Posts Tagged ‘gender’
Patriarchy: a tough nut to crack
We all know who wears the panties on this planet
I’ve just finished rereading The Bonobo Sisterhood, and was amused and bemused by this passage:
The current patriarchal laws gaslight women into not believing what they know to be true. Recall Heidi Schreck sitting in her car, thinking something like ‘stay alive’ while a boy removed her panties. At that moment she knew something to be true, and in Bonoboland her truth will be acknowledged and acted upon, either in the moment if her cry is heard or afterward.
Diane L Rosenfeld, The Bonobo Sisterhood, p225
Of course there’s nothing amusing about date rape, which so many women have experienced, and which is dealt with at some length in the book, along with the male privilege and male solidarity that often facilitates such behaviour, but on this occasion I was struck by the word ‘panties’. Girls wear panties. Even grown women wear panties, apparently. Males never wear panties, even when they’re children. I’m presuming Rosenfeld used the term inadvertently, but it’s that very inadvertence that resonates. It’s an infantilising term, that’s so commonplace that we’re generally oblivious to its effect. But it’s important to make the connection. Children are under our control. They need to do as they’re told, to realise what’s good for them – it might hurt them at first, but they’ll finally recognise that it’s all for their own good…
Panties are pretty, underpants are boring, jocks are manly (they’re an Aussie term, not sure if they’re globally recognised). A lot of the names for clothing have underlying gendered and sexual connotations, some of which are subtle, others, like ‘panties’, not remotely so. Why do men have shirts while women are stuck with blouses? Why do women wear stupid shoes, aka stilettos, while men have Cuban heels or whatever? Like petticoats, it’s all a bit petty. And of course patriarchy is at the bottom of it all, and it’s telling that Rosenfeld, so clearly onto feminist issues, should make that slip … (slip for a female undergarment – sexist or not?)
Who wears the pants? The men of ancient Greece and Rome, all ultra-patriarchs, wore skirts and dresses, which they called robes or togas. Trousers probably started with horse-riding among the Asiatic nomads, males generally, though hopefully women too. And think of tights and slacks, socks and stockings, bloomers and knickerbockers, which somehow became knickers; ties and scarves, hats, caps and bonnets, all with their shiftingly genderised elements. And nowadays, for good or ill, we’ve gone beyond or underneath clothing, with trans and cis, shemales, bitches, butches, incels, alphas, betas, sluts and studs, to name a few. Language does seem to have its downside.
Which brings me back to those language-free, and clothing-free, primates that I like to go on about. You see how we’ve mucked things up a bit with all that paraphernalia. With bonobos, what you see is what you get. And what do they see, or sense? A backside to die for? A wet dream of pink bits? The sexy scent of those fabulous pheromones? A boner to… well, you get the idea. And even without the sexual stuff – though the sexual stuff is pretty central – bonobos have something which could almost be called a policy. No-one left behind. Yes, I’ve mentioned a bit of female-on-male discipline, which very effectively sends a message to the odd uppity male, who always seems to learn his lesson, but the contrast with their chimp neighbours north of the Congo and elsewhere, is stark. And I mean really stark. Here are the facts on chimp aggression, from Wikipedia:
Dominance Aggression: Adult males fight for social status and access to fertile females using charging, biting, and displays (like branch-shaking), which rarely result in death due to submission rituals.
Coalitionary Aggression: Multiple males or females gang up on a single rival to gain rank or improve mating opportunities.
Intercommunity Warfare & Raiding: Neighboring groups regularly patrol borders, ambush loners, and engage in coordinated lethal attacks. Famous instances include the Gombe Chimpanzee War (1974–1978) and ongoing civil strife among the massive Ngogo Chimpanzee Community in Uganda’s Kibale National Park.
Infanticide and Cannibalism: Males and females occasionally kill and consume infants from rival groups or within their own community to eliminate competition or speed up a mother’s return to fertility.
Sexual Coercion: Males frequently chase, hit, and bite estrous females to control mating access.
This is a truly stark contrast to bonobo behaviour, just as human patriarchal behaviour, in terms of numbers slaughtered alone, dwarfs that of chimps. But then, we’ve still managed to out-number them, by a huge margin. We doubtless need to produce fewer kids, and to look after them better. Like bonobos…
We have a lot to learn.
References
Diane L Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood, 2022
evolutionary psychology, bonobos and our future
Having got stuck into evolutionary psychology in my last post (and others), or at least one essay published under this monicker, and recalling that the essay was published in 2016, I’m wondering how this relatively recently-minted field of study is faring. Wikipedia, I must say, gives the field a fair shake of the sauce bottle in its lengthy presentation. My own interest is largely in the area of sexuality, and I’m particularly interested in female sexuality. Bonobos, I’ve noted, engage in female-female sex, generally in the form of genito-genital rubbing, significantly more than males in male-male sex, and this, obviously, strengthens female-female bonding in general.
As I write this, I’m thinking of devoting a lot more of my writing to the sexual aspect of human behaviour, and how it can be utilised more productively, after the fashion of bonobos. Of course it can be argued, as Freud argued back in the day, that sublimation of the sex drive is – well, the basis of civilisation. By ‘controlling’ our sexual urges, or ‘channelling’ them, we’ve created art and science, and made piles of money. But then again, Genghis Khan sired oodles of children but still managed to slaughter, or preside over the slaughter of, millions – though there was nobody around to do a body count. The point being that you can build empires and spit out children at the same time, or something like that. But of course his campaigns and those of his rellies could hardly be said to be major contributions to civilisation.
It would be hard to describe marriage in terms of evolutionary psychology, but let’s try monogamy. It’s for the birds, surely. Mammals, not so much. The BBC Earth website tells me that only 3 to 5% of all non-human mammals are monogamous, though in primate species it’s closer to 30%. At least, that’s for social monogamy, which apparently isn’t the same as genetic monogamy. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation:
Social monogamy does not describe the sexual interactions or patterns of reproduction between monogamous pairs; rather it strictly refers to the patterns of their living conditions. Rather, sexual and genetic monogamy describe reproductive patterns. It is possible for a species to be both genetically monogamous and socially monogamous but it is more likely for species to practice social monogamy and not genetic monogamy.
