Posts Tagged ‘matriarchy’
matriarchy needs work – please consider
dreams dreams dreams
We’ve surely all heard that patriarchy began with agriculture, but I don’t think there’s any solid evidence for this. The Australian Aboriginal societies weren’t agricultural, but according to many early anthropologists and white commentators they were profoundly, even brutally patriarchal. Take this description:
“The treatment which women experience must be taken into account in considering the causes which lead to the extinction of the native tribes. Amongst them the woman is an absolute slave. She is treated with the greatest cruelty and indignity, has to do all laborious work, and to carry all the burthens. For the slightest offence or dereliction of duty, she is beaten with a waddyu or yam stick and not infrequently speared. The records of the Supreme Court in Adelaide furnish numberless instances of blacks being tried for murdering lubras. The woman’s life is of no account if her husband chooses to destroy it, and no one ever attempts to protect or take her part under any circumstances. In times of scarcity of food, she is the last to be fed, and the last considered in any way. That many die in consequence cannot be a matter of wonder …”
George Taplin, The Native Tribes of South Australia, 1878
Just about all of these early descriptions are from men, so I’m a wee bit skeptical here too (and for a very different description, see below)
My interest in this topic – I mean the origins of patriarchy – goes back to the chimp-bonobo contrast. What brought about this patriarchal-matriarchal divide on opposite banks of the Congo River between one and two million years ago? If it was essentially an environmental divide, with the bonobos benefitting from an abundant, largely frugivorous food supply, could it be that Aboriginal societies, divided by more than 200 different languages, might also be divided by more or less fruitful environments, where gathering was more or less key and hunting more or less incidental, leading to different cultural norms? Aboriginal people have been generally defined as nomadic, but they also had their own tribal lands and sacred places, the nomadism simply referring to a lack of fixed dwellings.
Some, perhaps most, anthropologists have found that Aboriginal culture is generally divided upon gender lines:
Diana Bell in her book “Daughters of the Dreaming” reported, after spending many years living with Aborigines in Central Australia, that there was no patriarchy or matriarchy but “Under the Law, men and women have distinctive roles to play but each has access to certain checks and balances which ensure that neither sex can enjoy an unrivalled supremacy over the other. Underlying male and female practice is a common purpose and a shared belief in the Dreamtime experience; both have sacred boards, both know songs and paint designs that encode the knowledge of the dreaming.” This was not as predicted by Gimbutas but is [a] more gender balanced society.
Some rituals are performed by both men and women. She tells of how men, grateful for being shown a woman’s dance, promptly return the favour by painting up their own boards and bodies and showing the women one of their own dances. In these dances they were exchanging ritual knowledge of the country and its Dreaming painted on their bodies and their boards and spelt out by the patterns their pounding feet make upon the earth. At one point the women picked up the male boards displayed and danced with them while the men called out approvingly “they are your dreamings now”. But this does not mean that there is not secret knowledge, private to each gender. In such displays, something is always held back, kept for people of the same gender.
Jani Farrell Roberts, Aboriginal women and Gimbutas, c 2000
If this is a reasonably accurate account of pre-colonial Aboriginal practice, we may be looking at societies that can’t be easily pigeon-holed as patriarchal or otherwise, which is difficult for me, as I’ve tended to argue that gender equality is kind of unnatural, like measuring the two genders on a balance of scales or a see-saw. The scales will either tip in favour of patriarchy or matriarchy, so we need to go for matriarchy as the more humane approach, based, just for starters, on all we know about history.
And bonobos.
As to history, most of it is about men, because it’s overwhelmingly been men who’ve started and fought in wars that have transformed human society. Let’s mention a few instigators, as well as slaughterers via policy – Genghis Khan, Kim Il Sung, Adolph Hitler, Ivan the Terrible, Pope Urban II, Napoleon Bonaparte, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Leo Victor (Leopold II of Belgium), Timur….
There’s plenty others, no doubt, but why make ourselves sick? How about the women warriors and presiders over slaughter?
Let’s see – Artemisia I of Caria, Boudicca, Fu Hao, Cleopatra, Isabella of Castille, Wu Zhao, uh, Margaret Thatcher…
It’s a struggle to find anyone who caused human suffering on anything like the level of the males. Maybe they just weren’t given enough power, but I doubt that. Whatever the case, I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that 99% of the human slaughter that has occurred throughout history has been at the hands of only one gender.
Having said that, humanity doesn’t seem to be getting the message, what with Xi, Putin, Trump, Kim Jung Un and co. Planetrulers.com claimed that there were 57 dictators worldwide in 2022, all of them male (though they really should have included Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s dictatorial Prime Minister .
