Posts Tagged ‘female leadership’
So how did bonobos become female dominant? Can anybody tell me…?
girls girls girls
One of the things that pissed me off about the ‘evolutionary psychologist’ who mocked a female writer who found inspiration in bonobos, was that he himself expressed not the slightest curiosity about how this species, the closest one to humans along with chimps, actually became female dominant. He was too busy trying to argue that we had nothing to learn from these apes, and that our ‘psychology’ was patriarchal from the get-go, and presumably always will be.
Anyway, enough of him. Many women have been inspired by bonobos and this will continue into the future. And we know that the principal feature of their dominance is sisterhood. Here’s how the NY Times put it in an article posted last April:
… researchers who tracked six bonobo communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo over nearly 30 years provided the first evidence-based explanation for how female bonobos gain and sustain dominance over the males within their communities. Females, they found, form coalitions against males to tip the balance of power in their favor.
When a male bonobo steps out of line, nearby females will band together to attack or intimidate him. Males who cower in the face of such conflicts lose social rank, while their female adversaries gain it, affording them better access to food, and mates for their sons.
Much is made in the article, and in other material I’ve read, that bonobos are not exactly the peaceful ape they’re claimed to be. But who claims this? My own focus has always been on matriarchy, not at all on peace. In human society, women have been murderers and child abusers – but of course not on anything like the level of men. Bonobo females sometimes have to deal aggressively with uppity males – often targeting the private parts (not so private for non-human primates). Chimp males on the other hand, and even females, have sometimes engaged in infanticide, and whole chimp troupes have been known to wipe out other troupes in all-out warfare.
Bonobos deal with tension between troupes through food-sharing and of course mutual masturbation (producing that sticky stuff that brings folk together). There has as yet been no solid evidence of bonobos killing bonobos, but it may well happen from time to time. So how did they come to be so different after, at most, 2 million years of separation from chimps? The time frame is important, considering the differences between the two species, and some studies argue for less than a million years.
As the article above points out, it’s about coalitions, a Bonobo Sisterhood, as Diane Rosenfeld has argued, most cogently, as a template for human females. So how and why did this sisterhood evolve? My thought on this is that, in the forests of the region south of the Congo, there was an abundant enough food supply, mostly frugivorous, so that hunting and physically overcoming animal resources became surplus to requirements. Physical size and strength was less important – as is the case in post-industrial human societies. That’s why we now allow women into the military and other ‘tough’ forms of employment, at least in more enlightened societies. And along with those changes we have women being ‘trusted’ to run businesses, to head scientific and legal teams, and even to be elected into parliaments and occasionally become Prime Ministers or Presidents. But of course the balance of power, even in the ‘enlightened’ WEIRD world, is still massively in favour of men. But, l’avenir est féminin, my t-shirt proclaims, and l’avenir est long….
And again, for those who are apt to mock the idea that we can learn anything from our ‘dumb’ ape cousins, I’ve been reminded, through an essay just sent to me by a friend, and referenced below, of Kanzi the bonobo, who ‘stunned the world’ with his cognitive abilities. It’s extremely doubtful that he’s a ‘freak’, a Stephen Hawking of the bonobo world, though the fact that he was brought up in captivity, with human carers, must be taken into account.
References
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300115
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/science/bonobos-matriarchies-females.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/science/bonobos-apes-matriarchy.html
Diane Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood: revolution through female alliance, 2023
A bonobo named Kanzi could play pretend, challenging ideas about animal imaginations
touching on women, the principal carriers of bonobo humanity
that book again…
So I feel I’ve been skating around the edge of the bonobo world lately, not getting the message across, and not even quite sure what the message is. Clearly their sexual openness is sort of intimidating to many humans, but it’s also clear that this openness is profoundly connected to their culture of greater caring and sharing than exists in chimp culture, or our own. It slightly annoys me when commentators suggest we should look past the sexual activity to the bonding and helping and mutuality that goes on, as if we (very literally) buttoned-up humans can have one without the other, but having said that, I too am nervous about focussing on frottage, outside of Max Ernst.
So now I’m going to focus a bit more on the sexual side, and not just in reference to bonobos. Some years ago I read Jared Diamond’s little book Why is sex fun? (though I was pretty sure I knew the answer). Erogenous zones are hypersensitive, even more so when stimulated by another – like tickling, only different somehow. And with concealed ovulation, adult humans, like bonobos and dolphins, are sexually receptive for most of the time. This isn’t the case with chimps, so for bonobos this is an intriguing case of relatively recent evolution. Diamond’s book didn’t speculate too much, but looked at two extant theories:
“Many-fathers” theory says that concealed ovulation allows women to have sex with many men and create paternity confusion, which then decreases the chances of infanticide. “Daddy-at-home” theory says that women entice men to be around, provide and protect, by allowing them to have sex regularly. By combining both, we reach the conclusion that concealed ovulation arose at a time when our ancestors were promiscuous to avoid infanticide (“many fathers theory”) but once concealed ovulation evolved, the women chose monogamous relationships with more dependable cave-men (“daddy-at-home theory”).