So, in the society that I and most of those around me were brought up in, i.e. Christian or post-Christian society, we’ve been expected to be socially and genetically monogamous, and many of us are. You could say it’s an easy and even lazy option. Of course we are sexually attracted to others outside of our marriage or coupledom, but it might be costly to act on, or try to act on, that attraction. We can also allow ourselves a sense of moral superiority in resisting temptation, even if the person we’re attracted to finds us as alluring as a rusty nail.
There are also difficulties in eschewing monogamy, due to our current highly segregated, and socially sanctioned, system of child-rearing, with essentially basic families all living under separate roofs, uniting two sets of genes to produce offspring. And of course this system has, by and large, proved extremely successful, though there’s no reason to suppose a more bonoboesque set of arrangements would be worse, IMHO.
Yes, shock, horror, don’t be ridiculous, I hear my tendentious twin barking, surely the private home and the nuclear family are here to stay. We don’t live in trees and wank each other all day, we make space telescopes, cyclotrons, LLMs, and superfoods, and it’s all down to monogamy and keeping our clothes on, mostly.
Well, I think we should keep our options open, at the very least. And that is happening, as we slough off religion and discover, through history, experimentation and the many-faceted post-industrial world, that there are more or less infinite ways of living collectively.
Experiments have been done with chimps and bonobos which are quite revealing in terms of their different strengths and weaknesses, and much has to do with the environment they grew up in. Bonobos landed themselves, quite fortunately, in an area south of the Congo River, heavily forested, with an abundance of food, especially of the non-meat variety. With enough to go round, there was no need to be overly competitive in obtaining the stuff. So, interestingly, the sexual dimorphism in bonobos has reduced slightly compared to that in chimps, remembering that they only separated between 1.5 and 2 million years ago, a sliver of evolutionary time. This is most likely due to a lesser need for strength in hunting live game – more of a male activity in that male-dominant society (and think of the implications for post-industrial human societies). More sharing, less competitiveness – this has led to general differences in bonobo versus chimp behaviours, and cognitive skills. Here’s a quote from a paper entitled Differences in the Cognitive Skills of Bonobos and Chimpanzees, published in PLoS One in August 2010:
We compared both species on a wide range of cognitive problems testing their understanding of the physical and social world. Bonobos were more skilled at solving tasks related to theory of mind or an understanding of social causality, while chimpanzees were more skilled at tasks requiring the use of tools and an understanding of physical causality. These species differences support the role of ecological and socio-ecological pressures in shaping cognitive skills over relatively short periods of evolutionary time.
.There’s a lot of food for thought here, and, in my view, much to hope for. My thoughts naturally run to human males as more competitive, and females, the mothers of us all, as more empathic. It’s not a yawning divide, of course, and there are plenty of individual exceptions, but there have been changes in the western world, in particular, since Darwin’s remarks about women’s intellectual inferiority, so typical of his place and time – changes which include our much greater knowledge of neurology, as well as changes in work practices and education in the post-industrial age – changes which, with a bit of imagination, we can compare to the abundant bonobo world leaving behind the tough, competitive chimp environment. Today we have the tragic, stupid wars against Ukraine and Iran – egotistical decisions that were typically male – or I might say, wars started by increasingly atypical males in the context of an increasingly less male-dominated or macho society. But the wheel turns painfully slowly, and I’m getting old, dammit.
We’re facing crises today which aren’t about wars, in spite of the enormous local suffering they cause. They’re about climate change and our varied and in places devastating impact on the environment and its multifarious gigantic and minuscule inhabitants. Einstein dreamed of a world government, and as a humanist, who participated in a humanist group for a decade or so, that’s one of my wildest dreams too. We’re affecting the whole planet, and so our species has, whether we will or no, responsibility for that planet’s future. When will we come to fully realise this, as a collective?
Okay, maybe I’m getting carried away, but the bonobo example is a good starting point, methinks. They care and they share. It can even be sexy.
References
https://www.bbcearth.com/news/seven-animals-who-mate-for-life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_monogamy_in_mammalian_species
Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution – a bit weird
my mother’s copy
I just finished reading Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, and I don’t quite know why, or whether I ever really read it. It was a tedious activity because I mostly had only the vaguest idea of what she was on about, and at times it seemed deliberately obscure. The quotes from classical Greek and Roman, only sometimes translated – didn’t help, nor did the extreme maleness of the language and references – Olympe de Gouges’ headless corpse would be spinning in its grave, if she was ever given one. The book is flooded with male pronouns and references to male predecessors of, commentators on or participants in the two principal revolutions she discusses – the American and the French. Let’s see – Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hume, Adams, Jefferson, Saint-Juste, Robespierre, Paine, Tocqueville and Marx to name a few (I was excited to find her dropping the name Odysse Barrot at one point. The first woman?!! But no, no, looking her up she turned out to be a male). She did finally, toward the end of the last chapter, give an honourable mention to Rosa Luxemburg – too little too late for me.
The book has been criticised – rightly – for its elitism, which occasionally shone through the murk of its exasperating pedantry. Here’s an example, if I’m able to read her aright:
The most the citizen can hope for [in a two-party system] is to be ‘represented’, whereby it is obvious that the only thing which can be represented and delegated is interest, or the welfare of the constituents, but neither their actions nor their opinions. In this system the opinions are indeed unascertainable for the simple reason that they are non-existent. Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods – moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former – but no opinion.
On revolution, pp 268-9
The claim that opinions don’t exist outside of public debate is about as preposterous as you can get, and rarely does Arendt write plainly enough for me to detect the absurdity. She seems to be saying that individuals just don’t have the wherewithal to form opinions. And here was me – a bit of an isolated type – thinking I’d been spending much of my time doing just that! Which doesn’t make me particularly clever – even five-year-olds can do it.
