Posts Tagged ‘gender’
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
sex and gender in bonobos, humans, etc
So there’s been a lot of talk lately about trans people, whatever that may mean, and whether or not they should be taken seriously. It seems to relate to the ‘woke’ issue, for some people, and it has become a hot button issue for the most divided and tedious nation in the WEIRD world. All of this has to do with sex and gender, it seems to me, and I’ve had many thoughts on this topic ever since I was a kid, over fifty years ago.
I’ve written about this before, briefly, but I want to go into it in more detail now. I was around eleven or so, pre-pubescent, in primary school, year 5 or 6. It was school assembly, and we were standing in line outside the school buildings, listening to some headmasterly homilies. I was at the back of the two lines for our class, one for girls, one for boys. It was probably towards the end of the year, because I was very familiar with my classmates, at least by observation. As I looked at them this day, I considered which ones were the most, and least, attractive, and why. I knew nothing about sex at the time (unlike most eleven-year-olds today), but I knew about physical attraction – and attraction generally. My thoughts ran along lines which I still feel proud of to this day, though no doubt I’ll exaggerate their sophistication, as is the way with memories.
I decided that the prettiest kid in the class was a boy, and I was ‘turned on’ by the naughtiness of this thought. I also noted that of the two prettiest girls, one was much more attractive to me than the other, not because of her physical appearance, but her manner – perhaps her air of gravity, her intelligent expression, the clothes she wore, her way of walking. And then there were girls I was attracted to, but not physically. They were fun, good sports, approachable. And on further reflection I noticed that the kids who least interested me were the ‘girlie’ girls and the ‘tough guy’ boys, and that the kids in front of me could all be put on a spectrum from most masculine to most feminine, regardless of their actual genitalia. Which led me to wonder – where was I on this spectrum?
It so happens that throughout my school years I was the shortest kid in my class, male or female, and skinny with it. A less masculine male could hardly be imagined. I never considered myself homosexual though. By the time I fully understood the term, the blokes my age were developing face fuzz, which was a total turn off. That didn’t stop me from falling in love with Bowie at sixteen – the music, that is, and the in-your-face androgynous persona. This tended to make me persona non grata in the socially conservative working-class environment of my childhood and early youth.
All of this is to say that I was highly sensitised to issues of sex and gender from an early age. Some years later, well into my twenties, a certain family kerfuffle came to my attention. A married cousin had a daughter, aged about six or so, who insisted on keeping her hair short and refused to be dressed in a dress. I encountered her once or twice, and she seemed morose, withdrawn, smart, and yes, kind of masculine, if that makes sense for someone so young. My mother seemed worried, as did other family members, but the mother not so much. There was talk of doctors, of taking a firmer line, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Nobody asked my advice of course, but I would’ve argued for letting the girl, or boy, be what they wanted to be. I was thoroughly fascinated, however. But I soon lost touch with family, became as solitary as an orang-utan, and know nothing of the outcome.
Returning to modern times, people talk today of the LGBTQIA+ community, and I can probably work out what each letter signifies, but only just. It seems to me that if there is a problem here, it’s a problem of categorising and compartmentalising – maybe of working out which ‘tribe’ you supposedly belong to. I myself have never been particularly tribal, so it all just flies over my head. And anyway, is there a community here, a community of difference? I hope so, but I’m doubtful.
I’ve mentioned orang-utans, but it’s the far from solitary bonobos I’m really interested in. Opposites attract, they say. Recently I’ve been pondering sex and gender in our primate cousins, and other mammals. Does our pet dog know she’s a girl? Does our pet cat know he’s a boy? We call our pets such things to eternally infantilise them, but that’s another story. Let’s consider bonobos – when, if ever, do they learn that they’re male or female? And when do we humans learn the same? For humans, it seems straightforward – we have language. One of the first things a child learns is that they’re ‘a pretty/naughty/clever girl, or boy, as the case may be. This sort of makes up for the fact that we rarely get to go about naked and notice the difference in each others’ genitalia – unlike bonobos. But our bonobo and chimp cousins are smart and complex – they know the difference between the one who nurses and protects them and the adults who are sometimes friendly but at other times indifferent or hostile. They might not conceive it in terms of gender, but they might discern a pattern. And of course hormonal and developmental differences both between and within the two sexes will play their part. So they too have ‘gender issues’, if we can call it that.
It’s often said that sex is biological, gender is cultural. That, of course, is way too neat, and too hard to prove, because every single family in which a child is brought up is a micro-culture of sorts, and every child has a slightly different genetic and epigenetic inheritance. The problem again is our tendency to compartmentalise. What is more important, as bonobos might teach us, is acceptance of variety and difference.
