Posts Tagged ‘patriarchy’
origins of human patriarchy, and where we may go from here
The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world … The point, however, is to change it.
Karl Marx
In a sense we [Beauvoir & Sartre] both lacked a real family, and we had elevated this contingency into a principle.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life
I’m not a historian, or an anthropologist, or a palaeontologist, or a primatologist, though I’ve taken in many shreds of those subjects, all of which might help to illuminate the mystery of patriarchy, the default state of the vast majority of human cultures throughout the period of H sapiens existence – as far as we’re able to tell. Of course, we’ve been around for some 300,000 years, according to the most recent findings, but we don’t really know much about our socio-sexual relations beyond the last 10,000 years – or 20,000 at the outside. And there are so many mysteries – the beginning of human language, for example, which I imagine as originating in a complexifying amalgam of gesture and sound. And the beginnings of the notion of possession and property, which, in terms of male possession of females, can be seen in gorillas, lions (though the females do the hunting, and are no shrinking violets), chimps, baboons and, arguably, orangutans (which are largely solitary). Female dominant species include elephants and orcas (and of course bonobos), some of the smartest and most communally successful species on the planet.
How did H sapiens, and H neanderthalensis, organise themselves socio-sexually, say 50,000 years ago? I mention Neanderthals because I’m nearing the end of Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ extraordinarily rich and detailed book on the subject, which makes little or no mention, even speculatively, on gender roles. What I did find was a great deal of focus on lithics and tool-making, which we tend to associate with males, though I see no reason why females would not be engaged in this activity in earlier times.
A blog piece I’ve discovered (linked below) argues that the size difference between male and female humans has been diminishing over the millennia. This has certainly been the case in the WEIRD world over the past few decades, when every human and her dog has become overweight (he wrote while downing another chardonnay with his pizza). This piece also argues for different roles (but not necessarily in a hierarchical sense) for the sexes based on consistently different teeth wear at numerous Neanderthal sites over thousands of years across the length and breadth of Eurasia.
Travel forward to the historical period – the period starting with the development and dissemination of writing – and we encounter a god-besotted world. Some of the first inscriptions we find are the names of gods, and it’s also notable that these early gods – Anu (Sumerian), Ra (Egyptian), Marduk (Babylonian), Brahma (Hindustani) and Zeus (Greek), were male. There were of course female gods, and ‘households’ of gods, but the principal deity was male, an indication that patriarchy was well established throughout the literate world a few millennia ago. It was also a world full of warfare, violence and mind-boggling cruelty, both within and between ‘states’. If you require evidence, read the first hundred pages or so of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s massive work The World: a family history. It should silence the critics of Pinker’s ‘better angels of our nature’ thesis, but it probably won’t. And with the odd notable exception, the warfare and slaughter was carried out by males. It’s interesting to remind myself that while all the horrors of Shalmaneser, Nebuchadnezzar, Darius, Ying Zheng, Sulla, Caesar and countless other warlords were being perpetrated, bonobos were doing their merry thing south of the Congo River, far from that madding crowd. And just north of that river, chimps were doing their small share of squabbling and killing.
Getting back to religion, the European success of the Roman Empire, and its eventual ‘capture’ by Christian monotheism, marked the beginning of the WEIRD world, according to Joseph Henrich. As he points out, the Catholic Church, which over time created a five-tiered male hierarchy of popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops and priests, was essentially the Christian Church, or simply the Church, from the fourth century CE to the reformation of the 16th century. During that time, Henrich persuasively argues, the Church transformed the world over which it held sway in subtle but significant ways, often to enrich and further empower itself. The key to that transformation was the Church’s marriage and family program (MFP). To be clear, this wasn’t a program drawn up by a Church Committee some time in the fourth century. There was nothing pre-meditated about it, and the result was in no way predicted, but it arguably set the foundations for the WEIRD values espoused today.
One key to all this was to break down the generally inward-facing kinship relationships of pre-Christian Eurasia. Before the Church’s interventions, linguistic and ethnic groups generally behaved in decidedly unWEIRD ways, but ways that are still found in regions dotted around the globe. Henrich provides an open-ended list:
- People lived enmeshed in kin-based organisations within tribal groups or networks. Extended family households were part of larger kin-groups (clans, houses, lineages, etc), some of which were called sippen (Germanic) or septs (Celtic).
- Inheritance and postmarital residence had patrilineal biases; people often lived in extended patrilineal households, and wives often moved to live with their husbands’ kinfolk.
- Many kinship units collectively owned or controlled territory. Even when individual ownership existed, kinfolk often retained inheritance rights such that lands couldn’t be sold or otherwise transferred without the consent of relatives.
- Large kin-based organisations provided individuals with both their legal and their social identities. Disputes within kin-groups were adjudicated internally, according to custom. Corporate responsibility meant that intentionality sometimes played little role in assigning punishments or levying fines for disputes between kin-groups.
- Kin-based organisations provided members with protection, insurance and security. These organisations cared for sick, injured, and poor members, as well as the elderly.
- Arranged marriages with relatives were customary, as were marriage payments like dowry or bride price (where the groom or his family pays for the bride).
- Polygynous marriages were common for high-status men. In many communities, men could pair with only one ‘primary’ wife, typically someone of roughly equal status, but could then add secondary wives, usually of lower social status
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world, pp 162-3
Henrich then presents a table of Church decrees, beginning in the fourth century and becoming more extreme as it increased its power, outlawing as incest marriage even up to sixth cousins, as well as with in-laws (sororate and levirate marriage). Marriage with non-Christians was also proscribed, and the Church enforced its own role as mandatory for officiating at marriages, ‘Christenings’ and the like. In fact the term ‘in-law’ derives from Canon Law as it was used to ‘officially’ order human relationships. These increasingly strict laws could sometimes be bent or broken through the payment of ‘Indulgences’, but it’s clear that many Church leaders came to believe their own propaganda, which they would back up with whatever scriptural passages they could find.
The power of Church laws, which determined the very legitimacy of human lives, was brought home to me as an adolescent reading Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbevilles, in which Tess Durbeyfield, a simple country girl of Wessex, is impregnated by Alex d’Urberville, an upper-class rake, and is refused permission to christen the dying child, born ‘out of wedlock’, so that she has to bury the boy herself, beyond church grounds – just the start of Tess’s ordeals. I remember feeling both shattered by Tess’s sufferings and contemptuous of the behaviour of Christians and the absurd concept of ‘illegitimacy’. By Hardy’s time, England had become decidedly anti-Catholic, but the Church had done its work in determining the very bona fides of human existence, work which has only been undone in recent times, thanks to pioneering humanists like Thomas Hardy.
