Something I encountered in S J Gould’s book Life’s Grandeur, added to other little encounters in my readings and researchings, has caused a few concerns. In trying to promote bonoboism, of a kind, the last thing I’d want to do is limit humanity’s intellectual pursuits, curiosity, adaptability and general gung-ho cleverness. As if I had the power haha. So whenever I read or hear something that might suggest that bonobos aren’t as smart as chimps I get worried.
Anyway, my reading, as usual, took me on some internet journeys, in one of which I found that the average chimp brain volume is 398 cc while that of bonobos is 348 cc. Remember of course that bonobos used to be known as pygmy chimps, and the average difference in overall size between the two species pretty well corresponds to the difference in brain size, and, as smart corvids and other birds remind us, size isn’t always an indicator of such things.
But there are other worries. I’ve gotten the impression that chimps are very much tool-users, bonobos perhaps not so much. But now, on consulting the literature more closely, I’m finding that maybe this isn’t so, and so I’m losing the point of this post. But of course there are differences, behaviourally, and so cognitively, between the two species, which would be worth exploring, for our future’s sake.
A scientific article, linked below, going back to 2010, and not fully available to amateurs like me, has this to say in its abstract:
Our observations illustrate that tool use in bonobos can be highly complex and no different from what has been described for chimpanzees. The only major difference in the chimpanzee and bonobo data was that bonobos of all age–sex classes used tools in a play context, a possible manifestation of their neotenous nature. We also found that female bonobos displayed a larger range of tool use behaviours than males, a pattern previously described for chimpanzees but not for other great apes. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the female-biased tool use evolved prior to the split between bonobos and chimpanzees.
As to their ‘neotenous’ (i.e. eternally childlike) nature, I’m wondering. Are they really any more childlike than chimps? Apparently, that’s the consensus. A more recent piece in Current Biology by Isabel Behncke, ‘Play in the Peter Pan ape’ (Peter Pan being the boy who never grows up) looks into this issue of bonobo neoteny, and play, noting that there’s a ‘small cluster of species in which adult play occurs, such as elephants, primates, social carnivores, cetaceans, parrots and corvids’. These are all highly social species, with otherwise little in the way of evolutionary connection. They do have other connections, though, apart form sociality – longevity, and neural complexity.
Behncke, in studying bonobos in the wild, argues that bonobos are more neotenous and playful than chimps, and one of her reasons for this corresponds with my own thoughts, happily. They live in a relatively abundant calorific habitat, and ‘play is energetically expensive and dwindles in conditions of resource scarcity’. Hence all those videos featuring pets at play. Hence, also, our own playful nature – sport, art, music, salons and pub chit-chat. Even our scientific explorations can be considered a form of play, at a stretch.
And then there’s sex, that Big Issue that humans beat themselves up about. Bonobo play is less solitary than that of chimps, and more sexual. I also would note that the development of tool use, which has, as mentioned, been more associated with females than males, in both bonobos and chimps, is surely associated with play. But much play between bonobos is genital-based. ‘Chasing’, especially around a solitary object such as a tree, and genital-grabbing is common, which of course can be potentially painful, but according to Behncke virtually never results in serious injury. This often happens between members of different troupes, and Behncke points out here a vital difference between the two tightly related primates. Chimps exhibit hostility between troupes, with ‘wars’ sometimes ending in wipeouts, as Jane Goodall and others have reported. Of the often fatal injuries sustained, mutilated genitals are high on the list.
So, about the sex. But first, it should be noted that communal or paired play is often about trust. The ‘hanging’ game, for example, is often played between an adult and a juvenile bonobo, in which the adult lets the child dangle from her arm, from a more or less high tree branch. Like bungee jumping, without the elasticity, but with much of the thrill. Also, play (and sex) occurs with a multitude of partners, with attendant advantages:
Play-partner diversity is important when thinking about adaptability: playing 100 times with the same individual requires less variation and adjustment of behaviour than playing 10 times with 10 different individuals. Playing with individuals of different sizes, personalities and sex requires learning about contextual-dependent behaviour: with whom and when a bite is appropriate, a chase over a push, a gentle tickle rather than a stomping slap, and so on.
So, much of this research has assured me that we’re on the right track in becoming more bonoboesque humans, in spite of Trump, Putin, Musk and other throwbacks. I’m hoping that even the USA will have a female President some time in the 21st century, and if they progress even further along the bonobo line, they might scrap their worthless semi-monarchical Presidential system altogether…
The late Frans de Waal, in his book Different: what apes can teach us about gender, observes some interesting traits that humans consider to be associated with leadership, and which probably date back to our primate ancestors. The most obvious one is physical. We’ve all heard that being short (as I am) is a serious disadvantage for those vying for the Prime Ministership or the Presidency, to say nothing of military leadership.
But what about Napoleon? Actually of average height for his time, as was Hitler. Mao was a little above average, and Stalin somewhat below, but of course none of these men were elected into power. The average height of US Presidents is well above the average US citizen, and much more so if you include women, from the time that women were eligible for that office (1920).
Another physical attribute we associate with power is loudness and vocal tone. A scientific paper published in 2016 entitled ‘Sexual selection on male vocal fundamental frequency in humans and other anthropoids’, began with this interesting statement:
In many primates, including humans, the vocalizations of males and females differ dramatically, with male vocalizations and vocal anatomy often seeming to exaggerate apparent body size.
and then it continues:
Here we show across anthropoids that sexual dimorphism in fundamental frequency (F0) increased during evolutionary transitions towards polygyny, and decreased during transitions towards monogamy. Surprisingly, humans exhibit greater F0 sexual dimorphism than any other ape. We also show that low-F0 vocalizations predict perceptions of men’s dominance and attractiveness, and predict hormone profiles (low cortisol and high testosterone) related to immune function. These results suggest that low male F0 signals condition to competitors and mates, and evolved in male anthropoids in response to the intensity of mating competition.
This is quite an issue, as our vocalisations are vast and complex, and better known as speech. As de Waal puts it:
We are a verbal species, and the voice is hugely important to us. And here I don’t mean the content of what we say, but how we say it, how loudly, and with what vocal timbre.
The adult male larynx is 60% longer than that of the female, a particular sexual dimorphism that is much greater than the general sexual dimorphism of humans. One has to wonder why this evolution has occurred, because the effect has been to reinforce male dominance. The principal argument, as alluded to above, is that it suggests male vitality to other males, and females, in the mating game – but are we more competitive than other primates in that arena? Of course, in the WEIRD world, male dominance is being increasingly challenged, but how can a few decades of social evolution compete with millions of years of the physico-genetic variety? Or, as de Waal put it: ‘How does it serve sound decision-making if decisions are prioritised by the timbre of the voice that expresses them?’ This is the dilemma – we know, sort of, that we shouldn’t fall for a deep voice – or a tall stature – as a sign of greater authority, but we fall for it nevertheless.
