Posts Tagged ‘prostitution’
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: 1 – sex, fun, sin, etc
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.
I recently read a comment somewhere online claiming that meta-analyses of human consumption of pornography have found that it leads to increased aggression (presumably in males?).
The commentator gave no information about this supposed study, so I can’t attest to its veracity, but given the issues around bonobos, sex, violence, patriarchy, matriarchy, the ‘oldest profession’, human sexual repression (and obsessions), to name a few related topics, I’m very much tempted to open this can of worms, though I’m worried that I’ll never see an end to such stimulating research.
I think I’ll start with bonobos. In a 1993 paper, ‘The evolution of sexuality in chimpanzees and bonobos’, Richard Wrangham wrote this:
Bonobos and chimpanzees have three functions of [nonconceptive] sexual activity in common (paternity confusion, practice sex, and exchange for favours), but only bonobos use sex purely for communication about social relationships. Bonobo hypersexuality appears closely linked to the evolution of female-female alliances. I suggest that these alliances were made possible by relaxed feeding competition, that they were favoured through their effect on reducing sexual coercion, and that they are ultimately responsible for the relaxed social conditions that allowed the evolution of “communication sex.”
I think Wrangham was right about the ‘relaxed feeding competition’, the abundance of resources south of the Congo that made for closeness and reduced the hormone-spiked tendency for the largest and/or pushiest males to compete for domination. One can only speculate, but it seems females began to realise the power of bonding, to protect their sisters against the kind of ‘domestic’ chimpanzee abuse described in the first chapter of Carole Hooven’s Testosterone, and written up (not by Hooven) in a Time magazine article ‘Wife Beaters of Kibale’.
This female bonding, as Wrangham and other researchers such as De Waals have claimed, is highly sexualised. I recall De Waals saying that the behaviour is at times ‘pornographic’, and so regular and time-consuming as to become ‘boring’, presumably for the viewer.
So what about human hypersexuality, and is it linked to pornography? We might get to the thorny question of what pornography actually is later. There’s no doubt that hypersexuality is frowned upon, especially by the patriarchal religious institutions that have dominated ‘western culture’ for millennia – and of course there’s no effective male counterpart to the term ‘nymphomaniac’, though it seems to me that this term has rather lost currency. In any case we’re living through an era fraught with concerns about sex, power and consent, and shifting attitudes about female and male roles, both within families and in the broader community. And sex itself can be gentle, rough, fast, slow, elaborate, basic, intense or humdrum. And so on. It’s surely also something that many people experience less than they’d like to, for a wide variety of reasons.
As I’ve written before, the first intellectual figure to influence me, when I was barely into my teens, was Sigmund Freud. It’s probably fair to say that I discovered Freud at about the same time that I discovered masturbation. Two connected Freudian terms stuck in my head, ‘polymorphous perversity’ and ‘sublimation’. The idea, or my interpretation of it, was that we were first ‘sexualised’ by the discovery that we could manipulate our genitals while thinking of an attractive neighbour or classmate, experiencing thereby a pleasure nowise comparable to anything experienced before, and that we’ve managed somehow to harness this energy and pleasure by channelling it into productive output. This second part of the theory struck me as a bit suss, but on reflection so did the first part. I never experienced polymorphous perversity, just plain old ‘perversity’, if that was the name to be given to my genitally-based delirium. And the fact that I, for one, wasn’t able to ‘sublimate’ these sensations into keeping up with my schoolwork or pondering the nature of the universe, made me feel something of a failure, and even, perhaps, a non-polymorphous pervert.
But I’m being too hard on myself – after all, I was exploring Freud at this time, as well as reading encyclopaedia articles on British history as well as on Einstein, Hitler and Albert Schweitzer, and masturbation was a bedroom secret. Unlike the bonobo situation, and that, of course, is the point. I couldn’t exactly go into breakfast and share with the family how invigorated and beneficent I felt, after a good wank.
Again, as I write, I feel I’m stepping into territory where angels fear to tread. Some years ago I read Jared Diamond’s little book, Why is sex fun? I don’t think it taught me anything new, and I understood why it didn’t need to be long. On the other hand, a work with the title – Why is sex so problematic for humans? – could easily run to several large volumes.
