Posts Tagged ‘patriarchy’
Iran, football, refugees, war…
in the spotlight, but not as they hoped…
There’s an argument going round that we (in Australia) are now at war with Iran because we’re allied to the US. Not that the people pointing this out are happy about it – it’s more like ‘an inconvenient truth’. And AI (never lies) agrees, sort of:
As of March 2026, Australia is peripherally involved in the US-Iran conflict through intelligence sharing, AUKUS personnel, and regional base support, though it has not engaged in direct offensive action. Australian personnel were aboard a US submarine that sank an Iranian frigate, and a base in the UAE hosting Australians was targeted.
tracing the history of patriarchy…
before pants were invented…
I’ve been wondering what to write next, whether I should limit myself to gender and feminist issues or to go wherever my very flighty mind takes me – to neutrinos, say, or dark matter and dark energy, all of which fascinates me but which I feel I should leave to experts, but what am I expert in? – this blog used to be called ‘An autodidact meets a dilettante’, and I wrote it in dialogue form, to satisfy my masculine and feminine personae, but then I decided, sort of, to focus more on feminism and the possibility of female supremacy, but I’ve never been able to keep to the script. And so…
Yesterday I was all set to have a go at particle physics, but I was at a friend’s house and she got me watching a video from a regular vodcaster (I think that’s the term), whose videos go under the title ‘Breaking Down Patriarchy’. Of course she knew that I’d be interested, and while watching I thought to myself, yes, I should stick to this topic – because it’s kind of endless and inexhaustible.
The presenter is a United Stater (not her fault) named Amy McPhie Allebest, and although it seems she is a Mormon, or was at least brought up as such and still retains her Christianity if not that particular take on Christianity, she presents the case against patriarchy in a highly intelligent, reasoned and humane way. In fact her calm approach sets a fine example for a ‘bonafide’ humanist like me (I was a member of the South Australian Humanists for years, and gave a number of talks to the group, including one on the rapid decline of Christianity in Australia), as I sometimes get a bit nasty – for example in recent pieces criticising an ‘evolutionary psychologist’ and his take on the evolution of human patriarchy and its supposed naturalness.
The argument goes, as one Breaking Down Patriarchy video points out, that the ancestral development of bipedalism altered the configuration of the lower limbs and pelvis, including the birth canal, so that offspring tended to be born at an earlier and more vulnerable stage of life, requiring more maternal care. And more paternal care? Of course, mothers did the breast-feeding, but child-minding and protecting could have been shared – as happens with bonobos. In fact bonobos aren’t monogamous at all, so it tends to be all in for the child-rearing. So again I raise the question – when, if ever, did we become ‘naturally’ monogamous?
Meanwhile, there was hunting, and gathering. It had long been thought that there was a fairly strict division of labour, on gender lines, but this is now being questioned, as well as the issue of which activity brought more nutrients to the group. On this question, a documentary, referenced below, provides striking data. Men and women in neolithic China, and in Malta at a similar period, were ‘of equal status’ – they ate the same foods, and, whether or not hunting was all-male and gathering was all-female (it’s unlikely), the usual claim that the hunting was more ‘important’, both in terms of the nutrients and of the status it provided, is now being debunked. It’s worth noting that my bonobo mates ate a mostly frugivorous diet, with absolutely no ill effects as far as I’m aware. Their ‘hunting’ was opportunistic – if some small animal or rodent happened by, it would be chased and seized, by either gender, and shared. Claims that hunting conferred greater status for men, as in the hunter-gatherers of Namibia, have been more or less debunked, unsurprisingly, considering that most of the food consumed wasn’t obtained through hunting.
This documentary, ‘Gender Revolution: The real role of ancient women’, also raises questions about ancient cave art, which often depicts tasty mammals. Early discoverers of these works ‘naturally’ assumed the artists were male, a typically 19th century view (for good measure the doco-makers cited Chaz Darwin’s typically Victorian view that men have evolved to be smarter than women). We can probably never be sure who created this art (examination of accompanying handprints doesn’t really answer the question, though I was fascinated by the fact that the female hand narrows toward the wrist more than the male hand – in my case, it’s true!), but it certainly isn’t safe to assume they were all men. Again, assumptions that neolithic and earlier hunters were men is based on a much later patriarchal society that kept women in domesticity and valued their ‘softness’ and physical weakness. It may be that we’ll never be certain about the status of women in the varied, scattered neolithic and bronze age societies. Bones from a bronze age site in China have revealed that the women’s diet was deficient in particular nutrients, suggesting separation and status imbalance, as well as an increase in sexual dimorphism. Bronze age sites in Europe have revealed a similar diet imbalance based on gender. The bronze age, dating from around 4,000 years ago was a period of much more elaborate burials, especially for males. Male corpses are always found at the centre of family burials, indicating their centrality and status in life.