It’s probably reasonable to assume that the Church’s aim in all this was to extend its power, and that the development of ‘love’ based marriage, or a union based on common interests, was an unintended consequence. Certainly the Church’s proscriptions released individuals from earlier kin-based responsibilities, and left them free to choose partners based on mutual attraction. It also widened individuals’ sense of allegiance from kinship groups to like-minded political, social, work-based and even sporting associations.
Another unintended consequence was the lessening of patriarchal control, via patrilineal kinship relations – somewhat ironic given the highly patriarchal nature of the Church. The choosing of partners on the basis of mutual interests smacked – shock, horror – of gender equality. This has led, ultimately, but really inevitably, to the choosing of partners of the same gender. And the reduced power of the Catholic Church – even amongst avowed Catholics, strangely enough, at least in moral issues – has led to a world of ‘cultural Catholics’ or ‘cafeteria Catholics’, who seem to be only in it for the pomp and circumstance, or a certain degree of camaraderie.
It seems weird that the WEIRD world, which is becoming weirder with its acceptance of or creation of a broadening range of sexual sub-types – agender, cisgender, genderfluid, genderqueer, intersex, gender nonconforming, and transgender – might owe its origins to the Church, but somehow it seems fitting to me. Meanwhile, priestly paedophilia seems to have been largely a consequence of that Church’s own bizarre and inhuman anti-sex restrictions on its trained messengers of the Holy Spirit. It has been weakened by the ensuing scandals – another small blow to patriarchy. Patriarchy didn’t of course originate with the Church, nor can its defeat, if that ever comes, be sheeted home to its capitalising edicts. The WEIRD world’s intelligentsia, and increasingly its leadership, has been freed from the narrow confines of religion and patriarchy into a more accurate understanding of humanity, its origins in the biosphere, and its capacities. But I admit to being impatient with the pace of change. If we don’t see a larger and more dominant role for the female of the species, and soon, the future looks grim.
References
Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, 2020
The WEIRDest people in the world, Joseph Henrich, 2020
on religion, secularism, tolerance and women
Over the years, I’ve read, listened to and encountered non-religious people defending religions and the religious in the name of tolerance, decency, human rights and more. A non-religious philosophy tutor once told the discussion group that I was a member of that western morality was based on Christianity. This claim appeared to be made as a criticism of the ‘new atheist’ movement that was prevalent at the time (some 15 or so years ago). I found it to be highly dubious on its face, so I engaged in a ‘deep dive’ into the key texts of Christianity – the so-called gospels, the purported reportage of the life, actions and teachings of Jesus, the son of the Judeao-Christian or Abrahamic god. Did these most basic Christian texts provide a coherent moral system for the western world, or even the barest framework of such a system?
Needless to say, I found no such thing, nor did I find any evidence that the gospel authors had ever even met the central figure in Christianity, Jesus. Whether such a person ever existed is a question with no clear answer. Jesus was a relatively common name at the time, a period which provides no written records of the existence of individuals outside of monarchs, governors and the like. Much research has explored the production and dating of the gospels, which were not contemporaneous with the life of their subject, who was said to have been crucified sometime between 30 and 40 AD (it doesn’t help that our current dating system is based on his conjectured birth). My writings on the subject (about a dozen blog posts, referenced below) were, as with most of my writings, a kind of self-education project. Amongst my gleanings were that the different gospels were inconsistent, both internally and compared to each other, and included interpolations from as late as the third or fourth century AD.
Let me focus briefly on one gospel example, the so-called ‘woman taken in adultery’ in John 8 (3-11), since it’s all about a topic of interest, the treatment of women. It’s now generally accepted as a later interpolation, but it’s still useful in terms of its lack of context – a problem with most gospel anecdotes. In modern jurisprudence, and modern (WEIRD) morality, context is absolutely essential. This is explored in much detail in Joseph Henrich’s book The weirdest people in the world, in which motive, intention, effect and a host of other factors are included in our judgment and appraisal of others.
So here is the story, from the ‘New Revised Standard Version’ of the Bible:
The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them,4 they said to him [Jesus], “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”6 They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”8 And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. 9 When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him.10 Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”11 She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”
So this is where we need to add, if we can, the context lacking in the story. For example, what does ‘caught in the act of adultery’ mean here? And indeed, what does ‘woman’ mean? It’s well established that, in this region, at this time, females were sold into marriage on a regular basis. Furthermore, these females were often – in fact customarily – children as young as ten, or younger, and once married, they were referred to as ‘women’.
But we hardly need to go into detail to recognise that adultery is here quite undefined, that stoning to death for this or any other crime is disproportionate to say the least, and that it’s highly unlikely that a man would be threatened with the same punishment as the ‘woman’ is in this case.
This of course isn’t an isolated anecdote – all of the parables, speeches and actions of Jesus, as described, lack the contextual elements we would need to arrive at the kinds of judgments expected of us in the WEIRD world.
Then again, it might be argued that the proscriptions enumerated in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 2-17) are a better starting point for western or WEIRD morality. Yet while it’s hardly surprising that lying, stealing and killing fellow humans would be offensive to an omnipotent god who wants to see his prize creations behaving nicely, it does seem odd that he should be so concerned about his own position in their lives that he must have their love more or less constantly (second commandment). It suggests a degree of insecurity not quite in keeping with omnipotence. The tenth commandment, too, strikes a flat note to a WEIRD individual keen to promote a bonobo humanity, as it speaks against coveting one’s neighbour’s wife along with other property items. It’s a bald reminder, as if one needed it after reading Genesis, etc, that this god is definitively male.
The whole point here is that, if western or WEIRD morality emerged from Christianity or the Bible, which to some extent is true, it needs to also be pointed out that the Bible and its ‘gospels’ are human documents. The Pentateuch was written five or six hundred years before the putative birth of Jesus, and was arguably the first successful creation of an omnipotent, controlling god, designed to unite a tribe or people as ‘special’ and chosen, while seeking to explain the origin of the world in which they lived (though of course its creation myths were derived from earlier versions). The god’s concern, through the commandments – or rather the concern of the Jewish leaders and authors who wrote them, was to unite and separate the Jewish people in the context of a multi-ethnic region with a bewildering array of gods, with ambiguous powers and rankings. Given the context, these commandments are bog-standard – don’t lie to, steal from or kill each other, don’t covet each others’ property (including women), treat your one and only god (creator of all things) with respect, treat marriage as sacred, honour your parents and kin, and follow the proper rituals. Basically, a recipe for the survival and thriving of the group, in what was, then and for a long time before and afterwards, a god-obsessed human world.