So the history is bleak, as is much of the present, and the worst of it is that this can drive a sense of fatalism, or ‘what’s the use’-ism, so…
What can we do? Of course, the internet has the answer, sort of. We certainly have no option but to take the long view, and work work work, even if it’s just talking, arguing, making the obvious points. Sometimes even to women – I’ve written, ages ago that Margaret McMillan, the prolific and highly regarded Canadian historian, on giving a Q and A after a talk about the history of war, was asked whether more women in leadership might make a difference to that tendency towards warfare that has so characterised our history. Sadly, she rattled off the usual extremely dumb response – sorry Margaret but I get so tired of it – that this and that female leader was just as bad as the men. Of course! That’s because it’s not at all about individual men and women – it’s about matriarchy versus patriarchy. It’s bonoboism versus chimpism. It’s about changing the overall structure of society. And that is, of course, Very Big. A very big task. A very necessary task, though, in my humble opinion. Not because we won’t survive without matriarchy – I have no idea whether we will or not – but because we, and the environment we so dominate, will be so much better off without patriarchy. That’s something I’m entirely convinced about.
I’d ask everyone to just think about this, just for starters.
References
http://www.witch.plus.com/7day-extracts/aboriginal-women.html
Diane Bell, Daughters of the Dreaming, 1983
on money and matriarchy
When I bring up the subject of a bonobo humanity in any public place I’m more often than not met with confusion or indifference. Bonobos are either unknown or seen as irrelevant to us super-smart, super-complex humans. So, though I don’t agree, I often skip to the issue of matriarchy. And that’s when I get the response, from women, that this female political leader/boss/family member/whatever, was useless/weak/disastrous etc.
THIS IS A CATEGORY ERROR – in my humble opinion. Nothing could be more irrelevant than this response. To explain, let me again quote the author Toni Morrison, who I’ve quoted before:
‘The problem is not men. The problem is patriarchy’.
To which I will add this correlated statement:
‘The solution is not women. The solution is matriarchy’.
And to be clear, we’re living in a patriarchy.
Of course I’m well aware that the human world is a hugely complex thing, and parts of it are more patriarchal than others, and maybe there’s even the odd tiny matriarchy buried somewhere in the hinterlands of our hinterlands, but it has occurred to me that there’s one powerful aspect of our world that attests to its patriarchal nature more than any other, and that’s finance. Money, I’ve been told, is power, and I’m inclined to believe it.
I’m not talking here about gender pay gaps, which sadly have remained much the same over the past three decades, I’m talking about the vast accumulations of wealth that bestow power. According to the Forbes list of the top 20 richest individuals, two are women, and of course they’re down at the bottom half, in 15th and 20th positions, and also of course the top, say, three, are exponentially richer than the bottom three on that list, though those comparative failures are richer than the wildest dreams you and I could ever concoct.
So – money, corruption, manipulation, genocide. It doesn’t always fall out that way of course, but there are some examples worth considering. First, let me replace the word ‘money’, which conjures up an image of coloured paper and round metallic stuff, with wealth, and its associated images of servants, palatial homes, international travel, manipulation of markets and such. And of something else which is hard to produce an image of – power.
The pursuit of wealth, almost exclusively by men, has led to some consequences worth contemplating. Take the soi-disant Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example. I won’t go into the complex pre-colonial history of that region, later known as sub-Saharan Africa’s ‘heart of darkness’, but from the 1860s onwards virtually all of sub-Saharan Africa became an intense battleground between various European states, with the USA often acting as a self-interested broker. And it was all about wealth, under a cloak of humanitarian-sounding verbiage. At the end of all the wrangling, Leo Victor, by family connections ‘Emperor Leopold II of Belgium’, had carved out a massive chunk of Central Africa for himself, which he named the Congo Free State. And let it be clear, this land didn’t belong to Belgium, it belonged entirely and exclusively to Leo. By the late 1880s, just about everything was in place…
But this isn’t a horror I want to revisit (suffice to say it was about as devastating to the Congolese as Genghis Khan was to Baghdad, all for wealth, booty, plunder and the power such things bring). It was around this time, towards the end of the 19th century, that the term ‘savage’ became just a bit out-dated, what with such newly fashionable studies as anthropology and sociology. Even so, the heart of Africa has remained too dark for the world to fully comprehend the sufferings visited upon its native inhabitants by white-skinned people and their proxies.
So, if we accept that wealth is power, and we accept that female empowerment, or female domination, is worth aiming for, what can we do about divesting in, or from, males and investing in females?
So I’ve looked it up, and, unsurprisingly, most initiatives start from the bottom, which is after all, where a huge percentage of women are found. World Vision highlights seven ways to empower women – ensuring clean water (women in Africa and elsewhere spend many hours in the day trying to find and collect the stuff), supporting women and girls in crisis (child labour, enforced prostitution…), mentoring (supporting women and girls into meaningful employment), empowering entrepreneurs (microloans), education advocacy (keeping girls in school for longer, awarding scholarships), supporting mothers (with essential items and a nurturing culture), and the seventh, perhaps most vague but also most vital, respect, support and advocacy for female-hood from the cradle to the grave.
This may not have to do with wealth, except in the broadest sense, but it’s really the only way to start. And it’s very likely that if the world continues to shift towards greater female empowerment over the next few centuries (and let’s face it, it’s going to be an excruciatingly slow process), the distribution of wealth will reflect this, with far fewer of the disgustingly rich and the distressingly poor.