I always feel inclined to eliminate men with high testosterone levels, perhaps by boiling them in their own sewerage (sorry, a macho moment), but every website tells me, in emergency tones, that low testosterone is a health hazard. So what is the antidote, the quick fix, to these male power advantages? One suggestion of course, is the bonobo way – not just safety in numbers but power in numbers, even to the point of bullying. A patrolling, policing bonobo sisterhood. And certainly women with ‘the knowledge’ are fighting back. And I too, have been campaigning on this front, for example by advocating less adversarial systems in politics, the law and industrial relations. I note that the political dramas currently occurring in South Korea have much to do with their having adopted, no doubt under ‘benign’ pressure, the fundamentally flawed US political system after the Korean war. However, even the more party-based Westminster parliamentary system could do with a shake-up, to effect a more inclusive, egalitarian approach to decision-making.
Ah, but wait up. Hierarchies are everywhere, de Waal and others tell us. It’s alpha males mostly, and alpha females among bonobos and some other species. And there are generally hierarchies within each gender, or sex. But these are more complex hierarchies than we might think. Whether male or female, they’re not always based on physical strength. What we would call emotional intelligence or EQ plays a big part, especially in female leadership. So, as human society, especially in the WEIRD world, becomes less patriarchal, this different kind of leadership, a kind of leadership against leadership, or a co-operation-promoting, networking leadership, will hopefully emerge. Such collaborations can help in the battle against patriarchy, of course. de Waal again, referencing the American anthropologist Barbara Smuts, writes this:
[One way] for women to reduce the risk of male sexual harassment is to rely on each other. Their support network may be kin-based (if women stay in their natal communities after marriage), but it could also, like the bonobo sisterhood, consist of unrelated women.
And, of course, sympathetic men. Some of whom, like the Dutch historian and sociologist Rutger Bregman, have tackled claims about the ‘natural’ violence of men head on. In stark contrast to de Waal, Bregman has this to say:
Basically, our ancestors were allergic to inequality. Decisions were group affairs requiring long deliberation in which everybody got to have their say.
So ‘allergic to inequality’ or ‘hierarchies everywhere’? Both of these things are not like the other. And yet both authors have written admiringly of each others’ work. I think the answer lies in complexity. I’ve lived in share houses, which formed hierarchies of a sort, hierarchies that shifted as tenants came and went. Others would describe the group as essentially egalitarian, though with a certain seniority for more long-standing tenants. And obviously a nuclear family is a hierarchy, with parents of different rank depending on personality, and age-ranked siblings. Workplaces are generally hierarchical, whether formally or informally, depending on seniority and competence. Again, in the world that I’ve grown up in, these hierarchies have become less patriarchal – in fact, my mother was the principal breadwinner in our family, and the principal decision-maker.
So is there much in the way of male advantage in today’s WEIRD world? Of course there is. How many women are in the top ten richest individuals (sorry to bring up filthy lucre)? Zero of course. How many female US Presidents? Zero of course. How many elected Canadian Prime Ministers? Zero. How many French Presidents? Zero. How many Italian Prime Ministers? Congratulations, their current PM Giorgia Meloni is the first to hold that office. How many Spanish Prime Ministers? None. And so on. Of course there has been Thatcher and Merkel, and other one-offs in progressive countries vis-a-vis gender, but there has been nothing like parity, and there won’t be for a long long time into the future. And then there’s the rest of the world, where patriarchy and misogyny run riot.
I’m getting old and tired.
References
Frans de Waal, Different: what apes can teach us about gender, 2021
I’ve already mentioned, and I’m still troubled by, a claim I read that watching pornography makes people more violent. The claim was almost as brief as this brief description, and included no references. Was it the consumption of pornography that made people more violent, and what exactly is pornography anyway? One doesn’t have to be a porn addict to know that there’s hardcore and softcore porn, that there’s woman-on-woman porn, men-on men-porn and hetero-porn. There’s presumably sado-masochistic porn, various role-play type porn, elder porn and, sadly but inevitably, its illegal opposite, child porn. And then, there are bonobos, whose sexual proclivities, I seem to remember the late Franz de Waals saying, border on pornography.
I’ve written on this topic before, in a rather hesitant way, and have avoided it in the couple of months since. So I’m going to try to be bold. In an article from way back in 2009, entitled ‘Does bonobo porn turn you on, ladies?’ – which completely avoids the actual issue, it’s reported that women are aroused by ‘bonobo porn’ but claim that they aren’t. There is no account of how such arousal is measured, and the idea that anything bonobos do could possibly influence or interest women, or even humans apparently, is treated as absurd.
Why such stupidity? Well, the fact that it’s a US article explains a lot.
Bonobo sex is predominantly female-to-female, and that is key to the female dominance of the species, just, as, some day, not in the near future, it might be key to female dominance in humans (maybe once we get AI and its attendant machinery to do all the work).
It’s also quite different from pornography, which, somewhat like prostitution, is primarily for the gratification of those, mostly men, who aren’t able to achieve – let’s call it sexual fulfilment – by virtue of their personal charms. They might indeed be overly aggressive types, or physically unattractive, or painfully shy, or impoverished, or disabled in one way or another. And there are gazillions of them out there, surely.
So it’s quite wrong, I think, to compare bonobo sex with porn. They don’t do it for display or reward, nor for love in the almost hopelessly complicated human sense. To try to define what they do it for might even seem arrogant. The main thing is that they do it, and many clear benefits ensue.
Then again, maybe I’m complicating matters. Mutual masturbation, which bonobos mostly indulge in, is pleasurable, and has evolved to be so, for many species. It also involves a brief intense expenditure of energy, generally followed by a state of mild, pleasant, temporary exhaustion. In these mutual exchanges, this would surely also involve a sense of gratitude.
I should also point out, to the anti-porn feminists and those who ‘dis’ porn (is that the right slang word?), that even if it’s true that watching porn makes people more violent, the most obvious reason would be that they’re not getting what those porn performers are getting. I seem to remember The Rolling Stones calling it ‘satisfaction’.