So what is the take-away from Arendt’s book? She writes much about the success of the American revolution and the failure of the French, but I’d always thought of the US experience being first a war of independence, and then an attempt to work out a new governmental system which would unite and perhaps incorporate the various systems that the British and European settlers had devised in the century or more before that war. A federal system indeed. The problem with the French revolution, as Arendt certainly realised, but never really spells out in her book, was that there was no agreed-upon replacement plan for its monarchy and its ancien regime. The disagreements, and the power vacuum created by the monarchy’s sudden destruction, led to internecine strife at a level never seen before in Europe, with some believing that everything had to change, including the calendar (which was much easier to deal with than the impoverishment of the people – the true cause of the revolution in the first place). In the following few years, moderates like de Gouges, who proposed a constitutional monarchy, were done away with, leading to the Terror and the execution of Robespierre, and eventually the Napoleonic despotism.
So the French Revolution was a murky, muddled and devastating affair, one that certainly ‘ate its own children’, and I’m not sure that comparing it to the situation a few years earlier in what was to become the USA, where the politically seasoned and not-so-impoverished settlers managed to fight off a common enemy while adopting variants of that enemy’s constitution, is all that helpful.
But that wasn’t so much what irritated me about the book. What most annoyed me was its opacity, and its maleness. It was as if she was trying to be more male than male, in her ‘scholarliness’, her dryness, her emotional distance. It was really quite weird.
Reference
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution 1963
this is important: bonobos and humans
Wolf Alice – the right stuff
I’ve been listening to the music and watching the videos of Wolf Alice recently – I’ve just discovered them, mea culpa. Just a fantastic band. They often sing about emotional stuff, emotional confusion, as in the song Blush, which is accompanied by a video that adds gender to the confusion, and an extra dose of sadness to the word ‘happy’, which is the song’s refrain.
I won’t pretend to analyse the song, but it’s one of a number of influences lately that have made me think of humanity’s gender issues – issues that don’t seem to be shared by our closest rellies. Tormenting issues.
My novel In Elizabeth dealt with adolescent and later teen issues in a working-class town, mostly in a light-hearted way. But the fact is, it was a period of torment – though sometimes I felt a sort of enlightenment, or superiority, in thinking of things, indulging in feelings, that I sensed were ‘beyond the pale’.
I described my first sex (but what exactly is ‘sex’, is it feelings or acts? The first erection, the first masturbation, the first awareness of the exciting/disturbing physicality of your own body, the first physical attraction to another?) – so here I’m talking about my first act of putting my penis into the vagina of a girl, an act which, I’m not sure, was probably illegal according to the laws of the time, and even of today. It was my 16th birthday, and the girl was a year below me at school, so either 14 or 15, but not a virgin, as she told me. I was beyond words overwhelmed by the occasion, because she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Only a few weeks before I’d spotted her in a school corridor, chatting to girlfriends. Her movements, her smile, her grace mesmerised me, and I recall thinking of a young horse, a filly, free and unself-conscious, untamed, perfect. For days I could barely think of anything else and I kept seeking her out in the school grounds….
So I described my obsession to a school friend, and when I pointed her out, he told me he knew her, her name was Edwina, her family were friends with his, and he suggested ‘putting in a good word to her’ about me. That sounded ridiculous, and I agreed. A couple of days later he came back to me. Edwina said yes, she would be my girlfriend.
The joyful impulses of youth. I described this in my novel, and I described the massive impact of Bowie on me as a 16 year-old, and my youthful questioning of sexuality and gender. I didn’t happen to mention that the boy who got me together with Edwina (very briefly) was very pretty, and I had delicious fantasies about him. Not that I avoided homosexuality – I wrote of some boy-boy cuddles and fantasies, which at least one reader told me she found ‘a bit shocking’.
To be honest, I’m shocked, dismayed, and above all disappointed, that people are shocked. Which seems code for disapproval.
The whole male-female gender stuff is still very much a minefield, and a battlefield. As someone in his 70th year on the planet, I’m hoping I can think about it ‘objectively’, if that word means anything.
The issue is important because for centuries upon centuries we’ve lived in a patriarchal world. I’ve read a lot of history, and much of it has been about men behaving badly. And I mean really really badly. And there are still large regions of the world in which females are automatically considered to be inferior, meaning their lives are heavily circumscribed vis-à-vis men. So gender matters muchly.
So what is it? What do we mean by it? And what does it mean to a bird, a cat or a bonobo?
Bonobos are female-dominant. In order to be so, they must clearly be aware of their gender, though they have no knowledge of the word ‘gender’ – they’re never confused by language like we can be. So they’re driven, or affected, by instinct, to be supportive of their own gender. They know who’s male and who’s female, though there may be degrees of maleness and femaleness, as Frans de Waal pointed out in the case of Donna, the female chimp who hung out with the males and never became pregnant (she finally became the dominant chimp in her troupe – or rather in the Lincoln Park zoo enclosure where she lived – but would this have happened in the wild?)
It’s difficult enough to understand how and why bonobos became female-dominant in a period of one or two million years (a pretty wide margin of error) since their separation from chimps, without trying to understand our broadly patriarchal system, which is clearly undergoing change, not only in the WEIRD world. Still, it’s a fascinating topic, which I feel the need to focus on more exclusively, without being distracted by Trumpism or the possibly coming European holocaust, should Putin be pushed to the brink, or the possible slaughter of Taiwanese people under Xi – and other horrorshow issues.
So, in the non-human primate world, size generally matters, and males are mostly bigger than females. Gorillas and orangutans are at the extreme end of this dimorphism. Interesting in the case of orangutans, as they’re solitary, so there’s no obvious need for gender-based dominance – but then, if you’re going to rape a female, it pays to be as big and strong as possible. But of course, the term ‘rape’ is never used when referring to non-human primates. Forced copulation is the preferred term.
But ‘forced copulation’ isn’t just a euphemism. It’s done to produce offspring, and humans don’t have sex, be it via rape or love or anything in between, just to produce children. And why do orangutans have sex? Do they know they’re doing it to produce children? Does a dog – male or female – rub its genital area intensely on your leg to produce offspring? Silly question. These activities are ‘evolutionary by-products’ – we are stimulated to have sex in order to reproduce, but that stimulation being in itself pleasurable, we just do it regardless, often without a partner. And often, as with bonobos, to promote fellow-feeling – you rub my front and I’ll rub yours. Humans often do it for similar reasons, but not enough, I think. After all, we can mutually masturbate and reflect on the nature of dark matter/energy. We contain multitudes.