Will this trend, if it continues over the next thousand years or so, end up in matriarchy? Well of course it will! I can predict this with the great confidence of someone who won’t be around to be proven right or wrong. But looking around at the world today, I can predict with depressing confidence that there will be plenty of setbacks along the way.
References
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
7 ways to empower women and girls
All we are saying, is give bonobos a chance….
Just following on from my last post, one of the difficulties humans have in comparing their society, or their plethora of societies, to bonobos is the fact that – we’re human. Being inside that particular species, we don’t really see ourselves as a species at all, in spite of all the efforts of Darwin and so many others.
This is a perhaps deceptively important point. When we think of chimps and bonobos, we think of a species of primate, vaguely considered as existing in troupes, with certain general characteristics such as male philopatry (the males stay put, while the females leave for other troupes around adolescence), and alpha males in the case of chimps, alpha females in the case of bonobos, and some kind of ever-changing pecking order. And generally, that’s about it. After all, we don’t have to live with these beasties.
And that’s not how we see humans – we see them as individuals. Family, friends, enemies, politicians, philosophers, comedians, teachers, lovers, heroes and villains. And that’s why, I think, that so many people take the individual view when the idea of a female-dominated, bonoboesque society is mooted. Margaret Thatcher was an inhuman monster. My mother treated me like shit. I hated my female boss at Woollies.
But on learning more about our closest living relatives, and primates generally, which I’ve done, unfortunately not directly but through observant primatologists such as Jane Goodall, Birute Galdikas, Frans de Waal and Dian Fossey, among many others, you soon learn that they too are individuals with a variety of quirks and sensibilities. But of course these individual proclivities are contained within the broader social structure – male dominance and greater violence for chimps, female dominance and more sex and less violence for bonobos.
I wish I could get this across to people. Is it the sex that bothers them? A while back I read a sentence on some website saying that some study of studies found that viewing pornography made people more violent. No references were given, but it occurred to me that, even if that were true, it seems not unreasonable to surmise that people who watch a lot of porn are not themselves having lots of sex other than masturbation, and not the mutual masturbation beloved of bonobos. By the same token it seemed to me that the porn performers would not be made more violent thereby – they’d be too busy recovering and looking forward to the next bonoboesque scene. Of course there is sado-masochistic porn, just as there is soft porn, female-female porn, male-male porn, and the kind of sexual amusement parlours I’ve described in a previous piece.
And there are also feminists that are anti-porn, or there were, back in the day. What such women, if they still exist, think of female-on-female porn is a question. It seems to me that all these varieties of porn exist because there’s a market for them, just as prostitution is described as the world’s oldest profession, and still going strong. Perhaps in a matriarchy this would still be the case, but with the majority of clients being female. Or perhaps, if we were to combine human matriarchy with bonoboism, prostitution of all kinds would be rendered obsolete. After all, Frans de Waal did describe bonobo behaviour as positively pornographic at times.
I don’t know, maybe I’m just a few hundred years before my time. But by then, surely bonobos will have gone extinct in the wild, and their behaviour in captivity will have been modified to be suitable for viewing by children.
Sigh…
References
a world turned….
https://www.ttbook.org/interview/women-who-revolutionized-primatology
a touchy but important subject 2: sex, family, and bonobos
sounds good
Do bonobos have families? Apparently not, since they aren’t considered monogamous, and monogamy (even failed or disrupted monogamy) and families go together. Don’t they?
First, let’s look at bonobos and child-rearing. It’s accepted that they’re matriarchal, and non-monogamous, and that humans are, by and large, patriarchal and monogamous. And the human family was surely an emergent ‘property’ of monogamous patriarchy. But before we go into further comparisons, let’s compare bonobos and their non-monogamous cousins, chimps.
Intriguingly, the idea of a cuddly-cosy bonobo parental style versus one which is often disrupted by infanticidal impulses from alpha male chimps, needs to be – adjusted, to say the least. According to observations described in a Scientific American article linked below, bonobo parents – that’s to say, mothers – are less likely to intervene when their child is bullied and mistreated by other adults than chimp mothers with their kids. This must be understood in the context of less extreme aggression compared to chimp culture, which has been known to involve infanticide as well as slaughter between chimp troupes.
So why the hands-off bonobo parenting style? More research is no doubt needed, but the article argues for a more protective mothering style among chimps precisely because of the threats both within and beyond the troupe:
one possible explanation is that the constant threat of violence in chimpanzee life could prime chimps to defend other members of their social group, regardless of the situation. In-group bonds are “a really core part” of chimp society… Chimpanzees “can take big risks to protect each other in encounters [with a hostile group]—like leaping over to cover someone who’s being attacked” with their own body.
So, counter-intuitively, bonobo ‘tough love’ might be a product of a more general easy-going, danger-free environment. And as to families, it’s essentially a single-mother situation, with help from others in the troupe, including males. This is especially so with sons, who are philopatric, while daughters disperse to other troupes. Bonobo mothers are generally extremely protective, one might say controlling, of their sons, including encouraging them, even forcing them, to mate with females of the mother’s choosing. All of which makes me wonder about that female-dominated human society which will surely prevail in the millennia to come, if we manage to survive patriarchy.