And yet there are serious downsides to being a female pornstar or prostitute in our still very horribly patriarchal society. It’s the old slut/stud dichotomy – how long will that one take to die? So it’s clear that the women in porn are being exploited and generally looked down upon in a way that the men are not. And that their time in the business is way shorter than that of the blokes. For some reason, thoughts of this kind take me back to my youthful interest in arthouse films. I’m thinking in particular of the harem scene in Fellini’s 8½, in which the debonaire and breezy bachelor Guido, played impeccably by Marcello Mastroianni, turns martinet when one of his nest of female companions resists the rule about having to move ‘upstairs’ to retirement, having turned the venerable age of thirty. The fact that this scene has stuck with me for nigh on fifty years is telling. Plus ça change…
Yet, change does happen, it’s just that our lives are so short in the vast scheme of things that we tend to live in an eternal present. Australia, where I’ve lived most of my life, wasn’t even a concept 300 years ago. Nor was the USA, or even the internet. And while we berate Middle Eastern nations/cultures for their treatment of women, our own culture has only recently woken up to their obvious superiority… oh, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
So compare all this to bonobos, our dumb female-dominant cousins. Of course, they only indulge in the lazy pleasures of mutual masturbation because they haven’t the smarts to indulge in all our high-falutin pleasures – such as exploring and defining gravity, making music, inventing deities, playing chess, bush-walking, racing each other under endless permutations, creating fashion trends, falling in love, identifying species, dancing, building bombs and spacecrafts, playing the stock market, and of course, yodelling. And that’s just the beginning….
Yet even with all that brain-building work and complex play to distract us, our erogenous zones are still a bothersome delightful drawcard, and so, failing willing partners, we have pornography, prostitution and masturbation sans mutuality.
So a website has come to my attention that provides a unique twist to this dilemma, if such it is. It almost turns the patriarchy on its head, if only by sheer force of numbers. The site or venue is called Party Hardcore, and it is based, I believe, in Germany, that most erotische of nations. Word of mouth tells me, though, that such venues exist in many large cities in the developed world. The venues are, essentially, nightclubs in which the patrons are exclusively women. Loud, danceable music plays, and alcohol and possibly other drugs are readily available. There appear to be well over a hundred patrons, becoming increasingly sozzled and smoochy. In the centre of the venue is a raised catwalk with the words ‘Party Hardcore’ printed over its length, clearly designed for the vast English-speaking audience that tunes in (people with video cameras wind through the crowd). A male model of the ‘condom full of walnuts’ type mounts the catwalk and dances and flexes for a few minutes before coaxing a woman or two to come up and join him in a bit of heavy foreplay, much to the amusement of their friends, apparently. Meanwhile, a handful of similarly built males suddenly emerge, sprinkling themselves about the room like an assortment of many-coloured sweets. Much licking and sucking ensues, and then some. In fact, the target audience ranges from pseudo-bored and disdainful wallflowers to gung-ho erotomaniacs wolfing down wobbly bits as if their life depended on it.
How to define such scenarios? Prostitution? Well, the men are no doubt being paid for this service, but I doubt if that’s the main reason they do it, and there’s no straightforward client-professional relationship. Pornography? A very divided matter of opinion. The fact is that, sozzled or not, the women in these venues have agency, and safety in overwhelming numbers.
Which brings me back to bonobos. Their females don’t outnumber the males, but female solidarity has evolved in this species to provide the protection that sheer numbers provides in the Party Hardcore scenario. I don’t expect humans to ever become as sexually ‘obsessed’ or ‘liberated’ (take your pick) as bonobos, but I do have high hopes women will emerge as the dominant gender, as we learn more and more the lessons from our patriarchal history. If such dominance brings about a more sexually relaxed society – and I’m sure it would – without reducing our creative and analytic explorations, and our concern for our fragile biosphere, then…
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.Richard Feynman 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 … Continue reading a touchy but important subject: 1 – sex, fun, sin, etc
It is illegal, just about everywhere in the world, to walk down a street completely unclothed, above a certain, very young, age. It’s also considered shocking, alarming and generally disruptive to the well-being of society. This truth has fascinated me ever since I was old enough to think muchly about it. Even the religious must accept that their god created humans déshabillé, so why all the fuss? Well, there’s been much philosophical palaver about the Garden of Eden story, the shocking discovery of ‘Otherness’ and how it distracted our ancestors from benefitting from the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and so forth, but from a more anthropological or palaeontological perspective, the question is, when did the purpose of clothing widen from providing protection and warmth to concepts of public decency? Not to mention style, fashion, class and all the rest.
So Wikipedia cites a 2010 study published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, on the origin of habitual clothes-wearing:
That study indicates that the habitual wearing of clothing began at some point in time between 83,000 years ago and 170,000 years ago based upon a genetic analysis indicating when clothing lice diverged from their head louse ancestors.
That’s a useful time-frame, but it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get an insight, based on genetics or anything else, about the why of habitual clothes-wearing – that’s to say the mindset of those ancestors. Clearly, need had a lot do with it initially. Even today there are indigenous peoples in tropical climates who go about their business completely naked for much of the time, but climates have varied considerably, both locally and globally, and one theory has it that a very cold period in Eurasia some 40,000 years ago likely wiped out our Neanderthal cousins. A good set of fleecy jackets and ugg boots might’ve seen them through.
It’s more or less taken for granted, though, that we wouldn’t have been so self-conscious about our nakedness when we were as hairy as our chimp and bonobo cousins. On that topic, here’s Wikipedia again:
The first member of the genus Homo to be hairless was Homo erectus, originating about 1.6 million years ago. The dissipation of body heat remains the most widely accepted evolutionary explanation for the loss of body hair in early members of the genus Homo, the surviving member of which is modern humans. Less hair, and an increase in sweat glands, made it easier for their bodies to cool when they moved from living in shady forest to open savanna. This change in environment also resulted in a change in diet, from largely vegetarian to hunting. Pursuing game on the savanna also increased the need for regulation of body heat
We might dispute the time-frame, but there’s surely no doubt that we’d lost a substantial proportion of body hair, over a substantial period of time, before we started getting coy about our jangly bits and crevasses. During that long period, we developed into anatomically, neurologically (and perhaps neurotically) modern humans, being increasingly obsessed not only with proto-clothing but various other forms of bodily adornment, scarification and the like.
Of course, as the human population grew and spread, it diversified culturally. Bodily adornment and dress became a cultural indentifier, as did the treatment of women. The veiling of women can be dated at least to the Assyrians some 3,500 years ago, though it was practised exclusively by the elites. Slave women would be severely punished for such practices. The point being made had to do with women’s ‘availability’, particularly in the matter of sex. Apparently, slave women should be accepted as sexually available as a matter of course, while a respectable woman belonged exclusively to her husband, along with his other wives. And just by the by, the ancient Athenians’ veiling and closeting of women, as well as their economic dependence on slavery, makes as much a mockery of their being touted as ‘the first democracy’ as does the slave-based colony later to be officially called the USA, as ‘the first modern democracy’.
