Posts Tagged ‘female supremacy’
the thirty percent rule, or whatever, revisited: bonobos, anyone?
cold land, warm heart
So I wrote about the 30% female empowerment rule, or target, put forward by some UN body, some time ago, and it’s time for another look, given the extreme macho activities of recent years, such as Putin’s war on Ukraine and ‘the West’, Xi’s relentlessly anti-female government, the horrors of Hamas and the Israeli government, MAGA brutalist absurdity, and the anti-female governments of – well, they’re too numerous to mention. Clearly, all Islamic governments are male-dominant, as are most South American and African governments, given their largely patriarchal societies….
I of course am more interested in a 70% rule, or a bonobo humanity, a world turned upside-down. Not likely, but wouldn’t it be interesting if some ‘small’ but advanced nation, like Australia, or New Zealand, or Taiwan, or one of the Scandinavian nations, performed such an experiment. After all, bonobos are a small community, and they’re putting the human world to shame, or they would be, if it wasn’t for the dolorous fact that we’re too far up ourselves to pay attention.
I’m always a little reluctant to address the fact that bonobo female dominance, and their less aggressive, more caring and sharing social behaviour, is mediated largely through kissing and-a hugging and mutual masturbation. Sex is always a touchy subject – even if it’s only yourself you’re touching. The Catholic Church, with its all-celibate, all-and-ever male clergy, continues to lead the way, in the WEIRD world, in terms of misbegotten attitudes to sexuality. Not only does it have a five-tiered edifice of celibate male bureaucratic authority (Popes above cardinals above archbishops above bishops above priests), but it insists upon promoting a ‘virgin mother’, essentially sexless, voiceless, compliant and devoid of any identifiable character, as the ideal woman. And yet, this disastrously misogynist organisation is holding up better than its protestant offshoots, a situation sorely in need of analysis in some future blog pieces.
Another setback for women’s rights and sexual freedom comes from the world’s largest Moslem nation, Indonesia, which I seem to recall once prided itself on being a ‘moderate’ nation by comparison to those of the Middle East. In late 2022 its parliament unanimously passed a law criminalising sex outside marriage throughout its numerous islands and cultures, which seems to me as dumb as banning ice-cream and lemonade. Not very bonobo. Which makes me wonder – how the fuck did Indonesia become Islamic? It’s a long way from Mecca, methinks. But that’s a story for another day.
Today I’m writing about advancing on the paltry 30% rule, or target, which I seem to remember was part of the UN platform… but never mind, must’ve been a dream. The UN has 17 ‘sustainable development goals’, and goal 5 is ‘gender equality’. An admirable goal of course, but I should remind everyone that in the mammalian world there’s very little gender equality. Mostly, when it comes to social mammals, it’s male dominance, while some mammals, like bonobos, squirrel monkeys, marmosets, tamarins and lemurs (amongst primates) are female-dominant. That’s one of many reasons why I favour female dominance over equality. The main reason, though, is that female dominance is generally not simply an inversion of male dominance – it tends to create a very different kind of social structure, one that, it seems to me, is worth striving to achieve (this is most obviously the case for bonobo culture, and it’s significant that they are our closest living relatives, along with chimps).
But of course we’re a long way from anything like equality, never mind female dominance. Here’s some commentary from the UN website on goal 5:
On average, women in the labor market still earn 23 percent less than men globally and women spend about three times as many hours in unpaid domestic and care work as men.
Sexual violence and exploitation, the unequal division of unpaid care and domestic work, and discrimination in public office, all remain huge barriers. All these areas of inequality have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic: there has been a surge in reports of sexual violence, women have taken on more care work due to school closures, and 70% of health and social workers globally are women.
At the current rate, it will take an estimated 300 years to end child marriage, 286 years to close gaps in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws, 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace, and 47 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments.
Fortunately, like most people, I plan to live forever, so it’ll be interesting to see if we can do better than those estimates. However, I’m man enough to admit that I’d rather not see it happen through men killing each other off in wars, a scenario that seems a bit real these days. One thing we can try to be optimistic about, I suppose, is that ‘current rates’ are never static. But it’s hard to deny that the current scenario is gloomier than it has been for a while. The UN’s future scenario re the pace of change is more or less duplicated by that of the World Economic Forum, which estimates that it will take ‘131 years to close the [gender] gap’. In a report published 6 months ago, it made these points:
- Gender equality recovers to pre-pandemic levels but pace of progress has slowed
- Gender parity in economic participation and opportunity drops from 2022 levels, while political empowerment makes only slight gains
- Iceland remains the most gender-equal country, followed by Norway, Finland, New Zealand and Sweden
Australia, by the way, isn’t in the top ten, and neither is the USA nor Canada, nations we tend to compare ourselves with. It’s a surprise to me that Nicaragua and Namibia are 7th and 8th, which says much about my own biases.
