable of our own species and many others. Our dominance should teach us to care more. With great power comes great responsibility. So many great powers in the past have not cared enough about the damage they’ve done, for it isn’t immediate damage to them.
Enough, I’m waxing melancholic. Bonobos are, it seems, happy with what they are, which they might continue to be if humans don’t wipe them out. Humans want to know more, grow more, be more than what they are. The ‘beginning of infinity’ indeed. I too am caught up in that quest, as I’m only human. Is it an upward spiral or a downward one? That is the question.
References
Still more critique of the PLOS article on women hunting in hunter-gatherer societies
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: the origins of inequality, 2023
Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest people in the world, 2021
First female US President? One small step for a bonobo humanity…
So how are we going with our bonobo humanity? Certainly there’s no shortage of articulate women presenting thought-provoking, dynamic, humorous stuff online, whether it be scientific, political, historical, pedagogical or bratty, whatever that is. And naturally I’m keen to see a female President of the USA at last, in spite of my view that their presidential system should be scrapped in favour of a much more distributed power system.
The fact is that, in the past 150 years or so, barely a blink in evolutionary time, the situation re female empowerment has greatly improved in the WEIRD world. And the more female leadership, or simple participation, we have in politics, business, law, science and the military, as the first fields that come to mind, the more we will shame those nations – some democratic, others autocratic – that cling to patriarchy. It’s a fact that being seen as backward, or even untrendy, can energise a movement towards change in our increasingly interconnected world.
There is some pressure now in the USA for Kamala Harris to name her running mate asap, but just about everybody is saying that it would be a bad, nay disastrous, idea to choose a female. Of course I ‘get’ this, what with the USA’s conservatism and patriarchal religiosity, but of course I’m impatient – I don’t want to wait 1,000 years for a ‘world turned upside-down’, and there are quite a few capable women to choose from. But I’m always too impatient and too optimistic. Wouldn’t it be something, though, if the USA – for so long overly authoritarian in its governing system, overly conservative in its laws and cruel in its policies regarding healthcare, education and social security, became something like a pioneer… though I suppose it’s a bit late for that?
So I don’t think Harris will go for Gretchen Whitmer, and even Whitmer (who is said to have ruled herself out) might regard a double female ticket as ‘too risky’, and the impressive Pete Buttigieg would perhaps also be considered too ‘extreme’, not politically but for obvious other reasons. Again, my hopes are too high. I listened to the Democratic campaign rally in Pennsylvania (I think) featuring Whitmer and Josh Shapiro, and found both to be excellent, at least in terms of eloquence.
But again I can’t get over the weirdnesses of US politics. One pundit was saying ‘and by gosh and golly there’s only 100 days until the election’. Exclamation mark! Nobody wakes up to a Federal election in Australia until about thee weeks before the event. There are a handful of campaign ads from the different parties, and there are no ‘rallies’ that I’m aware of. And there’s certainly not the kinds of funds raised – we have very strict regulations about campaign finances (a $15,000 limit without disclosure). The US seems to have no regulations whatsoever – it’s the money country after all.
Anyway, weird or not, this is a very important election, not just for the USA. As an eternal optimist, I’m expecting a Trump loss, but what if, somehow, Trump actually wins? Much of the bullshit he spews (sorry for the mix-up of orifices) about his plans as Dictator will fall by the wayside, and I selfishly am not so concerned about what happens within the USA (and fortunately individual states have a fair amount of power), but there’s no doubt that dictators elsewhere will take advantage of the situation, at great human cost. What happens in the USA has global implications, unfortunately. For example, an essay, ‘Winds of Change: Ukrainian Politics Reacts to the US Electoral Drama’, linked below, and posted only two weeks ago, was mostly downbeat about Ukraine’s future given the likelihood of a Trump victory in November. Meanwhile, many of Ukraine’s rightist politicians have been looking forward to warming relationships with both the USA and Putinland. What a difference a fortnight makes!
But I’m not sufficiently au fait with US elections and such to know whether a President Harris would be able to make a difference in Ukraine, Palestine or in US-China relations (and I wouldn’t really have a clue what to do about China myself, apart from farting in Xi’s general direction). But the very idea of a woman being the person these regions – especially the Arab and Moslem nations – have to negotiate with gives me quite a thrill.
Okay, Harris hasn’t won yet. And, as mentioned, the feverish US ‘election period’ is interminably long compared to those of any other nation. And people do tend to get shot quite often over there. Just saying. And, my optimism has let me down many times before.
The FiveThirtyEight polling website, which I followed closely in the run-up to the 2020 US election, called it correctly enough, though they certainly couldn’t predict the bullshit about fake voting, or the fake electors scheme, and I must admit I was too focussed on the general vote and not enough on the Electoral College shite that has favoured Republicans for decades. I now know it’s as much about ‘swing states’ as anything else, and realize that the Democrats will have to do much more than gain a popular majority. Just another failing of their woeful federal system.
Anyway, we all need to take our protein pills and put our helmets on. It’s a long ride to November…
Vive les bonobos!