The interesting innovation of Christianity, of course, was that it dispensed with the chosen people concept, making it more universalisable, if that’s a word. The concept of Christ dying for our sins, or so that the rest of humanity might be ‘saved’, does seem rather obscure, but it has doubtless provided grounds for thousands of theological theses over the centuries.
I began this piece reflecting on those non-believers who look askance at other non-believers criticising religion and the religious. I understand full well that, had I been born many centuries ago, I too would have believed in the gods of my region. Galileo, the foremost mathematician and astronomer of his day, was a lifelong Catholic. Newton, born in the year of Galileo’s death, and the foremost scientist of his generation, was also a thorough if idiosyncratic Christian. Whatever one thinks of free will, we can’t escape the zeitgeist we’re born into. The thing is, today’s zeitgeist is more complex than anything that’s gone before, and will probably become more so, and the tensions between religious beliefs and secular, scientific explorations of every imaginable research field, including religion, its origins, modalities and effects, and why it is losing its grip on WEIRD humanity, will continue long into the foreseeable. I have no idea how it will all end, but I suspect that the feminine side of humanity will be an essential element in bringing about a best-case resolution, if such a resolution ever comes.
References
http://stewartsstruggles.blogspot.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novum_Testamentum_Graece
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020.
Bible: Child Marriage in Ancient Israelite times – Paedophilia?
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2020%3A2-17&version=NIV
Dava Sobel, Galileo’s daughter: a drama of science, faith and love, 1999
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
a bonobo world 61 or so: some more species
Gibbons – beautiful and imperilled
Canto: So if only we could quicken the modern world, which is so fast leaving behind the benefits of brute strength and embracing the strength of collaborative smarts… Well, maybe not that fast… We’d experience ourselves the loving fruits of bonobo-humanism.
Jacinta: Yeah, too bad. So let’s look more closely at other female dominated species, like elephants. They tend to value experience, so their family units have a female head.
Canto: Except that, they split into female and male groups, don’t they?
Jacinta: Well, they have these female family units, ranging from 3 to 25 members. The males presumably have their groupings, but sometimes they come together to form large herds or herd aggregations – huge numbers. Males can also be solitary, which virtually never happens with females. Of course it’s the females who raise the young, but there can be a lot of group solidarity.
Canto: It seems that the grouping changes more or less perpetually, seasonally, daily, hourly.
Jacinta: Yes, that’s a fission-fusion society, common among primates too – such as Homo sapiens at work, school, uni etc. But over time, the matriarch becomes more important, and presides over a wider network as she gets older. They play follow the leader as she has accumulated knowledge on the best watering holes, the paths of least resistance.
Canto: So elephants have it all worked out. What about those orangutans, what’s going on there?
Jacinta: Well apart from imminent extinction, there’s little to say. They’re solitary, though the Sumatran orang-utans are a little less so than those in Borneo, due to more food being available. The males exhibit hostility to each other and try to avoid each other, though they’re not territorial. They only hang out with females until they get their end away, and the females raise the offspring until they’re old enough to go solo.
Canto: So I wonder why the males are so much bigger than the females?
Jacinta: Yes they can be well over twice the size of the females. I haven’t found any explanation for it. They don’t have a harem of females to prove their rugged manliness. Apparently those big cheek pads help to attract the girls, but their huge bulk seems a bit superfluous.
Canto: Maybe it’s like whales – they grow big because they can. But then, the more you grow, the more you have to eat, presumably. A bit of a mug’s game.
Jacinta: Tell that to the elephants. Or those old ginorosauruses. Basically, if you’re as huge as an elephant, who else is going to attack you or compete with you? Apart from blokes with guns. But we were talking about sex. Or at least gender. Gorillas are proving a lot more complex than originally thought in their social structure – quite multilayered, not quite the chest-beating alpha male and his harem, more like human extended families. Matriarchies within patriarchies perhaps.
Canto: And what about gibbons – just to round out the primates. I know nothing about them.
Jacinta: Well, apparently these South-East Asian apes are monogamous, unlike other primates (except maybe humans, but I’m reluctant to rule on that). In fact only 3% of mammals are monogamous, according to a fact sheet I found (linked below). So that makes for family groups of two to six, just like our nuclear family, unless you’re a Catholic. Gibbons are considered as ‘lesser apes’, family Hylobatidae, unlike we great apes, family Hominidae. Physically, they’re by far the smallest of the apes, depending on particular species, but weighing at most about 12 kgs. These small family groups defend their territory aggressively – none of this fission-fusion stuff. They’re quite good at bipedalism, and present a good model for bipedalism in humans, but they’re also fantastically acrobatic tree-swingers, with the longest arms in relation to their bodies of any of the primates. They also have a nice healthy herbivorous diet.
Canto: They sound like a good human model all-round, and maybe a model for gender equality?
Jacinta: Well, yes, but I do prefer female supremacy. Gibbons are apparently the least studied of all the apes. There are 12 species of them, but many species are very near extinction, a fact not much known by the general public. Orangutans clearly get much more attention.
Canto: Okay so let’s look further afield – before coming back to human cultures to see if there are any matriarchies worth emulating. What more do we know about dolphins and other cetaceans?
Jacinta: Well, as you know dolphins live together in pods of up to 30, though sometimes where there’s an abundant food source they can form massive superpods of over 1000. And as we’ve learned, they engage in sex for fun.
Canto: I suppose also they could form superpods in the face of predators, like schools of fish.
Jacinta: Yes, possibly, though they wouldn’t have too many predators, unlike small fish. Interestingly these superpods can be made up of different cetacean species, so this would obviously benefit the smaller species. And individual dolphins can switch from pod to pod quite freely. Something like fission-fusion, but with greater flexibility. Researchers find this flexibility a sign of high intelligence.
Canto: Ahh, so that accounts for the stupidity of conservatives.
Jacinta: Some dolphin species are a bit more hierarchical than others, and you can see plenty of bite marks on bottlenose dolphins, evidence of fights for dominance.
Canto: And I recall a big hubbub a few years ago when those delightful creatures were discovered torturing and killing some of their own. But then, they are male-dominated, aren’t they?
Jacinta: They are, sadly. Males of all species are largely arseholes (well, not literally). But they certainly engage in a lot of play, I mean dolphins generally. Maybe they’ll evolve one day into a higher form of female-dominated life, but I doubt it. They’ll have to realise how fucked-up they are as a species to do that, like some humans have realised – but not enough.
Canto: Okay, so dolphins are out as a model. What about other cetaceans? I somehow suspect that orcas won’t fit the bill.
Jacinta: Next time. And we’ll look at some human models, if we can find them.