I’m generally intrigued, and often disturbed, by the difference between human sexual practices and those of other species. Again we are probably the only species that knows that sex leads to pregnancy. We’re also the only clothed species, and these two facts seem connected. Is there anywhere on this planet where public nudity (above a certain tender age) is not a crime? Clothing and civilisation go hand in hand, and most people are relieved that this so. After all, we’re not animals…
But seriously, civilisation demands clothing. Indeed, we might argue that the greater our level of civilisation, the more vast and varied our vestments should be. Charles Darwin, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, used the word ‘savage’ rather a lot in The descent of man, and it seems clear to me that he could see one coming by her lack of anything resembling a petticoat.
So, enough of the cheap shots. I’m intrigued, and inspired by the fact, and surely this is a fact, that bonobos have used sex to become female dominant, while humans have used violence to become male dominant.
There, I’ve come out with it. I’ve avoided being direct about it till now, in fact I’m not even sure that I was clearly aware of this before writing it. Of course it wasn’t deliberate, but that’s how it happened. So, if we deliberately create, or try to create, a female dominant society, will it have a bonoboesque result? Are we currently trying to create such a society, or is it just happening, like evolution? The WEIRD world is certainly more ‘permissive’ than it used to be – with the inevitable frustrating conservative backlash, which means we need to recognise that the future is long, frustratingly long for us mortals, especially the oldies. And of course there are plenty of ultra-conservative females in powerful positions throughout our world, as well as women who are skeptical of any difference that greater female empowerment would make. Usually they point to one or two female politicians, or bosses, or mothers, who weren’t much chop. That’s a ‘not seeing the forest for the trees’ argument, IMHO.
Obviously I’m not going to be around to experience a female-dominant WEIRD world, and neither is anyone now living. It may never happen, but I think it should, for the sake of humanity and life on this planet. The trouble-makers today are the leaders of Russia, the USA, China, Iran, Israel, Sudan and North Korea, to name a prominent few. Of course they’re all male, and they’d all expect their successors to be male for all eternity, but that won’t happen, at least we know that much.
So, Wolf Alice isn’t an all-female band, but at least they’re not an all-male one, and there’s no doubt that their sole female member, Ellie Rowsell, is also their most prominent member, for a number of reasons. Their song The Sofa, in contrast to Blush, the song I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, seems to me to be happy and life-affirming, and the accompanying video of males, females and kids engaging in fun, skillful, weird and wonderful activities as a backdrop to a floating or rolling sofa occupied by the band members in turn, but mostly by Rowsell, the singer (and intellectual beauty queen), is – well, it’s just nice, in a bonobo sort of way. Here are some of the lyrics:
Hope I can accept the wild thing in me, hope nobody comes to tame her, And she can be free.Sick of second-guessing my behaviour, And what I want to be. Just let me lie here on the sofa…
I’ll be fine, I’ll be okay, I feel kind of lucky right now and I’m not ashamed to sayI can be happy, I can be sadI can be a bitch when I get madI wanna settle down, or to fall in loveBut sometimes, I just want to fuckI love my life, I love my lifeSometimes, I just want to…
Bonobos don’t have sofas, but I like to think to think they have a similar mind-set, if in a more simplified form. Emotionally labile at times, excitable, sexual, and, given their precarious position in the Congo, hoping to maintain their freedom, the threats to which they’re perhaps dimly aware of. .
So, vive les bonobos, and thank you Wolf Alice, you’re good.
Okay, so this is a chimp, but you get the idea…
why is being transgender so controversial?
The first time I lived completely away from family, when I was twenty-one, I shared house with two males, an older homosexual who never wore clothes in the house, and a bisexual who was more sexually interested in me than I was in him, so it was a challenging but fascinating environment. The older man introduced me to his subculture, which included a couple of men, quite elderly, at least from my youthful perspective, who wore dresses and had male partners. I think the word transvestite was used. This wasn’t particularly in-your-face stuff, with heavy make-up, flashy jewellery and fake busts, or whatever, though of course I was a bit nonplussed. These guys were softly spoken, feminine in their gestures, simply but femininely dressed, and clingy with their partners. This was all a revelation to me, and I remember being quite moved, even teary about it all. They seemed so quietly defiant, and contented.
I presume there have always been humans who have felt they were born into the wrong gender. Girls who, even before they really gave it much conscious thought, preferred the shapes, colours, textures and activities that we adults or parents associate with boys, and who, over time, became embarrassingly consistent about their ‘odd’ choices. And maybe it’s just a phase, but sometimes not. And some parents might push their kid to behave more ‘appropriately’, and some might not. And maybe science has an answer for all this, but maybe not.
All of this might involve genetics, epigenetics, pre-natal experience, parental treatment or a host of other causal factors I know next to nothing about. We’re surely the most complex species on the planet, which should make us proud but wary.
Transgender stuff is very newsworthy at the moment, with passions running high. My own position would be to accept people’s deeply felt views about themselves and never mind what the science says. But what does the science say? Can biology and psychology be separated? Is psychology a science? Can the brain and the body be seen as separate? (My answer to that last one is no, obviously).
So in exploring this issue I’d prefer to avoid youtube debates and legal decisions. As described in my previous post, I went through a period, particularly in my mid-teens, of what might be called ‘gender uncertainty’, though I found it more thrilling than disturbing, and tended to be proud of my ‘sophistication’. Perhaps ‘gender fluidity’ would be a more accurate term. But this faded over time and I came to be happy to accept that I was a boringly heterosexual male (cisgender, as they now call it). But I also recognised that this had to do with appearance. Fifteen year-old boys become twenty-five year olds, but not in the same way, physically, that fifteen year-old girls do. You could say that it was the ‘feminine’ side of boys that attracted me, which faded as they became ‘masculinised’. Note that there are many descriptions of boy lovers among the ancient Greeks – Achilles derived strength from his love of Patroclus and Aristophanes spoke favourably of ‘hermaphrodites’ in Plato’s Symposium. We’ve become rather more conservative in our sexual outlook since then, methinks. I blame patriarchal religion.