Different climatic conditions seem to have affected different gender-based behaviour, tasks and diet. A period of climatic stabilisation marked the beginning of the Holocene, some 11,700 years ago, and the beginning of stable agriculture and animal husbandry. But this leads to struggles for the best agricultural land, the best herds, and so on. So, the story goes, the age of warfare begins, and to a large extent it still continues.
Another feature of this period of stabilisation as opposed to mobility was that women began to give birth more frequently, becoming, to a greater degree, ‘perpetual mothers’, increasingly domesticised. Reducing breast-feeding periods, thanks to the development of specialised meals such as porridges for children, led to increased post-natal fertility and more children – and more suffering and death for mothers. Common-marriage systems came into being, as fathers sought to maintain control of their children – essentially their property – into the next generation.
Patrilocality has also become a proven feature of bronze age societies. This prevented inbreeding, and is also a feature of bonobo and chimp societies. It’s been argued that this is another blow to female independence and status, as they have to establish themselves in a new group, presumably with more or less zero status to start with, and yet this still doesn’t prevent bonobo females from being dominant. I’ve watched a video which followed one of these young females as she nervously sought to be accepted by these bonobo strangers, but it didn’t really address the issue – presumably, once accepted by the females, she was able to contribute to their group domination of the males. The simple answer seems to be that sisterhood is powerful… and the males are just too egotistical to form similar brotherly bonds…?
It’s intriguing, and worth pursuing….
References
on power and sexploitation: the Epstein files
a young woman who deserved so much better
What was I thinking about writing about? Oh yes, the Epstein thingy. I’ve been avoiding it, partly because I have, I think, a rather permissive attitude to sexuality (I blame bonobos), even though my own sex life has been largely a disastrous nullity, and in my seventieth year it’s not likely to improve.
But the Epstein matter isn’t about a kind of open-hearted – ‘let’s get it on so that we can be more of an all-for-one, one-for-all’ – society, which is, of course, the Musketeerian motto of bonoboism. It’s pretty well all about exploitation and power.
So let me for the purpose of this essay divide power relations into two forms – the power of males over females, and the power of the rich over the poor. In the WEIRD world, it seems to me, the power of males over females is slowly diminishing, but the power of the rich over the poor is growing faster than ever before. And the wealth of males is of course growing much faster than that of females. That’s to say, in the world of the super-rich, men like to have it all, and their quantum of wantum doesn’t vary much in its exponential increase.
We’re the financial apes, though of course there are many other distinguishing features, good and bad – the clothed apes, the language apes, the nationalistic apes, the nucleonic apes, the mass-murdering apes, the astronautical apes, and of course the most populous apes by far. It’s hard to keep up with it all, but what might ground us, as they keep us in touch with the rest of the animal world, are our sexual urges.
But these urges have long been a problem for us, or maybe not that long, maybe since the dawn of religion and its various tabus. How long ago was that? 15,000 years ago? 300,000? At some stage monogamy was born – a ‘this is my sole sexual partner’ notion, which somehow transmogrified into ‘I own this female’, or something similar. And attitudes to sex changed, perhaps long before the advent of clothing. Sex, or sexual play, could only be an adult thing – which rather undermines the notion of play.
There are so many perhaps unanswerable questions – when did ‘civilisation’ begin? Did this supposed civilisation load us with endless sexual tabus? Yes, maybe, and it also gave us agriculture and cities and writing and more sophisticated weapons and a whole variety of artful activities. Perhaps, if we’d gone more the way of bonobos, we’d have been so absorbed in sexual fun that we’d never have stopped to contemplate the Meaning of Life, and the Creation of the World.
However, it seems that the super-rich, and their families, many of whom, like the offspring of monarchs and so-called ‘robber barons’, come under the category of the idle rich, are drawn to a bonoboesque lifestyle, if a rather more patriarchal and one-sided version of it. And, given our generally hypocritical public attitude towards sex, the victims tend to suffer as much as, or more than, the perpetrators when all is exposed. Virginia Giuffre’s suicide here in Australia last year is a tragic example.
It’s amusing, though, from this distance, to note how the so-called MAGA conservatives, with their generally negative thinking about abortion, feminism and anything resembling sexual licence, have been so keen to hide the sexual licence on steroids that are the Epstein files. But to be fair, the MAGA people are divided on the issue – those in power and in government are definitely in favour of suppression, while the rest are confused, to put it generously. Then again, if you take the expression ‘Make America Great Again’ seriously, confusion must be a fundamental aspect of your identity.