An easy target for blame is surely religion. I was shocked recently when the government of our nearest neighbour, Indonesia, unanimously passed a law declaring sex outside marriage a crime requiring imprisonment (presumably only for humans). The unfathomable stupidity of such legislation is beyond belief, and I had thought that Indonesia was a moderate Moslem country – though one might fairly argue that moderate Islam is as much a contradiction in terms as moderate Catholicism. The proportion of women in Indonesia’s parliament is at its highest at around 22%, but it would need a majority (which will never happen in a Moslem country) for any real change to occur.
Anyway, the topic I began with, and which I seem to be avoiding, was pornography. But actually I’m not avoiding it, I was going to use it, and prostitution, as an entree into sexual behaviour, in the WEIRD world, more generally, and in trying to find a healthy way of balancing our needs and aims in a future more feminist society – for it will become more feminist, of that I’m certain.
So, look forward to more of this waffle.
References
Carole Hooven, Testosterone, 2020
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/6/indonesia-passes-legislation-outlawing-sex-outside-marriage
why do fools fall in love, and bonobos not so much?
Animals don’t ‘fall in love’, right? Only humans do that sort of thing. But wait on – humans are animals. Darwin told me so. Funny how we keep forgetting that. Or, if we’re members of particular religions, we insist it just isn’t so. Simone de Beauvoir, in a section near the end of her monumental work The Second Sex, titled ‘The woman in love’, describes this rather mythologised experience from the second sex’s perspective:
The supreme aim of human love, like mystical love, is identification with the loved one. The measure of values and the truth of the world are in his own consciousness; that is why serving him is still not enough. The woman tries to see with his eyes; she reads the books he reads, prefers the paintings and music he prefers, she is only interested in the landscapes she sees with him, in the ideas that come from him; she adopts his friends, his enemies and his opinions; when she questions herself, she endeavours to hear the answers he gives; she wants the air he has already breathed in her lungs; the fruit and flowers she has not received from his hands have neither fragrance nor taste; even her hodological space is upset: the centre of the world is no longer where she is but where the beloved is; all roads leave from and lead to his house. She uses his words, she repeats his gestures, adopts his manias and tics. ‘I am Heathcliff,’ says Catherine in Wuthering Heights; this is the cry of all women in love; she is another incarnation of the beloved, his reflection, his double: she is he. She lets her own world founder in contingence: she lives in his universe.
I can hear plenty of women I know roaring with laughter at this description. It might seem dated and extreme, but Beauvoir directly quotes women of her time and earlier who give expression to this type of mindset, and a whole sub-genre of romantic literature is still devoted to it. And after all, humans are essentially monogamous, unlike any of the other great apes.
But how essential is our monogamy, really?
Bonobos have been lightly referred to as the ‘make love not war’ apes, or our ‘hippy’ cousins. These are telling references, methinks. I have to say that when I was a young teen, and sometimes shell-shocked witness to a very unhappy parental marriage, I had high hopes that the hippy ‘love the one you’re with’ lifestyle (and revolution) was here to stay, and that marriage, the consecration of monogamy, was on its way out. I won’t say those hopes were entirely dashed, because over the past fifty years or so, with the introduction of no-fault divorce, the greater acceptance of same sex relations and non-marital partnerships, and the drop in religious belief, traditional marriage has certainly been tottering on its pedestal. But there are other barriers to our adopting a bonobo lifestyle of all-in, apparently indiscriminate frottage and sexual healing – including our ideas about ‘true love’.
One factor, surely, has ensured the continued supremacy of monogamy in our society – the production and maintenance of offspring. While it’s generally conservatives who maintain that ideally children need a father and a mother for a ‘balanced’ upbringing (in spite of many examples to the contrary), the idea, I’ve found, niggles at many a single parent I’ve encountered. My own mother – by far the dominant parent, the breadwinner, the rule-maker, the sometimes unnerving dictator – seemed obsessed that the weakness of my father was affecting my own masculinity. She sent information my way as I grew older, about a career in the military, or the police, and made the odd – indeed quite odd – remark about homosexuality as a disturbing and unhealthy condition. I wasn’t particularly inclined that way, though as a ten-year-old I definitely found some of the boys in my class as pretty (or ugly) as the girls. And later, my discovery of David Bowie, the most intense experience of my teenage life, had a clear sexual element.