References
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/six-facts-about-elephant-families-9015298.html
https://seaworld.org/animals/all-about/orangutans/behavior/
http://www.gibbons.de/main2/08teachtext/factgibbons/gibbonfact.html
a bonobo world 26: boys and girls at work and play
Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, brilliant women with great dress sense
In her introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir wrote this:
.. the truth is that anyone can clearly see that humanity is split into two categories of individuals with manifestly different clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, movements, interests and occupations; these differences are perhaps superficial; perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that for the moment they exist in a strikingly obvious way.
A whole book could easily be written – some already have – to expand on this apparently mundane observation. Today in the west, or the developed world, or Anglo-American or Euro-American society (I never know quite what to call it), there are no set rules, of course, about how people should dress, or behave, or work or play, gender-wise, but there are conventions and social pressures, and I’ve noted encouraging developments, as well as their opposite.
A close female friend expressed a certain despair/disdain the other day in telling me that Dr Jill Biden, aged 69, wore stilettos for her husband’s confirmation as US President. I share that friend’s conviction that stilettos should only be used as murder weapons. In any case men only wear stilettos when in drag, which is all too rare.
On clothing and accessories, while today’s variety is inspiring and liberating for both sexes, one still sees frustrating gender-based tendencies everywhere. Frills and furbelows have long been all the go for female formal attire, while tuxes or frock-coats are de rigueur for males, compleat with ties, bowed or straight. These traditions tend to emphasise gender differences you’d never notice in bonobos, though there is a welcome playfulness of gender-swapping attire among the elites, seldom replicated in your local bar or restaurant.
What has constantly surprised me, as a person who spent his youth in the sixties and seventies, when déclassé jeans and t-shirts, in colourful variety, were common and pleasantly informal, is that those decades didn’t establish a trend of ambisexual dress – just as I’ve been surprised that traditional marriage didn’t get thrown out as seemed to be on the cards in those days. Marriage today appears to represent much of human ambiguity – a commitment to monogamous ideals even while recognising their limitations, even their absurdity. Conservatives argue that loyalty is a much undervalued value, but it’s always been possible to have more than one loyal friend, with benefits. Bonobos manage to have a bunch of them. Bonobos aren’t being rad, they’re just being bonobos. Which raises the question, what is it, to be humans?
David Deutsch, in The beginning of infinity, celebrates and encourages our infinite possibilities, to find solutions, to expand our outlooks, to achieve outrageously amazing things. He writes of the value of optimism over pessimism, and progress over stasis. I’m largely in agreement, but with some reservations. He has nothing to say about community, for example. Community, it seems to me, has become ever more important as change has become more rapid. As Deutsch and others have pointed out, during the many thousands of years when humans lived the hunter-gatherer life, with no doubt many variations, life simply didn’t change from generation to generation. And as long as that life was sustainable, there was little need for new developments, new hunting or grinding implements, new forms of shelter or clothing. So, nobody was out of date or old-fashioned, there were no old fuddy-duddies you wouldn’t be seen dead with. In fact, quite the opposite – the elders would have been more expert at the latest technology, developed in the previous aeon, than the youngsters, who would marvel at how those old guys’ boomerangs always came back (okay, they were never actually intended to). Given this relatively static society, it’s hardly surprising that elders were more respected, for their skills, experience and store of communal lore, than today’s nursing home denizens. And, as always, I’m aware of the multifarious nature of modern human societies, static and otherwise, to which I have little access, beyond book-larnin. Most of these societies or cultures, though, are today forced to interact with others, creating identity confusions and divided loyalties by the brainload.
Anyway, sticking with the White Anglo-Saxon ex-Protestant culture I’m familiar with, I’m a bit shocked that, despite two or more waves of feminism in the last century or so, women are still earning less than men and paying more for what I would deem unnecessary accoutrements, including hairstyles, bling, fancy tattoos, make-up and the aforementioned frills and furbelows. I recently bought a ‘men’s’ stick deodorant, which seemed to me nothing more than an anti-perspirant, and which was identical to that of my female partner, only bigger, and cheaper! These are ‘first-world issues’, of course, but they reflect, in little, an exploitation of the feminine worldwide, which seems a hard nut to crack.
There’s of course a thing about eternal youth, in regard to women, that should be addressed. Men in their fifties don’t wear make-up, at least not the ones I know. Quite a few women I know, in their fifties, and older, also don’t wear make-up, but let’s face it, most of them do – with all the expense, as well as the time and effort, this involves. They do it, presumably, to hide the effects of gravity, though gravity always wins, as Radiohead informs us. With men, apparently, gravity lends gravitas.
I’ve often – in fact, ever since adolescence – imagined myself as female. Mostly lesbian female, though I did have an early period of male-male attraction. So, if I did turn out female, how would I behave, appearance-wise, now that I’m in my sixties? Would I wear an op-shop jacket, t-shirt (usually with some thought-bubble printing) and chino-type trousers, as I do now? I hope so. It’s a kind of unisex outfit for academic and sciencey people, the types I’ve always aspired to be. But unfortunately, feminists have recently written of the pink/blue divide in children’s clothing that’s stronger than ever, as well as the divide in toys – fighting, racing and danger versus dancing, cuddling and beauty. This appears to be driven by manufacturers and advertisers, who, like social media moguls, seem to derive a benefit from driving their customers down wormholes of like-mindedness. Not surprisingly, social psychologists find that children benefit from being more unisex in these choices – not a matter of turning them into their opposites, but seeing dolls and trucks as others see them, and generally being more colourful. And slowly, all too slowly, we’re following this advice, and seeing more male nurses and female truck-drivers than previously. Not to mention female white supremacists sporting submachine guns – but that’s only in the US, they do things differently there. And more males working in child-care? That’s another nut to crack.
References
Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), new translation 2009.
https://www.naeyc.org/resources/topics/play/gender-typed-toys
A bonobo world and other impossibilities 24: women and warfare (1)
The following is re-posted and was first written on this blog in December 2018, but I’m doing this under a new title (with some changes) because it clearly belongs in this series.
female ring-tailed lemur – strong and sexy
I recently listened to a bit of historian Margaret McMillan, along with some military reps, on the radio talking about warfare past and future. It was recorded during a public talk on the topic. I’ve got her book, The Uses and Abuses of History, which I’ve not yet read, but I was struck by her pessimistic attitude. Of course she’s right to say that warfare isn’t about to disappear, and dog knows we have a proliferation of macho thugs on the global scene at present, but her somewhat dismissive description of Pinker’s thesis, that the world is getting less violent, rather irked me. She described the thesis as ‘persuasive but too positive’ or some such term (which struck me as odd if not disingenuous – obviously she wasn’t persuaded). To me, considering that, almost to the end of the nineteenth century, warfare was a way of life for many a European male, and that the so-called Great War showed so many people how disastrous zero-sum game nationalism and one-eyed patriotism can be, and how far we have come, generally, from seeing other cultures as ‘savage’ or backward, and especially how far we’ve progressed in multiculturalism over the past century or so, I can’t accept that we haven’t made great strides in reducing warfare among civilised nations in the 20th century and beyond. Not, of course, without great cost, in the early half of that century especially. Our knowledge of our own destructive capabilities has acted as something of a brake.
