Posts Tagged ‘identity politics’
sex and gender in bonobos, humans, etc
So there’s been a lot of talk lately about trans people, whatever that may mean, and whether or not they should be taken seriously. It seems to relate to the ‘woke’ issue, for some people, and it has become a hot button issue for the most divided and tedious nation in the WEIRD world. All of this has to do with sex and gender, it seems to me, and I’ve had many thoughts on this topic ever since I was a kid, over fifty years ago.
I’ve written about this before, briefly, but I want to go into it in more detail now. I was around eleven or so, pre-pubescent, in primary school, year 5 or 6. It was school assembly, and we were standing in line outside the school buildings, listening to some headmasterly homilies. I was at the back of the two lines for our class, one for girls, one for boys. It was probably towards the end of the year, because I was very familiar with my classmates, at least by observation. As I looked at them this day, I considered which ones were the most, and least, attractive, and why. I knew nothing about sex at the time (unlike most eleven-year-olds today), but I knew about physical attraction – and attraction generally. My thoughts ran along lines which I still feel proud of to this day, though no doubt I’ll exaggerate their sophistication, as is the way with memories.
I decided that the prettiest kid in the class was a boy, and I was ‘turned on’ by the naughtiness of this thought. I also noted that of the two prettiest girls, one was much more attractive to me than the other, not because of her physical appearance, but her manner – perhaps her air of gravity, her intelligent expression, the clothes she wore, her way of walking. And then there were girls I was attracted to, but not physically. They were fun, good sports, approachable. And on further reflection I noticed that the kids who least interested me were the ‘girlie’ girls and the ‘tough guy’ boys, and that the kids in front of me could all be put on a spectrum from most masculine to most feminine, regardless of their actual genitalia. Which led me to wonder – where was I on this spectrum?
It so happens that throughout my school years I was the shortest kid in my class, male or female, and skinny with it. A less masculine male could hardly be imagined. I never considered myself homosexual though. By the time I fully understood the term, the blokes my age were developing face fuzz, which was a total turn off. That didn’t stop me from falling in love with Bowie at sixteen – the music, that is, and the in-your-face androgynous persona. This tended to make me persona non grata in the socially conservative working-class environment of my childhood and early youth.
All of this is to say that I was highly sensitised to issues of sex and gender from an early age. Some years later, well into my twenties, a certain family kerfuffle came to my attention. A married cousin had a daughter, aged about six or so, who insisted on keeping her hair short and refused to be dressed in a dress. I encountered her once or twice, and she seemed morose, withdrawn, smart, and yes, kind of masculine, if that makes sense for someone so young. My mother seemed worried, as did other family members, but the mother not so much. There was talk of doctors, of taking a firmer line, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Nobody asked my advice of course, but I would’ve argued for letting the girl, or boy, be what they wanted to be. I was thoroughly fascinated, however. But I soon lost touch with family, became as solitary as an orang-utan, and know nothing of the outcome.
Returning to modern times, people talk today of the LGBTQIA+ community, and I can probably work out what each letter signifies, but only just. It seems to me that if there is a problem here, it’s a problem of categorising and compartmentalising – maybe of working out which ‘tribe’ you supposedly belong to. I myself have never been particularly tribal, so it all just flies over my head. And anyway, is there a community here, a community of difference? I hope so, but I’m doubtful.
I’ve mentioned orang-utans, but it’s the far from solitary bonobos I’m really interested in. Opposites attract, they say. Recently I’ve been pondering sex and gender in our primate cousins, and other mammals. Does our pet dog know she’s a girl? Does our pet cat know he’s a boy? We call our pets such things to eternally infantilise them, but that’s another story. Let’s consider bonobos – when, if ever, do they learn that they’re male or female? And when do we humans learn the same? For humans, it seems straightforward – we have language. One of the first things a child learns is that they’re ‘a pretty/naughty/clever girl, or boy, as the case may be. This sort of makes up for the fact that we rarely get to go about naked and notice the difference in each others’ genitalia – unlike bonobos. But our bonobo and chimp cousins are smart and complex – they know the difference between the one who nurses and protects them and the adults who are sometimes friendly but at other times indifferent or hostile. They might not conceive it in terms of gender, but they might discern a pattern. And of course hormonal and developmental differences both between and within the two sexes will play their part. So they too have ‘gender issues’, if we can call it that.