So where and how is this all going to end? It’s hard to imagine that the rich and very powerful are going to allow the mid-term elections, destined to result in a large non-conservative majority in Congress, to cause any more damage vis-à-vis the Epstein files than they already have. They will surely find a solution, and I’m sure they’re working on it right now, or have already worked it all out more or less to perfection. We will have to wait and see.
on civilisation, savages, clothing, sex and bonobos
I’m a great admirer of Charles Darwin. I’ve read On the Origin of Species three times now. I’ve read his Voyage of the Beagle, and a number of biographies – Darwin, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Janet Browne’s two-volume work, Charles Darwin, Voyaging, and Charles Darwin, the Power of Place, as well as Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the Barnacle and David Quammen’s The Kiwi’s Egg: Charles Darwin and Natural Selection. Not that I’m showing off or anything…. I also have a copy of The Indelible Stamp – four volumes in one, the Voyage, the Origin, the Descent, and the Expression of the Emotions. I’m currently about a third of the way through The Descent of Man, but…
In spite of all that I know about this driven, timid, well-born, sensitive, fatherly, loyal, reclusive, internationally-connected, obsessive genius, his revolutionary impact on biological science, and the Victorian-era context of his life, I still find myself wincing at his regular use of the word ‘savage’ to refer to certain types of human, especially in The Descent. It is of course, a very much discarded term today, and I’m quite aware that I wouldn’t have winced had I been reading the book in the late 19th century.
So I’ve been thinking about what exactly made certain humans ‘savages’ in the minds of your typical Victorian gentleman. And to me, the primary feature of the ‘savage’ was clothing, or the lack thereof.
Think of clothing in upper-class Victorian society. Top hats, frock coats, or great-coats in winter, waistcoats and ties or cravats, stiff-collared shirts, high-waisted trousers, sometimes with suspenders, and of course a good solid pair of boots. Certainly their clothing had to be of a quality that distinguished them from their servants, of which Darwin had many over the years.
And then, I almost forgot, there also existed another, generally lower class of Victorian, known mostly as ladies, though courser terms were sometimes used. Their clothing was more layered and complex, involving corsets and crinolines, petticoats, bustles, bows, furbelows and lace trimmings, and finished off with jewellery of various kinds – necklaces, brooches, medallions and such, all of which required servants for dressing and maintenance. Surprisingly enough, these ladies and gentlemen sometimes produced children, which generally required something like an archaeological excavation on the part of the male. Then again, a more plausible explanation is that these children were carried to upper class couples by storks.
So, imagine how shocked some of these more adventurous, voyaging gentlemen would have been on encountering the inhabitants of darkest Africa, Tierra del Fuego, Australia, New Zealand, and the many scattered islands of the Pacific and elsewhere, and finding that their inhabitants were almost as unclothed as – animals! Wild animals, even.
I haven’t done much voyaging and exploring outside of books. When I first learned of native Americans I pictured many feathers, in head-dresses and skirt-like garments, with muscular bodies naked apart from dots and dashes of paint, or woad or whatever. I also pictured – and saw on our TV screen – skilled horse-riders, bow-and-arrow sharp-shooters, strong and silent types, with cool, unsmiling expressions. They never seemed to have anything to smile about, to be sure.
It was also clear that these various peoples had their own languages, rituals, and skills, tools and inventions adapted to survival and thriving in an environment they’d become familiar with over thousands of years. In his Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin describes the Aboriginal people he encounters in Australia:
They were all partly clothed, and several could speak a little English: their countenances were good-humoured and pleasant, and they appeared far from being such utterly degraded beings as they have usually been represented. In their own arts they are admirable. A cap being fixed at 30 yards distance, they transfixed it with a spear, delivered by the throwing-stick with the rapidity of an arrow from the bow of a practiced archer. In tracking animals or men they show most wonderful sagacity; and I heard several of their remarks which manifested considerable acuteness. They will not, however, cultivate the ground, or build houses and remain stationary, or even take the trouble of tending a flock of sheep when given to them. On the whole they appear to me to stand some degrees higher in the scale of civilisation than the Fuegians.
Of course Darwin couldn’t help but make comparisons with his own ‘civilisation’. Some could speak English and make astute observations, but they were a bit weak on housing and land cultivation. He presumably wasn’t aware that when the first fleet of convicts and guards tried to cultivate the land at Sidney Cove they were seriously unsuccessful, the soils being nowhere near as fertile as those in England, and totally unsuitable for English-style crops. Only the arrival of the Second Fleet, and a slow general understanding that they needed to adapt to vastly different environmental conditions, prevented catastrophic loss of life. Nor did he recognise that the semi-nomadic lifestyle of Australia’s native population was an intelligent and hard-earned adaptation to local conditions over tens of thousands of years.