But it was a response during question time that has prompted me to write. MacMillan was asked whether things would be better if, say, the US President was a woman, or some such thing. Anyway the gist of the question was whether warfare would be reduced if women were in charge. Macmillan was again sceptical/pessimistic, citing Indira Ghandi’s record as India’s PM. Of course she could’ve cited others, like Margaret Thatcher, or even Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace prizewinner who’s been so much under fire for Burma’s treatment of its Rohingya population. But I found this response to be shallow and fatuous. The case of Aung San Suu Kyi is most telling – she’s largely a captive of the all-male military, all Buddhists like the all-male monks who’ve been most active in the Rohingya persecutions. But it’s the same for all female heads of state. Their cabinets and their political advisers are overwhelmingly male, they have to deal with a military sector which is entirely male, and a business sector which is much the same. All the power in all the lands you care to mention is massively male. Massively. In order to seriously answer the question ‘What if women were in charge?’ you have to imagine a ‘world turned upside down’. Anything less, as I say, would be a fatuous and shallow response. You would have to imagine a world with a more or less all-female political-military-business sector. And if you think that’s crazy, why don’t you think the current more or less all-male power situation is crazy?
The fact is that statistically, women are less aggressive than men. We can go into all sorts of genetic, hormonal, cultural and environmental reasons for this – and it’s important to explore all of that – but the fact itself is undeniable. It also appears that women are more collaborative – more able to work especially with other women. Of course women can be aggressive and highly competitive – I love women’s sports, but I notice that in women’s soccer and basketball I’ve never once seen the kind of all-in biffo that quite regularly spoils the men’s version of these sports. This is no accident (and nor is it necessarily a permanent feature – societies evolve, for better or worse).
Wars in the past have always been associated with manliness – not just physical warfare, but the kind of business and political warfare that Trump – the archetypal wannabe macho ‘winner’ – engages in. And in an increasingly interconnected and inter-reliant global scenario, this kind of warfare is proving more and more counter-productive.
I believe that one day – though hardly in the near future – we will socially evolve, out of sheer necessity, into civilisations in which women hold the balance of power. It won’t simply be a ‘world turned upside down’ but more like a move from chimp-like society to bonobo-like society. I’ve held this view for a long time but I’ve hardly dared express it. Luckily, so few people read my writing that I’m unlikely to experience much blowback, but in any case many would argue that it’s illegitimate to compare humans with other species. Not just because of the essentially religious idea of ‘human specialness’, but because ‘civilisation’ or ‘culture’ has so altered the human psyche that it’s essentially useless to compare us with species that either don’t have culture or have it in only the most rudimentary form.
I doubt if Darwin would agree, as much of his work focussed on the extraordinary complexity of non-human species, and the ‘instinctiveness’ of humans. In any case I’ll focus now on other primates, all of whom are socially organised in one way or another.
The lemurs of Madagascar are prosimians, species of primates that are considered less ‘evolved’ than simians. Outside of their current island home, lemurs were out-competed by the more adapted species they gave rise to. Fascinatingly, all lemur species are female-dominant, though not always through sexual dimorphism. Lemurs live in small groups, with a generally even male-female ratio. A key feature of lemur social life is the creation of coalitions, especially as regards sexual behaviour, and sexual behaviour, obviously, is key to any species’ survival and development. The lemurs are something of a mystery in regard to their female-dominant traits, which has even given rise to a slightly pejorative title for the mystery – the lemur syndrome. In any case, understanding their group dynamics, involving coalitions, competition and sex, inter alia, and linking this behaviour to genes, gene expression and neurological findings – which are being increasingly honed and targeted – is essential to solving the mystery.
The same goes, of course, for all prosimian and simian species. The vast majority of them are male-dominant, often, but not always reflected in a greater or lesser degree of sexual dimorphism. Size isn’t everything in species with complex and sometimes gender-based group dynamics. And so I come to that old favourite topic, chimps and bonobos, our equal-closest living relatives.
Chimps can be violent towards each other, often to a sickening degree – almost as sickening as humans – but, as with humans, this violence is clearly not ultimately self-destructive. For example, when a gang of chimps come across a stray member of a neighbouring group, it’s not uncommon for them to bite, kick and stomp the unfortunate to death. There have even been occasions when one group has slaughtered another wholesale, though one or two might survive by flight – and again, human comparisons spring to mind.
Chimps live in fission-fusion social groups, meaning that they form small, relatively unstable groups within a larger association which may amount to hundreds. Within these groups, large or small, there is a male linear dominance hierarchy, in which the group has one alpha male, who dominates all the others, followed by a beta male, who dominates everyone but the alpha, and so on down the line. Males remain in their birth communities, but females emigrate more or less at adolescence. This means that the young females entering a new group are of lower status and are viewed with suspicion (think of refugees at the US southern border). It also means that the females break kinship ties more than the males. Males also bond through co-operative hunting and boundary patrolling, and in attacking other groups. Again, think of human tribal behaviour. In some chimp communities kinship has been observed to be more important than other coalitions, in others not, but in either case male bonding adds to dominance over females. Co-operative hunting, it should be added, is having serious effects on the hunted, which is usually the red colobus monkey, which is in serious decline in multiple sites where chimps are thriving.
There is always one power that females have in these societies, the power to produce offspring – to maintain the species. Estrus in chimps is marked by visible swelling of the anogenital region, though the first of these swellings occurs before the young female is fertile, and may be a way of attracting males in her new community. Females are able to give birth (parturition) at 13-14 years, but if they aren’t accepted in the community, there’s a danger of infanticide by males, especially as females often use promiscuity to establish themselves. Infanticide tends to reduce the female’s interbirth interval, and favours the genetic line of the male doing the killing (one wonders if they have a way of ‘knowing’ that the murdered child isn’t theirs). Chimp sexual activity is generally promiscuous, though it most often occurs during estrus (maximal tumescence). The female, of course, has to strategise to find the best opportunity for producing healthy and communally favoured offspring – not an easy task, as it leads to secretiveness, suspicion, jealousy and so forth.