And if we do, will we become as boringly sexualised as bonobos, while human civilisation crumbles around us? My prediction, FWIW, is – yes and no. After all, today we have pornography as well as astrophysics, palaeontology, biochemistry, quantum computing (almost?) and artificial intelligence – though not all at the same time. And on the sexual side of things, at least in the WEIRD world, we’ve definitely become more permissive, just in the last few decades, and I can’t see such a trend reversing. So some will be more drawn to the sexual side of life, some to the more analytic, and many will have a foot, or other parts of their anatomy, in both camps. It’s all experimentation after all.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520171625.htm
homosexuality, hypocrisy, violence and bonobos
not quite, but I’m getting the t-shirt anyway
A few months back I read The picture of Dorian Gray for a reading group, and the book irked me, to say the least, with its effete Oxbridge elitism, its occasionally crass descriptions of women, and its obsession with sin, which I prefer to believe had already become an outmoded concept in Wilde’s time. I like to identify as a working-class high-school drop out with a chip on his shoulder, a type who finds aristocratic poseurs highly expendable, and my scorn was hardly likely to diminish on learning that Wilde, a tragically broken man at the end of his short life, turned to the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, that richly resplendent monument to sexual hypocrisy, for reasons unknown, but presumably having something to do with eternity. Did he actually believe in a heavenly afterlife, in which forgiven sinners would be supplied with translucent wings while having their genitals erased? Heaven really does sound like a place where nothing ever happens, at least nothing the old, pre-dead or at least pre-disgraced Wilde would’ve had much interest in. Of course lions would lie down with lambs – boredom is a universal trait.
Of course, it’s impossible to transport yourself to a world of ‘typical’ 19th century values. Human society, at least in the WEIRD world, has been rapidly transforming in the past few centuries, unlike bonobo society, which was surely as female-dominated and sexually active in the 1500s as it is now. Atheism was hardly recognised as a word in Shakespeare’s time, and nobody would’ve admitted to holding such a belief. Homosexuality, however, under a variety of names, has been a feature of life in virtually all cultures since history has been written, and of course before. Simon Sebag Montifiore, in his BIG book The world: a family history, provides some orifice-opening examples (sans illustrations, unfortunately). Yet even in pre-medieval times, in non-Christian regions, homosexuality, particularly among men, appears to have been looked upon with disdain if not contempt, presumably due to the warrior expectations surrounding the gender. Think chimpanzees.
I’ve mentioned the hypocrisy of the Church, so thoroughly exposed in recent decades, with its all-male ‘celibate’ clergy and its bizarre and unworkable public attitude to sex, contraception, abortion and the limited role of women within its profoundly hierarchical structure. It’s frustrating to see how unwilling it is to reform itself, but heartening to note how little political clout it has in the WEIRD world compared to previous centuries, and how Christianity in general is fading quite rapidly, outside of the USA. It appears to be making headway, though in a small way, in some Asian countries, I think largely because it offers community – a microcosm of mutual support in troubled and often dangerous times. And many of these new Christian groups are more supportive of gender differences, alternative lifestyles and the like. These are the green shoots I like to see – though I might just be imagining them – that might be harbingers of a bonobo world, a world in which the word ‘queer’, in sexual terms, will have become meaningless.
Of course there’s much to be pessimistic about. Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iran, South Sudan…. The Wisevoter website lists 32 countries that are currently in ‘conflict’, though history tells us that it seems to have always been thus, and indeed it was even worse ‘back then’. In the more internally peaceful WEIRD world I inhabit, a lot of the citizenry’s violent inclinations have found expression in social media platforms, which would seem to involve words rather than deeds, but nonetheless create self-contained but relational spaces of self-righteousness which militate against bonoboesque caring, sharing and becalming. The concern is that these social media bubbles of discontent and rage may become over-heated and burst into real violence against the physical embodiments of largely fantasised ‘evil’, as in replacement theory, vaccination mind control, an international Jewish conspiracy, etc etc. We may need to examine, culturally and perhaps governmentally, the algorithms that tend to spread and reinforce toxic misinformation, as evidence is brought more clearly to light about real and present damage. It seems that there may be a connection between the seemingly harmless creation of certain mathematical sequences (algorithms) and the strange forms of belief that imprison the susceptible. But then, you can lead a horse to water, as they say, and humans are always free to refuse an education in critical thinking.
I’ve used the word ‘free’ in that last sentence, but we’re not free. Something in the strange beliefs that organisations like the Church have imposed on us for millennia – that it’s a sin to enjoy sex outside of an aptly named concept called ‘wedlock’, and that children born outside of that concept are not legitimate human beings, and a variety of other sex-related ‘sins’ – won favour in the neural networks inside our heads, imprinted from generation to generation, at least until the rise of the sciences, and our demotion, more recently still, to the status of a primate among other primates, albeit a fascinatingly and frighteningly successful one.