So, contradicting myself, I want to understand the British Supreme Court’s recent decision on sex and biology and why so many women seem to be very pleased about it – and I’ll start by saying I currently know very little about it. CNN London reports it thus:
The United Kingdom’s Supreme Court has ruled that a woman is defined by “biological sex” under the country’s equality law – excluding transgender women – in a case that is expected to impact accommodations for trans women in bathrooms, hospital wards, sports clubs and more. The court ruling on Wednesday is limited to defining the term “woman” within the country’s Equality Act 2010, meaning trans women are no longer protected from discrimination as women, although they remain protected from discrimination in other forms.
But, as the reporter points out, this will have wider implications, not only for what trans people will be able to do, but for how they’re perceived.
I note that the reporter puts “biological sex” in quotes, which is as it should be. A legal definition of an essentially biological matter is always going to be problematic. There are those who, from an early age, behave in a way that is seen as ‘gender inappropriate’ to what might be expected by noting their genitalia (see Donna the chimp as described in my previous post). They’re generally not doing it to seek attention, it just comes automatically. You could say their brain makes them do it, and not particularly consciously. And the brain is a 100% biological entity.
But the UK Supreme Court has chosen to consider ‘biological sex’ in a more reductive way, as have many conservatives. The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, a science and skepticism podcast that I’ve been listening to regularly over the past 15 years, recently featured an interview with Dave Farina, a popular science communicator on YouTube, in which the transgender issue was briefly discussed. It seems there are some other science communicators, notably Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, who take a strong line on ‘biological sex’, largely based on gametes. And shamefully, I had to look the term up, though I’ve doubtless written about them before. Gametes are the sex cells – ova in females, sperm in males, which combine with their opposites to produce offspring. So, according to Dawkins, Coyne et al, the whole gender controversy can be reduced to these haploid cells (cells containing half the genetic material of diploid cells, the somatic cells of all mammals). You are what your gametes reveal. According to these scientists, this isn’t reductive, but entirely determinative, regardless of thoughts or ‘gender-affirming’ surgery. Farina and the principal host of The Skeptics’ Guide, Steven Novella, firmly disagreed, and more or less dismissed Coyne and Dawkins as members of a ‘passing generation’. We shall see.
So what to do with these trans people, with their wayward thoughts, their fantasies? And why was the Supreme Court’s decision met with such glee, by so many women? A spokeswoman for the campaign to prevent transgender women from being recognised as women, on being interviewed after the decision was handed down, expressed ‘great sympathy’ for their position, but common sense had prevailed, and – what? These people, a tiny proportion of the population, have been left in no man’s land, and no woman’s land either. If this is sympathy, I wouldn’t like to experience her hostility. What solution has been offered, apart, it seems, from forcing them to recognise that they’re deluded?
This is obviously not going to be the end of the matter, and indeed it will create greater acrimony within and between genders than there ever was before.
Meanwhile, I’m still wondering about those unisex toilets. I like the suffix uni-. I like to think it stands for ‘united’.
References
https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/transgender-people-gender-identity-gender-expression
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/19/europe/uk-supreme-court-biological-woman-intl/index.html
on gender, and bonobos
a world turned….
Australia knocks Denmark out of the World Cup – time for a hug
Often, in my usually brief discussions with women on the concept of a ‘bonobo humanity’, I get, first of all, ‘What are bonobos?’, and second, ‘But we’re not bonobos’, and third, ‘This female [boss/politician/influencer] was a disaster’. So, in this post, I want to write about this third response.
A thought experiment. Men are banned from running for political office of any kind, and also from voting. And, somehow the world’s richest people – say the top twenty, are all women (though they may not all be multi-billionaires – it just might be a more sharing human society). In other words, forget about female x or y who’s reached the top in an essentially patriarchal society. Think more about a world in which care and concern, and collaboration, and yes a bit more of lovey-dovey sex, has become the norm, and men are mostly happy about not having to make all (or any of) the decisions.
Okay, perhaps that’s going a bit far, but if you consider that the bonobo world is in some ways an inversion of the chimp world, then it might be worth considering what would be an inversion of the current human world, horrendously complex though it obviously is. And for me the obvious transformation would involve gendered power relations.
Do I see it happening? Not globally, of course, but human society is both highly fragmented and yet more inter-connected, technology-wise, than ever before. The Scandinavian countries, observed from my distance, which is about as far away as one can get, seem the most likely pioneers of this New Order, with Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark ranking as the least machismo nations by some August Body or other (what’s the female version of machismo? – apparently we’re still working on it), but there are any number of nations vying for the title of most patriarchal.
Perhaps we need to look at what the ingredients need to be, to bake a female-dominated society. One ingredient would surely be female solidarity. Here’s a nice solidarity statement that says all the right things:
Women supporting women is a powerful concept that helps foster success and empowerment. Women are more successful in all facets of life when they support one another. Building a community or a tribe of supportive women boosts morale and creates opportunities for growth and collaboration that lead to a more harmonious and inspiring environment. Mutual support among women is essential for overcoming cultural and systemic hurdles, promoting gender equality, and providing a sense of companionship, healing, and encouragement.
Read this and think bonobos. Don’t worry so much about ‘gender equality’ – genders are no more equal than people are. Just think about how female gender support can create a generally better environment for all, humans and non-humans alike, and as we think more on this, and as the evidence grows that female, as opposed to male, empowerment generally leads to more group ‘companionship, healing and encouragement’, without reducing our ability to innovate and problem-solve, female leadership might just become the order of the human planet, with the assent, if at times grudging, of cantankerous males.
So, when you think of female leaders you consider to be ‘disastrous’, or simply not much chop, think of all the male leaders, particularly in what we broadly term ‘politics’. Have there been any female Genghis Khans? (the Mongol invasions have been estimated to have killed nearly 40 million – but who was counting?). How about Mao Zedongs? (whose ‘Great Leap Forward’ in 1958-62 led to the deaths of some 45 million of his own countrywomen, and men – someone has been calculating), or Adolf Hitlers? (whose war-mongering and racism resulted in 15 to 20 million deaths in Europe), or Joe Stalins? (the numbers for him are hard to calculate as they include deaths from forced collectivisation as well as mass executions, gulag neglect, and more or less avoidable famines). Then there was Leo Victor, aka Leopold II of Belgium, whose atrocities in the ‘Congo Free State’ as it was grotesquely named at the time, have left a legacy from which the region has never recovered, as recent extreme crimes and punishments have shown.
