Posts Tagged ‘monogamy’
why do fools fall in love, and bonobos not so much?
Animals don’t ‘fall in love’, right? Only humans do that sort of thing. But wait on – humans are animals. Darwin told me so. Funny how we keep forgetting that. Or, if we’re members of particular religions, we insist it just isn’t so. Simone de Beauvoir, in a section near the end of her monumental work The Second Sex, titled ‘The woman in love’, describes this rather mythologised experience from the second sex’s perspective:
The supreme aim of human love, like mystical love, is identification with the loved one. The measure of values and the truth of the world are in his own consciousness; that is why serving him is still not enough. The woman tries to see with his eyes; she reads the books he reads, prefers the paintings and music he prefers, she is only interested in the landscapes she sees with him, in the ideas that come from him; she adopts his friends, his enemies and his opinions; when she questions herself, she endeavours to hear the answers he gives; she wants the air he has already breathed in her lungs; the fruit and flowers she has not received from his hands have neither fragrance nor taste; even her hodological space is upset: the centre of the world is no longer where she is but where the beloved is; all roads leave from and lead to his house. She uses his words, she repeats his gestures, adopts his manias and tics. ‘I am Heathcliff,’ says Catherine in Wuthering Heights; this is the cry of all women in love; she is another incarnation of the beloved, his reflection, his double: she is he. She lets her own world founder in contingence: she lives in his universe.
I can hear plenty of women I know roaring with laughter at this description. It might seem dated and extreme, but Beauvoir directly quotes women of her time and earlier who give expression to this type of mindset, and a whole sub-genre of romantic literature is still devoted to it. And after all, humans are essentially monogamous, unlike any of the other great apes.
But how essential is our monogamy, really?
Bonobos have been lightly referred to as the ‘make love not war’ apes, or our ‘hippy’ cousins. These are telling references, methinks. I have to say that when I was a young teen, and sometimes shell-shocked witness to a very unhappy parental marriage, I had high hopes that the hippy ‘love the one you’re with’ lifestyle (and revolution) was here to stay, and that marriage, the consecration of monogamy, was on its way out. I won’t say those hopes were entirely dashed, because over the past fifty years or so, with the introduction of no-fault divorce, the greater acceptance of same sex relations and non-marital partnerships, and the drop in religious belief, traditional marriage has certainly been tottering on its pedestal. But there are other barriers to our adopting a bonobo lifestyle of all-in, apparently indiscriminate frottage and sexual healing – including our ideas about ‘true love’.
One factor, surely, has ensured the continued supremacy of monogamy in our society – the production and maintenance of offspring. While it’s generally conservatives who maintain that ideally children need a father and a mother for a ‘balanced’ upbringing (in spite of many examples to the contrary), the idea, I’ve found, niggles at many a single parent I’ve encountered. My own mother – by far the dominant parent, the breadwinner, the rule-maker, the sometimes unnerving dictator – seemed obsessed that the weakness of my father was affecting my own masculinity. She sent information my way as I grew older, about a career in the military, or the police, and made the odd – indeed quite odd – remark about homosexuality as a disturbing and unhealthy condition. I wasn’t particularly inclined that way, though as a ten-year-old I definitely found some of the boys in my class as pretty (or ugly) as the girls. And later, my discovery of David Bowie, the most intense experience of my teenage life, had a clear sexual element.
The point here is that we’re plagued with traditional notions of masculinity, femininity and monogamy which will take time to break down. But changes are afoot, and the gradual fading of religion and the great work of pioneers like Beauvoir and many intellectual heroines before and after her are making for a much more female-friendly, not to say female dominant, political and social environment. Slowly slowly catchy monkey. Or in the case of bonobos, catchuppy monkey.
Bonobos don’t live in houses. They don’t have sex in bedrooms. And, like us, at least post-religion, they don’t have sex to produce offspring. It seems that, like dogs on their masters’ legs, they’ve learned about erogenous zones, but, being smarter than dogs, have taken that a step further in terms of bonding. Humans hide away to have sex, but consume ‘adult’ videos involving sex on beaches and other open air spaces, in bars, on stages, in public toilets, in palatial residences, in the best and worst of places. It’s as if we long to be open and brazen about our sexuality, but dare not.
I note that one of the biggest sex video industry in the world is in Japan, which is also, surely not coincidentally, the least religious country in the world. It’s also not exactly a haven of feminism, to be honest, and critics, including feminists, have often targeted the sex video world as, like prostitution, a haven of macho exploitation. I prefer to see it as, at least potentially, a haven of sex without love, but not without fellow-feeling. And certainly anyone familiar with the Japanese sex video industry would have to scoff at the characterisation I’ve heard, from conservative politicians among others, that a large proportion of the females employed in the industry, are entrapped and drug-addled (as is not infrequently the case, of course, with prostitution). Having said that, it’s still clearly an industry directed primarily at male consumers.
Feminists are generally divided about the industry, between those who want to kill it off and those who want, or hope, to transform it. In any case, one of the problems is that the industry compartmentalises sex. It becomes a product, most often accessed by men, alone, in their bedrooms, sometimes by couples or groups as an aid or an inspiration. It helps with fantasy and technique but has little if anything to do with fellow-feeling or – well, love.
And yet – what I note with Japanese sex videos is that they are more story-based than those of the Euro-American industry. Yes, the stories are often repetitive and predictable, and there’s too much ‘fake rape’, with the female invariably ending up ‘enjoying’ the experience, though it appears to be a fact that rape fantasies are common among women – an issue I feel way too squeamish to explore, at least for now. The point I’m trying to make is that many Japanese videos make the effort to place sex in a domestic or workplace context, to normalise it, even if in a somewhat ludicrous, and sometimes comical, way. I also note that sometimes they involve interviews with the performers before and after scenes, giving the impression of ‘happy families’, though there are definitely cases of coercion and the situation may be worsening. Again, more female empowerment is the key to changing this environment. The fact remains that both pornography and prostitution are signs of a culture that has never really come to terms with its sexual needs and its sexual nature. If we cannot accept that sex is healthy we will continue to pursue it in ways that are unhealthy – the drive will always be with us.
