Posts Tagged ‘sexuality’
a touchy but important subject 2: sex, family, and bonobos
sounds good
Do bonobos have families? Apparently not, since they aren’t considered monogamous, and monogamy (even failed or disrupted monogamy) and families go together. Don’t they?
First, let’s look at bonobos and child-rearing. It’s accepted that they’re matriarchal, and non-monogamous, and that humans are, by and large, patriarchal and monogamous. And the human family was surely an emergent ‘property’ of monogamous patriarchy. But before we go into further comparisons, let’s compare bonobos and their non-monogamous cousins, chimps.
Intriguingly, the idea of a cuddly-cosy bonobo parental style versus one which is often disrupted by infanticidal impulses from alpha male chimps, needs to be – adjusted, to say the least. According to observations described in a Scientific American article linked below, bonobo parents – that’s to say, mothers – are less likely to intervene when their child is bullied and mistreated by other adults than chimp mothers with their kids. This must be understood in the context of less extreme aggression compared to chimp culture, which has been known to involve infanticide as well as slaughter between chimp troupes.
So why the hands-off bonobo parenting style? More research is no doubt needed, but the article argues for a more protective mothering style among chimps precisely because of the threats both within and beyond the troupe:
one possible explanation is that the constant threat of violence in chimpanzee life could prime chimps to defend other members of their social group, regardless of the situation. In-group bonds are “a really core part” of chimp society… Chimpanzees “can take big risks to protect each other in encounters [with a hostile group]—like leaping over to cover someone who’s being attacked” with their own body.
So, counter-intuitively, bonobo ‘tough love’ might be a product of a more general easy-going, danger-free environment. And as to families, it’s essentially a single-mother situation, with help from others in the troupe, including males. This is especially so with sons, who are philopatric, while daughters disperse to other troupes. Bonobo mothers are generally extremely protective, one might say controlling, of their sons, including encouraging them, even forcing them, to mate with females of the mother’s choosing. All of which makes me wonder about that female-dominated human society which will surely prevail in the millennia to come, if we manage to survive patriarchy.
And if we do, will we become as boringly sexualised as bonobos, while human civilisation crumbles around us? My prediction, FWIW, is – yes and no. After all, today we have pornography as well as astrophysics, palaeontology, biochemistry, quantum computing (almost?) and artificial intelligence – though not all at the same time. And on the sexual side of things, at least in the WEIRD world, we’ve definitely become more permissive, just in the last few decades, and I can’t see such a trend reversing. So some will be more drawn to the sexual side of life, some to the more analytic, and many will have a foot, or other parts of their anatomy, in both camps. It’s all experimentation after all.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520171625.htm
Tenderness seeking an outlet – touching on sex, shame and bonobos
Confidences about passionate love are only well received between schoolboys in love with love, and between girls devoured by curiosity, by tenderness seeking an outlet – perhaps already drawn by the instinct which tells them this is the important business of their lives, and the sooner begun the better.
Stendhal, Love (De L’Amour)
There’s no doubt that we humans have cultural difficulties, depending on culture, and/or subculture, about the kind of sex bonobos engage in. In the WEIRD world we’re gradually becoming okay with female/female and male/male sex, but bonobos also openly (they don’t have bedrooms) engage in child/child, adult/child and old/old sex combos. I should add that this is mostly, and for the kids, exclusively, mutual masturbation. Some of these combos are so unacceptable to the WEIRD that I feel like a criminal in even raising the matter. We’re still generally critical of non-monogamous sexual behaviour, especially for women, though in my recent reading of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The World: a family history (and in viewing many Korean historical dramas), I’ve learned of countless potentates keeping hordes of concubines, and even of powerful women maintaining a stream of male and female lovers. However, for most of us in the WEIRD world, monogamy, whether serial or ‘till death us do part’, has become so culturally normative that any sexual feelings outside of that norm elicit a sense of guilt and betrayal. Simone de Beauvoir describes the problem in The prime of life:
I had surrendered my virginity with glad abandon: when heart, head, and body are all in unison, there is high delight to be had from the physical expression of that oneness. At first I had experienced nothing but pleasure, which matched my natural optimism and was balm to my pride. But very soon circumstances forced me into awareness of something which I had uneasily foreseen when I was twenty: simple physical desire. I knew nothing of such an appetite: I had never in my life suffered from hunger, or thirst, or lack of sleep. Now, suddenly, I fell a victim to it. I was separated from Sartre for days or even weeks at a time…
S de Beauvoir, The prime of life, pp 54-5