Of course, I’m writing this to draw comparisons between chimp societies and early human societies, out of which our modern civilisations developed. Human societies are more complex, naturally, reflecting individual, neurological complexity, and greater, more diverse cultural complexity, but the basis of our patriarchy can certainly be traced in our chimp relatives. Bonobos, however, are quite different, and remarkably so considering their relatively recent divergence from their chimp cousins. Humans have one great advantage over chimps and bonobos, I think. We can consciously teach ourselves to change, to be better adapted to a biosphere we have increasingly recognised is interdependent and precious in its astonishing diversity. And we can learn a lot about this from bonobos.
References
Margaret MacMillan, The uses and abuses of history, 2010.
Charles Darwin, On the origin of species by means of natural selection, 1859
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemur
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee
a bonobo world? 12 – in search of happy productive human cultures
Messalina, a bit naughty maybe, but not quite Genghis Khan
The cliche that bonobos make love not war obviously needs a lot of finessing, but I’m hopeful that it will repay close analysis. A National Geographic photographer, Christian Ziegler has said, in a youtube video, that while he noted plenty of sexual activity during feeding time at a bonobo sanctuary, he only once saw it happen in 40 days of observation in the wild – though whether this counts as extensive observation is questionable. There are a number of videos online featuring face-to-face sexual frottage, which tends to be of brief duration, and it’s impossible to say how long the cameras were running before the hoped-for money shot occurred. One video, however – and it came with a warning – did interest me, as it featured a bit of the old in-out-in-out in the midst of a large group clambering over each other, apparently indifferent to the shenanigans. It made me wonder about public and private sex in the ape world, and about ownership, monogamy and jealousy.
In the bonobo world, largely controlled by females, or should I say women, children don’t know who their parents are. Imagine if we didn’t know who our parents were, but grew up in a communal world, of adults and other kids, all of whom looked out for us, fed us, played with us, taught us, fought with us, and sexually excited us, though not all at the same time. We might develop special relations with some, and those relations might change over time, depending on our needs, and theirs. It would be a comfortable supportive world, especially if we were girls. The boys would come after us, but we would sense that the females of all ages were more protective, and there was safety, and even power, in numbers. Then the boys would tend to more ingratiating, knowing where the power lay. Sex, when it happened, would be more polite, so to speak. I mean sex with males. Our relations with other girls would also have a sexual element, so we would be able to make comparisons and develop preferences. Variety being the spice of bonobo life, we might occasionally try out others, then return to our favourites.
Imagine all this in a human context. It’s almost beyond imagining in our more formalized, highly separated lives. People mostly live hidden from others in houses or apartments, in nuclear families. Intrusions are rare, and again highly formalised. In the ultramodern era, knocks on the door are virtually never unexpected, they’re prepared for by device-based communications, and privacy and personal property are so sacrosanct as to be the basis of a whole larger-than-life ideology. This kind of separated living goes back to the agricultural revolution, with its land-clearing, its set residents and the gradual growth from tribal groupings to villages to towns and citadels and cities and territories. Inner privacy often went hand-in-hand with outward display, and impressive structures and their grounds were both fortifications and symbols of wealth and power. Clothing, too, layered and elaborate, came to indicate exclusivity, and certainly tended to rule out sexual spontaneity, though it’s likely that such spontaneity had scooted well before the layers of clothing became a thing.
If only we could uncover the habits of the australopithecines along with their bones. There does seem to be some evidence that bonobos are more like Australopithecus afarensis than are chimps. They have a slightly more upright stance than chimps, they’re a little more differentiated, facially (though this may be disputed) and early neural studies help to explain their less aggressive, more co-operative culture:
We find that bonobos have more gray matter in brain regions involved in perceiving distress in both oneself and others, including the right dorsal amygdala and right anterior insula. Bonobos also have a larger pathway linking the amygdala with the ventral anterior cingulate cortex, a pathway implicated in both top–down control of aggressive impulses as well as bottom–up biases against harming others. We suggest that this neural system not only supports increased empathic sensitivity in bonobos, but also behaviors like sex and play that serve to dissipate tension, thereby limiting distress and anxiety to levels conducive with prosocial behavior.
Of course, these findings, if further verified, lead to a chicken-and-egg question. Surely these neural differences (presumably the comparison here is with chimps) come from an infancy raised in a culture that encouraged or required those connections, but how did this caring-and-sharing culture itself evolve in contrast to the culture north of the Congo? More interestingly, for me, what sorts of cultures were created by the hominins, such as Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus afarensis, Paranthropus robustus, Homo naledi and all the rest, and what, above all, were male-female and adult-child relations like in these cultures? It seems to me that old Milan Kundera was right – the best questions are those we seem unable to answer.
So we’re reduced to comparing ourselves with much more recent historical cultures, and they all seem to be patriarchal, dotted with the occasional forceful female (as far as the historical record goes). Artemisia of Halicarnassus, Boudicca of the Iceni, Cleopatra, Agrippina, Hypatia… and I would have loved an exclusive interview with Messalina – venomous vamp or much-maligned sex therapist?
Have there been any examples of human cultures, ancient or modern, that we can favourably compare with bonobo culture, mutatis mutandis as the philosophers say? Again I think of the international culture of science. Okay, not quite so sexy, and without any infant members, and yet…
References
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3324566/
Sex and Fruit: The Sweet Life of Bonobos | Nat Geo Live (youtube video)
the male violence thing: why deny it?
I’ve written a few pieces on women, power and such things, from a position of frustration that there haven’t been enough women in power, and that women, and men, have suffered too much from male abuses of power – and that of course includes violence. At the beginning of last year I attended a vigil of sorts on the steps of our state parliament, which involved a solemn roll call of all the women who died violently in Australia (not including those who died in vehicle accidents, of which more later), and the sad circumstances of their passing. I noted that not all the women were victims of male violence – only 90-95% from memory – but clearly male violence was the principal problem. I was also aware, from research, that most victims of male violence are other males.
Around 95% of all victims of violence, whether women or men, experience that violence from a male perpetrator.
White Ribbon Australia, citing the Australian Bureau of Statistics
So I was a bit disconcerted when, some time ago, I brought up the obvious issue of male violence, in the context of sport (as opposed to the relative lack of violence, on and off the field, or court etc, in female sports) and I received pushback, as the Yanks say, from someone who more less completely denied that there was any imbalance. In fact he appeared to argue that women were just as violent as men, in every way.
So, to be clear, this is a question of fact, not of opinion, and in order to be factual we need to define violence precisely. I’m defining it as an act which results in death or physical injury, to the self and/or others. This isn’t to deny that psychological or emotional violence exists, of course it does, but it’s virtually impossible to measure. Any conversation between two people could be seen as profoundly coercive by one, totally benign by the other, or anything between these extremes by observers. It’s very subjective. Nor am I denying that psychological violence can be totally life-destroying. It just isn’t measurable in any clear way, unlike physical violence. And it was physical violence that our conversation was about.