So what about love, again? And its relation to sex. As Beauvoir points out, the idea that two people will be able to satisfy each other sexually, exclusively, for decades, is ridiculous. Of course, many couples become increasingly comfortable with each other and co-dependent over the years – as do two dogs more or less forced to share the same home. This may be not so much a sign of love as of the standard living arrangements developed over the centuries in our civilised world – rows of few-bedroomed homes fit for maybe three to five people set out in grids of streets serviced with all the conveniences of modern life. We don’t build for anything like a bonobo world, understandably, and it’s hard to see beyond the reality that has shaped our whole lives. Still, I’m hearing a new term that might be worth clinging to – ‘ethical non-monogamy’. Something that might be worth considering once the hormones die down and the scales fall…
So that very bonoboesque idea I’ll endeavour to explore next time.
love, monogamy, marriage and bonobos
To claim that a union founded on convention has much chance of engendering love is hypocritical; to ask two spouses bound by practical, social and moral ties to satisfy each other sexually for their whole lives is pure absurdity.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p 478.
Discuss…
Canto: So we’re reading Beauvoir’s The second sex, inter alia, and though things have changed a bit in the WEIRD world over the past seventy-odd years, the section titled ‘The Married Woman’ does give something of a historical perspective, via the writings of such males as Montaigne, Balzac, Diderot and Kierkegaard, on the perceived differences between love and marriage and the problems that arise from these differences.
Jacinta: Yes, and marriage and monogamy are something of a mystery, historically, in spite of arguments such as those of Ferdinand Mount in The subversive family, that they are a more or less natural element of human life. We don’t know much about the state of affairs of early Homo sapiens or their ancestors and extinct cousins vis-a-vis monogamy. We do know that our closest living relatives, the bonobos and chimps, aren’t monogamous. And as to the claim, made by some, that humans are meant to be monogamous, that’s of the same type as, say, that humans are meant to be bipedal. No, it’s just something that we evolved to be, as some, but not all of us, socially evolved to be (more or less) monogamous.
Jacinta: The question is when? I suppose an obvious answer is when the concept of property became important, and the handing down of property to offspring. So that families started to become powerful rather than individuals. The beginnings of agriculture?
Canto: Some say division of labour may have played a part, though I’m not sure why…
Jacinta: Scientific American has an interesting online article from a few years ago reporting on studies that ‘aimed to find the best explanation for monogamy among three persistent hypotheses: female spacing, infanticide avoidance and male parental care’. So female spacing is just what it says: according to SciAm:
The female-spacing hypothesis posits that monogamy arises after females begin to establish larger territories to gain more access to limited food resources and, in the process, put more distance between one another. With females farther apart, males have a harder time finding and keeping multiple mates. Settling down with a single partner makes life easier, reducing a male’s risk of being injured while patrolling his territory and enabling him to ensure that his mate’s offspring are his own.
Canto: Females began to do that? In the bonobo world, female closeness was the key to their success – the females I mean, but perhaps also bonobos in general. It seems to me more likely that women would work in teams, helping each other to find and exploit resources, or am I being too hippy-happy-clappy?
Jacinta: Yeah maybe, but I note also the assumption here that males would have a hard time keeping multiple mates – the assumption being that early humans were already male-dominated.
Canto: Yes that quoted paragraph is all about the males… though to be fair most primate species are male-dominated. Still, one can’t assume…
Jacinta: Well, the proponents of this hypothesis did a statistical analysis of couple of thousand mammalian species, and found, apparently, that they started out solitary, but many, or some, switched to monogamy during their evolutionary history. How they proved that I’m not sure. They claimed that ‘monogamy most frequently occurred in carnivores and primates…’
Canto: Hang on. Isn’t it true that most primates are not monogamous?
Jacinta: Ahh, you’re probably thinking only of apes. There are hundreds of primate species, and they’re still being discovered. Three more were added in the last couple of years.
Canto: Shit! It’s all so hard to keep up with.
Jacinta: Lorises and lemurs, tarsiers and hatfuls of monkeys. Simians and prosimians, old world and new world, greater and lesser apes, etc. And actually, most primates are monogamous.
Canto: Well, I don’t think we should let it bother or constrain us. If we don’t feel monogamous, I mean individually speaking, we don’t have to be so.
Jacinta: But there are social constraints. They’ve loosened, no doubt, in the WEIRD world, but they’re there still. Besides, it’s convenient to settle down with one person, especially as you get older. It’s hard work trying to impress one partner after another into canoodling, what with rivalries and jealousies, and children who end up not knowing who’s what.
Canto: Well, yes – it does spice up life a bit, but too much spice can be overly acidic, or something. Still, I cling hopefully to the bonobo way…
Jacinta: Anyway, let’s get back to the second hypothesis – infanticide avoidance. I don’t think there’s much in this, re humans, but here’s the rationale:
Primates are uniquely at risk for infanticide: they have big brains that need time to develop, which leaves babies dependent and vulnerable for long periods after birth. And the killing of babies has been observed in more than 50 primate species; it typically involves a male from outside a group attacking an unweaned infant in a bid for dominance or access to females.
I suppose early hominids lived in smallish groups, like troupes of other primates, and I never considered that there’d be an alpha male among them, but I suppose it makes sense. But the bonobo part of me is in denial….