It’s often said that sex is biological, gender is cultural. That, of course, is way too neat, and too hard to prove, because every single family in which a child is brought up is a micro-culture of sorts, and every child has a slightly different genetic and epigenetic inheritance. The problem again is our tendency to compartmentalise. What is more important, as bonobos might teach us, is acceptance of variety and difference.
Another obvious difference between bonobos and the only clothed apes, is of course, clothing, covering, hiding our ‘naughty bits’. It’s a topic I tend to be squeamish about, being human, but it needs to be addressed. We wear clothing for a whole variety of reasons – for keeping protected and warm, to display solidarity with our tribe, to be fashionable and attractive, to show contempt for fashionable elites, to avoid being arrested for indecent exposure, and so on. We certainly learn from very early on that it’s ‘rude’ and ‘uncivilised’ to go about in the altogether. It’s interesting to note that the term ‘savage’, used regularly by Europeans well into the 19th century, precisely coincided with the degree of covering used by the indigenous populations they encountered. The more covered they became, the more civilised and intelligent they became in our minds.
It’s also worth noting that, until recently in the WEIRD world, clothing and other visible accoutrements have been used to distinguish the two sexes – hence the concept of cross-dressing, which now seems dated. In my own youth my hair was long and bushy, and it seemed to me that most of the girls’ hair was shorter than the boys’, which I found titillating. At the time I thought it was revolutionary, and went along with free love and the dissolution of marriage, but sadly it turned out to be just another turn of the fashion wheel.
And yet, not quite. Or not at all. Some of us might be slaves to fashion, but the percentage has considerably reduced. Gone forever are the days, revealed in 100 year-old photos and newsreels, when men were obliged to wear more or less lookalike homburgs, and women cloche hats. Jeans, t-shirts and casual jackets are as commonplace now as they were fifty years ago, and casual apparel has maintained its non-binary style in that time. Fashions may go in cycles but they never return to the same place. Marriage is still popular, but it’s not what it was when my dad were a lad.
So at a time when sexual identity and politics are being fought over to a degree that I find laughable, it’s a relief to turn to the bonobo world. Bonobos females tend to engage in same sex acts a lot more than males do, according to research by the Max Planck Society, and this activity creates more lifelong bonds than occurs with mixed-sex pairs. The research suggests that this has to do with increased oxytocin levels after these interactions. Oxytocin, the so-called ‘feel good’ or ‘love’ hormone is often associated with the bonding of mother and child. These increased levels didn’t occur after male-female sex. Interestingly, and very surprisingly (and rather disappointingly to me) male-male sex is rare among bonobos. Considering that some 75% of bonobo sex has no reproductive purpose (compared to 99.999% of human sex, according to my own extensive research), this seems to me a missed opportunity. Then again, this female-female bonding appears to be the key, not only to female dominance, but more importantly that species’ lack of aggression compared to chimps and humans. Obviously the answer for us humans is to ban male homosexuality on penalty of death, and encourage the female version with prizes and worldwide fame for the loudest and longest orgasms.
Okay, I was a bit drunk when I wrote that.
There’s a lot more to be said, though, about how bonobos have broken the aggression habit, or how they’ve targeted aggression to reduce aggression, and so to become less aggressive overall. I’ll explore that in my next post.
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-insights-same-sex-sexual-interactions-important.html
some thoughts on blackface, racism and (maybe) cultural appropriation
I’ve been only half-listening to the apparent furore about some politician having worn ‘blackface’ decades ago to a fancy-dress party (I may not even have those facts straight) and I’ve been struck by the absoluteness of pundits’ condemnation of this behaviour as deeply offensive. So heads must roll.
This is apparently about ‘race’, and black-white relations, but it has occurred to me, or rather it occurred to me over 40 years ago, that there are no ‘white’ people, and no ‘black’ people. This was a matter of very basic observation – every human on Earth (even albinos) is a shade of brown. Later, certainly by the early eighties, I had another, deeper concern. Is there such a thing as race? This wasn’t a thought driven so much by observation, but by my reading at the time. And the person who switched me on to this fascinating question, more than anyone else, was the great 20th century anthropologist and public intellectual Ashley Montagu.