So, Darwin described these natives as ‘partly clothed’. What does this mean? The earliest photographic images were taken decades after the beginning of white settlement, but women were generally depicted bare-breasted, unlike the highly civilised women of today, and men’s genitalia were hidden under pouches tied with strings. Was this always the case, before civilised whities caught a glimpse? We’ll never know. It does seem that the taste for decoration, expressed largely in clothing by my culture, was also a part of native cultures, through face and body painting, especially for ceremonial occasions.
And with all this near-nakedness, what about sex? Well, it’d be way too time-consuming and effortful to look into the sex lives of all the peoples that Darwin and the Victorians would deem to be savages, so why not focus on the land that recently came to be known as Australia? Well, unsurprisingly, given the vastness of the continent, the huge variety of its landscapes and environments, the large number of language and cultural groups living in isolation from each other, the story is one of diversity and complexity – not a free-for-all, but not standard Victorian monogamy either.
It’s been claimed, and I think proven, by anthropologists and historians that Australia has been inhabited for some 50,000 years by these native peoples. What wouldn’t we give to travel back all those years to see what those early arrivals were up to. For that matter, what was human life like in the region of Kent 50,000 years ago? Presumably colder than down south, with very different megafauna to deal with. And the reason why things changed so much in the north, in Europe, especially in the last five to ten thousand years, is explained, at least partly, by books such as Who we are and how we got here, by David Reich, and The WEIRDest people in the world: How the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, by Joseph Henrich. Waves of interaction, often brutal, from the east, brought not only rape and pillage, but new weaponry and skills, technology and tactics – and whole new approaches to culture, with, in the last thousand years or more, eastern Confucian patriarchy and middle eastern Islamic patriarchy reinforcing western Catholic patriarchy, forces which women, at least in the last century or so, have just begun to fight off.
And so to bonobos, those fabulous but insufficiently appreciated close relatives of ours, unhampered by clothing or religion, unjudged by puritanical ideologies, unwed but far from unloved. Judged by human standards, bonobos are paedophiles, sluts, studs, poofs, lezzos, straights, queers, nymphos, ambisexuals and all the rest, yet the only threat to their community is humanity….
What more needs to be said?
References
Charles Darwin, The voyage of the Beagle
Charles Darwin, The descent of man
patriarchal power, money, and endings
I’ve written before about how people make the category error of confusing patriarchy/matriarchy, which is a system, with men/women, which is about individuals. Of course we can think of woeful women and marvellous men, but that’s not at all the point.
And then there are others who say that the aim should be égalité, not oppression of one gender by another. Of course this is reasonable, but if we look at other primates we find a complexity that is hard to parse into neat categories. In a study of 121 primate species, published in PNAS, entitled ‘the evolution of male-female dominance in primate societies’, they start with this:
We show that societies where males win nearly all aggressive encounters against females are actually rare. Evolutionarily, females became more dominant when they gained more control over reproduction, as in monogamous, monomorphic, or arboreal species, as well as when they faced more competition, as in solitary or pair-living species. Contrarily, male-biased dominance prevails in terrestrial, sexually dimorphic, and polygynous species.
Human primates (and don’t we just hate being described that way) are, these days, mostly monogamous, very varied in terms of size, and generally terrestrial, so it’s hard to say how that works for gender dominance.
However, though it galls me to harp on human uniqueness, we have created or evolved these things we call civilisation, language, nations, technology, etc, which have complicated questions of gender dominance. For example, it’s clear that size would hardly be expected to matter so much in a technically-savvy society such as ours. Then again, male violence against women, as we all know, is far more prevalent than its opposite.
Male dominance is still very much the norm in human societies, and is often taken for granted in surprising ways. I remember as a mature-age student in the 90s befriending a young woman who was convinced that men had better, more complex brains than women, and that neural physiology would bear that out. What could make her think this? Did she also think that male cats and dogs had more complex brains than their female counterparts? It seems that our patriarchy, slightly declining though it is in recent times, is still doing its damage in terms of human ambitions and expectations.
One way that gender empowerment can be measured in human societies, and nowhere else in the living world, is wealth. Moulah. Wealth, they say, is power. And when we look at the USA, supposedly the richest country on Earth, with the greatest wealth disparity in the WEIRD world, it’s very clear that wealth is wielding its power there in rather disturbing ways. This has made me wonder – how much wealth, globally, is in the hands of men, compared to women? Would it be 90%? Surely more than that. Surely closer to 99%. In any case it makes a mockery of looking at gender dimorphism when determining the power imbalance between the sexes in humans. And it’s no good looking at the disparities of pay between Mr and Ms Average, I’m talking about the world’s controlling billionaires, all of whom are men. Here’s the opening paragraph of an essay from the Brennan Center for Justice, on money spent on the recent US election:
The 2024 federal election cycle was the most secretive since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. Dark money groups, nonprofits and shell companies that spend on elections without revealing their donors, plowed more than $1.9 billion into last year’s election cycle, a dramatic increase from the prior record of $1 billion in 2020.