Canto: Well, warfare goes back a long way and capturing and raping women has always gone along with that, and it’s often been about capturing and expanding territory – e.g. Putin and Ukraine – and in those earlier times when resources were scarcer and harder-won, children, that’s to say the children of the defeated, would’ve been a burden. And the winners knew they could make more of their own with the captive women. It’s all quite plausible. I saw it in Empress Ki!
Jacinta: Hmmm. Having it off with captive women – essentially rape – doesn’t really fit with monogamy. In those Korean historicals you love there are wives and also concubines, and your alpha-maledom would be defined by the number of concubines you commanded, I’m guessing. So the male parental care hypothesis is most palatable to us moderns, I hope. Here’s what the SciAm site says:
When a baby becomes too costly in terms of calories and energy for a mother to raise on her own, the father who stays with the family and provides food or other forms of care increases his offspring’s chances of survival and encourages closer ties with the mother. A related idea… holds that the mere carrying of offspring by fathers fosters monogamy. Mothers have to meet the considerable nutritional demands of nursing infants. Yet for primates and human hunter-gatherers, hauling an infant, especially without the benefit of a sling or other restraint, required an expense of energy comparable to breast-feeding. Carrying by males could have freed females to fulfill their own energetic needs by foraging.
Canto: Yes, that’s a much more Dr Feelgood hypothesis, but interestingly this assumes an understanding of the relationship between sex and offspring. Males wouldn’t want to be caring for someone else’s kids, would they? And I’m sure I read somewhere that even some cultures living today, or at least not so long ago, aren’t clear about that relationship.
Jacinta: Well, and yet I’ve heard that bonobo females try to control who their adult sons mate with, as if they have an inkling… Bronislaw Malinowski (the first anthropologist I ever heard of) claimed that Trobriand Islanders thought that males played no role in producing children, but that’s been found to be a bit questionable. Seems plausible to me though. And something to aim for.
Canto: One thing anthropologists seem to say nothing about in these reflections on monogamy is love. This eternal bonding force that unites Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleo, Sonny and Cher…
Jacinta: Yeah, hormones they say. And when offspring come along, a certain force of duty, often reinforced by the community, or the State. So the male parent ends up staying, not really knowing whether it’s because he wants to or not. And one of the forces, a principle force, is societal, or cultural. He sees pairings-off all around him, physically reinforced by separate houses, fenced in. It’s the ‘norm’. With bonobos, no physical or, apparently, ethical barriers have been erected against polyandry/polygyny – to use human terms that would be meaningless to them. Does that mean no love? Of course not – on the contrary, our cousins can still teach us a thing or two about love…
References
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949
Ferdinand Mount, The subversive family, 1982
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/human-monogamy-has-deep-roots/
do bonobos love each other?
Fly with me, lift me up to my feet, set me free from this skin I’ve been too long in
Leddra Chapman, ‘Picking Oranges’
I got to know that your heart beats fast, and I got to know I’m the only one for you. What have I become? I’m a fucking monster, when all I wanted was something beautiful. My love, too much. Your love, not enough
Meg Myers, ‘Monster’
It wasn’t that I didn’t wanna hold your hand, I just knew if we held tight once, we would never let go. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to call you mine – but, you’re not mine
Liza Anne, ‘Watering Can’
right… but why only two?
Canto: So bonobos have been called the ‘make love not war ‘ apes, a joke moniker in a way, but I’ve been thinking about that in an attempt to be more serious about love, fellow-feeling and all that stuff, in bonobos, humans, and other species.
Jacinta: Yes, the idea of ‘true love’, which involves some kind of eternal monogamy, and is seen as peculiarly human, and sells ye olde penny romances, is still with us, and whole governments are raised around it – the couple, the nuclear family and such. Of course, in the WEIRD world, there are increasingly diverse ‘household arrangements’, but they still generally involve separate, enclosed households. Ye olde hippy free love encampments, if they were anything other than an imaginary figment, seem as distant now as our connection with bonobos. A while back we read Ferdinand Mount’s 1982 book The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage, a fairly well-reasoned defence of marriage and monogamy, and its glorious survival in spite of the free love mini-revolution, but of course he didn’t mention bonobos or speculate about the domestic arrangements of australopithecines.
Canto: Mount was – still is – a lifelong conservative, so his history was always going to be tendentious, and as you say, limited to more recent times, so it didn’t really address how we came to be monogamous, if that’s what we are. And just to set the scene with our loving cousins:
Bonobos do not form permanent monogamous sexual relationships with individual partners. They also do not seem to discriminate in their sexual behavior by sex or age, with the possible exception of abstaining from sexual activity between mothers and their adult sons.
Wikipedia entry: bonobo sociosexual behaviour
Jacinta: Conservatives wouldn’t be too happy about that sort of indiscriminate behaviour among humans, but they’d be hard pressed to argue that bonobos are ‘immoral’ or selfish, or dysfunctional and a behavioural threat to the well-being of their own society.
Canto: No, they’d probably just argue that they’re not humans and we have nothing much to learn from them. We’re 8 billion, after all, and they’re just a few thousand. We win! But I don’t think our success has much to do with our domestic arrangements. It presumably has more to do with the enlargement of our prefrontal cortex, and the causes of that, which were presumably numerous and incremental, may have also brought about an increasing division of labour along patriarchal lines.
Jacinta: Certainly our history, at least since it has been recorded, has been overwhelmingly patriarchal. Hunting as a largely male activity, as I believe it also is in chimps, could be kind of brutalising, as it’s a kill-or-be-killed activity at its worst.
Canto: Meanwhile bonobos have been evolving in their own way over the past few million years. Or not. I mean, they’ve been content to stay in the forest, in a pretty lush part of the Congo, consuming a very largely vegetarian diet, not exactly requiring a lot in the way of muscles and physical prowess. And get this, again from Wikipedia:
Bonobo clitorises are larger and more externalized than in most mammals; while the weight of a young adolescent female bonobo “is maybe half” that of a human teenager, she has a clitoris that is “three times bigger than the human equivalent, and visible enough to waggle unmistakably as she walks”
As they say ‘exercise makes the clit grow longer’. Dunnit?