Reliable statistical data on this topic is available everywhere on the internet. It tells us a sad, but fairly obvious truth. Men are more violent than women in every country and in every culture on the planet, without exception. And men have been more violent than women in every age of which we have record, since the appearance of Homo sapiens some 300,000 years ago.
Looking at the matter historically, there’s a certain amount of controversy, due to the patchy evidence as to whether hunter-gatherers were more ‘prone to violence’ than humans in a more ‘civilised’ state. Certainly it’s true that after the establishment of expansionist states, war was more often than not a central component of politics, and war was carried out by men, generally young men from their late teens into their late twenties. This state of affairs was the norm for centuries, and one could reasonably argue that warfare as policy was only abandoned when weaponry became so devastating that it was too costly for each state to engage in it, though I think Enlightenment values, a more scientific understanding of universal human nature and the subsequent development of trans-national treaties and organisations have all played a role.
But even in hunter-gathering societies the pattern of male violence was set. The hunters were of course more or less exclusively male, and, with rewards going to the best hunters, fierce competition was bound to arise within hunter-gathering tribes. It’s quite likely that the most successful competitors would have high status, even chieftain status, within the group. And with the division into groups, or tribes, with their more or less self-appointed hunting territories, rivalry and competition between groups would have arisen, the precursors of later, more destructive forms of aggression. We see exactly this pattern, of course, in our closest living relatives, chimps – battles between males of different groups over territory and resources, and battles between males within groups over hierarchy and access to females.
It might be argued that the modern world is quite different. But there’s a pattern in modern society that needs to be accounted for, though it’s not exactly a modern pattern, even if it’s given a modern spin. Men – and boys -tend to join gangs. Of course, not all young men do this, but a substantial proportion do. Women tend not to do so, or not nearly to the same extent. I’m talking about street gangs, crime gangs, ethnic gangs, ‘football hooligan’ gangs, bikie gangs, neo-nazi gangs, white supremacist gangs etc. I even joined one myself as a teenager, and we roamed the streets looking for trouble but rarely managing to find it.
What drives this behaviour amongst this section of the male population (from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties, roughly speaking)? Hormones appear to play a primary role, and it’s no coincidence that exactly the same aggressive, show-offy group behaviour is to be found in the young males of other complex, highly social mammals, including chimps, dolphins and elephants. I have mixed feelings for those who scoff at all comparisons between homo sapiens and other mammals, because of course science has taught us about our profoundly mammalian nature, while our development of scientific explanations and understandings is precisely what marks us off from other mammals, and provides us with the potential to transcend our mammalian nature. Biology doesn’t have to be destiny.
The preponderance of male violence in our society is a problem for which we need to find solutions. But first we need to admit that there’s a problem. Let me give one compelling statistic as proof. The major cause of violent death and injury in peaceful countries – those not engaged in internal or external warfare – are males between the ages of approximately 17 and 25 behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. On a per capita basis, males cause 1.5 to 2 times more vehicle accidents than females, regardless of country, and it’s entirely that 17-25 age group that causes the disparity. It’s of course no coincidence that this is the same age that young males join gangs or the military. It’s the hormonal age.
In presenting this brief account of male risk-taking, aggression and violence, I’m not pretending that females are passive victims of all this. Of course the picture is enormously complex (in humans and in other mammals). In the cyber-age, female teenage bullying has become a serious problem – and of course it was a problem in the schoolyard before that. People in general can be brutal and malicious to their neighbours in times of stress, but we’ve emerged from, or are trying to emerge from, a highly patriarchal culture in which being a physically tough male is still a source of respect – in my own schoolyard, everyone knew who the toughest kid was, the ‘best fighter’, not the ‘brainiest’.
So, to return to my conversation, which was about sport and violence, and the claim that men are no more violent on and around sporting arenas than women. It amazes me that, given all the evidence about male violence, someone would think that sporting arenas would be an exception to the well-attested facts about male violence, in comparison to that of women. The sport I follow most by far is soccer, and I’ve particularly enjoyed the rise in women’s soccer in the last few years. It’s of course fiercely competitive, full of rough and tumble, with plenty of pushing and shoving at corners and free kicks, but having watched a lot of female matches over the years, I’ve rarely seen an example of the face-to-face, ‘I’m tougher than you’ behaviour shown at the top of this post, which is very common in the male game. The image prompts more or less amusing comparisons with wildlife programs, with rival males competing to be the pack leader. Men are too often like that, but of course not all men, and with the broad societal changes that have occurred in recent decades and centuries, there’s no need for men to think and act like this today – though the profound inequality that persists still sanctions and rewards this behaviour in poorly resourced, embattled parts of the world.
Where I see most progress and feel most hopeful is, again, the enterprise of science. In reading, for example, Venki Ramakrishnan’s book The gene machine and Meredith Wadman’s The vaccine race, I find the mix of competition and collaboration in fields of research to be favourable to both genders (or should I say all genders these days), and its success will hopefully flow on to politics, sports and other aspects of life.
women and warfare, part 1: humans, chimpanzees and patriarchy
Recently listened to a bit of historian Margaret McMillan, along with some military reps, on the radio talking about warfare past and future. It was recorded during a public talk on the topic. I’ve got her book, The Uses and Abuses of History, which I’ve only just started to read, but I was struck by her pessimistic attitude. Of course she’s right to say that warfare isn’t about to disappear, and dog knows we have a proliferation of macho thugs on the global scene at present, but her somewhat dismissive description of Pinker’s thesis, that the world is getting less violent, rather irked me. She described the thesis as ‘persuasive but too positive’ or some such term (which struck me as odd if not disingenuous – obviously she wasn’t persuaded). To me, considering that, almost to the end of the nineteenth century, warfare was a way of life for many a European male, and that the so-called Great War showed so many people how disastrous zero-sum game nationalism and one-eyed patriotism can be, and how far we have come, generally, from seeing other cultures as ‘savage’ or backward, and especially how far we have progressed in multiculturalism over the past century or so, I can’t accept that we haven’t made great strides in reducing warfare among civilised nations in the 20th century and beyond. Not, of course, without great cost, in the early half of that century especially.
