touching on women, the principal carriers of bonobo humanity
that book again…
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.
Meanwhile, I must get hold of that book…
References
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