Would female leaders have been just as bad, as even some females are prepared to argue? Well, I would point to bonobos as compared to rather more murderous chimps – but we’re not bonobos, are we?
So the point is not to become bonobos but to note that women are in general less violent than men, more co-operative, and – well they have other features that are more attractive than men, just as bonobos, in their social behaviour, have features that are more attractive than chimps. I’ve written about women’s soccer as an example. Opposing teams in the women’s game can be tough and testy with each other – I’ve seen it – but I’ve never seen anything like the bad behaviour I’ve observed in the men’s game, while group hugs in the women’s game are much more frequent and demonstrative. It’s just something in women’s nature – or is it socialisation, it’s hard to pick it all apart. The point is to utilise these better natures, however begotten, for a better world.
And yes, we can learn from bonobos!
References
https://modernminds.com.au/journal/latest/women-for-women-why-do-we-need-our-tribe-to-grow
on male advantage and how it continues…
The late Frans de Waal, in his book Different: what apes can teach us about gender, observes some interesting traits that humans consider to be associated with leadership, and which probably date back to our primate ancestors. The most obvious one is physical. We’ve all heard that being short (as I am) is a serious disadvantage for those vying for the Prime Ministership or the Presidency, to say nothing of military leadership.
But what about Napoleon? Actually of average height for his time, as was Hitler. Mao was a little above average, and Stalin somewhat below, but of course none of these men were elected into power. The average height of US Presidents is well above the average US citizen, and much more so if you include women, from the time that women were eligible for that office (1920).
Another physical attribute we associate with power is loudness and vocal tone. A scientific paper published in 2016 entitled ‘Sexual selection on male vocal fundamental frequency in humans and other anthropoids’, began with this interesting statement:
In many primates, including humans, the vocalizations of males and females differ dramatically, with male vocalizations and vocal anatomy often seeming to exaggerate apparent body size.
and then it continues:
Here we show across anthropoids that sexual dimorphism in fundamental frequency (F0) increased during evolutionary transitions towards polygyny, and decreased during transitions towards monogamy. Surprisingly, humans exhibit greater F0 sexual dimorphism than any other ape. We also show that low-F0 vocalizations predict perceptions of men’s dominance and attractiveness, and predict hormone profiles (low cortisol and high testosterone) related to immune function. These results suggest that low male F0 signals condition to competitors and mates, and evolved in male anthropoids in response to the intensity of mating competition.
This is quite an issue, as our vocalisations are vast and complex, and better known as speech. As de Waal puts it:
We are a verbal species, and the voice is hugely important to us. And here I don’t mean the content of what we say, but how we say it, how loudly, and with what vocal timbre.
The adult male larynx is 60% longer than that of the female, a particular sexual dimorphism that is much greater than the general sexual dimorphism of humans. One has to wonder why this evolution has occurred, because the effect has been to reinforce male dominance. The principal argument, as alluded to above, is that it suggests male vitality to other males, and females, in the mating game – but are we more competitive than other primates in that arena? Of course, in the WEIRD world, male dominance is being increasingly challenged, but how can a few decades of social evolution compete with millions of years of the physico-genetic variety? Or, as de Waal put it: ‘How does it serve sound decision-making if decisions are prioritised by the timbre of the voice that expresses them?’ This is the dilemma – we know, sort of, that we shouldn’t fall for a deep voice – or a tall stature – as a sign of greater authority, but we fall for it nevertheless.
I always feel inclined to eliminate men with high testosterone levels, perhaps by boiling them in their own sewerage (sorry, a macho moment), but every website tells me, in emergency tones, that low testosterone is a health hazard. So what is the antidote, the quick fix, to these male power advantages? One suggestion of course, is the bonobo way – not just safety in numbers but power in numbers, even to the point of bullying. A patrolling, policing bonobo sisterhood. And certainly women with ‘the knowledge’ are fighting back. And I too, have been campaigning on this front, for example by advocating less adversarial systems in politics, the law and industrial relations. I note that the political dramas currently occurring in South Korea have much to do with their having adopted, no doubt under ‘benign’ pressure, the fundamentally flawed US political system after the Korean war. However, even the more party-based Westminster parliamentary system could do with a shake-up, to effect a more inclusive, egalitarian approach to decision-making.
Ah, but wait up. Hierarchies are everywhere, de Waal and others tell us. It’s alpha males mostly, and alpha females among bonobos and some other species. And there are generally hierarchies within each gender, or sex. But these are more complex hierarchies than we might think. Whether male or female, they’re not always based on physical strength. What we would call emotional intelligence or EQ plays a big part, especially in female leadership. So, as human society, especially in the WEIRD world, becomes less patriarchal, this different kind of leadership, a kind of leadership against leadership, or a co-operation-promoting, networking leadership, will hopefully emerge. Such collaborations can help in the battle against patriarchy, of course. de Waal again, referencing the American anthropologist Barbara Smuts, writes this:
[One way] for women to reduce the risk of male sexual harassment is to rely on each other. Their support network may be kin-based (if women stay in their natal communities after marriage), but it could also, like the bonobo sisterhood, consist of unrelated women.
And, of course, sympathetic men. Some of whom, like the Dutch historian and sociologist Rutger Bregman, have tackled claims about the ‘natural’ violence of men head on. In stark contrast to de Waal, Bregman has this to say:
Basically, our ancestors were allergic to inequality. Decisions were group affairs requiring long deliberation in which everybody got to have their say.
So ‘allergic to inequality’ or ‘hierarchies everywhere’? Both of these things are not like the other. And yet both authors have written admiringly of each others’ work. I think the answer lies in complexity. I’ve lived in share houses, which formed hierarchies of a sort, hierarchies that shifted as tenants came and went. Others would describe the group as essentially egalitarian, though with a certain seniority for more long-standing tenants. And obviously a nuclear family is a hierarchy, with parents of different rank depending on personality, and age-ranked siblings. Workplaces are generally hierarchical, whether formally or informally, depending on seniority and competence. Again, in the world that I’ve grown up in, these hierarchies have become less patriarchal – in fact, my mother was the principal breadwinner in our family, and the principal decision-maker.