Much of this is less than relevant to today’s WEIRD human world with its contraceptives and prophylactics, but ‘permissive’ sex has still to overcome the barriers of religion, and, for women, discrimination.
In any case Diamond completely missed the possible role of sex in bringing people together, in creating alliances, and the kind of overall cultural harmony that appears to subsist in bonobo society. This cultural harmony, which transcends the mother-child bond or the supposedly ideal development known as the nuclear family, has been the main attractant for me vis-a-vis bonobos, because I was brought up in what is called, by cliché, a ‘toxic family situation’, bearing in mind Tolstoy’s clever dictum that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This situation was most salient for me in the late sixties and early seventies, the ‘hippy era’, when free love was touted, along with the death of the nuclear family. The hope that this idea gave me in my teen years was almost unbearably painful, but it all fizzled out. I didn’t learn about the bonobo lifestyle until more than a decade later, in the mid to late 80s, but that was rather too late, and a whole species out of reach…
But that’s just my personal situation. Bonobos still offer an example for our species in general, as we socially evolve, very slowly and in piecemeal fashion, out of patriarchy. But what exactly is this example, if it isn’t sexually modulated empathy, which is so far from a species that is so compartmentalised, un-neighbourly, sexually repressed, competitive, materialistic and personally hubristic as ours?
Of course, the hope surely lies with the greater empowerment of the human female, who, by and large, hasn’t quite the intensity of the above-mentioned traits than the male. Or am I just pissing in the wind? Of course, there are outrageous and apparently obnoxious females on the political scene, especially in the USA, when a lot of reportage focuses on the outrageous and obnoxious. But I believe, and fervently hope, that women are better at operating co-operatively and below the radar. For example, I’ve written before about Arab and Israeli women getting together to lobby against injustice and to promote sexual freedom, amongst other things (okay, sexual freedom is probably low on their list of priorities right now), a particularly difficult task considering the status of women in Moslem cultures, and their apparently feverish fear of homosexuality, especially among the lower classes. The Haifa Women’s Coalition, for example, based in that coastal northern Israeli city, suffers from the sorts of cultural tensions no bonobo would ever have to deal with, such as a concern about being dominated by Ashkenazi Jews, and a fear of backlash re ‘abnormal’ sexual preferences. Sigh, if we could only just give in to and celebrate sharing our basic primate primacy.
I could go on about the backlash against female empowerment in China, Russia, Burma, the Middle East, etc etc, the product of power politics that I like to hope are ultimately ephemeral – given a 1000+ year time-line for a bonobo humanity – which reminds me, I need to save my pennies to be cryopreserved – I really really want to see that future.
Meanwhile, I’ve noted, rather belatedly, that others have been discovering and basing some writings on bonobos, one way or another. Two recent examples, The bonobo gene: why men can be so dumb, is apparently a light-hearted account by an Aussie TV sports producer, Steve Marshall, of toxic masculinity and the male appendage. It’s clearly not about science (what could this bonobo gene be?), but anything that mocks the jocks can’t be a bad thing. More intriguing to me, though, is The bonobo sisterhood: revolution through female alliance, by Diane Rosenfeld, which sounds like it’s tactfully avoiding the sexual stuff. We’ll see – I’m definitely going to grab myself a copy.
Taking the long view on a future bonobo humanity is of course the only way to stay hopeful. In spite of the situation in Israel-Palestine, in Ukraine-Russia, in Afghanistan, Syria, South Sudan, Burundi and so on, the human world is far less overtly violent than it was centuries and millennia ago. Reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s rather too whirlwind a world history (The World: a family history), amongst countless others, will tell you that. Even with a nuclear holocaust currently hanging over us (I recently encountered someone who fervently favours a nuclear strike – and strong male leadership – to stop Putin), and our slowness in handling the global warming crisis, I can’t seriously envisage a future human wipeout. The fact is, it often takes shocks at our own cruelty and stupidity to bring about anything like bonoboesque reform. It took two World Wars and all the barbarity they entailed to get us to become more global in our concerns, to take more seriously the concept of universal human rights and united nations, though these are still not taken seriously enough. Worse before it gets better? I can only hope not.
Meanwhile, I must get hold of that book…
References
more frayed and fractured thoughts on the long and winding road that leads to your bonoboism
I have attempted to show, in my book The Second Sex [1949], why a woman’s situation still, even today, prevents her from exploring the world’s basic problems.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, 1960
L’admission des femmes à l’égalité parfaite serait la marque la plus sûre de la civilisation et elle doublerait les forces intellectuelles du genre humain.
Stendhal, De l’amour, 1821
Little Women
The move towards female dominance in the WEIRD world has begun. Or has it? If so, it has a bloody long way to go. Here in Australia, our Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister are male, but at least our Foreign Minister is female. As a relatively new country, federated in 1901, we’ve had 31 Prime Ministers, 30 of whom have been male. That’s slightly (or much?) better than the USA, with 45 Presidents, all male, from 1789. Of course, Australia’s only female PM, Julia Gillard, came to power in the 21st century (unelected ‘by the people’, due to internal ructions in the sitting government, though her party, the Australian Labor Party, went on to retain government in 2010 – but then the party dumped her before the next election). Our neighbour New Zealand has had three female PMs, one of whom, Helen Clark, managed to hold the post for nine years. And New Zealand was the first country in the WEIRD world to allow women to vote, in 1893.