But returning to clothing in general, it is likely that, at least in cooler climates, the change from hunter-gathering, nomadic lifestyles to a more settled agricultural existence in the Neolithic period led to clothing becoming the norm, for adults at least. Perhaps the persistence of hair around the genital region marked it out as special and inviolable. It’s notable that the early paintings and drawings of Australian Aborigines depicted them as naked but for leaf-decorated belts or strings, with attached hides conveniently covering their privates. This may have been whitefella modesty, but it also makes sense that they would have been useful for attaching dilly bags, small weaponry and other items. It also makes sense that the genital area would have been most in need of protection, and so marked out as special, and then sacred.
Religion, of course, has played a role in all this, especially in terms of female bodies, but this of course begs the question of why all the dominant traditional religions are so patriarchal, and so obsessed with controlling sexuality….
All of which makes me want to express my exasperation by paraphrasing Marx – the question isn’t so much to understand this weird sex-policing world we’ve created for ourselves, but to change it…
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it. Richard Feynman
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.
Some years ago I read Bonk: the curious coupling of sex and science, by the popular science writer Mary Roach, having read one of her previous books (Stiff – and no, it wasn’t because I thought it’d be about sex), and of course I found it compelling, but I recall being disappointed at the lack of information in some areas, one of which has come back to me thanks to a YouTube video recently watched. The colloquial term is ‘squirting’, sometimes also referred to as female ejaculation. What’s that about, and is it just urine, with a few womanly additives? That’s what I want to explore today.
So according to popular YouTuber Rena Malik MD, squirting is ‘the emission of fluid from the urethra, during sexual arousal or orgasm, that occurs in some women’. The urethra (I’m writing as a none too sexually experienced male here) is the tube through which urine from the bladder leaves the body, and it ranges in length from about 3.8cm in women to about 20cm in men, and most of that male length is external, and is sometimes called the penis. Malik also educates me about the Skene’s gland. These glands are located ‘around and beneath the urethra and are homologous to the male prostate gland’, so these different glands start to emerge in embryonic development. Again according to Malik ‘the theory is that during sexual arousal these Skene’s glands fill with fluid, then during orgasm the pelvic floor muscles contract, putting pressure on the spongy tissues of the urethra’, causing fluid to be ejected. The question again is, what precisely does this fluid consist of? And one ‘issue’, if you can call it that, is that if it’s just pee, with a few additives, why don’t men pee when their urethra/penis is aroused or manipulated? And we must thank the universe that they don’t.
There appears to be more mystery around these matters than there should be, given their centrality to a sexually satisfying and mind-expanding life. So what do we know?
This, I’m finding, isn’t an easy topic to research. I mentioned female ejaculation, which Malik describes as something quite separate from squirting, while others seem to disagree. A 2015 paper, ‘Nature and origin of “squirting” in female sexuality’, the abstract of which is posted on PubMed, concludes with this:
The present data based on ultrasonographic bladder monitoring and biochemical analyses indicate that squirting is essentially the involuntary emission of urine during sexual activity, although a marginal contribution of prostatic secretions to the emitted fluid often exists.
This accords with my guess, and it also, perhaps, provides a clue to why it’s an exclusively female experience. And here I have to admit that my research comes from viewing Japanese sex videos, in which women are induced to squirt by manual manipulation, often vigorous, of the upper wall of the vagina, near where both the clitoris and the urethral opening sit. It’s not hard to imagine that such vigorous pressure, on both the urethra and the clitoris, by a male or female sex performer with savour faire, can produce the required result. And clearly, males just aren’t anatomically open to such an experience. And of course it doesn’t always require manual manipulation, as my scientific researches have found. Some women are able to squirt through standard sexual intercourse, or by the use of a vibrator or some such device. And presumably some are not. After all, every set of female and male genitalia is as anatomically unique as is every human face. We’re just not looking closely enough!
Now, in inquiring into this, I’ve found commentators claiming that ‘it’s definitely not urine’. They must surely be going not by the look of the fluid – it certainly looks like pee – but by smell and, dare I say, taste. I’ve never tried the taste test myself, and I must admit to being slightly averse to sniffing pee, but I do know that pee can come in slightly different colours and this is obviously due to variations in its chemical composition due to diet, illness and the like. And it would seem obvious to me that ‘squirt’ varies similarly, but also due to the ‘marginal contribution of prostatic secretions’ above-mentioned.
So, are squirting and female ejaculation the same things? Off the top of my head I would say it’s just semantics. An ejaculate (noun) is, arguably, something you ejaculate (verb). It could be vomit, or blood, or, common amongst dictatorial types, verbal diarrhoea. And so I disagree with Dr Malik when she says that ‘ejaculation and squirting are two different things’, though I think she’s trying to make the distinction between what women sometimes release during sex/masturbation, and the semen released by men. In fact she’s fallen for the patriarchal myth, or just the patriarchal way of putting things, that only males ejaculate. Then again, maybe it’s me that’s trying to preserve the term in its broadest sense. Most dictionaries define ejaculation specifically in terms of semen, and describe its broader use as ‘dated’. So I don’t know if I’m an old fuddy-duddy or a post-modern feminist seeking renovation of a patriarchalised term. Enfin, je m’en fous de tout ça!
One more point. It’s often claimed that squirting is a more or less involuntary occurrence. It’s said to happen unexpectedly, causing a degree of shock and embarrassment. Women just can’t control themselves, as we all know, while men ejaculate by means of freely-willed effort. It almost takes us back to the days of Aristotle – men are the seed-bearers, women the mere receptacle. It’s enough to make me piss myself laughing.
All in all this is a most stimulating topic. I might try to get a handle on the g-spot next, so to speak.
Reference
Mary Roach, Bonk: the curious coupling of sex and science, 2008
The mind is certainly a very mysterious organ, I reflected,.. about which nothing whatever is known, though we depend upon it so completely.
Virginia Woolf, A room of one’s own, 1928
ah yes, it all makes sense now…
So there’s still plenty to learn about the mind, and maybe calling it the brain is only giving us a false sense of the matter (and I’m thinking of ye olde ‘what’s mind, it doesn’t matter, what’s matter, never mind’ jibe), though we’ve made great neurophysiological strides in recent decades. But having just read Virginia Woolf’s thoughts on the position of women almost a century ago, and being old enough to remember texts like ‘Women are from Venus, men are from Mars’, which sought to ‘explain’ and make the best of the pigeonholes the author presumably believed in, I’ve decided to have another quick look at the current expert views on the neurophysiological and hormonal differences between the sexes.
What I’ve found is that it’s still a contested issue. When I last reported on it, I found myself very happy to accept that there are statistical differences between male and female brains, but no categorical differences. That’s to say, both male and female brains vary widely, and it’s reasonable to say that the differences within each gender are as great as the differences between them. Another striking way to think about it is to say that, were you to hand a still living but completely disembodied human brain (just imagine!) to a trained and experienced neurologist, they’d be unable to say categorically that it was M or F.