For those of us who accept this demotion, or, more accurately, accept that our status has been revised and made more meaningful, embedded as it has become with the stuff of all living things within the biosphere that sustains them, the behaviour of our closest kin, chimps and bonobos, as well as other intelligent, social beings far from our line of development, such as cetaceans, some avian species, elephants, bats and rats, might offer lessons for us in community and sustainability. But, in my humble opinion, bonobos most of all, for, I think, obvious reasons.
Our strong genetic links with bonobos means that, as fellow primates, we can look each other in the eye and feel a depth of connection. Their sexual behaviour and family dynamics are clearly more relatable to us than, say, dolphins, so that we’re keen to close the gap in knowledge about how our ancestry connects with theirs. Exactly how and why – and when – did they become female dominant? Can we uncover female dominance in any of our own ancestors or cousins? (It should be pointed out – for those who would favour male-female equality rather than the dominance of one sex, that such equality rarely if ever exists in the world of social mammals). And, considering how dangerous male violence and militarism has become in the world of nuclear weaponry, the example of a bonobo social world of mutual care, limited exploitation and empathy is surely needful as we tackle problems we have created for ourselves and other creatures due to our rapacity. In some ways, in the WEIRD world, we’re becoming just a little bit more like bonobos, but we need to go further in that direction, with all our amazing knowledge and inventiveness.
Any how, vive les bonobos.
References
The picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, 1891
The world: a family history, by Simon Sebag Montefiore
back to bonobos – and sex
Canto: We’re reading Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ brilliant book, Kindred, an almost up-to-date account (published in 2020) of all the new discoveries about our close relatives the Neanderthals, and the speculations resulting from them. And of course we’re always alert to the slightest mention of bonobos in any works of anthropology…
Jacinta: Yes, we’ve been a bit timid about talking too much about bonobos and sex, but a few mentions in Kindred have emboldened us.
Canto: W’ve seen the odd photo or video of chimps or bonobos with erect penises, and it was a scary but also puzzling sight, but we’ve not really explored the difference between theirs and ours, so now is the time to do so. So here’s some interesting comments linking humans, Neanderthals and our chimp/bonobo rellies:
Anatomically, pelvic dimensions point to vaginas very similar to ours, and as penises are tailored to fit, those too were probably more like living men’s equipment than that of chimpanzees.
Luckily for all concerned, unlike chimps Neanderthal males lacked the genes for ‘penis spines’. While in apes they’re more like tiny hardened pebbles than spikes, their presence does affect copulation: marmosets have sex and orgasms that last twice as long when the spines are removed.
We should probably therefore picture Neanderthal sex as more leisurely and satisfying than chimp-style rapid thrusting bouts. Not forgetting clitorises – organs solely existing for pleasure – unluckily for Neanderthals, like us they probably lacked bonobo-like versions that make face-to-face orgasms easier. But masturbation in some form is pretty much guaranteed, whether during sexual encounters as is found among humans, or more generally for social bonding and diffusing tensions, as in bonobos where it takes place between pretty much anyone.
Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes, p 271
Jacinta: So this makes me want to know more about the bonobo penis, and ‘penis spines’. It sounds like it isn’t ‘made for pleasure’, which helps to explain why female-female sex is the most practised type among bonobos.
Canto: Then again chimps have the same penises as bonobos but they’ve evolved differently. So here we go with ‘penile spines’. First, Wikipedia:
Many mammalian species have developed keratinized penile spines along the glans and/or shaft, which may be involved in sexual selection. These spines have been described as being simple, single-pointed structures (macaques) or complex with two or three points per spine (strepsirrhines). Penile spine morphology may be related to mating system.
This is news to me, but fascinating.
Jacinta: Just up our alley, so to speak. So to elaborate on this last quote, again using Wikipedia (largely), strepsirrhines are a suborder of primates including lemurs, galagos or bushbabies, pottos and lorises. Sexual selection is, I presume, a form of mating system, which Darwin reflected upon in The Descent of Man, inter alia. Macaques are a type of Old World monkey, with 23 known species. Interestingly, they’re matriarchal and frugivorous, like bonobos.
Canto: Apparently they’re a feature of felines – penile spines, that is. In cats, it’s speculated that they may contribute to pregnancy, as they ‘rake the walls of the female’s vagina [during withdrawal], which may serve as a trigger for ovulation’. I’m wondering, though, how that might relate to sexual selection. ‘A spiny dick, nothing turns me on more.’
Jacinta:
It all works below the conscious level, mate. I mean, female bowerbirds hang out with the males with the best display, but I don’t think they’re thinking about sex, especially considering how much of a nothing bird sex generally is. But getting back to bonobos, Wragg refers in the above quote to ‘bonobo-like’ clitorises that make face-to-face orgasms easier than it was for Neanderthals and, more to the point, we H sapiens. How could we have missed this in all our explorations of the bonobo world?
Canto: Hmmm. I blame the prudery of researchers. Including ourselves. Anyway, it probably all gets back to genes and their expression. So we need to explore – but should we look at penises first or clitorises – is that the plural?