Though it occasionally happens, the super-rich, pretty well all male, don’t contribute money to the left side of politics. There is an Emoluments Clause in the US Constitution, but it’s a sick joke, and I’m very doubtful about that $1.9 billion figure – surely it’s far more than that. And although it hasn’t been so prominent lately, the ‘project 2025’ agenda includes an assault on women’s rights and freedoms in that beleaguered country, including a nationwide ban on abortion care, with the further threat of banning all forms of birth control and fertility treatment such as IVF. It also plans to prosecute health professionals who engage in abortion care, and to largely curtail the Affordable Care Act, which would disproportionately disadvantage women in a number of ways.
Of course Trump, who is now clearly the dictator of that country, is less concerned with project 2025 than with prosecuting anyone who has slighted him, and with cashing in on his dictatorship, but his fellow-travellers are mostly of the macho-fascist type, so the assault on women’s rights, freedoms and empowerment will continue, perhaps into Trump’s third term. All we seem to be able to cling to is the long arc bending towards justice that Martin Luther King evoked.
I suppose it will all end by our discovering how smart we are, as opposed to how smart we think we are….
And then maybe bonobos will survive us, and evolve…
References
a wee piece on monogamy
So, back to the question of monogamy. Is Homo sapiens a monogamous species? If they are, how long have they been so? We know that neither chimps nor bonobos are monogamous (it’s very rare in primates generally), and we know very little – almost nothing – of the social lives of those extinct species that fill in the gaps between ourselves and Pan paniscus. Nor do we know anything much about the social lives of our own species going back 50,000 years and more. A fairly standard view, it seems to me, is that the rise of agriculture and the stable settlements that were part of this change promoted monogamous ‘ownership’ just as it promoted land ownership. But, as Joseph Henrich argues in The weirdest people in the world, powerful or large-scale landowners could also become large-scale people-owners too, in terms of wives and slaves. Polygyny was an elitist cultural thing, even if it has faint links with our gorilla ancestors.
So it’s fair to say that monogamy is more a cultural than a natural phenomenon, and so subject to variation. We can see this cultural effect in terms of our obsession with lineage and inheritance, generally along male lines. A culturally created patriarchal monogamy, with various exceptions, increasingly in the modern WEIRD world.
The general acceptance of monogamous norms puts pressure on individuals, as well as affecting their worldview, as they may, often unconsciously, take on the concept of a ‘right partner’, especially for breeding purposes. This goes along with ‘hearth and home’, much like the nest-building of most avian species.
I’m trying not to write this from an anti-monogamy perspective – frankly I’m not sure where I stand on the topic. Laissez faire might be the best description. Nowadays, again in the WEIRD world, we’re more conscious about how we’ve come to arrange things – nuclear families, home-making, and their alternatives, single parents, kibbutzim, two mums, two dads, and so forth, and we can even question the hearth and home arrangements, given our knowledge of bonobos in particular, with their broader supportive communities. Could it be that earlier human communities, those of Homo erectus and their immediate ancestors, were also more communal, in terms of sexual activity and child-rearing? Less possessive and jealous? Will we ever know?
And is our greater consciousness about monogamy having the effect of making us less monogamous? Bucking the trend? Is this really the best way to raise children? Of course it’s still generally seen as the norm, and the best – single-parent homes are ‘broken monogamies’, half-families. But we’re constantly evolving, learning new ways, considering other species – bonobos again. Their kids are so well-adjusted (funny expression, that).
We’re stuck in our own time, and history can’t teach us the future. Keeping options open is surely a key to survival so let’s not condemn other ways, let’s keep on searching and admiring, not just the best in human efforts, glimpses of utopia, but in those of other species….
References
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0140175079900010
Joseph Henrich, The weirdest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020
more on ‘evolutionary psychology’, humans and bonobos
bonobo kids have plenty of baby-sitters
So Ryan Ellsworth’s attempt to dismiss the possibility that bonobos can serve as any kind of model for sexual and political behaviour in humans has obviously got my dander up, as this is my third post on the matter, and it has renewed my interest in searching for the origins of patriarchy, and in how we can reduce patriarchal attitudes, at least in the WEIRD world – and especially among the soi-disant intelligentsia.