Another obvious difference between bonobos and the only clothed apes, is of course, clothing, covering, hiding our ‘naughty bits’. It’s a topic I tend to be squeamish about, being human, but it needs to be addressed. We wear clothing for a whole variety of reasons – for keeping protected and warm, to display solidarity with our tribe, to be fashionable and attractive, to show contempt for fashionable elites, to avoid being arrested for indecent exposure, and so on. We certainly learn from very early on that it’s ‘rude’ and ‘uncivilised’ to go about in the altogether. It’s interesting to note that the term ‘savage’, used regularly by Europeans well into the 19th century, precisely coincided with the degree of covering used by the indigenous populations they encountered. The more covered they became, the more civilised and intelligent they became in our minds.
It’s also worth noting that, until recently in the WEIRD world, clothing and other visible accoutrements have been used to distinguish the two sexes – hence the concept of cross-dressing, which now seems dated. In my own youth my hair was long and bushy, and it seemed to me that most of the girls’ hair was shorter than the boys’, which I found titillating. At the time I thought it was revolutionary, and went along with free love and the dissolution of marriage, but sadly it turned out to be just another turn of the fashion wheel.
And yet, not quite. Or not at all. Some of us might be slaves to fashion, but the percentage has considerably reduced. Gone forever are the days, revealed in 100 year-old photos and newsreels, when men were obliged to wear more or less lookalike homburgs, and women cloche hats. Jeans, t-shirts and casual jackets are as commonplace now as they were fifty years ago, and casual apparel has maintained its non-binary style in that time. Fashions may go in cycles but they never return to the same place. Marriage is still popular, but it’s not what it was when my dad were a lad.
So at a time when sexual identity and politics are being fought over to a degree that I find laughable, it’s a relief to turn to the bonobo world. Bonobos females tend to engage in same sex acts a lot more than males do, according to research by the Max Planck Society, and this activity creates more lifelong bonds than occurs with mixed-sex pairs. The research suggests that this has to do with increased oxytocin levels after these interactions. Oxytocin, the so-called ‘feel good’ or ‘love’ hormone is often associated with the bonding of mother and child. These increased levels didn’t occur after male-female sex. Interestingly, and very surprisingly (and rather disappointingly to me) male-male sex is rare among bonobos. Considering that some 75% of bonobo sex has no reproductive purpose (compared to 99.999% of human sex, according to my own extensive research), this seems to me a missed opportunity. Then again, this female-female bonding appears to be the key, not only to female dominance, but more importantly that species’ lack of aggression compared to chimps and humans. Obviously the answer for us humans is to ban male homosexuality on penalty of death, and encourage the female version with prizes and worldwide fame for the loudest and longest orgasms.
Okay, I was a bit drunk when I wrote that.
There’s a lot more to be said, though, about how bonobos have broken the aggression habit, or how they’ve targeted aggression to reduce aggression, and so to become less aggressive overall. I’ll explore that in my next post.
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-insights-same-sex-sexual-interactions-important.html
feminism in China? Must be too busy holding up half the sky…
Chinese feminists, happily out there, but sadly not in China
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not just religion that’s providing a brake to the progress of female empowerment. The Chinese ‘Communist’ Party, which seems to be religiously opposed to religions of all kinds, with their popes and patriarchs, hasn’t benefitted from this opposition by promoting any of its female citizens to leadership positions.
I say ‘communist’, because there’s surely no organisation on the planet that’s less communist than the thugocracy that currently rules China, and has done for the last seventy-odd years, since Mao bludgeoned his way to power. If we take communism to mean the dictatorship of the proletariat, clearly it will only happen when ‘prole’ and ‘dictator’ mean the same thing – that’s to say, never. And it’s a sad irony that any nation with any reference to communism in its title has always engaged in the most brutal – and very macho -authoritarianism. So basically I’ve come to consider both communism and fascism as synonymous with thugocracy.
So Mao’s statement that woman hold up half the sky was just patronising claptrap, apparently. Xi Jinping, the unutterably worthless bag of scum that is China’s latest dictator (I’m sorry, but I always get emotional where thugs like Mr Pudding and his Chinese mate – can’t think of a nickname just yet – are concerned. My anti-authoritarianism goes back to earliest childhood and is deeply ingrained), is suppressing the equality of women as part of his corruption campaign. It doesn’t seem to be phasing outspoken women in China, most of whom are destined to outlive the scumbag. Still, for the time being, they’re being muzzled, their Weibo accounts suspended, and their harassment by Party goons adds another layer to the harassment they’ve lately been experiencing on campuses and in workplaces.