Jacinta: Not sure, I can only cope with one at a time. So here’s something we should never have missed:
Bonobo clitorises are larger and more externalized than in most mammals; while the weight of a young adolescent female bonobo “is maybe half” that of a human teenager, she has a clitoris that is “three times bigger than the human equivalent, and visible enough to waggle unmistakably as she walks”. In scientific literature, the female–female behavior of bonobos pressing genitals together is often referred to as genito-genital (GG) rubbing. This sexual activity happens within the immediate female bonobo community and sometimes outside of it. Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe stated that female bonobos rub their clitorises together rapidly for ten to twenty seconds, and this behavior, “which may be repeated in rapid succession, is usually accompanied by grinding, shrieking, and clitoral engorgement”; he added that it is estimated that they engage in this practice “about once every two hours” on average. As bonobos occasionally copulate face-to-face, evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk has suggested that the position of the clitoris in bonobos and some other primates has evolved to maximize stimulation during sexual intercourse. The position of the clitoris may alternatively permit GG-rubbings, which has been hypothesized to function as a means for female bonobos to evaluate their intrasocial relationships.
Canto: What can I say?
Jacinta: So this quote, from Wikipedia, compares the bonobo clit to the human one, but says nothing about chimps. I mean, it occurs to me that this enlarged clit, and the pleasure derived from it, would help to explain female-female sexual bonding, leading to social bonding, leading perhaps to matriarchy, if we can call it that. But if chimps have the same-size female pleasure-place, that thesis collapses.
Canto: Good point. So, googling ‘chimp clitoris’ takes me first to an essay from nearly 40 years ago on ‘The external genitalia of female pygmy chimpanzees’, an early term for bonobos. The abstract actually compares Pan paniscus (bonobos) and Pan troglodytes (chimps) as if just to resolve your dilemma:
The external genitalia of four adult female pygmy chimpanzees (Pan paniscus) were examined during a 2-year period. It was found that the labia majora are retained in adults of this species and that, when tumescent, the labia minora effectively relocate the frenulum and clitoris so that they point anteriorly between the thighs. When detumescent, the configuration of the labia minora and clitoris resembles that of immature common chimpanzees (P. troglodytes). It is suggested that the simple, structural relocation of the clitoris from the normal [sic] condition noted in adult P. troglodytes makes possible the homosexual, intergenital rubbing observed in P. paniscus, when ventroventral juxtaposition of the individuals permits eye-to-eye contact. In addition, this change probably increases sexual stimulation of the female during heterosexual, ventroventral copulations.
Jacinta: Wow. So bonobos separated from chimps between 1 and 2 million years ago. And in that time a kind of structural change took place in the positioning of the clitoris. Is that plausible? And what about the swelling?
Canto: Hard to get clear info, but the general genital swellings of chimps versus bonobos differ in one respect – in chimps, they’re indicative of fertility, or ovulation, but bonobos, like humans have ‘concealed’ ovulation. A wonder that this can occur in the relatively short time since the split. Or maybe not, I’m no primatologist.
Jacinta: Apparently bonobos and humans aren’t the only primates with concealed ovulation – it also occurs in Vervet monkeys, but the very concept of ‘concealed ovulation’ is a bit controversial – as if it’s being done deliberately, which would surely be absurd. But it certainly does mean that, in those primates that don’t exhibit clear signs of ovulation, copulation occurs through all stages of the menstrual cycle. It could be a way of preventing males from being aware of their own offspring, thus reducing the infanticidal tendencies found in male, and sometimes female, chimps. As for the position of the clitoris, its shift to a more ‘accessible’ spot for genito-genital rubbing in bonobos is often mentioned as a great development for female bonding, but I can find nothing much on how this anatomical change could’ve happened.
Canto: Well, think of Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos. Certain beak shapes were more adaptive to the particular vegetation on particular islands, and birds with those beak shapes outbred other birds and became dominant, and ultimately the outright winners. With bonobos, okay this different clitoral positioning might not have led directly to those females outbreeding other females, since it might not have made it easier for males to have sex with females (though where there’s a willie there’s a way), but it might have led indirectly to females becoming dominant through sexually stimulated female bonding, allowing the females with the most changed and, to females, most alluring clitorises to choose the most male partners and so produce the most offspring.
Jacinta: Female rather than male choice. Or even females ‘sexually assaulting’ males? Definitely sounds interesting. But as always, more research is required…
References
Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art. 2020
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3985376/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strepsirrhini
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaque
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-sex-and-society-2006-06/
a bonobo world 61 or so: some more species
Gibbons – beautiful and imperilled
Canto: So if only we could quicken the modern world, which is so fast leaving behind the benefits of brute strength and embracing the strength of collaborative smarts… Well, maybe not that fast… We’d experience ourselves the loving fruits of bonobo-humanism.
Jacinta: Yeah, too bad. So let’s look more closely at other female dominated species, like elephants. They tend to value experience, so their family units have a female head.
Canto: Except that, they split into female and male groups, don’t they?
Jacinta: Well, they have these female family units, ranging from 3 to 25 members. The males presumably have their groupings, but sometimes they come together to form large herds or herd aggregations – huge numbers. Males can also be solitary, which virtually never happens with females. Of course it’s the females who raise the young, but there can be a lot of group solidarity.
Canto: It seems that the grouping changes more or less perpetually, seasonally, daily, hourly.