References
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/winds-change-ukrainian-politics-reacts-us-electoral-drama
Concerning the future, I suspect things might change…
As we’re just about to have an election in the UK I listened to a vox populi set of interviews, which seemed to take place in traditionally conservative electorates, about who should run the country over the next several years. There were complaints about everything being run down, too many immigrants, too many scandals, they shouldn’t have kicked out Boris Johnson, or they shouldn’t have allowed him anywhere near the Prime Ministership, no they won’t be voting Labour, no the Liberal Democrats are useless, I haven’t decided who I’ll vote for, might not vote at all… And there were plenty of complaints about the general neglect of their particular fraction of London, and plenty of images of abandoned and broken down homes and buildings.
By all accounts, the Tories are set to lose this election big-time, after 14 years of incumbency preceded by 13 years of Labour government. I’ve not been paying too much attention to UK politics, having left the place (Scotland in fact) for the balmy shores of Australia as a five-year-old. I was surprised to learn just this week that voting isn’t compulsory there, which I think is a shame. When a few years ago there was a vote in Scotland regarding national independence, I mentally sided with the ‘no’ vote, as I generally take a ‘together’ view over a ‘separated’ view. But then Brexit happened, which of course was a shambles.
I try to be impartial about politics, but of course I have my hobby horses, e.g. moving towards a bonobo humanity, and that involves change, very much. And the very word ‘conservative’ means wishing to conserve, to preserve, to maintain and so forth. Small government, reduced taxation, minimal involvement. Here in Australia, our former long-standing PM, John Howard liked to say ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. But this, of course, misses the point. Landlines were once an acceptable form of communication – I recall how sophisticated we felt when we had a phone connected in the early sixties – but now we all have ‘smart’ phones, which don’t seem to have made us smarter people. We came to Australia by ship, which now seems quaint. Elly Noether, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, had to work without pay, teaching only male students, and often surreptitiously, because it was widely accepted in the 1910s and 1920s that maths and physics were beyond the ken of women, and that wasn’t so long ago in my time frame (we’ll reach bonobo humanity in about 1000 years). Conservatism generally tends to face backwards, as culture moves forward.
Is it a fear of change? We all fear it, to different degrees. The interviewees were reluctant, mostly, to mention particular issues, though they all seemed to voice a general weariness and dissatisfaction with the current government. Immigration was mentioned a couple of times, and unions once. A different video presented a poll of voters’ main concerns heading into the election, and their dissatisfaction with the current National Health Service (NHS) came out well on top. So, low tax, low government revenue, cuts to the NHS, too bad.
I’ve often thought there’s something wrong or missing about current representative democracies, in which there are two major parties locked in combat for the support of the majority, and I’ve written previously about my issues with adversarial systems in general – for example in the law, in industrial relations, in politics, and even in the media, especially in the US. And with the rise of social media, a sort of bloated juggernaut of disinformation and abuse, the future doesn’t appear to look good for the kind of consensus approach to social issues I’ve always hoped for. The dog-eat-dog world of the USA is no example to follow – a broken system of mutual hatreds. ‘The United States exhibits wider disparities of wealth between rich and poor than any other major developed nation’, according to inequality.org, Quelle surprise.
Could it be that, in the long long view, nation states will be in the rear-view mirror? Currently, complaints about immigration and ‘illegals’ are commonplace, but national borders, passports and visas are a recent phenomenon, and so many of us think we’re living in a ‘thousand-year reich’ or an eternal present. Of course I’ve no idea what the human planet will be like in a thousand years, but there’s nout wrong with speculating. And hoping. My hopeful expectation is that transnational and international activities and lifestyles will grow, and that both the local and the global will become more rather than less important. It will become increasingly clear that centralised control – powerful national government – is failing distant local regions with their specific issues requiring specialised local expertise. At the same time, more effective global communications will bring about better dissemination of knowledge and ideas, with ‘red tape’ being reduced or bypassed. Sounds a bit utopian I know…
And the human world will have become more bonoboesque. Not only with female dominance, but a reduction if not a complete dissolution of monogamy. Our scientific discoveries and enquiries will proceed apace, underlining what can be achieved through teamwork and collaboration as well as friendly rivalry between teams. Adversarial approaches will be greatly watered down, and elected representatives will work together for the best results, always allowing for input from the represented. Dictatorships will be almost a subject of ancient history… well perhaps not quite ancient, but history. Children will indeed be cared for communally, and a thriving and happy sexuality will be normalised. Education will be respected, and those doing the educating will be held in particularly high regard. An overwhelming proportion of leaders, in all areas – decision-making, research, education, group dynamics, sanctioning – will be female, though males will be well-treated, consulted and respected.
And if there are no nations? Freedom of movement and interaction will be greater than it is today, facilitated by increasingly improved telecommunications and transport. Language barriers will be reduced by effective translation algorithms. The mechanisation of food production will continue to advance, and housing will undergo a revolution corresponding to the dissolution of the nuclear family and a preference for more communal living. Diets will change as we focus more effectively, both on health and the biosphere we share with all other species. The human population will stabilise, as will its calorific intake. Inequalities will not, of course, disappear, but they will greatly reduce, as the community will insist on nobody being left behind or forgotten. Education and community participation will be the highest priority, as we know that exclusion will fuel resentment, ultimately leading to violence… But involvement in communal activities will be so highly prized that few would be willing to turn their backs…
Okay, okay, just kidding. In a thousand years, we might survive, but things’ll be much more fucked than they are today. I’m glad I’ll be outta here…
But then again…
References
Wealth Inequality
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