The point here is that we’re plagued with traditional notions of masculinity, femininity and monogamy which will take time to break down. But changes are afoot, and the gradual fading of religion and the great work of pioneers like Beauvoir and many intellectual heroines before and after her are making for a much more female-friendly, not to say female dominant, political and social environment. Slowly slowly catchy monkey. Or in the case of bonobos, catchuppy monkey.
Bonobos don’t live in houses. They don’t have sex in bedrooms. And, like us, at least post-religion, they don’t have sex to produce offspring. It seems that, like dogs on their masters’ legs, they’ve learned about erogenous zones, but, being smarter than dogs, have taken that a step further in terms of bonding. Humans hide away to have sex, but consume ‘adult’ videos involving sex on beaches and other open air spaces, in bars, on stages, in public toilets, in palatial residences, in the best and worst of places. It’s as if we long to be open and brazen about our sexuality, but dare not.
I note that one of the biggest sex video industry in the world is in Japan, which is also, surely not coincidentally, the least religious country in the world. It’s also not exactly a haven of feminism, to be honest, and critics, including feminists, have often targeted the sex video world as, like prostitution, a haven of macho exploitation. I prefer to see it as, at least potentially, a haven of sex without love, but not without fellow-feeling. And certainly anyone familiar with the Japanese sex video industry would have to scoff at the characterisation I’ve heard, from conservative politicians among others, that a large proportion of the females employed in the industry, are entrapped and drug-addled (as is not infrequently the case, of course, with prostitution). Having said that, it’s still clearly an industry directed primarily at male consumers.
Feminists are generally divided about the industry, between those who want to kill it off and those who want, or hope, to transform it. In any case, one of the problems is that the industry compartmentalises sex. It becomes a product, most often accessed by men, alone, in their bedrooms, sometimes by couples or groups as an aid or an inspiration. It helps with fantasy and technique but has little if anything to do with fellow-feeling or – well, love.
And yet – what I note with Japanese sex videos is that they are more story-based than those of the Euro-American industry. Yes, the stories are often repetitive and predictable, and there’s too much ‘fake rape’, with the female invariably ending up ‘enjoying’ the experience, though it appears to be a fact that rape fantasies are common among women – an issue I feel way too squeamish to explore, at least for now. The point I’m trying to make is that many Japanese videos make the effort to place sex in a domestic or workplace context, to normalise it, even if in a somewhat ludicrous, and sometimes comical, way. I also note that sometimes they involve interviews with the performers before and after scenes, giving the impression of ‘happy families’, though there are definitely cases of coercion and the situation may be worsening. Again, more female empowerment is the key to changing this environment. The fact remains that both pornography and prostitution are signs of a culture that has never really come to terms with its sexual needs and its sexual nature. If we cannot accept that sex is healthy we will continue to pursue it in ways that are unhealthy – the drive will always be with us.
So what about love, again? And its relation to sex. As Beauvoir points out, the idea that two people will be able to satisfy each other sexually, exclusively, for decades, is ridiculous. Of course, many couples become increasingly comfortable with each other and co-dependent over the years – as do two dogs more or less forced to share the same home. This may be not so much a sign of love as of the standard living arrangements developed over the centuries in our civilised world – rows of few-bedroomed homes fit for maybe three to five people set out in grids of streets serviced with all the conveniences of modern life. We don’t build for anything like a bonobo world, understandably, and it’s hard to see beyond the reality that has shaped our whole lives. Still, I’m hearing a new term that might be worth clinging to – ‘ethical non-monogamy’. Something that might be worth considering once the hormones die down and the scales fall…
So that very bonoboesque idea I’ll endeavour to explore next time.