a bonobo humanity?

a young woman who deserved so much better

What was I thinking about writing about? Oh yes, the Epstein thingy. I’ve been avoiding it, partly because I have, I think, a rather permissive attitude to sexuality (I blame bonobos), even though my own sex life has been largely a disastrous nullity, and in my seventieth year it’s not likely to improve.

But the Epstein matter isn’t about a kind of open-hearted – ‘let’s get it on so that we can be more of an all-for-one, one-for-all’ – society, which is, of course, the Musketeerian motto of bonoboism. It’s pretty well all about exploitation and power.

So let me for the purpose of this essay divide power relations into two forms – the power of males over females, and the power of the rich over the poor. In the WEIRD world, it seems to me, the power of males over females is slowly diminishing, but the power of the rich over the poor is growing faster than ever before. And the wealth of males is of course growing much faster than that of females. That’s to say, in the world of the super-rich, men like to have it all, and their quantum of wantum doesn’t vary much in its exponential increase.

We’re the financial apes, though of course there are many other distinguishing features, good and bad – the clothed apes, the language apes, the nationalistic apes, the nucleonic apes, the mass-murdering apes, the astronautical apes, and of course the most populous apes by far. It’s hard to keep up with it all, but what might ground us, as they keep us in touch with the rest of the animal world, are our sexual urges.

But these urges have long been a problem for us, or maybe not that long, maybe since the dawn of religion and its various tabus. How long ago was that? 15,000 years ago? 300,000? At some stage monogamy was born – a ‘this is my sole sexual partner’ notion, which somehow transmogrified into ‘I own this female’, or something similar. And attitudes to sex changed, perhaps long before the advent of clothing. Sex, or sexual play, could only be an adult thing – which rather undermines the notion of play.

There are so many perhaps unanswerable questions  – when did ‘civilisation’ begin? Did this supposed civilisation load us with endless sexual tabus? Yes, maybe, and it also gave us agriculture and cities and writing and more sophisticated weapons and a whole variety of artful activities. Perhaps, if we’d gone more the way of bonobos, we’d have been so absorbed in sexual fun that we’d never have stopped to contemplate the Meaning of Life, and the Creation of the World.

However, it seems that the super-rich, and their families, many of whom, like the offspring of monarchs and so-called ‘robber barons’, come under the category of the idle rich, are drawn to a bonoboesque lifestyle, if a rather more patriarchal and one-sided version of it. And, given our generally hypocritical public attitude towards sex, the victims tend to suffer as much as, or more than, the perpetrators when all is exposed. Virginia Giuffre’s suicide here in Australia last year is a tragic example.

It’s amusing, though, from this distance, to note how the so-called MAGA conservatives, with their generally negative thinking about abortion, feminism and anything resembling sexual licence, have been so keen to hide the sexual licence on steroids that are the Epstein files. But to be fair, the MAGA people are divided on the issue – those in power and in government are definitely in favour of suppression, while the rest are confused, to put it generously. Then again, if you take the expression ‘Make America Great Again’ seriously, confusion must be a fundamental aspect of your identity.

So where and how is this all going to end? It’s hard to imagine that the rich and very powerful are going to allow the mid-term elections, destined to result in a large non-conservative majority in Congress, to cause any more damage vis-à-vis the Epstein files than they already have. They will surely find a solution, and I’m sure they’re working on it right now, or have already worked it all out more or less to perfection. We will have to wait and see.