Jacinta: Well, it’s true, bonobo females engage in genito-genital rubbing more than males do, and this seems to form the basis of female group dynamics, which has led to female dominance. Unfortunately in humans, clothing creates a major barrier to this activity, at least in public.
Canto: Ahh, the terrible price of civilisation. But what I’m interested in is the effect of female dominance. Yes, it’s mediated to a large degree by sexual play, and a general closeness, which we don’t seem to have the maturity to adopt, so obsessed have we been with sexual possessiveness and jealousy, to the point of stoning people – sorry, women – for adultery. Death by drowning was the punishment back in Hammurabi’s day, almost 4000 years ago. Under Ancient Greek and Roman law, women could be executed for adultery, while the men would rarely get more than a smacked bottom.
Jacinta: Actually, stoning is still a punishment, for both genders, in countries that apply strict Shari’ah law. But in the WEIRD world, where no-fault divorce is increasingly accepted, adultery has faded as an issue. And generally we’ve become more relaxed about sexuality in all its varieties, and more sceptical about ‘love’, of the everlasting and exclusive type.
Canto: Yes, and yet… love, whether it’s a human invention or not, or whether it’s just hormones – it really hurts. You develop this ridiculous passion for someone, her movements, her smile, her vitality – though she has as much interest in you as in a rotten egg. Or she takes a general interest but backs off when she senses your need. And that’s just ‘unrequited love’. Even when it’s a mutual passion it can sooner or later turn to shit. The quotes above are just three of thousands that could be mined from songs, stories, legends and our own lives. Great expectations, dashed, sublimated, given up on, nursed in solitude. A tension between the cult of individuality and its freedoms and the love that loves to speak its name, where those individuals go together like a horse and carriage, like fire and ice, Batman and Robin, Venus and Mars…
Jacinta: Well, humans do tend to overthink these matters, or over-feel them perhaps, what with our heightened sensibilities. And our civilisations have tended to push us towards exclusive ‘love relations’, and the concept of ownership:
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour. (Exodus 20:17)
So it’s not just that we’ve fallen for the myth of true love and the ideal partner – our society has created a monogamous reproductive norm, and for a good few millennia (not really so long in human history, but we know hardly anything about our sociosexual behaviour beyond the last 10,000 years or so) we’ve fallen in with it – leaving aside sultans, random monarchs and the odd billionaire entrepreneur. Our homes have, over time, become designed to largely rule out even extended family togetherness. Bonobos don’t have homes and they’re not particularly territorial….
Canto: Well, to change the subject, I’m interested in that description of bonobo clitorises. It sounds wild -so to speak. And of course it sounds very much like a penis. It all makes me think of the whole penis envy malarky of Freudian psychotherapy. Not a problem for bonobos, clearly. If we get our social evolution right, our female descendants in the non-foreseeable future (if that makes any sense) will be waggling those clits about most merrily.
Jacinta: Hah, makes a change from current-day ‘clitoridectomy’ aka FGM.
Canto: Well, they could give em a trim, like modern-day circumcision. Or have em shaped and coloured, like orchids….
Jacinta: Lovely. Interestingly, Simone de Beauvoir touches on this in The Second Sex, probably influenced by the penis envy ideas of the time. Writing of woman:
her anatomy condemns her to remain awkward and impotent, like a eunuch: the desire for possession is thwarted for lack of an organ to incarnate it. And man refuses the passive role.
No organ permits the virgin to satisfy her active eroticism; and she does not have the lived experience of he who condemns her to passivity.
the second sex, trans. C Borde & S Malovany-Chevallier, vintage books 2011
But in the WEIRD world, things have changed, or are changing, and hopefully girls are much more expert at playing the organ. Though, unlike bonobos, it’s largely done in solitude.
Canto: But do bonobos love each other, or just each others’ organs? It’s probably as uninteresting a question as What’s this thing called, love?
Jacinta: Well, that’s it, bonobos just get it together, not just for sex, but for safety in numbers, for huddling and cuddling, for play, for warmth, food-sharing and back-scratching. I doubt if they wonder if it’s really love, or how selfish or selfless they’re being. It’s their life – one of community rather than pairing off – as long as they can be left to get on with it.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
https://www.britannica.com/topic/adultery
Ferdinand Mount, The subversive family: an alternative history of love and marriage, 1982
Simone de Beauvoir, The second sex, 1949
exploring the history and future of human monogamy
the world’s dictatorships, according to someone – but remember, not all dictatorships are thugocracies and not all thugocracies are dictatorships
So, humans are predominantly monogamous, but our closest living relatives, chimps and bonobos, are sexually promiscuous within large male-female communities. When and why did we turn monogamous?
Offhand, I’ve heard of and can think of a few answers. For example, I’ve read that it began with the notion of private property, which itself began with or was reinforced by the advent of agriculture and permanent settlement. Many anthropologists try to date this, but the spread of Homo sapiens and her ancestors both within and outside of Africa produced a diversity of cultures, no doubt tightly related to environmental conditionals. For example the Australian Aborigines lived here for as much as sixty thousands years without developing permanent settlements and agriculture, and they were right not to do so, as the soil and conditions didn’t favour that lifestyle. So monogamy would have become the norm at different times for different cultures, and sometimes not at all.
Bearing all this in mind, I take with some salt the claim by Kit Opie, an evolutionary anthropologist at University College, London, that ‘the modern monogamous culture has only been around for just 1,000 years’. Okay I got this in a report from CNN Health – did they lose a zero somewhere? Opie’s argument is a familiar one, about property and inheritance, but surely this goes back more than a thousand years in Europe.