Jacinta: Yes, that’s a fission-fusion society, common among primates too – such as Homo sapiens at work, school, uni etc. But over time, the matriarch becomes more important, and presides over a wider network as she gets older. They play follow the leader as she has accumulated knowledge on the best watering holes, the paths of least resistance.
Canto: So elephants have it all worked out. What about those orangutans, what’s going on there?
Jacinta: Well apart from imminent extinction, there’s little to say. They’re solitary, though the Sumatran orang-utans are a little less so than those in Borneo, due to more food being available. The males exhibit hostility to each other and try to avoid each other, though they’re not territorial. They only hang out with females until they get their end away, and the females raise the offspring until they’re old enough to go solo.
Canto: So I wonder why the males are so much bigger than the females?
Jacinta: Yes they can be well over twice the size of the females. I haven’t found any explanation for it. They don’t have a harem of females to prove their rugged manliness. Apparently those big cheek pads help to attract the girls, but their huge bulk seems a bit superfluous.
Canto: Maybe it’s like whales – they grow big because they can. But then, the more you grow, the more you have to eat, presumably. A bit of a mug’s game.
Jacinta: Tell that to the elephants. Or those old ginorosauruses. Basically, if you’re as huge as an elephant, who else is going to attack you or compete with you? Apart from blokes with guns. But we were talking about sex. Or at least gender. Gorillas are proving a lot more complex than originally thought in their social structure – quite multilayered, not quite the chest-beating alpha male and his harem, more like human extended families. Matriarchies within patriarchies perhaps.
Canto: And what about gibbons – just to round out the primates. I know nothing about them.
Jacinta: Well, apparently these South-East Asian apes are monogamous, unlike other primates (except maybe humans, but I’m reluctant to rule on that). In fact only 3% of mammals are monogamous, according to a fact sheet I found (linked below). So that makes for family groups of two to six, just like our nuclear family, unless you’re a Catholic. Gibbons are considered as ‘lesser apes’, family Hylobatidae, unlike we great apes, family Hominidae. Physically, they’re by far the smallest of the apes, depending on particular species, but weighing at most about 12 kgs. These small family groups defend their territory aggressively – none of this fission-fusion stuff. They’re quite good at bipedalism, and present a good model for bipedalism in humans, but they’re also fantastically acrobatic tree-swingers, with the longest arms in relation to their bodies of any of the primates. They also have a nice healthy herbivorous diet.
Canto: They sound like a good human model all-round, and maybe a model for gender equality?
Jacinta: Well, yes, but I do prefer female supremacy. Gibbons are apparently the least studied of all the apes. There are 12 species of them, but many species are very near extinction, a fact not much known by the general public. Orangutans clearly get much more attention.
Canto: Okay so let’s look further afield – before coming back to human cultures to see if there are any matriarchies worth emulating. What more do we know about dolphins and other cetaceans?
Jacinta: Well, as you know dolphins live together in pods of up to 30, though sometimes where there’s an abundant food source they can form massive superpods of over 1000. And as we’ve learned, they engage in sex for fun.
Canto: I suppose also they could form superpods in the face of predators, like schools of fish.
Jacinta: Yes, possibly, though they wouldn’t have too many predators, unlike small fish. Interestingly these superpods can be made up of different cetacean species, so this would obviously benefit the smaller species. And individual dolphins can switch from pod to pod quite freely. Something like fission-fusion, but with greater flexibility. Researchers find this flexibility a sign of high intelligence.
Canto: Ahh, so that accounts for the stupidity of conservatives.
Jacinta: Some dolphin species are a bit more hierarchical than others, and you can see plenty of bite marks on bottlenose dolphins, evidence of fights for dominance.
Canto: And I recall a big hubbub a few years ago when those delightful creatures were discovered torturing and killing some of their own. But then, they are male-dominated, aren’t they?
Jacinta: They are, sadly. Males of all species are largely arseholes (well, not literally). But they certainly engage in a lot of play, I mean dolphins generally. Maybe they’ll evolve one day into a higher form of female-dominated life, but I doubt it. They’ll have to realise how fucked-up they are as a species to do that, like some humans have realised – but not enough.
Canto: Okay, so dolphins are out as a model. What about other cetaceans? I somehow suspect that orcas won’t fit the bill.
Jacinta: Next time. And we’ll look at some human models, if we can find them.
References
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/six-facts-about-elephant-families-9015298.html
https://seaworld.org/animals/all-about/orangutans/behavior/
http://www.gibbons.de/main2/08teachtext/factgibbons/gibbonfact.html
beyond feminism – towards a female supremacist society
Canto: I’ve decided to declare myself as a female supremacist.
Jacinta: Really? I thought you had nothing to declare but your genius. So you’ve come out at last?
Canto: Well it’s not as if I’ve been stifled in the closet for years. I’ve rarely thought about it before. I’ve always considered myself a feminist, but recently we’ve been looking at female-male differences, and it’s been making me feel we need more than just equality between the sexes.
Jacinta: You’ve got a hankering for that bonobo world, haven’t you? Females ganging up on you and soothing your aggressive macho emotions with a bit of sexual fourplay.