But it was a response during question time that has prompted me to write. MacMillan was asked whether things would be better if, say, the US President was a woman, or some such thing. Anyway the gist of the question was whether warfare would be reduced if women were in charge. Macmillan was again sceptical/pessimistic, citing Indira Ghandi’s record as India’s PM. Of course she could’ve cited others, like Margaret Thatcher, or even Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace prizewinner who’s been so much under fire for Burma’s treatment of its Rohingya population. But I found this response to be shallow and fatuous. The case of Aung San Suu Kyi is most telling – she’s largely a captive of the all-male military, all Buddhists like the all-male monks who’ve been most active in the Rohingya persecutions. But it’s the same for all female heads of state. Their cabinets and their political advisers are overwhelmingly male, they have to deal with a military sector which is entirely male, and a business sector which is much the same. All the power in all the lands you care to mention is massively male. Massively. In order to seriously answer the question ‘What if women were in charge?’ you have to imagine a ‘world turned upside down’. Anything less, as I say, would be a fatuous and shallow response. You would have to imagine a world with a more or less all-female political-military-business sector. And if you think that’s crazy, why don’t you think the current more or less all-male power situation is crazy?
The fact is that statistically, women are less aggressive than men. We can go into all sorts of genetic, hormonal, cultural and environmental reasons for this – and it’s important to explore all of that – but the fact itself is undeniable. It also appears that women are more collaborative – more able to work especially with other women. Of course women can be aggressive and highly competitive – I love women’s sports, but I notice that in women’s soccer and basketball I’ve never once seen the kind of all-in biffo that quite regularly spoils the men’s version of these sports. This is no accident.
Wars in the past have always been associated with manliness – not just physical warfare, but the kind of business and political warfare that Trump – the archetypal wannabe macho ‘winner’ – engages in. And in an increasingly interconnected and inter-reliant global scenario, this kind of warfare is proving more and more counter-productive.
I believe that one day – though hardly in the near future – we will socially evolve, out of sheer necessity, into civilisations in which women hold the balance of power. It won’t simply be a ‘world turned upside down’ but more like a move from chimp-like society to bonobo-like society. I’ve held this view for a long time but I’ve hardly dared express it. Luckily, so few people read my writing that I’m unlikely to experience much blowback, but in any case many would argue that it’s illegitimate to compare humans with other species. Not just because of the essentially religious idea of ‘human specialness’, but because ‘civilisation’ or ‘culture’ have so altered the human psyche that it’s essentially useless to compare us with species that either don’t have culture or have it in only the most rudimentary form.
I doubt if Darwin would agree, as much of his work focussed on the extraordinary complexity of non-human species, and the ‘instinctiveness’ of humans. In any case I’ll focus now on other primates, all of whom are socially organised in one way or another.
The lemurs of Madagascar are prosimians, species of primates that are considered less ‘evolved’ than simians. Outside of their current island home, lemurs were out-competed by the more adapted species they gave rise to. Fascinatingly, all lemur species are female-dominant, though not always through sexual dimorphism. Lemurs live in small groups, with a generally even male-female ratio. A key feature of lemur social life is the creation of coalitions, especially as regards sexual behaviour, and sexual behaviour, obviously, is key to any species’ survival and development. The lemurs are something of a mystery in regard to their female-dominant traits, which has even given rise to a slightly pejorative title for the mystery – the lemur syndrome. In any case, understanding their group dynamics, involving coalitions, competition and sex, inter alia, and linking this behaviour to genes, gene expression and neurological findings – which are being increasingly honed and targeted – is essential to solving the mystery.
The same goes, of course, for all prosimian and simian species. The vast majority of them are male-dominant, often, but not always reflected in a greater or lesser degree of sexual dimorphism. Size isn’t everything in species with complex and sometimes gender-based group dynamics. And so I come to that old favourite topic, chimps and bonobos, our equal-closest living relatives.
Chimps can be violent towards each other, often to a sickening degree – almost as sickening as humans – but, as with humans, this violence is clearly not ultimately self-destructive. For example, when a gang of chimps come across a stray member of a neighbouring group, it’s not uncommon for them to bite, kick and stomp the unfortunate to death. There have even been occasions when one group has slaughtered another wholesale, though one or two might survive by flight – and again, human comparisons spring to mind.
Chimps live in fission-fusion social groups, meaning that they form small, relatively unstable groups within a larger association which may amount to hundreds. Within these groups, large or small, there is a male linear dominance hierarchy, in which the group has one alpha male, who dominates all the others, followed by a beta male, who dominates everyone but the alpha, and so on down the line. Males remain in their birth communities, but females emigrate more or less at adolescence. This means that the young females entering a new group are of lower status and are viewed with suspicion (think of refugees at the US southern border). It also means that the females break kinship ties more than the males. Males also bond through co-operative hunting and boundary patrolling, and in attacking other groups. Again, think of human tribal behaviour. In some chimp communities kinship has been observed to be more important than other coalitions, in others not, but in either case male bonding adds to dominance over females. Co-operative hunting, it should be added, is having serious effects on the hunted, which is usually the red colobus monkey, which is in serious decline in multiple sites where chimps are thriving.
There is always one power that females have in these societies, the power to produce offspring – to maintain the species. Estrus in chimps is marked by visible swelling of the anogenital region, though the first of these swellings occurs before the young female is fertile, and may be a way of attracting males in her new community. Females are able to give birth (parturition) at 13-14 years, but if they aren’t accepted in the community, there’s a danger of infanticide by males, especially as females often use promiscuity to establish themselves. Infanticide tends to reduce the female’s interbirth interval, and favours the genetic line of the male doing the killing (one wonders if they have a way of ‘knowing’ that the murdered child isn’t theirs). Chimp sexual activity is generally promiscuous, though it most often occurs during estrus (maximal tumescence). The female, of course, has to strategise to find the best opportunity for producing healthy and communally favoured offspring – not an easy task, as it leads to secretiveness, suspicion, jealousy and so forth.
Of course, I’m writing this to draw comparisons between chimp societies and early human societies, out of which our modern civilisations developed. Human societies are more complex, naturally, reflecting individual, neurological complexity, and greater, more diverse cultural complexity, but the basis of our patriarchy can certainly be traced in our chimp relatives. Bonobos, however, are quite different, and remarkably so considering their relatively recent divergence from their chimp cousins. Humans have one great advantage over chimps and bonobos, I think. We can consciously teach ourselves to change, to be better adapted to a biosphere we have increasingly recognised is interdependent and precious in its astonishing diversity. And we can learn a lot about this from bonobos.
The bandwagon of macho thuggery rolls on
Brazil has just elected a macho thug to lead its country down the descent to demagogic doom. So now, just off the top of my head, we have the USA, Russia, China, North Korea, Cambodia, the Philippines, Poland, Turkey, Syria, Israel, Belarus, Iran, Saudia Arabia, all full of shit leaders.
Tears of rage, tears of grief. Women, women, we need you to save us! Rise up, flush these scumbags down the toilet, and never never let a man run your country again! Never!