Of course, inheritance only matters when you have something to inherit, and in feudal society that wasn’t much for the vast majority. In early agricultural society, perhaps it was even less of a consideration.
Another causal factor I hadn’t considered, but which may have been effective in reinforcing monogamy rather than causing it, was the rise of STDs in earlier times. These diseases had ravaging effects, and would certainly have inhibited promiscuous behaviour among the infected and their associates. Infections of this type tend to make us more insular. The sad death of Nell Gwyn (and her lover Charles II) is a prime example. It’s likely that both syphilis and gonorrhoea jumped to humans from cattle and sheep, but that appears to be centuries rather than millennia ago.
Another theory has to do with the enlargement of the human brain, together with the changes to the female pelvic structure due to bipedalism. This of course takes us back much further in time. With females being more incapacitated during this period, and requiring assistance during childbirth, would this have resulted in closer male-female bonds? Then again, this might have strengthened female-female bonding, for obvious reasons. In any case, these problems of childbirth are likely to have increased social cohesion. And at some stage in the enlargement and greater complexity of the human brain, especially the prefrontal cortex, humans or their ancestors would have twigged to the connection between sex and pregnancy, and so male parentage, or what has been termed ‘reproductive consciousness’. An attempt to answer this ‘when’ question was posted in Slate back in 2013 (all links below), but understandably, it comes up with nothing firm, and even the claim that this understanding probably occurred in Homo sapiens between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago strikes me as questionable. Did H neanderthelensis have reproductive consciousness? Could H erectus have had some such understanding?
I would expect there to be a link between reproductive consciousness and monogamy, so answering this question is important. Of course, knowing, or having a strong sense, that a female’s new-born is also a product of a male (a very sophisticated and hard-won notion, as Matthew Cobb’s book The egg and sperm race makes clear) would change male-female dynamics in a dramatic way. It might be expected to turn the male and female into a team. It might also be expected, in a generally promiscuous culture, to turn males into jealous rivals, each asserting parenthood or ownership of the offspring over others. With no other form of proof, the ‘father’ would be the contest winner. Another way of assuring paternity, of course, is to reduce or eliminate the promiscuity, to ensure that you could be the only father.
So now I’m looking at the why of monogamy rather than the when. Anthropologists have found that different cultures have different understandings of the relation between sex and pregnancy, and there are likely different understandings within those cultures too. But even if one man’s paternity is accepted in all or most cases, we can’t be sure that this will lead to monogamy. It would depend on the group’s dynamics. For example, imagine a bonobo-like human culture, in which the mother-child bond is very strong, and adult female bonds are also very strong, so that the mother would get help from other females when she needs it (and males too will help out, but they are further along in the chain of connections). Why should males knowing that they’re the father change this dynamic? There’s already a perfectly adequate, female-centred method for bringing up baby. The males had previously been shut out, and knowledge of paternity wouldn’t necessarily change that situation, even if the females acknowledged the paternity of particular males.
Again, it seems to me that monogamy is most likely to be linked strongly to private property, which isn’t a concern for bonobos, but is more so for chimps, who fight over territory and pecking order, between and within groups. And fighting over territory has been a virtual raison d’être for humans as far back as we can trace.
So it seems that bonobos are really the outliers – less monogamous than us, less possessive and less aggressive. So is it possible to learn from those relatively dumb beasts?
Well maybe we already are, without quite being aware of it. I always live in hope. The push is on – and it is relatively recent – to recognise intellectual powers and physical skills. Women have been allowed to study at universities only recently – less than a century ago. Women’s sport has only started to come into its own in the last couple of decades. Beauty pageants – putting women in their ornamental place – are on the decline. And we note with both horror and satisfaction that the world’s thugocracies – Afghanistan, Algeria, Russia, China, North Korea, the Philippines, Hungary, Brazil, Chechnia, Belarus, Burma, Turkey, India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Angola, Azerbaijan, Brunei, Burundi, the two Congos, Cambodia, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Cuba, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan, South Sudan, Nicaragua, Mauritania, Libya, Oman, Kazakhstan, Laos, Vietnam, Gabon, Qatar, Rwanda, Eswatini, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Uganda, Western Sahara – and yes, there are a lot, and I’m sure there are more – these thugocracies are, without exception, controlled by men. And if you look at countries run – at least for the time being – by women, such as Germany, Taiwan, New Zealand, Iceland, Denmark, Finland and Slovakia, they make for great holiday destinations, especially in the time of covid. Though they might not let you in.
So the evidence is mounting that a human world turned upside-down would be a great improvement. My hope is that women continue to band together with other women to make it happen. Sadly it won’t happen in my lifetime, but I look forward to seeing a little more progress before my span is complete. Whether this world would continue to be as monogamous as it is now is an interesting question. As has been pointed out, by Melvin Konner amongst others, men are largely surplus to requirements, once their sperm has been gathered, so they may be treated like drones, of the ant variety, and left to die. Or maybe they’ll be kept on as pets and playthings, as well as useful drudges. Whatever the future holds, monogamy is certainly not a necessary part of it.
References and links
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/17/health/sti-infanticide-human-monogamy/index.html
Matthew Cobb, The egg & sperm race, 2006
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/dictatorship-countries
Melvin Konner, Women after all: sex, evolution and the end of male supremacy, 2015
bonobos, community and our good selves…
owl monkeys just happen to be highly monogamous, and very cute. Photo by Kevin Schafer
I’ve been quite exercised recently by Ferdinand Mount’s 1981 book The subversive family: an alternative history of love and marriage, which is a defence of marriage and the nuclear family, but not quite from a conservative perspective. I’m particularly interested in chapter 11, ‘The dilution of fraternity’, which critiques attempts to replace an institution seen as ‘selfish and inward-looking’, the family, with something more universal, or at least broad – the community, the tribe, the flock, and so forth. For some reason Charles Manson’s alternative ‘family’ keeps coming to mind, but that’s an aberration.