Well, the first website I’ve come to disputes this claim. It’s from PNAS (often fondly vocalised as ‘penis’, which may or may not be relevant) and it’s a short essay with only one author, Marek Glezerman. My initial sense of it is that he misses the point, and seems disturbingly emphatic. To give an obvious example, the title of the piece is “Yes, there is a female and a male brain: Morphology versus functionality”. In his opening paragraph (but the essay only has two paragraphs), Glezerman summarises the conclusion he disagrees with, a conclusion I based my own essay on years ago:
The authors conclude that brains of women and men are not dimorphic and not categorically different, as are the genital systems of the two genders, but resemble more an overlapping mosaic of specific functional regions and therefore cannot be distinguished as male and female brains.
Reading this made me wonder, and I thought back to the night before – ahhh, the night before – when I spent time at a well-frequented pub full of individuals, male and female, well beyond the first flush of youth. It occurred to me that there wasn’t a single person there whose sex I would feel mistaken about. Many of the men, and none of the women, were balding, bearded and paunchy. Some did have breasts, I admit, that could’ve competed with the females, but I doubt if they’d have managed the same expression, so to speak. And though there was a lot of variety in the voices, it was easy enough to distinguish males from females in that characteristic. Of course there were also differences in dress, mannerisms and choice of drink, but those could be put down to ‘culture’ and dismissed. Even so there might be enough evidence on display to suggest a categorical difference – a morphological difference – traceable to the brain and hormones.
So, what did Glezerman mean, exactly, by ‘morphology versus functionality’? Well, here’s a long, but essential quote from his essay.
Whenever the terms “female brain” and “male brain” are used, the intention should be functional and not morphological, qualitative and not quantitative. Functionally, brains of women and men are indeed different. Not better, not worse, neither more nor less sophisticated, just different. The very brain cells differ chromosomally. The male brain is exposed to a completely different hormonal environment during intrauterine life than the female brain. The available scientific data as to the crucial effect of testosterone on the developing male brain is overwhelming.
Glezerman provides references for his claim about testosterone and its effects, a subject of great interest to me, but I’ll leave that for another essay. But one wonders if this isn’t a storm in a teacup. Going back to my pub reference, of course there were differences within the sexes – some males seemed more ‘feminine’ than others, whatever that may mean, and some women more ‘masculine’. This may again be a matter of hormone expression rather than personal choice, or a complex combination. I find it fascinating that male hormone levels (i.e testosterone) are dropping in the WEIRD world, a matter of concern to some, but not me…. oh, but that’s for that other essay, or did I already write that one?
PNAS has a reply to Glezerman’s essay, which I’ll now focus on. And I should note how polite and civilised these scientific disputes are: far from the world of social media. This response is even shorter that Glezerman’s little essay (I’ll bet that was by design!), so I’ll reflect on it here, passage by passage.
As Marek Glezerman (1) rightly points out, there are differences between females and males in brain and behavior. Glezerman overlooks, however, the fact that such differences may be different and even opposite under different environmental conditions. That is, what is typical under some conditions in a brain composed of cells with an XX chromosomal complement residing in a body with low levels of testosterone, may be typical under other conditions in a brain composed of cells with an XY chromosomal complement residing in a body with high levels of testosterone.
Being a person who spreads himself thinly over a wide variety of intellectual topics (i.e master of none), I had to look up XX and XY (remember mate, two kisses female, one kiss male – which is surely typical). What the response (which has three authors) appears to be saying is that what is typical for a low-testosterone female in some conditions, may also be typical for a high-testosterone male under quite different conditions, in spite of the fact that one set of brain cells carries an XY chromosomal complement, while the other carries XX. Not sure if this carries the day though. But to continue:
Such “reversals” of sex effects have also been reported when the manipulation of environmental conditions was done in utero (by manipulating the dam) and the offspring were tested in adulthood (reviewed in refs. 2 and 3). These observations led to the hypothesis that brains are composed of a “mosaic” of “male” and “female” features rather than of only “male” features or only “female” features, as expected of a “male brain” and a “female brain,” respectively (2, 3)
Wasn’t sure what ‘manipulating the dam’ meant, but a dam is a dam, something that reduces or stops flow, so I suppose this was done in non-human test species? Presumably if you’re able to change hormonal conditions in utero via such methods – or by changing environmental/social conditions, as bonobos appear to have done – you will change the mosaic of behaviour. Bonobos can be quite aggressive, but it appears to be more tilted towards the male of the species. Also, the drop in male testosterone is surely due to changed conditions and expectations for males over a relatively short period – for example in the mere century since A room of one’s own was written, but even more so in the past few decades of mechanisation and anti-machismo, at least in the WEIRD world.
Our study (4) is the first to empirically test whether brains are “male” or “female” by assessing internal consistency in the degree of “maleness-femaleness” of different elements within a single brain. We found that brains with both “female-end” and “male-end” characteristics were more prevalent than brains with only “female-end” or only “male-end” characteristics. This was true for both the volume of brain regions and the strength of connections between regions (assessed in a similar way to ref. 5), in contrast to Glezerman’s assumption that “Other imaging methods might have yielded different results.”
This is claiming evidence for mosaic traits in a majority of the brains under study, both for individual regions in isolation and for brain connectivity. All I can say is that this seems eminently plausible, indeed I would’ve expected such a finding. Not sure, of course, what ‘male-end’ and ‘female-end’ characteristics are exactly. There is a question here, though, about what Glezerman meant by ‘other imaging methods’.
To corroborate our analysis of different aspects of brain structure assessed using MRI, we also analyzed brain function, as revealed in people’s behaviors, personality characteristics, preferences, and attitudes. Also here there were many more people with both “feminine” (i.e., more common in females compared with males) and “masculine” (i.e., more common in males compared with females) characteristics than people with only feminine or only masculine characteristics (4).
Behaviour, over time, can affect brain function and brain regions mightily. An obvious case is language, spoken and written, which is a behaviour that has had considerably impact on the brain, as, for example Maryanne Wolf recounts in Proust and the squid. You’d hardly expect those brain regions that have been adapted/co-opted for language production/reception to have been much affected by gender. The same would go for other skills and practices, such as mathematics. As to the different physical characteristics of males and females (my pub observations), how connected are they to our brains? They certainly have much to do with hormones, of which we have at least fifty types, many of which are connected to/stimulated into action by the pituitary gland, which is in turn stimulated by the hypothalamus, but these regions account for a minuscule proportion of the brain.