Beauvoir is no doubt typical, in sexual terms, of women of her time – and perhaps still today, almost a century later – in the WEIRD world. Losing her virginity (a thought-provoking term in itself) in her early twenties as a ‘function’ of her first serious relationship with a man (Jean-Paul Sartre), opens up something of a mine-field for her. Beauvoir says nothing about her sexual feelings or urges before this time, though she must surely have had them. Then again, my perspective on such things comes from the late 20th century, hers from the early 20th century. I’m also male, which may or may not make a difference. My own experience, which I doubt is particularly exceptional, is that sexual arousal came early, too early to put a reliable number on it. Three years before Beauvoir’s birth, Sigmund Freud published Three Essays on the theory of Sexuality, in which he described infantile sexuality in broad terms, including thumb-sucking. All of which suggests that sexuality may be an ill-defined and elusive concept. Returning to Beauvoir, she describes a period of separation from Sartre:
I had emancipated myself just far enough from my puritanical upbringing to be able to take unconstrained pleasure in my own body, but not so far that I could allow it to cause me any inconvenience. Starved of its sustenance, it begged and pleaded with me: I found it repulsive. I was forced to admit a truth that I had been doing my best to conceal ever since adolescence: my physical appetites were greater than I wanted them to be. In the feverish caresses and love-making that bound me to the man of my choice I could discern the movements of my heart, my freedom as an individual. But that mood of solitary, languorous excitement cried out for anyone, regardless. In the night train from Tours to Paris the touch of an anonymous hand along my leg could arouse feelings — against my conscious will — of quite shattering intensity. I said nothing about these shameful incidents. Now that I had embarked on our policy of absolute frankness, this reticence was, I felt, a kind of touchstone. If I dared not confess such things, it was because they were by definition unavowable. By driving me to such secrecy my body became a stumbling block rather than a bond of union between us, and I felt a burning resentment against it.
Ibid, pp 55-6
These are complex emotions and sensations which surely lie at the heart of any relationship that purports or intends to be monogamous. One might claim that Beauvoir is over-thinking the relationship – you can have these thoughts and sensations and still remain faithful to the One. Another might claim that there’s no shame in these sensations, and if you act on them with others, why should that compromise your Main Squeeze relationship?
But there’s another factor at issue, and that’s the idea that we humans should have risen above these sordid sexual urges, and have at our best:
I learned with my body that humanity does not subsist in the calm light of the Good; men suffer the dumb, futile, cruel agonies of defenseless beasts. The face of the earth must have been hellish indeed to judge by the dark and lurid desires that, from time to time, struck me with the force of a thunderbolt.
Ibid, pp 56
There’s much to unpack and critique here, especially in the light of bonobo sexual and relational practices, which, it needs to be said, are neither dumb nor futile. Beauvoir is clearly referring to humans, rather than simply men, and she also apparently refers to ‘cruel agonies’ in reference to the actors as well as those acted upon. But of course, she’s describing an overheated emotional state within the context of a well-buttoned civil society. It’s ye olde standard contrast between cultured humans and brute beasts, which the anthropology, palaeontology and primatology of the 20th and 21st centuries have done so much to fuzzify. It’s perhaps worth noting that just as Beauvoir was struggling with her sexual demons in the Paris of the late 1920s and early 1930s, a new species of primate, very closely related to H sapiens, was being identified and investigated, a species whose sexual behaviours have gradually caused the cognoscenti, a very tiny proportion of the population even of the WEIRD world, to reflect upon the role of sexuality in both bonobo and human culture.
Again, it’s worth reflecting on how human culture, especially in the long period when religion held sway in the proto-WEIRD world, outlaws and debases ‘brute beast’ sexuality. Take this passage from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, describing the ‘saintly’Alyosha:
Boys pure in mind and heart, almost children, are fond of talking in school among themselves, and even aloud, of things, pictures, and images of which even soldiers would sometimes hesitate to speak. More than that, much that soldiers have no knowledge or conception of is familiar to quite young children of our intellectual and higher classes. There is no moral depravity, no real corrupt inner cynicism in it, but there is the appearance of it, and it is often looked upon among them as something refined, subtle, daring, and worthy of imitation. Seeing that Alyosha Karamazov put his fingers in his ears when they talked of “that,” they used sometimes to crowd round him, pull his hands away, and shout nastiness into both ears, while he struggled, slipped to the floor, tried to hide himself without uttering one word of abuse, enduring their insults in silence. But at last they left him alone and gave up taunting him with being a “regular girl,” and what’s more they looked upon it with compassion as a weakness.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p 18
This captures well, though par inadvertence, the hypocrisy of Christian civilisation – or, not just Christian, but every civilisation that seeks to repress the most natural urges, generally via religion. Alyosha’s saintly aversion to ‘that’ makes him a ‘regular girl’ among these rough-house schoolboys, but to apparently enlightened readers it characterises him as something akin to the Sacred Virgin, the ideal woman of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. We need to work harder at leaving all that silliness well behind us. We need more outlets for our tenderness and our kindness, whether sexual or otherwise, and so, Vive les bonobos.