Mount describes these seekers after a better alternative as ‘fraternalists’, which seems immediately problematic, though he is certainly not anti-feminist. The idea of fraternity is old, but Mount argues that it’s as problematic as the other legs of the Liberty-Equality-Fraternity triad. I prefer to use the term community, and I won’t be looking at the old-guard quasi-communist ‘brotherhood of man’ notion that negatively dominates Mount’s thinking on the matter. I’m thinking more of the bonds that unite a pod of dolphins, a herd of elephants, a pack of wolves or hyenas, and a community (the agreed-upon term) of chimps or bonobos.
Mount makes the claim that human attempts at fraternity – in cults (or religious associations), communes, social movements and the like, have tended to run out of steam, as they require a discipline to maintain them, a discipline that is unnatural to us, especially as compared to the maintenance of the family. There is a feeling of enforcement about them which often makes the individual member uneasy or skeptical. A true sense of intimacy is difficult to maintain, and is sometimes replaced by a kind of fake heartiness.
There is some truth in all this, and it often seems that humanity is moving in the other direction, towards a sort of atomistic individualism, in spite of the popularity of political rallies and social media movements. The trouble with libertarians though, is that they seem not to realise that humans didn’t get to reach a population of nearly 8 billion, and to dominate the planet, for better or worse, by means of individual liberty. We achieved this by being the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet, and this social construct, in recent millennia, goes by the name of civilisation, or the state. It seems that the state – very tyrannical and hierarchical at its outset, becoming somewhat more egalitarian over time – has been the victim of its own success, creating a population of individuals convinced that all its achievements – in trade, education, infrastructure, technological development and the like, are somehow their own.
Returning to marriage, monogamy and the nuclear family, Mount wishes to claim that it is natural, though he’s somewhat hesitant about it. The basis of this claim is that it has withstood all attacks and critiques, first by the Church, which in earlier times preferred asceticism and celibacy, and later sought to regulate it almost out of existence, with dire restrictions on adultery and divorce, and second by Marxists, anarchists and various cults, who criticised marriage as bourgeois, selfish, inward-facing and imprisoning in various ways. It’s interesting that, in the forty years since The subversive family was published, marriage has gained further strength and legitimacy from a somewhat unexpected source (to me at least), in the demand for same-sex marriage, a demand that has been acceded to in many democratic nations. So marriage and monogamy is the majority human option for the foreseeable future.
This provides no proof that marriage is natural, however. Of course, in one obvious sense it is purely cultural, as marriage refers to a ceremony. The question really is whether monogamy is natural, for humans. Of course monogamy is natural for many species, but humans are the species that mess up the ‘natural’ concept, by building cities, sending spaceships out to beyond our solar system and calculating the age of the universe. And by conducting experiments, mostly failed, in alternative lifestyles.
Humanity, in any case, has never lived in a ‘state of nature’ as vaguely conceived, in virtually opposite ways, by Hobbes and Rousseau. In its gradual spread out of Africa it has created a multitude of cultures – monogamous, polyandrous and polygynous – with exceptions to general rules often making clear classification difficult. However, the situation as it stands today is clear enough in some respects. In a recent review of contemporary societies to answer the question ‘Are We Monogamous’, anthropologists Ryan Schacht and Karen Kramer wrote:
… we conclude that while there are many ethnographic examples of variation across human societies in terms of marriage patterns, extramarital affairs, the stability of relationships, and the ways in which fathers invest, the pair-bond is a ubiquitous feature of human mating relationships. This may be expressed through polygyny and/or polyandry but is most commonly observed in the form of serial monogamy.
I have no argument with this conclusion, but I have two questions. Was it ever thus? Will/must it always be thus? For the past, I look to bonobos, and for the future, I look to ‘the beginning of infinity’ – our extraordinary ability to transform ourselves and our world.
Bonobos and chimps split from each other between 1.5 and 2 million years ago, probably due to the formation of the Congo River. The question I’m interested in – and, as Milan Kundera once pointed out, the best questions are those we can’t answer, at least not easily – is, what was this species like before the split? Was it more like bonobos – female-dominated, gentle and sexual – or more like chimps – male-dominated and aggressive? These are relative terms, of course, as chimps too have their caring and sharing side, as much recent research has revealed. Another question we will probably never be able to answer is this. How did our common ancestor with chimps and bonobos, both of which (or should that be whom) ‘live in multi-male and multi-female communities, promiscuously mating with each other’ (BBC earth), come to be predominantly monogamous or pair-bonding?
I’ll look at what the research says about this – if anything – next time.
References
http://www.bbc.com/earth/world
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2019.00230/full
Ferdinand Mount, The subversive family: an alternative history of love and marriage, 1981
A bonobo world 39 – a world turned upside-down?
yummy scummy
Jacinta: Why did Homo floresiensis go extinct? What happened to Homo neanderthalensis? What about mastodons, Australia’s megafauna, thylacines, dodos, stegodonts, mammoths, passenger pigeons, aurochs, great auks, quaggas, moas, and maybe hundreds more dead species?
Canto: Well humans are accused of being the direct cause, though no doubt there are lawyers out there with ingenious arguments to the contrary, or at least in mitigation. It might be argued for example that the rise to supremacy of H sapiens is a good thing, at least for H sapiens, and it could never have occurred without a bit of damage. I mean, there are plenty of species left, and more will come as nature selects them. And besides, we’re so smart we could bring many of those species back to life, if it’s not too inconvenient.
Jacinta: Hmmm, the issue of de-extinction aside, modern humanity is actually good at learning from its mistakes, and re-appraising our relationships with other species, and with other cultures within our own. That’s why I’m obsessing over bonobos and our own overly macho culture. We need an overhaul and more and more humans are becoming aware of it.