Canto: Well, yes and no. I first learned about bonobo society almost twenty years ago, and of course it excited me as a model, but then the complexity of human societies with all their cultural overlays made me feel I was naive to imagine a non-human society, without even its own language, could teach us how to improve our own. And the sex stuff in particular – well, that really got me in, but then it seemed too good to hope for. Too much self-serving wishful thinking, to model our society on a bunch of oversexed, indolent banana-eaters.
Jacinta: Do they have bananas in the Congo?
Canto: Absolutely. They have a town there on the Congo River, called Banana.
Jacinta: Oh wow, sounds like heaven. I love bananas. Let’s go there.
Canto: Anyway, now I’m thinking that a female-supremacist society is what we need today, though not necessarily based on bonobos….
Jacinta: That’s disappointing. I think it should be based on bonobos. Bonobos with language and technology and sophisticated theories about life, the universe and everything. Why not?
Canto: Well then they wouldn’t be bonobos. But do you want to hear my reasons for promoting female supremacy?
Jacinta: I probably know them already. Look at the male supremacist societies and cultures in the world – in Africa, in India, in the Middle East. They’re the most violent and brutish societies. We can’t compare them to female supremacist societies because there aren’t any, but we can look at societies where discrimination against women is least rampant, and those are today’s most advanced societies. It might follow that they’ll become even more enlightened and advanced if the percentage of female leaders, in business, politics and science, rises from whatever it is today – say 10% – to, say 90%.
Canto: Yes, well you’re pretty much on the money. It’s not just broader societies, it’s workplaces, it’s schools, it’s corporations. The more women are involved, especially in leadership roles, the more collaborative these places become. Of course I don’t deny female violence, in schools and at home, against children and partners and in many other situations, but on average in every society and every situation women are less violent and aggressive than men. In fact, all the evidence points to a female-supremacist society being an obvious solution for a future that needs to be more co-operative and nurturing.
Jacinta: So how are you going to bring about the female-supremacist revolution?
Canto: Not revolution, that’s just macho wankery. I’m talking about social evolution, and it’s already happening, though of course I’d like to see it speeded up. We’ll look at how things are changing and what we can hope for in some later posts. But the signs are good. The feminisation of our societies must continue, on a global level!
matriarchy – surely it couldn’t be worse than patriarchy?
In one of the international English classes I occasionally teach, we have an opportunity for debate. Here’s a debate topic I’ve thought up but haven’t yet tried out: If 90 to 99% of the world’s business and political leaders were female, instead of male as they are today, would the world be a better place to live in?
It’s not a question that’ll find a definitive answer in the foreseeable future, but my strong view is that the world would be better.
Why? I’m not entirely convinced that women are the gentler sex, and I’m very wary of succumbing to a facile view of women as inherently more calm, co-operative and conciliatory, but I think that on balance, or statistically, they’re more risk averse, less impulsive, and, yes, more group-oriented. Whether such tendencies are natural or nurtured, I’m not at all sure. It’s a question I intend to investigate.
So to stimulate myself in pursuing the subject of patriarchy and its obverse I’m reading Women after all: sex, evolution and the end of male supremacy, a rather optimistically-titled book by an American doctor and teacher, Melvin Konner. It’s one of many sources of information I hope to access in the future. It argues that there are fundamental differences between males and females, and that females are the superior gender. I’m not sure about the ‘fundamentals’, or categorical differences, but I agree that the current differences can and probably should be interpreted in terms of female superiority. Certainly, given the needs and responsibilities of humanity in this time, woman appear to have more of the goods than males for facing the future. After all, if we look back at the last 6000 or so years of human history, it’s dominated by male warfare, and if we look at today’s most violent and brutish cultures, they’re clearly the most patriarchal.
Of course if you believe that women and men are fundamentally different, as Konner does, then it becomes straightforward to argue for women being in control, because it’s highly unlikely, indeed impossible I’d say, that these fundamentally different genders are precisely equal in value. And given the devastation and suffering that men have caused over the period of what we call ‘human civilisation’, and given that women are the (mostly) loving mothers of all of us, it seems obvious that, if there is a fundamental difference, women’s qualities are of more value.
On the other hand if you’re a bit more skeptical about fundamental differences, as I am, and you suspect that the idea that ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ is as applicable to women as it is to men, you’ll feel rather more uncertain about a profoundly matriarchal society. And yet…
I draw some inspiration for the benefits of matriarchy from the closest living relatives of homo sapiens. There are two of them. The line that led to us split off from the line that led to chimps and bonobos around 6 million years ago. Chimps and bonobos split from their common ancestor much more recently, perhaps only a little over a million years ago, so they’re both equally related to us. Chimps and bonobos look very very alike, which is presumably why bonobos were only recognised as a separate species in the 1930s – quite extraordinary for such a physically large animal. But of course bonobo and chimp societies are very very different, and vive la différence. I’ve written about bonobo society before, here and here, but can’t get enough of a good thing, so I’ll look more closely at that society in the next few posts.
I think I’d rather be a bonobo