References
Stendhal, Love, 1822
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, 1961
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880
stuff on bonobos, gender and sex
I recall a while back reading, in Australia’s premier science magazine, Cosmos, that some 6000 species have been found to engage in homosexual activity, so far. I’ve read similar claims on other scientific sites, and I can’t help but wonder, what does that even mean? Do cats, rats and bats know that what they’re doing is frowned upon by the Catholic Church, and by Islamic governments worldwide? More interestingly, do any of these creatures have any clear idea of what they’re doing? Do they actually know whether they’re male or female? Or that they’re actually engaging in ‘sex’, ‘masturbation’ or whatever?
Mammals can apparently differentiate between males and females of their own species primarily via odour – pheromones and such. This of course is very different from having a concept of maleness and femaleness, though it does help mightily in terms of reproduction, which is what it’s all about from an evolutionary perspective. It also makes me wonder – do some male cats smell more thoroughly male than others? Do some female pigs have an almost-male odour? Is there a spectrum of male-to-female odours given off by male/female cats/dogs/pigs/humans/bonobos? Do vets, who, for example, treat a lot of dogs, take a whiff and think ‘wow, this dog is so male.’? More importantly, do, say, female dogs scent a difference between mucho male dogs and mildly male dogs?
Getting back to all that homosexual activity detected in innumerable species, clearly it’s not about reproduction, but it’s not likely to be all about gender confusion either. In bonobos, as in humans, it’s mostly about good dirty fun, and as to species further removed from us, maybe we should mind our own business.
Amongst humans, at least in some parts, there’s an obsession with where we place ourselves in the growing list of sex/gender categories available. And of course in other parts there’s a refusal to accept more than two categories. And then there’s the most sensible option, to me, of accepting gender fluidity and not getting too obsessed with labels. I might call this the bonobo option, but then again, bonobos are generally described as female dominant….
So I’ve been looking at some research into the social system of bonobos and what we can learn about what they might know about femaleness, maleness and who should dominate who. For example, it’s been ascertained that female bonobos dominate males through group (female-female) bonding, but what happens in dyadic (one-on-one) interactions between males and females?
In a March 2022 paper entitled ‘Dominance style and intersexual hierarchy in wild bonobos from Wamba’, researchers ‘tested whether female intersexual dominance is dependent on female coalitions or whether it still arises when only dyadic interactions are considered’. The researchers were testing a prediction – that in these dyadic interactions, female dominance would disappear or be reduced, and this is in fact what they found. Considering that there’s a slight, and apparently narrowing, dimorphism in favour of males, this shouldn’t be surprising. Interestingly, an earlier (2006) study of captive bonobos found no clear dominance hierarchy. Its conclusion:
The dominance style of bonobos may be loose and differentially expressed in diverse groups or in the same group, along with shifting conditions.
As I’ve written before, bonobo society isn’t matriarchal to the degree that chimp society is patriarchal – the differences are more subtle. What’s important, to me at least, is that bonobos aren’t predominantly patriarchal, and this marks a difference in their behaviour, both within and between troops. That difference is a positive one, less violent and more caring and sharing. More loving, one might say. It’s what, as the song goes, the (human) world needs now.
It’s been claimed that bonobos engage in sex in all varieties, but it seems to me that there’s only one variety that counts – an encounter that leaves both, or all, parties, feeling better, happier and more relaxed. This doesn’t mean that we all end up lying around in a sexual stupor, which of course doesn’t happen with bonobos. As with every other species, they have to ‘make a living’, to feed themselves and their families, and to multiply, or at least replace themselves. And we humans aim for much more, to deeply understand our bodies, our history and our universe, to endlessly expand the horizons of knowledge and invention. We also aim to be better in our treatment of each other and the planet we depend upon. War, aka male ultra-violence, is very much still with us. Those females who have engaged in it have done so within the context of a violently male world. Human patriarchy has been so historically dominant that it’s almost beyond us to imagine a human world without it. That’s why the example of bonobos, our so-close relatives, is so precious to me, and why it’s so exasperating that so few people I meet know the first thing about them.
So, what about sex? Is it really necessary to curb our sexual drives in order to build civilisation, as Freud essentially argued? After all, the ancient Romans were great civilisation builders while enjoying open and vigorous sex lives – at least for males. Even today the slut/stud dichotomy holds sway, though it’s slowly changing. And the fact that there’s a massive not-so-underground industry called ‘pornography'(surely a questionable term) seems a testament to our hypocrisy over sex, though this is a minefield I’m reluctant to explore. I will say that the dangers of the sex industry seem to me like the dangers of drug use, all the more problematic when driven underground. It’s a horny issue – I mean a thorny one, which I’ll write about soon, when I’ve boned up on the subject a bit more.
References