There is no doubt that sex affects the structure and function of brain cells. However, the fact that sex can affect brain cells does not necessarily entail that the form and function of brain cells are either “male” or “female” nor that the brains comprised of these cells can be divided into two distinct categories. For such claims to be true it is necessary that the effects of sex are dimorphic, resulting in the formation of distinct “male” and “female” types, as well as internally consistent (2, 3, 6).
I think what’s being said here is that just because our brain cells, indeed all our somatic cells, have either an XX or XY chromosomal complement in their nuclei, this doesn’t dictate essential expressed traits – our intelligence, our humour, our physical skills, our bodily needs, and so forth. As this essay suggests, ‘manipulating the dam’ in utero is likely to have a far greater effect on human development than gender does, unless of course you’re born into a culture in which one gender is significantly undervalued. But let’s not go too near that hornet’s nest.
So to the last lines of the reply to Glezerman:
Hopefully, future studies looking at the relations between sex and other systems in which sex differences have been documented (e.g., the immune system, the cardiovascular system) will assess both internal consistency and degree of overlap, to reveal whether the relations between sex and other systems are more similar to the relations between sex and the brain (mosaicism) or to the relations between sex and the genitalia (dimorphism).
And no doubt there will be differences, especially in relation to hormonal levels associated with the reproductive system, but also in those associated with diabetes, the heart and the circulatory system and so forth, but these are not easily predictable based solely on gender. And there’s another problem with fixating on sex differences in a hard and fast way. It’s not exactly coincidental that male supremacists are all for favouring such differences. That’s why the bonobo example needs to be known and promoted far more than is currently the case.
So I feel I’ve been skating around the edge of the bonobo world lately, not getting the message across, and not even quite sure what the message is. Clearly their sexual openness is sort of intimidating to many humans, but it’s also clear that this openness is profoundly connected to their culture of greater caring and sharing than exists in chimp culture, or our own. It slightly annoys me when commentators suggest we should look past the sexual activity to the bonding and helping and mutuality that goes on, as if we (very literally) buttoned-up humans can have one without the other, but having said that, I too am nervous about focussing on frottage, outside of Max Ernst.
So now I’m going to focus a bit more on the sexual side, and not just in reference to bonobos. Some years ago I read Jared Diamond’s little book Why is sex fun? (though I was pretty sure I knew the answer). Erogenous zones are hypersensitive, even more so when stimulated by another – like tickling, only different somehow. And with concealed ovulation, adult humans, like bonobos and dolphins, are sexually receptive for most of the time. This isn’t the case with chimps, so for bonobos this is an intriguing case of relatively recent evolution. Diamond’s book didn’t speculate too much, but looked at two extant theories:
“Many-fathers” theory says that concealed ovulation allows women to have sex with many men and create paternity confusion, which then decreases the chances of infanticide. “Daddy-at-home” theory says that women entice men to be around, provide and protect, by allowing them to have sex regularly. By combining both, we reach the conclusion that concealed ovulation arose at a time when our ancestors were promiscuous to avoid infanticide (“many fathers theory”) but once concealed ovulation evolved, the women chose monogamous relationships with more dependable cave-men (“daddy-at-home theory”).
Much of this is less than relevant to today’s WEIRD human world with its contraceptives and prophylactics, but ‘permissive’ sex has still to overcome the barriers of religion, and, for women, discrimination.
In any case Diamond completely missed the possible role of sex in bringing people together, in creating alliances, and the kind of overall cultural harmony that appears to subsist in bonobo society. This cultural harmony, which transcends the mother-child bond or the supposedly ideal development known as the nuclear family, has been the main attractant for me vis-a-vis bonobos, because I was brought up in what is called, by cliché, a ‘toxic family situation’, bearing in mind Tolstoy’s clever dictum that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This situation was most salient for me in the late sixties and early seventies, the ‘hippy era’, when free love was touted, along with the death of the nuclear family. The hope that this idea gave me in my teen years was almost unbearably painful, but it all fizzled out. I didn’t learn about the bonobo lifestyle until more than a decade later, in the mid to late 80s, but that was rather too late, and a whole species out of reach…
But that’s just my personal situation. Bonobos still offer an example for our species in general, as we socially evolve, very slowly and in piecemeal fashion, out of patriarchy. But what exactly is this example, if it isn’t sexually modulated empathy, which is so far from a species that is so compartmentalised, un-neighbourly, sexually repressed, competitive, materialistic and personally hubristic as ours?
Of course, the hope surely lies with the greater empowerment of the human female, who, by and large, hasn’t quite the intensity of the above-mentioned traits than the male. Or am I just pissing in the wind? Of course, there are outrageous and apparently obnoxious females on the political scene, especially in the USA, when a lot of reportage focuses on the outrageous and obnoxious. But I believe, and fervently hope, that women are better at operating co-operatively and below the radar. For example, I’ve written before about Arab and Israeli women getting together to lobby against injustice and to promote sexual freedom, amongst other things (okay, sexual freedom is probably low on their list of priorities right now), a particularly difficult task considering the status of women in Moslem cultures, and their apparently feverish fear of homosexuality, especially among the lower classes. The Haifa Women’s Coalition, for example, based in that coastal northern Israeli city, suffers from the sorts of cultural tensions no bonobo would ever have to deal with, such as a concern about being dominated by Ashkenazi Jews, and a fear of backlash re ‘abnormal’ sexual preferences. Sigh, if we could only just give in to and celebrate sharing our basic primate primacy.
I could go on about the backlash against female empowerment in China, Russia, Burma, the Middle East, etc etc, the product of power politics that I like to hope are ultimately ephemeral – given a 1000+ year time-line for a bonobo humanity – which reminds me, I need to save my pennies to be cryopreserved – I really really want to see that future.
Meanwhile, I’ve noted, rather belatedly, that others have been discovering and basing some writings on bonobos, one way or another. Two recent examples, The bonobo gene: why men can be so dumb, is apparently a light-hearted account by an Aussie TV sports producer, Steve Marshall, of toxic masculinity and the male appendage. It’s clearly not about science (what could this bonobo gene be?), but anything that mocks the jocks can’t be a bad thing. More intriguing to me, though, is The bonobo sisterhood: revolution through female alliance, by Diane Rosenfeld, which sounds like it’s tactfully avoiding the sexual stuff. We’ll see – I’m definitely going to grab myself a copy.
Taking the long view on a future bonobo humanity is of course the only way to stay hopeful. In spite of the situation in Israel-Palestine, in Ukraine-Russia, in Afghanistan, Syria, South Sudan, Burundi and so on, the human world is far less overtly violent than it was centuries and millennia ago. Reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s rather too whirlwind a world history (The World: a family history), amongst countless others, will tell you that. Even with a nuclear holocaust currently hanging over us (I recently encountered someone who fervently favours a nuclear strike – and strong male leadership – to stop Putin), and our slowness in handling the global warming crisis, I can’t seriously envisage a future human wipeout. The fact is, it often takes shocks at our own cruelty and stupidity to bring about anything like bonoboesque reform. It took two World Wars and all the barbarity they entailed to get us to become more global in our concerns, to take more seriously the concept of universal human rights and united nations, though these are still not taken seriously enough. Worse before it gets better? I can only hope not.