Of course, the real problem is our very long historical tradition of patriarchy. Going back several hundred years, before the scientific revolution initiated by the likes of Kepler, Galileo and Newton, the proto-WEIRD world, of Jews, Christians and Moslems, all worshipped essentially the same ultra-male god, and the Christians, the most numerous of the three sects, raised up, as their ideal female, a ‘virgin’ mother, sexless, voiceless, and symbolically passive. Even before that, the ancient Greeks, Romans and Mesopotamians forced their women under veils and kept them enclosed, but the Abrahamic religions cemented patriarchy and faith together into a kind of powerful ontological force that only gradually began to crack apart with the scientific and philosophical enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries – though this enlightenment has been largely ignored by the Islamic world.
Science is the intellectual force that religion is struggling to contend with. I’ve written, years ago, about the falsity of Steven Jay Gould’s concept of NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria), a rather pretentious term arguing for completely different spheres of concern for science and religion. Galileo, that devoutly Christian scientific pioneer, might’ve approved, but he almost lost his life because the then Pope, Urban VIII, and the Bible itself, differed with him on celestial matters. And even today, if you care to press the requisite keys on your device, you’ll be flooded with creationist propaganda and other anti-science ‘Christianity’.
Anyway, that’s why I encourage anyone, including myself, to consider the science of primatology, our human heritage, and our primate cousins the bonobos and chimps, and the lessons to be learned.
References
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/
https://karger.com/fpr/article/91/1/48/144017/Female-Power-A-New-Framework-for-Understanding#
https://www.weforum.org/press/2023/06/gender-equality-is-stalling-131-years-to-close-the-gap/
https://bonobohumanity.blog/wp-admin/post.php?post=9879&action=edit
a bonobo world 29: the 30% rule and Myanmar
exploring the history and future of human monogamy
the world’s dictatorships, according to someone – but remember, not all dictatorships are thugocracies and not all thugocracies are dictatorships
So, humans are predominantly monogamous, but our closest living relatives, chimps and bonobos, are sexually promiscuous within large male-female communities. When and why did we turn monogamous?
Offhand, I’ve heard of and can think of a few answers. For example, I’ve read that it began with the notion of private property, which itself began with or was reinforced by the advent of agriculture and permanent settlement. Many anthropologists try to date this, but the spread of Homo sapiens and her ancestors both within and outside of Africa produced a diversity of cultures, no doubt tightly related to environmental conditionals. For example the Australian Aborigines lived here for as much as sixty thousands years without developing permanent settlements and agriculture, and they were right not to do so, as the soil and conditions didn’t favour that lifestyle. So monogamy would have become the norm at different times for different cultures, and sometimes not at all.
Bearing all this in mind, I take with some salt the claim by Kit Opie, an evolutionary anthropologist at University College, London, that ‘the modern monogamous culture has only been around for just 1,000 years’. Okay I got this in a report from CNN Health – did they lose a zero somewhere? Opie’s argument is a familiar one, about property and inheritance, but surely this goes back more than a thousand years in Europe.
Of course, inheritance only matters when you have something to inherit, and in feudal society that wasn’t much for the vast majority. In early agricultural society, perhaps it was even less of a consideration.
Another causal factor I hadn’t considered, but which may have been effective in reinforcing monogamy rather than causing it, was the rise of STDs in earlier times. These diseases had ravaging effects, and would certainly have inhibited promiscuous behaviour among the infected and their associates. Infections of this type tend to make us more insular. The sad death of Nell Gwyn (and her lover Charles II) is a prime example. It’s likely that both syphilis and gonorrhoea jumped to humans from cattle and sheep, but that appears to be centuries rather than millennia ago.