So is there much in the way of male advantage in today’s WEIRD world? Of course there is. How many women are in the top ten richest individuals (sorry to bring up filthy lucre)? Zero of course. How many female US Presidents? Zero of course. How many elected Canadian Prime Ministers? Zero. How many French Presidents? Zero. How many Italian Prime Ministers? Congratulations, their current PM Giorgia Meloni is the first to hold that office. How many Spanish Prime Ministers? None. And so on. Of course there has been Thatcher and Merkel, and other one-offs in progressive countries vis-a-vis gender, but there has been nothing like parity, and there won’t be for a long long time into the future. And then there’s the rest of the world, where patriarchy and misogyny run riot.
I’m getting old and tired.
References
Frans de Waal, Different: what apes can teach us about gender, 2021
Rutger Bregman, Human kind: a hopeful history, 2020
the gender agenda, and other positives
It’s New Year resolution time, which I try not to pay much attention to, and yet… I’m thinking of/resolving to focus on the biggest issue that bugs me, rather than trying to expand my understanding every-which way (corals, dark matter, Milankovich cycles, the cryosphere…), and that’s our culture and politics, in the broadest sense, including our existence as primates, mammals, forms of life. Dominators of the biosphere.
So that’s why gender is important to me, because one gender, in the sexually reproducing world, nurtures and brings forth life from her own body, and so, it reasonably follows, has a greater regard for life than the other. Yet, reasonable though this observation might be, it often meets with resistance, sometimes mounting to hostility, from members of the other gender. In the case of Aristotle – and no doubt his idea was formed from the ancient Greek zeitgeist – it was the male’s seed that produced the next generation, the female being nothing more than the incubator.
I’m interested in exploring why humanity came to be, by and large, patriarchal, and how we can be less so – much much less so, because I’m deeply convinced that this is our best path to the future. A long and winding road, I suspect.
I’ve retitled this blog a few times, but it has been called ‘A bonobo humanity?’ for some time now. I’ve wondered occasionally about changing the title again, as people have looked quizzical, or chuckled, and even sneered. For those who know at least something about bonobos, the general impression I’ve felt has been – ‘yes, cute, but really what has this got to do with us?’
So yes, bonobos are hairy, more or less ugly (to us), forest-dwelling, sex-obsessed frugivores who will never express themselves in a complex language, never invent a complex device, never play a musical instrument or wonder where those twinkling lights in the night sky came from. They have nothing to teach us.
And yet, we study them, just as we study other primates, and mammals, and our own human history, and so on and so forth. To learn about, and to learn from. And in the process, we’ve discovered, as we have with so many species we’ve turned our attention to – complexity. Remember the term ‘bird-brain’? Those brains in those tiny heads that enable their owners to build complicated nests of all kinds, to communicate all sorts of tuneful messages to their kin, to use humans to crack nuts for them, to fashion tools from twigs to spear tasty morsels for themselves and their chicks?
Yes, we’re smart to have uncovered these smarts in other species, which has helped us to respect the cleverness and complexity of life itself, its amazing development from the earliest archaea or whatever. But the neurological developments that led to H sapiens, the massively dominant species on this planet, in destructive as well as productive terms, are of the greatest interest. How is it that this most complex species, which has divided its billions of specimens into hundreds of nations, can allow individuals like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Xi Xinping (and many other repugnant characters) to wield power over millions of their obvious intellectual and pro-social superiors? Why is one gender, the more pro-social of the two, given so much less power than the other? I like to think that the situation is changing, but if this is so, it’s at such a heart-rendingly slow pace that it really is painful to bear.
Even so, I tend towards optimism. We’re programmed to survive, not just individually – no species survives individually – but by working out what’s best for us all. And I do mean all, and that’s an endless learning process.
What I’m doing here, in this first post for the new year, is trying to work out how to put my queer shoulder to the wheel. I’m being inspired by writers such as Frans de Waal, Cat Bohannon and Rutger Bregman, by positive texts such as Glimpses of Utopia by Jess Scully and The Future We Choose (as yet unread!) by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, and by the work of all those in the field, protecting wildlife, providing education, supporting effective solutions, promoting hope and thoughtfulness. But enough of this sludge, it’s 2025, let’s see what we can do!
References
Jess Scully, Glimpses of utopia, 2020
Frans de Waal, Different, 2022
Rutger Bregman, Humankind:a hopeful history, 2020
Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac, The future we choose, 2020
the history of patriarchy in a small room.
The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.
Toni Morrison
Central Politburo – what if they were all women?
About a month ago I went to a ‘meet-up’ for a group which went under the name ‘philosopher’s corner’. The topic, from memory, was something like ‘Donald Trump and the future of US democracy’. I’ve written a number of posts on and around this topic, so I thought it might be fun, in a perverse way. Unfortunately it wasn’t as much fun as I’d hoped. There were about ten attendees, sitting at tables which more or less faced in each other in a squarish formation, something like a Square Round Table, in an out-of-the way little upstairs room. Again from memory, there were seven men to three women, but in the whole two hours’ non-stop conversation, to which I contributed my fair share, I can only recall one brief comment and one question from the female attendees. So, well over 95% of the conversation was male. I was wearing my bonobo t-shirt, featuring a large photo-portrait of said primate, with underneath the line ‘I’d rather be a bonobo’, which is only occasionally true for me, and this might have been one of those occasions. In any case nobody seemed to notice.
Not that there was any violence or even slight rowdiness in evidence, but a couple of those present did seem to sympathise with Trump’s politics (whatever they thought they were) while deploring his personal behaviour. Fortunately (more or less) the conversation drifted to other political hotspots such as Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Palestine, plus a fair slice of local Aussie politics worth pontificating about. Altogether, I don’t recall much that particularly stimulated me, especially from those who most dominated the conversation (the convenor did quite a good job of giving everyone a fair go), but the bloke immediately to my left made two separate comments that, for hopefully obvious reasons, caught my attention. First, he declared that we need a strong, male leader to deal with the world’s trouble-spots in a firm, no-nonsense way. By ‘we’ he appeared to be speaking for the WEIRD world in general. I did try to respond to this, but others jumped in before me, not to disagree with him specifically, but to turn the conversation in another direction, leaving the notion to fester. But shortly afterward, my left-hand compatriot offered another comment, or rather, a question. What’s wrong with the idea of a first nuclear strike, given the current situation? Again, nobody took up the idea, and I admit to being too stunned to offer a response. Presumably he meant on Russia, on Moscow? I took a closer look at the man – middle-aged, neatly dressed, he looked like a clerk, a public servant. The middle-class ‘man in the street’.