Canto: So we haven’t focussed on bonobos for a while – I’d love to be able to answer the question, How did bonobos become female dominant?
Jacinta: Yes, were they always that way? That would mean, presumably, that they were female dominant at the time of their split from chimpanzees, somewhere between one and two million years ago (a rather vague time-frame, for me), which would then raise the question – how did chimps become male-dominant?
Canto: Haha, a question we don’t ask ourselves, we’re so used to being male-dominant. I seem to recall that one reason, or theory, is that bonobos have evolved in a region that’s densely vegetated, plenty of fruit and nuts, not so much hunting as gathering, which doesn’t require so much physical strength and aggression.
Jacinta: Which is interesting – we humans are evolving, at least in the WEIRD world into a post-industrial species, where manual labour is being replaced by mechanisation, robotics and such, requiring less of the physical strength of old-fashioned factory work. Australia, for example has become, internally, a service economy, exporting raw materials such as iron ore and coal, and importing finished products. There are few labour-intensive jobs these days, and testosterone levels are dropping, happily.
Canto: Yes, if we can take the long view – a very difficult thing for humans – we can see that only a couple of centuries ago women couldn’t get a decent education, couldn’t participate in government or be workplace bosses – though there were always the rare exceptions – but now the gates are opened and the trickle to the top is happening. In a thousand years or so – not so long in evolutionary time – we might have achieved a bonobo-style humanity.
Jacinta: Well on that sort of happy note, let’s see if research has told us anything about bonobo femdom. The quickest click-research brings up this, from the Max Planck Institute:
Some researchers suggest that bonobo female dominance is facilitated by females forming coalitions which suppress male aggression. Others think of an evolutionary scenario in which females prefer non-aggressive males which renders male aggressiveness to a non-adaptive trait.
That’s from ten years ago, and I doubt if we’ve gone much beyond those very reasonable speculations, with both of those developments, female coalitions and less aggressive males, creating a synergistic effect.
Canto: Well, looking more closely at that fairly short article, they suggest that female attractiveness – by which they don’t mean looking like Taylor Swift or FKA Twigs, but displaying sexual receptivity through behaviour or sexual swellings, seems to soften up the males somehow:
If females display sexually attractive attributes, including sexual swellings, they win conflicts with males more easily, with the males behaving in a less aggressive way.
Which is the opposite of male chimp behaviour, so why, and when, the difference?
Jacinta: Well, the article mentions two changes – subtle differences, no doubt, in female sexuality and in male mating strategies over a million or two years. And, okay, that doesn’t tell us anything much. As to when, obviously these are changes that developed gradually. Emory University, in Atlanta Georgia, which has done a whole-genome comparison of chimps and bonobos, makes a more specific claim for the divergence:
Chimpanzees and bonobos are sister species that diverged around 1.8 million years ago as the Congo River formed a geographic boundary and they evolved in separate environments.
Canto: But is it likely that genomic comparisons will tell us much about these subtle – or, ok, not so subtle, differences in behaviour? I mean, comparing the genes of Taliban Afghans and Aussie radical lesbians isn’t going to tell us much, is it? It seems to me to be largely a cultural shift.
Jacinta: Well, the Emory website, I must say, has the most interesting little article I’ve found for a while, and it relates to diet, which we’ve looked at before, and hormone production, which we haven’t, because it’s a bit sciencey for us dilettantes. Let me quote at length from the site, as I think this will provide us with a sense of direction for our own future research, if you can call it that:
The whole genome comparison showed selection in bonobos for genes related to the production of pancreatic amylase — an enzyme that breaks down starch. Previous research has shown that human populations that began consuming more grains with the rise of agriculture show an increase in copies of a closely related gene that codes for amylase.
“Our results add to the evidence that diet and the available resources had a definite impact on bonobo evolution,” Kovalaskas says. “We can see it in the genome.”
Compared to chimpanzees, bonobos also showed differences in genetic pathways well-known to be related to social behaviors of animals — as well as humans. Bonobos had strong selection for genes in the oxytocin receptor pathway, which plays a role in promoting social bonds; serotonin, involved in modulating aggression; and gonadotropin, known to affect sexual behavior.
“The strong female bonds among bonobos, in part, may be mediated by their same-sex sexual behaviors,” says co-author James Rilling, professor and chair of Emory’s Department of Anthropology. “Our data suggest that something interesting is going on in the bonobo pathways for oxytocin, serotonin and gonadotropin and that future research into the physiological mechanisms underlying behavioral differences between bonobos and chimpanzees may want to target those specific systems.”
Canto: Yes, that’s a most interesting finding, and one to follow up – pathways for serotonin, oxytocin and gonadotrophin, think SOG. And think not testosterone. And of course it’s not about opening up these pathways artificially, with, I don’t know, hormone supplements and such, but engaging in and encouraging behaviour that takes us along those pathways….
Jacinta: Haha I think oxytocin comes first, even if it wrecks the acronym. Looks like we need a crash course in endocrinology.
Canto: Or a crash course in how to raise our levels of, or expression of, those hormones? Over the next million years or so? With lots of orgasm-inducing touchy-feelies?
Jacinta: Well I can’t see that happening for as long as we have anti-sex religions dominating many nations. I seem to remember there were a few ‘free love’ cults back in the hippy days, but things have dulled down since then. You’d think there’d be a return, what with the mechanisation of labour, and the growth of the service economy. What better service can we offer our fellows than body rubs? Mind you, the Japanese seem to be leading the way there – a notably non-religious people. And yet, still far too patriarchal….
Canto: Interesting that Japanese teams have led the way in bonobo studies. Let’s hope they’re spreading the news among their countrywomen.
Jacinta: Well the sex video industry in Japan, and its sex industry generally, is enormous, though doubtless very exploitative. I presume it’s being driven by men rather than women – not exactly the bonobo way. A country that forces its few female politicians to wear high heels is far from being female-dominant. At least that was the case in 2019, when there was a backlash against this grotesque policy. I presume it has changed, but it isn’t clear.
Canto: Well, this has been interesting. We need to look more at endocrinology and happiness, or at least pleasure-inducing practices, in future… meanwhile, Vive les bonobos!
Jacinta: So how is the bonobo influence faring these days – in Afghanistan, Iran, Trumpistan, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel and Burma, to name a few…?