One important resource I’ll be relying on in this exploration is Angela Saini’s The patriarchs: how men came to rule, but I’ll start again with Ellsworth’s critique of Block, and in effect others who advocate ‘free love’ and other such fantasies through ‘misinterpreting’ bonobo culture, as well as advocating that we [i.e. women] ‘release our inner bonobo’. Of course there seems to be some naïveté in Block’s praise of bonobos, which I find quite forgivable, unlike Ellsworth:
It is egregiously naïve to conclude that, “bonobos reveal that an incredible range of sexual diversity is normal for animals like us” (p. 99, emphasis in original).
The fact is that humans do engage in an incredible range of sexual diversity – though not all at the same time. On the other hand, humans, especially under patriarchal religion over the last few millennia, have sought to stifle sexual diversity with a vengeance, especially among women. And considering that writing to any copious degree has only existed for a few millennia, our sexual practices, dating back to our primate ancestors, are something of a black box – though orgiastic practices get a mention here and there.
Of course one of the obvious barriers to ‘sexual licence’ in humans is clothing – making ourselves ‘decent’, which we learn in childhood, becoming early aware that there are parts of our bodies that it would shock others to see. But would we be shocked if we weren’t told, virtually from birth, that we should be shocked? If we were taught that clothes were solely for decoration and warmth, and were entirely optional? And when did this clothing business start? We can give some sort of vague starting date – say 100,000 years ago – but we also know that Australian Aborigines were shamelessly wearing nothing, or nothing much, when we started wiping them out with guns and germs a little over 200 years ago. So, it was culture wot done it. There seem to have been a mixture of factors – to wrap someone in clothing makes them unavailable to the general public, in sexual terms, and it also becomes a form of decoration, conveying status, or clubbish belonging – business suits, cycling togs, pyjamas (well, maybe not) and haute couture, whatever that may be.
So in modern Australia Aboriginal people will be arrested for indecent exposure if they were wear nothing but strings around the waist for carrying dilly bags and such. This reminds me of an Aboriginal man, of impressive physique, who used to walk up and down a busy street near my home wearing nothing but the skimpiest of budgie smugglers – a fascinating clash of manliness and cultural cringe, or something like that.
So, clothing – the fact and the concept – has played a major inhibiting role. There’s also monogamy, which, for most of its history has been about male ownership of females – though, in some societies the very upper classes got away with polygyny, as described in Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest people in the world, and also in Korean historical dramas (though they present a rather tame version for modern susceptibilities).
Ellsworth claims that “Sex differences in promiscuous impulses are minimized in Block’s account”, which is an odd remark, because in order to know whether such sex differences are minimised, or maximised, we need to know what they are. And surely this is more an individual thing than a sex/gender thing. But clearly, Ellsworth is claiming that he knows. It’s funny that, just yesterday, I received a ‘shorts’ video on my feed – presumably ‘shorts’ being a rival to ‘tik-tok’, in which a young woman was admitted to hospital after having sex with 500+ men in one day. According to the video it was all her idea, but she reflected that it was probably ‘a bit much’, as she’d never had sex with more than 29 men in one day before – or was it 59, I’m not sure, and these ‘shorts’ videos disappear as suddenly as they arrive – one day of fame at most. And of course, whether this was promiscuity or an obsession with breaking records is unclear. Anyway, here’s more from Ellsworth, and I’ll make it the last:
Block refers to babies to care for, and reputations to protect, but does not seems to understand the significance of these two things for understanding human sex differences in sexual desire. Perhaps she privately does, but to acknowledge the significance of these forces on the evolution of human sexuality would severely compromise her arguments, as it demands recognition of the fact that women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men.
I may have commented on these remarks before, but they’re worth revisiting. Caring for her baby is a mother’s role, but assistance in this task is varied depending on culture. Bonobo females help with birth, supporting both mothers and infants in the post-partum period. Bonobo males also play with and support young infants. The degree to which humans do this is dependent on culture, not to mention class, with wet-nurses and such. As described in previous posts, the pressure in patriarchal societies on women’s sexual behaviour, regardless of their proclivities, has been enormous and often life-threatening. This is all about culture, not evolution in the Darwinian sense.
The sexism in Ellsworth’s paper is obvious to me, and I assume, or hope, that others have pointed this out before me, as it was published back in 2015. Then again, evolutionary psychology doesn’t have a great reputation, so maybe it’s best ignored. Meanwhile, Angela Saini’s work is much more recent and much more interesting, so that will be my focus in the immediate future.