In around 1983-1984 I was sharing house, as I’d been doing for years, and engaging in high-octane mostly pseudo-intellectual argy-bargy with mostly reluctant co-tenants on any subject worth mentioning. During one of these sessions I tossed out the line that ‘there’s no such thing as race’. An eruption of mockery and disdain followed, so over the the next few days or more I betook myself to Adelaide University’s Barr-Smith library, a favourite haunt in those days, and did what research I could. I ended up writing several foolscap pages in my tiny script – pre-computer days – ‘proving’ my ‘race is a myth’ thesis, which I handed to my opponent. He refused to read it, unsurprisingly.
Those old pages are either lost or hidden among the piles of pre-computer writing mouldering about my house, so now I’m going to think about the topic afresh. One question that interests me is this – if races don’t exist, can racism be said to exist? Obviously there is discrimination of people based on their skin colour, their religion and their ‘ethnicity’ – another concept that needs examination – but should we use terms other than ‘racism’ to describe this?
If there is such a thing as race, then we should be able to determine what the different races are, and how many, but we certainly know that all humans are able to breed with all other humans of the opposite sex, regardless of which race they might belong to. So race, supposing it to be a concept describing something existent in the world, is unlikely to be anything pure or stable. Jefferson Fish, author of ‘The Myth of Race’, distinguishes between social and biological race. Social race just fits with the popular conception. Africans don’t look like Europeans (and their differences in looks can be vaguely described), and so they belong to different races in this respect. Chinese/Japanese/Koreans all belong to another race (because we Europeans can’t tell them apart), Melanesians another, Indians/Pakistanis another, and so on – but don’t examine this too deeply or it will all fall apart. Biological race, on the other hand, doesn’t exist, according to Fish, and many others. Craig Venter baldly stated in 2000, at the completion of the human genome project, “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.” The genome was deliberately assembled from a number of human subjects who self-identified as members of different races.
I don’t think we need go further into the science of this here. Racism exists because some people believe, for whatever reasons, that ‘white’ people are superior to ‘black’ people, that Asians are superior/inferior to Europeans, etc etc. Sometimes the discrimination is called something else – Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Indophobia, Francophobia, whatever. But sometimes ‘racism’ is used for something a little different from ‘race hatred’. It’s used for having insufficient sensitivity or respect for someone of another ‘race’. Or, I suppose, for someone who is ‘different’. And that’s where ‘blackface’ comes in, apparently.
The idea is that if you blacken your face to represent a ‘black person’, or a person with (considerably?) darker skin than yourself, whatever your intention, you are insulting/mocking that person and the ‘race’ s/he belongs to.
When I think of ‘blackface’ I think of The Black and White Minstrel Show of my youth, and Al Jolson singing ‘Mammy’. People nowadays don’t condemn these examples, they largely excuse them as naive, aspects of an age of innocence. The same people nowadays say that blackface is verboten because it returns us to a history of dressing up as black people to represent barbarity, violence and general lack of civilisation.
Really?
I will use an Australian essay by Marion Gray for The Conversation as a typical example of the argument that if you dress up like someone of another culture/race etc you might offend, so you shouldn’t do it, though you might just be excused on the basis of naïveté. The essay is titled ‘Explainer: why blackface (and brownface) offend.‘ So there are poor benighted people out there who need to have it ‘explained’ to them that dressing up as someone you admire (but whose shade of brown skin is a long way from your own) by changing your skin colour to look more like them – well, that’s a complete no-no. It’s okay (perhaps) to dress up like them (watch out for cultural appropriation), but changing skin colour – even though it’s the most obvious way to look like your hero/ine – just can’t be done, because people used to do this for completely different purposes in the past. Here’s how Gray puts it re US history.
In 19th century America, white performers would put dark paint on their faces and perform ridiculous stereotypes about African Americans in Minstrel shows. As Norm Sheehan has written, blackface began as a popular movement that ridiculed and lampooned African Americans leading up to the American Civil War. It continued until the 1970s.