We need more female leadership, please please please. Above all we need it in Russia, China, North Korea, Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Burma, Indonesia, all the places where we have it least. It’s no good saying, as has been said to me, ‘look at this, that or the other female leader, what difference did they make, some were even worse than the men’. These were all odd women out in a patriarchal world, who had to conform, more or less, to the male stereotype. It needs to be a numbers game, a world turned upside-down, with the kind of group leadership in politics, business, the law, science, even the military, that males enjoy today. And the fact is, it’s happening, if too slowly. The academic world isn’t what it was in Virginia Woolf’s time, and that’s only taken a century. Imagine the human world a thousand years from now. If we survive, and I’m sure we will, things will continue along the painfully slow track of incremental empowerment for the sex that gave birth to us all, that nourished and nurtured us in our early years, the ‘without which not’ of all humanity, and more.
That small community of primates south of the Congo River is putting us to shame. How did they manage it? Obviously it wasn’t a conscious development, and it will need to be more conscious for us. We need our patriarchy to be deflated, little by little, puncture by puncture, for the betterment not just of our own humanity, but for the biosphere that we’ve come to dominate so very disturbingly.
no references this time!
stuff on bonobos, gender and sex
I recall a while back reading, in Australia’s premier science magazine, Cosmos, that some 6000 species have been found to engage in homosexual activity, so far. I’ve read similar claims on other scientific sites, and I can’t help but wonder, what does that even mean? Do cats, rats and bats know that what they’re doing is frowned upon by the Catholic Church, and by Islamic governments worldwide? More interestingly, do any of these creatures have any clear idea of what they’re doing? Do they actually know whether they’re male or female? Or that they’re actually engaging in ‘sex’, ‘masturbation’ or whatever?
Mammals can apparently differentiate between males and females of their own species primarily via odour – pheromones and such. This of course is very different from having a concept of maleness and femaleness, though it does help mightily in terms of reproduction, which is what it’s all about from an evolutionary perspective. It also makes me wonder – do some male cats smell more thoroughly male than others? Do some female pigs have an almost-male odour? Is there a spectrum of male-to-female odours given off by male/female cats/dogs/pigs/humans/bonobos? Do vets, who, for example, treat a lot of dogs, take a whiff and think ‘wow, this dog is so male.’? More importantly, do, say, female dogs scent a difference between mucho male dogs and mildly male dogs?
Getting back to all that homosexual activity detected in innumerable species, clearly it’s not about reproduction, but it’s not likely to be all about gender confusion either. In bonobos, as in humans, it’s mostly about good dirty fun, and as to species further removed from us, maybe we should mind our own business.
Amongst humans, at least in some parts, there’s an obsession with where we place ourselves in the growing list of sex/gender categories available. And of course in other parts there’s a refusal to accept more than two categories. And then there’s the most sensible option, to me, of accepting gender fluidity and not getting too obsessed with labels. I might call this the bonobo option, but then again, bonobos are generally described as female dominant….
So I’ve been looking at some research into the social system of bonobos and what we can learn about what they might know about femaleness, maleness and who should dominate who. For example, it’s been ascertained that female bonobos dominate males through group (female-female) bonding, but what happens in dyadic (one-on-one) interactions between males and females?
In a March 2022 paper entitled ‘Dominance style and intersexual hierarchy in wild bonobos from Wamba’, researchers ‘tested whether female intersexual dominance is dependent on female coalitions or whether it still arises when only dyadic interactions are considered’. The researchers were testing a prediction – that in these dyadic interactions, female dominance would disappear or be reduced, and this is in fact what they found. Considering that there’s a slight, and apparently narrowing, dimorphism in favour of males, this shouldn’t be surprising. Interestingly, an earlier (2006) study of captive bonobos found no clear dominance hierarchy. Its conclusion:
The dominance style of bonobos may be loose and differentially expressed in diverse groups or in the same group, along with shifting conditions.
As I’ve written before, bonobo society isn’t matriarchal to the degree that chimp society is patriarchal – the differences are more subtle. What’s important, to me at least, is that bonobos aren’t predominantly patriarchal, and this marks a difference in their behaviour, both within and between troops. That difference is a positive one, less violent and more caring and sharing. More loving, one might say. It’s what, as the song goes, the (human) world needs now.
It’s been claimed that bonobos engage in sex in all varieties, but it seems to me that there’s only one variety that counts – an encounter that leaves both, or all, parties, feeling better, happier and more relaxed. This doesn’t mean that we all end up lying around in a sexual stupor, which of course doesn’t happen with bonobos. As with every other species, they have to ‘make a living’, to feed themselves and their families, and to multiply, or at least replace themselves. And we humans aim for much more, to deeply understand our bodies, our history and our universe, to endlessly expand the horizons of knowledge and invention. We also aim to be better in our treatment of each other and the planet we depend upon. War, aka male ultra-violence, is very much still with us. Those females who have engaged in it have done so within the context of a violently male world. Human patriarchy has been so historically dominant that it’s almost beyond us to imagine a human world without it. That’s why the example of bonobos, our so-close relatives, is so precious to me, and why it’s so exasperating that so few people I meet know the first thing about them.
So, what about sex? Is it really necessary to curb our sexual drives in order to build civilisation, as Freud essentially argued? After all, the ancient Romans were great civilisation builders while enjoying open and vigorous sex lives – at least for males. Even today the slut/stud dichotomy holds sway, though it’s slowly changing. And the fact that there’s a massive not-so-underground industry called ‘pornography'(surely a questionable term) seems a testament to our hypocrisy over sex, though this is a minefield I’m reluctant to explore. I will say that the dangers of the sex industry seem to me like the dangers of drug use, all the more problematic when driven underground. It’s a horny issue – I mean a thorny one, which I’ll write about soon, when I’ve boned up on the subject a bit more.
References