References
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: how men came to rule, 2023
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491501300115
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020
on gender, and bonobos
So there seems to be a lot of noise about gender issues these days, and it has been a topic of much interest to me from pre-pubescent days. I wrote in my novel In Elizabeth about how, even in primary school, I stood at the back of my class line during ‘school assembly’ and surveyed my classmates in terms of ‘likeability’, not so much in sexual terms, though there was probably an element of that. It interested me to think, or feel, that those who attracted me least were the ‘girly girls’ and ‘the boysy boys’, even if I could only judge from the clothes they wore, which may well have been chosen by their parents. But also something in the way they moved, which attracted or repulsed me like no other school-kid.
Later, into my teens, with schooldays happily left behind, I discovered Bowie, and Lou Reed’s Transformer album, and played deliciously transgressive games with lipstick and stockings and a tucked-away penis. It was a phase, you might say, but I do recall that in the pre-pubescent era, I found boys who were just as physically attractive as girls, an attraction that faded with the appearance of facial hair and signs of muscularity. Broken voices might have broken the spell too.
One term that I never had to consider, of course, was the term ‘trans’, a term I’m still not sure that I understand, hence this investigative piece. But before I embark on that prickly issue, here’s a thought.
Do dogs know that they’re male or female? Cats? Birds? Yes, some get pregnant, or lay eggs, while other don’t, and that’s how we distinguish them, as well as anatomically, but… Is it a matter of consciousness, aka the hard problem of philosophy? Of course ‘AI’ provides an answer, which is more or less the one I would give. Gender as we know it is a social construct, as well as an aspect of language, but with other creatures it’s more about biological cues – pheromones perhaps, as well as subtle physiological differences (perhaps not so subtle for them). Chimps/bonobos seem to recognise those of their own sex, not just for sex but for hanging out, for fighting and so on. And it seems that, even with our close cousins, there are girly girls and boysy boys, as Frans de Waal noted in his book Different, particularly in his description of the gender-nonconforming female chimp, Donna, brought up in the Yerkes Field Station in Atlanta, USA:
Donna grew up into a robust female who acted more masculine than other females. She had the large head with the rough-hewn facial features of males, and sturdy hands and feet. She could sit poised like a male. If she raised her hair, which she did more often the older she got, she was quite intimidating, thanks to her broad shoulders. Her genitals were those of a female, however, even though they were never fully swollen. Female chimpanzees, at the peak of their thirty-five day menstrual cycle, sport inflated genitals. But after Donna passed puberty, hers never reached the shiny maximum size that announces fertility. The males were barely interested in her and refrained from mating. Since Donna also never masturbated, she probably didn’t have a strong sex drive. She never had offspring.
Frans de Waal, Different: what apes can teach us about gender, pp 50-51
de Waal spends the next half dozen pages describing Donna in terms of sex (physical elements) and gender (behaviour), which again reminds me of schooldays. Donna was big for a female, just as some human females are taller and heavier than the average male, her calling voice was lower than most females’, and she engaged in hooting, swaggering behaviour with other males, though she was never violent. As with humans, male chimps are hairier than the females, but Donna was hairier than most. In spite of her eccentricity, her tendency to hang out with the males and her unusual appearance, she was well-accepted by her troupe.
So was Donna “trans”? de Waal asks this question himself:
Individuals who are born as one sex yet feel they belong to the opposite sex are known as transgender. Transgender humans actually prefer to turn this description around and prioritise their felt identity. They were born as one sex but found themselves inside the body of the other. We have no way of applying this to Donna, however, because we can’t know how she perceived her gender. In many ways – her grooming relations with others, her non-aggressiveness -she acted more like a female than a male. The best way to describe her is perhaps as a largely asexual gender-non-conforming individual.
Ibid, p54
I mentioned schooldays. A fond memory from when I was around nine years old was of a class-mate, a big strapping thunder-thighed girl who would lie on her back on the school’s grassy knoll and urge us to run and jump on her. She’d catch us, rough us up a bit, then toss us to one side ready for the next victim. As the smallest kid in the class I was an easy toss, and I loved it. I found her totally admirable, perhaps also because she was the smartest kid in my class – along with myself of course.
The point here, I think, is acceptance of difference – which is what de Waal’s Different is all about. In some ways the ‘trans’ thing is about our need to categorise, and our obsession with being hard and fast about those categories. I recall my enthusiasm when unisex toilets became a thing a couple of decades ago, but it doesn’t seem to have caught on, really, though I do know of a few people who subscribe to gender fluidity, and ‘men who want to be men’ and ‘women who want to be women’, are types I prefer to avoid, largely because they tend to want to impose those hard and fast categories on others. But in researching ‘gender fluidity’ I again find this human tendency to categorise gets in the way, with ‘gender fluid’ being described as it own category that requires explaining, like some medical/physiological/psychological condition, as if people who are this way worry about being abnormal in some sense, rather than rarely giving it a moment’s thought.