This passage strikes me as overly simplistic, to put it mildly. It may well be that some nineteenth century blackface was meant to mock ‘black’ people, just as whiteface was used by dark-skinned people to mock ‘whites’, but it’s surely also true that motives and intentions were mixed – and undoubtedly much more so in the 20th century.
Let’s go further back to the case of Shakespeare’s Moor of Venice, whose skin colour is never specified but was often assumed to be – well, dark. We don’t know if the earliest actors wore blackface for Othello (in England), but it’s certain that anyone of dark skin (a ‘savage’ in those days) would be prohibited from acting, just as women were. And it’s absurd to suppose that a blackface actor would be mocking the Moor, a serious and tragic figure, just as it would be absurd to suppose that the male actors playing women were somehow mocking Shakespeare’s multivarious and complex female characters. As we know, in the twentieth century famous ‘black’ and ‘white’ actors have played Othello on screen, with the utmost seriousness, though in the past half-century the role has rightly been seen as a perfect vehicle for ‘black’ actors, given the lack of substantive roles for them in plays from earlier times.
My main point here is that intention should be everything, as it is in law. Take, for example, the BBC’s Black and White Minstrel Show, which ran from 1958 to 1978. It’s described by just about everyone writing in the late 20th century and the 21st as overtly racist, but I would describe it instead as an increasingly ham-fisted attempt to suggest that ‘black’ and ‘white’ people might get along through singalong. Born at a time when racial discrimination was beginning to be raised as a serious issue in Britain, as immigrants were beginning to arrive from the colonies, it harked back to old days of Jolson-style music hall in an increasingly faux-innocent way, but it was never, I think, intended to mock or insult people of non-anglosaxon colours. That’s the issue for me. Racism is about disparaging people due either to the colour of their skin – which is an obviously trivial category – or to other features of ‘social race’, as mentioned above, and this might be the clothes they wear, the language they speak, the food they eat, the customs they keep or any form of identifiable ‘otherness’. So it’s really about discrimination, not race.
It’s hard not to bring up the issue of identity politics here, and it’s easy for me, as white, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, more or less déclassé, and boring in so many other ways, to be dismissive of those who identify as different and in some sense oppressed, but I do take my humanism seriously and try to take people as I find them. As a bit of a loner, I don’t personally know a lot of oppressed people, or privileged people, or people for that matter, so I can’t always tell whether people are generally aggrieved and offended or just getting on their high horse for politically opportunistic reasons. We do seem sometimes to take our ‘offence’ to absurd extremes. No Cowboys and and Indians nowadays, and that’s fine, but was it ever mockery? Stereotyping, yes, but that’s what kids do. First they stereotype, then over time and brain development they learn about nuance and complexity. Dress-ups too, is a time for play, for a bit of silliness, and that means stereotyping, dressing as a ‘typical’ sailor, or nun, or pirate, or geisha or whatever.
And here’s one final example. Imagine you’re invited to a fancy-dress party, and you’re asked to go as one of your historical idols. You happen to be ‘white’ but your chosen idol happens to be ‘black’. Maybe it’s Michael Jackson, or Mohammed Ali, or Martin Luther King. So you start to dress up, but realise nobody’s going to guess who you are unless, shock horror, you darken your skin. So you’re applying ye old boot polish when your girlfriend arrives and asks what you’re doing. When you explain, she looks shocked and horrified, ‘oh no, you can’t do that!’ (or maybe ‘oh dear, what can I do, baby’s in black and I’m feeling blue, tell me oh, what can I do?’). So you’re reduced to going to the party in your birthday ‘white’ (but with Mohammed Ali’s boxing gloves and poetic patter) and when you tell people who you’re dressed up as, you might well get the response ‘so you think Ali was/ should’ve been a white man, eh? Well how’d you like them uppercuts?’
It’s all a bit of a mindfield. Some say that wearing ‘blackface’ can be forgiven if people don’t know their history, for then they’re condemned to repeat it. I respectfully disagree. You can dress up to look like someone else, including lightening or darkening your skin, while knowing all the history you need to know. You’re not repeating history if your intentions are more or less completely the opposite of those of the past.