Another theory has to do with the enlargement of the human brain, together with the changes to the female pelvic structure due to bipedalism. This of course takes us back much further in time. With females being more incapacitated during this period, and requiring assistance during childbirth, would this have resulted in closer male-female bonds? Then again, this might have strengthened female-female bonding, for obvious reasons. In any case, these problems of childbirth are likely to have increased social cohesion. And at some stage in the enlargement and greater complexity of the human brain, especially the prefrontal cortex, humans or their ancestors would have twigged to the connection between sex and pregnancy, and so male parentage, or what has been termed ‘reproductive consciousness’. An attempt to answer this ‘when’ question was posted in Slate back in 2013 (all links below), but understandably, it comes up with nothing firm, and even the claim that this understanding probably occurred in Homo sapiens between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago strikes me as questionable. Did H neanderthelensis have reproductive consciousness? Could H erectus have had some such understanding?
I would expect there to be a link between reproductive consciousness and monogamy, so answering this question is important. Of course, knowing, or having a strong sense, that a female’s new-born is also a product of a male (a very sophisticated and hard-won notion, as Matthew Cobb’s book The egg and sperm race makes clear) would change male-female dynamics in a dramatic way. It might be expected to turn the male and female into a team. It might also be expected, in a generally promiscuous culture, to turn males into jealous rivals, each asserting parenthood or ownership of the offspring over others. With no other form of proof, the ‘father’ would be the contest winner. Another way of assuring paternity, of course, is to reduce or eliminate the promiscuity, to ensure that you could be the only father.
So now I’m looking at the why of monogamy rather than the when. Anthropologists have found that different cultures have different understandings of the relation between sex and pregnancy, and there are likely different understandings within those cultures too. But even if one man’s paternity is accepted in all or most cases, we can’t be sure that this will lead to monogamy. It would depend on the group’s dynamics. For example, imagine a bonobo-like human culture, in which the mother-child bond is very strong, and adult female bonds are also very strong, so that the mother would get help from other females when she needs it (and males too will help out, but they are further along in the chain of connections). Why should males knowing that they’re the father change this dynamic? There’s already a perfectly adequate, female-centred method for bringing up baby. The males had previously been shut out, and knowledge of paternity wouldn’t necessarily change that situation, even if the females acknowledged the paternity of particular males.
Again, it seems to me that monogamy is most likely to be linked strongly to private property, which isn’t a concern for bonobos, but is more so for chimps, who fight over territory and pecking order, between and within groups. And fighting over territory has been a virtual raison d’être for humans as far back as we can trace.
So it seems that bonobos are really the outliers – less monogamous than us, less possessive and less aggressive. So is it possible to learn from those relatively dumb beasts?
Well maybe we already are, without quite being aware of it. I always live in hope. The push is on – and it is relatively recent – to recognise intellectual powers and physical skills. Women have been allowed to study at universities only recently – less than a century ago. Women’s sport has only started to come into its own in the last couple of decades. Beauty pageants – putting women in their ornamental place – are on the decline. And we note with both horror and satisfaction that the world’s thugocracies – Afghanistan, Algeria, Russia, China, North Korea, the Philippines, Hungary, Brazil, Chechnia, Belarus, Burma, Turkey, India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Angola, Azerbaijan, Brunei, Burundi, the two Congos, Cambodia, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Cuba, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan, South Sudan, Nicaragua, Mauritania, Libya, Oman, Kazakhstan, Laos, Vietnam, Gabon, Qatar, Rwanda, Eswatini, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Uganda, Western Sahara – and yes, there are a lot, and I’m sure there are more – these thugocracies are, without exception, controlled by men. And if you look at countries run – at least for the time being – by women, such as Germany, Taiwan, New Zealand, Iceland, Denmark, Finland and Slovakia, they make for great holiday destinations, especially in the time of covid. Though they might not let you in.
So the evidence is mounting that a human world turned upside-down would be a great improvement. My hope is that women continue to band together with other women to make it happen. Sadly it won’t happen in my lifetime, but I look forward to seeing a little more progress before my span is complete. Whether this world would continue to be as monogamous as it is now is an interesting question. As has been pointed out, by Melvin Konner amongst others, men are largely surplus to requirements, once their sperm has been gathered, so they may be treated like drones, of the ant variety, and left to die. Or maybe they’ll be kept on as pets and playthings, as well as useful drudges. Whatever the future holds, monogamy is certainly not a necessary part of it.
References and links
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/17/health/sti-infanticide-human-monogamy/index.html
Matthew Cobb, The egg & sperm race, 2006
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/dictatorship-countries
Melvin Konner, Women after all: sex, evolution and the end of male supremacy, 2015