And yet, what with the patriarchy that is still with us, abetted by all the major religions, gender in a general sense is something we need to face. So I will leave transgender and gender reassignment issues, which are purely human ones, for another piece, and focus for now on sex, or gender, and power, which is an issue for all complex social creatures.
de Waal has a chapter in his book, ‘Bonobo Sisterhood’, which compares those apes with their chimp cousins and neighbours. The Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary near Kinshasa, capital of the embattled Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), is home to over 70 bonobos, many of them damaged orphans rescued from poachers and traders. This has made the sanctuary a difficult place for observing the natural life of bonobos, since many of them have experienced injury, separation from parents and other disruptions, including leading pampered lives in human households. One female bonobo who had been brought up with humans was quite bewildered when brought to the sanctuary, where other females greeted her with kisses and presenting of genitals for hoka-hoka, also known as genito-genital (GG) rubbing, a form of female sexual bonding that is key to their collective control of males. Not having been brought up in a bonobo environment, this female took some time to become accustomed to the ‘natural’ behaviour of her kind. Another bonobo had spent his early years in a gorilla enclosure, and was accustomed to making ‘gorilla’ noises and gestures. He was quite bewildered when female bonobos made advances, and didn’t recognise their genital swellings as anything sexual – though he eventually worked it out.
The point here is that there are social cues about sex and behaviour as well as what we might consider natural cues. And, as Donna the chimp has shown us, there may be wide differences in sexual behaviour within species, and it might be well for we humans to note the tolerance within the chimp community shown to Donna’s quasi-male behavioural traits.
de Waal provides a description of bonobos, particularly in contrast to chimps, that I’ll set down here to remind myself, more than anyone, of the difference:
Chimps look as if they work out in the gym every day. They have large heads, thick necks, and broad, muscular shoulders. In comparison, bonobos have an intellectual look, as if they spend time in the library. They have slim upper bodies, narrow shoulders, thin necks, and elegant piano-player hands. A lot of their weight is in their legs, which are long and thin. When a chimpanzee knuckle-walks on all fours, his back slopes down from his powerful shoulders. A bonobo, in contrast, has a perfectly horizontal back because of his elevated hips. When standing on two legs, bonobos straighten their back and hips better than any other ape, so that they look eerily human-like. They walk upright with remarkable ease while carrying food or looking out over tall grass.
Frans de Waal, Different: p 109
There’s more, and you get the impression that de Waal is very much captivated by the species. He even argues that their anatomy is closer to Lucy, our Australopithecus ancestor, than is any other of the great apes. It’s true that they’re more arboreal, due to the environment in which they’re confined. They’re also more group-oriented than chimps and more neotenous, according to de Waal. That’s to say, they preserve childhood or juvenile traits into adulthood – as do humans, with our love of play of all kinds. Their sensitivity may be attested to by a poignant story related by de Waal. A group of bonobos were sent to the Hellabrunn Zoo in Munich in the 1930s, just around the time that they were recognised as a separate species. Their uniqueness was noted by the first experts who studied them – ‘The bonobo is an extraordinarily sensitive, gentle creature, far removed from the demoniacal Urkraft [primitive force] of the adult chimpanzee”. But, as de Waal relates:
Sadly, the Hellabrunn bonobos died on the night in 1944 when the World War II allies bombed Munich. Terrified by the noise, they all succumbed to heart failure. That none of the zoo’s other apes suffered the same fate attests to the bonobo’s exceptional sensitivity.
Ibid: p 111
It seems to me – no doubt many would disagree – that bonobo sensitivity bears some relation to their matriarchal and more generally bonding culture. As de Waal and others point out, bonobos really are very very sexual, and it has nothing to do with reproduction, the rate of which is no greater than chimps. And it really is a ‘make love not war’ mind-set, with sexual closeness, especially among females, acting against serious violence, though they can be as rough-and-tumble in their play as their chimp cousins. de Waal, in his bonobo chapter, describes how reluctant the scientific community were to accept both bonobo matriarchy and bonobo sexual enthusiasm. I find this community’s reluctance, even today, to emphasise the matriarchy and sexuality of this closest relative of ours, to be a source of great frustration. Bonobos deserve our attention – and will repay it in spades – not just by the fact that they’re matriarchal but in the way they’ve become matriarchal, in spite of a slight sexual dimorphism in the males’ favour. Diane Rosenfeld’s The Bonobo Sisterhood is a start, but it requires the attention and activity of both females and males to move us in the right direction. Et ça va prendre beaucoup de temps, malheureusement.
References
Frans de Waal, Different: what apes can teach us about gender, 2022
Diane Rosenfeld, The bonobo sisterhood, 2022
https://www.bonobosisterhoodalliance.org
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
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