We don’t have a presidential system, we have a far better party-based system, in which we vote for policies and party platforms rather than a one-on-0ne between two ‘I alone can fix it’ noise-makers. Having said that, I’m being a bit disingenuous – it’s very likely that a lot of Aussies vote based on the ‘personality’ of Mr Labour or Mr LNP (the federal LNP has never had a female leader, while federal labour has had only Gillard). But at least the party can dump their leaders at the behest of the elected members, and there’s nothing in the way of immunity or ‘pardoning powers’. And that goes for virtually every democracy in the WEIRD world, apart from the USA. Getting rid of all that bullshit would, I think, be a move in the bonobo direction for that teetering nation. Don’t hold your breath.
The bonobo world, as I see it, is not just a predominantly female world, it’s a collaborative world. And with a greater spirit of collaboration in the structure or design or evolved culture of a company or a discipline – think education, the law, but above all the sciences, which don’t suffer from the negativities of in-built adversarial systems (politics, courts, industrial relations) – more women will be attracted, and will succeed. The horrorshow regions of the world – China, Russia, the Middle East (including Israel) and much of Africa, Asia and South America, are mucho macho. Which, frankly, doesn’t leave much territory for women to display their wares. Those that succeed, politically, often do so by aping the confrontational male approach, to the delight of their male ‘advisors’. Pew research from a few months ago tells us that fewer than a third of UN member states have ever had a female leader, and that of the mere thirteen current female leaders, nine are the first female leaders of their nation. Of course, if we go back 100 years, when the League of Nations was struggling to survive, the situation was far worse. So unless change occurs exponentially, we’ll be waiting a few centuries before bonoboism takes its rightful place in our world.
And yet, we must take the long view. It has amused and annoyed me that so many scholars, who should know better, take issue with Steven Pinker’s ‘better angels of our nature’ and Peter Singer’s ‘expanding circle’. The evidence of extreme, mass human violence and cruelty going back centuries into millennia has been gathered and presented by countless historians, and the fact that so many millions were killed in just the past century or so of warfare is not due to our growing thuggishness and indifference to suffering, but the greater efficiency of our killing machinery, culminating in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki horror. Some may say this is wishful thinking, but I consider that double event as a watershed in our history. What followed was a period of unprecedented peace in the WEIRD world, and the establishment of a concept of universal human rights, developed and promoted by the indefatigable Eleanor Roosevelt, among many others.
Over the years I’ve known many individuals to sneer at and dismiss the UN as a toothless tiger, and it would be easy enough to enumerate its failings, but the very existence of ‘peacekeeping forces’ is, historically, a completely novel, and quite bonoboesque, phenomenon. After all, bonobos aren’t entirely non-violent, but they tend to employ violence only to prevent further violence.
Bonobos are less territorial than chimps. They both live in distinct troupes (think ‘nations’) but while bonobos are observed to share food (and cuddles) with bonobo foreigners, chimps are just as likely to engage in death-fights. In recent centuries, humans have created nations, whose integrity obsesses us, so that we patrol borders, we obsess over the ‘legality’ of those who cross those borders, we pride ourselves on being ‘us’ and not ‘them’. Before we developed those obsessions, an intrepid voyager, or ‘immigrant’, might have travelled from Albion, where I was born, to the European mainland, and on east for thousands of kilometres, to arrive at the northern Pacific, perhaps around where Vladivostok is now, without ever having crossed a border, or been asked to produce her ‘papers’. Of course she may well have been robbed or raped a few times along the way, all part of the adventure, and would’ve learned about safety in numbers, and the art of ingratiation… Intrepid travellers generally have many skills to rely on, for surviving and even thriving in new arenas, enlivening and enriching those arenas to the benefit of all, a process that has occurred time and time again – but when males have dominated, there has aways been a conflictual downside. If female dominance manages to become the norm, as one day, long after the eight billion humans currently doing their diverse things around the biosphere have passed away, I believe it will, this downside will be greatly reduced, and a true golden age for humanity, and for the biosphere within which it is enmeshed, will begin.
Or maybe not. I always like to have an each-way bet, even when I’ll never know in my lifetime what the outcome will be. Got to protect my future rep after all. But I really don’t think a future without greater female empowerment can be contemplated with equanimity. China, Russia, the Middle East and most of Africa are currently shithole regions for women, but arguably this isn’t because women’s situation has deteriorated in these regions. It has never been good for them, since their history has been recorded. Or perhaps not never. There have been brief periods – before the Ayatollahs turned Persia into Iran, for example, or when Catherine the Great introduced the idea of (limited) education for women in Russia – but it so often seems like one step forward then two steps back.
Anyway, Vive les bonobos. We need to keep learning from them.
References
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eleanor-Roosevelt
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Universal-Declaration-of-Human-Rights