Canto: So I know you’re talking about that world-turned-upside down idea again, what with a large majority of our political leaders being men, surrounded by mostly male advisers and government ministers, dealing with overwhelmingly male business leaders and public intellectuals, male military brass, a male judiciary and scientific community…
Jacinta: Male billionaires, male mass-shooters, male sports stars, mostly… why are we so invisible in the public sphere?
Canto: The times they are-a-changin mate. Okay, forget that. It really is interesting to think what our world would be like if the men were in the position the women are now. And of course we can’t seriously turn to bonobos to find out. Can we?
Jacinta: Let’s leave that aside for now.
Canto: Anyway, crazy as it might be, our current situation has a long history…
Jacinta: Yeah, like astrology and traditional Chinese medicine, which is mostly horseshit.
Canto: I thought it was rhinos…
Jacinta: The point isn’t to understand our world historically, but to change it.
Canto: Yes, but in order to change gears, you need to know how a gearshift works.
Jacinta: ??
Canto: We need to know, I mean it would be helpful to know how we got into this lopsided mess, so we can extricate ourselves…
Jacinta: Yes, and sexual dimorphism isn’t the reason, because bonobos. Division of labour is more likely. Hunting and gathering. Both activities require getting out and about, far from GHQ, whatever that was in early hunter-gatherer days – makeshift constructions, caves. But the hunters would’ve travelled much further afield. Hunting trips may have lasted days.
Canto: But I think we need to be careful about that hunter-gatherer term. It’s surely too neat. I’m getting the impression, for example that the Australian Aboriginal survival life was much more complex, with fish traps, organised burnings and the like. A lot of accumulated knowledge to enable them to gain more foodstuff with less output. A bit like us really.
Jacinta: Yeah they knew how to store their food for a rainy day – but then so do tons of bird species. Anyway, let’s move on to the age of agriculture. Fixed dwellings. And remember it was the women who had the children.
Canto: Really?
Jacinta: They might carry the newborns out to the fields, but once they became pesky toddlers they were too much of a hindrance…
Canto: Yes, and more… Imagine this conversation: ‘Now Wilma you need to keep the little one home, she’s impossible to keep an eye on here, and you know how dangerous it is with those big flaming birds…’ ‘Oh don’t remind me again Fred..’ ‘Well I will – that big bloody bird took the neighbour’s little one, flew off with him, dropped him on that rock, and Bam Bam, that was the end of him’. ‘Dear god of our harvest, you’re a bastard, Fred’. ‘Bam bam, you should’ve seen the mess. Anyway you need to keep her home, keep her occupied, make some pretty jewellery…’ ‘I’m sick of being home, how many times have I told you…’ ‘Yeah but look – hey are you preggers again? Is that one mine, or has that Barney been creeping around? I know he wants another Bam-Bam, but I’ll Bam Bam him….’
Jacinta: Yes, thought-provoking. And Fred would stick his arm out and say ‘Feel that muscle? That tells you I can do enough work for two. So you just stay home and prepare some of that great brain food you’re so good at. All those omega-6 and omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids and trace elements and such, they’re just doing my head in they’re so good. A man sure needs a maid and you sure is the best’.
Canto: This is getting overly speculative I think. I mean, you’re assuming monogamy at this stage, which is perhaps reasonable but not certain. So this scenario is from around 10,000 years ago? That’s when they say agriculture got started, at the earliest. And we know that most primates are non-monogamous. I’m thinking of the connection between monogamy and division of labour. And there’s also the idea of wives – but not husbands – as property, which is a feature of the Old Testament.
Jacinta: Well to be fair husbands could often be treated that way, as in ‘stop trying to steal my man or I’ll rip your eyes out’, but mostly it was the husband who carried the club, now replaced by the Kalishnikov AK-47 among others. I think monogamy goes back a long way. Ferdinand Mount, in his book The subversive family, argues that monogamous romantically-based relations are a permanent feature of humanity, but by ‘permanent’ he really means as far back as written records, and not even that, as his examples mostly go back some hundreds of years. I’m prepared to accept that monogamy goes back as far as agriculture and the establishment of fixed dwellings, and more restricted notions of property…
Canto: So do you think that if we did have a world-turned upside down we’d be less monogamous?
Jacinta: Uhhh, hesitantly I’d say yes, but in such a way that the offspring wouldn’t suffer. I mean you can see the trend in developed countries – with the rise of women’s rights came the new appreciation of children and their rights and value. ‘A woman’s place is in the home’, and ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’, those clichés went together in blighted Victorian England.
Canto: Funny that, considering that Victoria was a woman, I’ve heard. But that was Irony Age England for you.
Jacinta: Again, with bonobos and other less male-dominated primate societies, infanticide is virtually non-existent. It’s quite prevalent in other primate societies. Female promiscuity is used as a strategy to keep males from killing the kids. ‘Oh shit, that one was mine, I think. Now I feel such a fool’.
Canto: Well I’m okay with female promiscuity personally.
Jacinta: Yeah and it also happens to be fun – variety’s the spice of life and all. Of course monogamy can be defined in various ways, for example as a tendency rather than a strict rule. But the tendency toward monogamy might’ve evolved as a response to environmental stresses – stresses that generally no longer exist for us. And so we see a rise in single-parent families, because they can manage now, albeit with difficulty, which they could barely do in previous centuries. Genetic studies, by the way, place human monogamy as having evolved between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. But I’m sure that’ll be endlessly disputed.
Canto: So have we worked out how we got into this lop-sided mess?