Canto: Okay, enough goat-getting. I’m still fascinated by how bonobos – more genetically similar to chimps, of course, than to humans – came to be so different. It’s not genetics, so what is it? It can’t just be diet, or habitat. And, my feeling is, if you know how something works, you can build it yourself. Like, if you know how beehives work you can build your own beehive, which we’ve done.
Jacinta: Not quite the same as building a new social system methinks. Though they have tried, haven’t they? ‘Let’s go to the Americas and build a Paraiso en el NuevoMundo‘… ‘But isn’t it already inhabited?’ ‘Yeah, we might need a bit of rubbish-clearing to start with’.
Canto: You’d think that our discovery of the bonobo lifestyle, really only a few decades ago, its feminism, its relative pacifism, its great community spirit, not to mention the sex, would be of interest to more than just a few primatologists, especially given the world of warfare, rapine and religious numbskullduggery that so many of us are still trapped within – it makes me scream with frustration.
Jacinta: It seems that the timber of humanity is more crooked than that of bonobos. I reckon we took a really wrong turn a few million years ago, so now we’re lost in the patriarchal jungle and we’ll never find our way back.
Canto: But bonobos are showing us the way don’t you see? And if humans didn’t make life so difficult for them, and their habitat wasn’t so fouled and fenced in by human depredations, they’d be so numerous, such a dominant force in the landscape, they’d put us to shame.
Jacinta: Haha we’re a pretty shameless species I’m afraid. Anyway, aren’t bonobos the anomalous ones? Chimps vastly outnumber them, despite the same human depredations. It be Nature, and what do please Evolution. If they hadn’t been separated into two species by the formation of the Congo River, they’d still be one species, and patriarchal, I’m betting.
Canto: Wow, who’s side are you on? Whether bonobos’ ancestors were patriarchal or not is beside the point to me. The point is, they’re matriarchal now, who cares when it started. And they’re happy, and successful. And we humans want to be happy, or happier, and more successful. So we might learn from bonobos about being less aggressive, less cruel, less exploitative, less competitive, and more caring, more playful, more communal, more uninhibited…
Jacinta: Okay, okay, I get it. But I’m wondering about that aggression, or at least that competitiveness. Hasn’t it been to our advantage as a species? The space race, the battles between competing scientific theories, between political ideologies and the like, haven’t they sharpened the collective human mind? Aren’t bonobos a bit intellectually lazy? I’ve read somewhere that chimps are more consistent toolmakers than bonobos. Or would you rather we lived in some timeless hippy-bonobo nirvana?
Canto: Okay, let’s look at the evidence, or what we have of it. Michael Tomasello et al published a research study in the journal PloS One in 2010, entitled ‘Differences in the Cognitive Skills of Bonobos and Chimpanzees’. Here’s the whole abstract from it:
While bonobos and chimpanzees are both genetically and behaviorally very similar, they also differ in significant ways. Bonobos are more cautious and socially tolerant while chimpanzees are more dependent on extractive foraging, which requires tools. The similarities suggest the two species should be cognitively similar while the behavioral differences predict where the two species should differ cognitively. We compared both species on a wide range of cognitive problems testing their understanding of the physical and social world. Bonobos were more skilled at solving tasks related to theory of mind or an understanding of social causality, while chimpanzees were more skilled at tasks requiring the use of tools and an understanding of physical causality. These species differences support the role of ecological and socio-ecological pressures in shaping cognitive skills over relatively short periods of evolutionary time.
Jacinta: Yeah, that is a bit abstract. WTF is the difference between social causality and physical causality?
Canto: Well, it hints of course as to why chimps might be less interested in tool-making, and more interested in how to effectively share in the relative abundance of their habitat – a habitat they had full control of, I suspect, before a species called H sapiens started fucking it up. Says little about intelligence, however defined. Interestingly, the study involved far more chimps (106) than bonobos (34), and fewer female bonobos (13) than males – a bit disappointing, given that female bonobos have become dominant for some reason, but clearly not because of physical strength!
Jacinta: Well, reading further into the article, they did do some experiments in which they evened out the numbers, and I was intrigued by the claim that bonobos were more ‘timid’ than chimps:
Mirroring individual differences observed in theory of mind development in human children, the more cautious and socially tolerant bonobos outperformed chimpanzees on the theory of mind scale. Meanwhile, the prolific tool-using chimpanzee, whose survival is more dependent on extractive foraging, outperformed bonobos in the tool-use and causality scale.
Canto: Yes, apparently human children of the more reflective and less, dare I say, ‘out there’ type, have been found to be better at ‘theory of mind’ tasks. Tasks involving ‘walking in others’ shoes’, might I say. And isn’t that what we need right now? And I’m willing to bet all my worldly goods, that human females outperform males in those tasks.
Jacinta: This has been a contentious issue for some time, and it’s complicated, but yes, it seems that females do better at ToM, as they call it.
This pattern can potentially be interpreted as suggesting that bonobos are more skilled at solving problems requiring an understanding of social causality, while chimpanzees are more skilled at solving problems relating to physical causality. In contrast, the two species did not differ in the scales measuring their understanding of problems related to spatial comprehension, discriminating quantities, using and comprehending communicative signals and learning from others via a social demonstration. This pattern of findings provides support for the hypothesis that socio-ecological pressures play an important role in shaping the cognitive differences observed between these species.
Long-term observations of wild chimpanzees have suggested that female chimpanzees acquire more proficient tool-using techniques faster than males, and other studies show a similar pattern in captive bonobos. Therefore, it may be that socio-ecological pressures play a more limited role in producing cognitive differences based on sex in these species, but it also suggests that female Panins pay closer attention to others which allows them to learn and solve social problems more quickly and skillfully than males (while both sexes perform similarly in physical cognition tasks).
Canto: That’s intriguing, but it still doesn’t come very close to helping us understand how bonobo females dominate. I’m still waiting for a good hypothesis to explain this apparent turn-around. I’d like to think that there’s a clue in their sexual activities, but since it all seems to be about mutual masturbation…
Jacinta: But maybe it’s because the females are more proficient masturbators. After all, human females are more easily able to achieve orgasm than males, and that’s likely true also for bonobos, and in a social system in which there’s no sexual prudery (and humans have barely any such systems), that achievement might be politically empowering.
Canto: Yes, and this Theory of Mind stuff suggests that bonobos would likely get off on each others’ excitement, the females especially. Creating greater closeness and empathy. But then, there’s masturbatory sex, but also more ‘serious’ sex, directed at producing offspring. I’ve read that dominant female bonobos seek to manipulate things so that there own male offspring have sex, in this procreative sense, with the ‘right’ females.
Jacinta: Yes, that does sound weird. Could bonobos possibly know the connection between sex and pregnancy? Seems unlikely.
a bonobo humanity?