These are backward steps for women in China. It was the fascinating Empress Dowager Cixi, one of China’s most under-rated political leaders, who first banned foot-binding back in 1902, a ban that was overturned, probably because it was instituted by a woman, but later reinstated. Even so, China was at the forefront of women’s rights in the early twentieth century. A researcher on women’s rights in China, Emeritus Professor Louise Edwards of the University of NSW, points out that early progress in equality and supportive legislation came from within the system rather than from grassroots activism:
If you were working in the state sector in China, as a woman in the 1950s, you had access to maternity leave, breastfeeding leave — these kinds of protections were way ahead of Australia at the time.
But the Party has become more repressive and ‘anti-western’ since the events of 1989, and especially since the rise of Mr Pingpong (okay this needs a bit of work). Clearly the Party has become more macho (there has never been a woman on the politburo standing committee, in its almost 70-year history), so feminists have had to work from outside that framework, and are more of a threat, and therefore more ‘western’. It’s all rather predictable in its stupidity. So China has dropped down the rankings for gender equality, temporarily. But Mr Pingpong will be dead meat soon enough (actually, not soon enough), and women will rise again, inevitably. The arc of the moral universe may be long, but it bends toward justice, in spite of these pingpongy, Mr Puddingy gremlins in the works. In fact, once Pingpong is out of the way, hopefully without being able to secure another fascist to replace him, feminism will likely burst into the public sphere with a vengeance, as identification with feminism is increasing big-time in China. Lu Pin, the founder of Feminist Voices, an influential media outlet shut down in 2018, remains confident about the future. An ABC article, linked below, quotes her:
Today, more young people than before agree that they are feminists. Today, the debate on feminism in Chinese society is unprecedentedly fierce.
Again, it’s a matter of nature eventually overcoming oppressive cultural artifice, but meanwhile the attitude of the Party towards increasing sexism and male brutality is to downplay the violence and to avoid at all costs any mention of feminist values and aspirations. It’s a very backward move considering that, by the 1970s, Chinese women, who in ancient China often didn’t even have their own names, formed the largest female workforce in the world. The one-child policy, introduced in 1979, led to abortions and abandonment of female infants, and a noticeable gender imbalance problem into the 21st century. Although the policy has since been relaxed, women are reluctant to become ‘baby factories’ for the Party, given the lack of support for child-rearing, and the current patriarchal fashion.
China’s first ever law dealing with domestic violence was enacted in 2016, over 40 years after Australia’s Family Law Act (1975) defined and legislated against domestic violence. However, it appears that the law is largely a well-kept secret. Frida Lindberg, in an article on women’s rights and social media for the Institute for Security and Development Policy (a Swedish NGO), writes this:
Despite the Anti-Domestic Violence Law, domestic violence cases have nevertheless continued. Some argue that the law is ineffective due to low public awareness about the issue and punishments that are too lenient. In addition, the law has been criticized for promoting family harmony and social stability, a principle that stems from Confucianism, as this seems to contradict the law’s principle of preventing domestic violence.
Lindberg’s article shines a light on current obstacles to female participation and progress in the Chinese workforce, obstacles that many WEIRD women now in their sixties and seventies (my generation) experienced regularly four or more decades ago. But of course the social media issue is new. Weibo and other social media sites became a vital outlet for women after the treatment of the so-called feminist five were muzzled, at least partially, after street protests in 2015 over domestic violence and the lack of public facilities for women. Unsurprisingly there was a backlash against feminist posts, which many in the movement saw as a good thing – any publicity being good publicity – but the Party decided to put a stop to the argy-bargy, removing many social media accounts of prominent feminists in 2021. It also appears to be lending support to anti-feminist nationalists, who have been trolling outspoken women for anything they can find, including sympathy for Hong Kong and for oppressed minorities. The Party has used the excuse of ‘disrupting social order’ to harass and shut down whistleblowers who’ve posted about sexual harassment, but the number of views these posts garnered argues for a groundswell of concern about the issue, one way or the other. Feminists have fought back by coding their messages to avoid censorship, but this obviously has its limitations for attracting public attention, and is usually identified and reported by the ‘nationalists’.
So, it’s a ‘watch this space’ situation, or rather, watch this region. Having taught scores of Chinese women over the years, I know all about their intellect, their passion and their power. In his book Asia’s reckoning, the Australian journalist Richard McGregor described the irony of how conformist Japan has become a liberal democratic country of sorts, while the more liberal and individualist Chinese are saddled with the Party and its goons. It’s surely a temporary situation, but just how temporary is temporary?
References
Click to access Lindberg.-2021.-Womens-Rights-in-China-and-Feminism-on-Chinese-Social-Media.-1.pdf
Richard McGregor, Asia’s reckoning, 2017