Jacinta: Well, sort of, and I think we’re slowly extricating ourselves. Less aggression, more collaboration, in an extremely uneven way from a global perspective, and in a two steps forward, one step back, Steven Pinker-type sense. Which requires work, community-building work to bring us all together out of the stresses that plague too many of us. We’re mostly in a post-industrial society, but exploitation proceeds apace. We need to call that out, in government, in business, and between nations. Anyone would think we’re not just one species, the way some people carry on.
References
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-infanticide-idUSKCN0IX2BA20141113
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monogamy
Ferdinand Mount, The subversive family, 1981
Barbujani G (2003). “A recent shift from polygyny to monogamy in humans is suggested by the analysis of worldwide Y-chromosome diversity”. J Mol Evol. 57 (1): 85–97.
a bonobo world 38: bonobos aren’t monogamous
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
Exodus 20:17 New International Version
As to humans and monogamy, it would be absurd to try to cover the subject in one book, let alone an essay, but absurdism has its appeal. Ferdinand Mount has many interesting things to say on the topic in his 1982 book The subversive family, which is not so much a defence of the nuclear family as an account of its endurance against attacks from religious organisations, communists and free-love advocates, among others. More recently, the same-sex marriage push throughout the developed world has been met with surprise rather than serious pushback from those of us not particularly committed to the institution, heterosexual or otherwise.
Advocates of monogamy generally focus on one positive attribute as central: loyalty. Of course it has variants – commitment, constancy, dedication and devotion -terms which are also used to promote nationalism.
It follows that those not committed to monogamy are described as fickle, selfish, shallow, or worse – decadent and degenerate. Top-down, ultra-controlling governments such as those of present-day Russia and China seek to prescribe the traditional values of their people in contrast to the decadence of the US and Western Europe, citing, with due exaggeration, the breakdown of families and the rise of homosexuality and other decadent practices, but they’re fighting a losing battle in an increasingly interactive human world. In fact, as Mount points out, until recently all states felt they had a right to control the rates and terms of divorce:
… it is remarkable how long even Western governments have clung on to their power over marriage. The most striking example is the state control of divorce – which in England was only transferred to the State from the Church courts in the mid-nineteenth century against severe opposition from Gladstone and other high churchmen. The real relaxation in the laws of divorce did not reach England – and many other countries – until well after the Second World War.
But the fact is that, if monogamy is on the decline, it’s a very slow one. We appear to be a jealous lot, ever on the lookout for betrayal and boundary-crossing. This doesn’t seem to be the bonobo way, and few would think to describe bonobos (or dolphins or elephants) as degenerate.
Monogamy is defended, promoted and celebrated in other ways too – in the form of true love. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Héloïse and Abelard, Bogart and Bacall, these couplings with their happy or sad endings have been presented, imitated and played upon in infinite varieties in novels, films and other media, while another view of this estate, more pragmatic or ‘realistic’, has an almost businesslike feel to it. You meet, you partner up, it’s all hormonal and feel-good for the first months or years, during which offspring come along, then come the disagreements and irritants, followed by a resolution of sorts, an appreciation of the good, a minimising of the rest, and another kind of love supposedly supervenes, a co-dependence which you’re never quite sure is unadventurous laziness or something like maturity. It helps that being part of a couple is highly approved of in a taken-for-granted way, and you don’t have to buy an interactive toy to keep you company in your twilight years.
However, defended or not, monogamy is certainly under some pressure, with the religious culture, which has emphasised the eternal nature of pair-bonding – ‘as long as ye both shall live’ – being very much in decline in Australia and similar nations. The developments of globalism and multiculturalism have encouraged us to look more broadly at human mating patterns, both culturally and historically. We generally find that, even in purportedly polygynous societies, monogamy is the norm – though serial monogamy is increasingly common. Think of the experimental teens – having any more than one boyfriend/girlfriend at a time is full of headaches, and because this is always about more than mating, rivalries, personality clashes and power struggles are bound to abound.
And yet, bonobos and other intelligent social animals are not classified as monogamous, serial or otherwise. Is this classification correct, and if so, how do they do it?
One obvious difference between them and us, is that they hang around together in large groups more or less all the time, whereas we spend much of our time in largely sealed off nuclear family units. We have homes, millions and millions of them. This separateness is built upon as we distinguish our homes from our neighbours’, and develop a private sphere within them. Private ownership extends to all the objects within the home’s perimeter, living or non-living. In some unmentionable countries, we even have private arsenals to protect our own from the potential incursions of ‘fellow’ humans. Compare, say, dolphins, who live in pods, for the protection, resource provision and welfare of all members. And yet, we know that we’re the most socially constructed mammals on the planet, and we owe our domination precisely to this fact. And we don’t, many of us, find anything odd about this paradoxical scenario.
So it seems that bonobos have evolved a mentality of sharing, of food, of space, and of each others’ bodies. This isn’t likely total, they surely experience greed, jealousy, spite and other such primal emotions, but it’s more like a spectrum and we’re tending, with affluence, to drift to one end of it, to what’s mine is mine, and what a depressing failure you are.
I recall, as autonomous (and electric) vehicles looked like they might be ‘five years away’, as the cliche had it, claims that they would not only solve the problem of petrol emissions, but also of traffic congestion, since we could not only dispense with drivers, but also with owners. Vehicles could be owned communally, and so be put to regular use as technological slaves, instead of hanging around idly in driveways and carparks. The libertarian reaction was swift and predictable. ‘I worked hard to get my bright shiny badge of a Tesla – daddy didn’t help me, honest – and I’m damned if I’m going to share it with any freeloading riff-raff etc etc’.
There are, of course, people pushing back against this libertarian drift. Most of them are women, it seems to me. People who support community banking, ethical investments and resource sharing. It’s an uphill battle, but it’s worth fighting, because the alternative is, I feel, pretty horrible to contemplate.
Reference
The subversive family, by Ferdinand Mount, 1982