The slogan 'make love not war' came from the 1960s, though it was popular at the time, it was regarded more as a joke rather than a practicable proposition. This is still true today, but from the very unlikely source of an article in Scientific American magazine, in 1995, comes animal research that shows how this slogan is a reality in one species of ape. This article called “Bonobo Sex and Society: The behaviour of a close relative challenges assumptions about male supremacy in human evolution” by Frans B. M. de Waal. This article is controversial, because it not only questions our beliefs about sex. It also shows that the bonobo ape, which is our closest relation, lives in a matriarchal society.
Most fairly knowledgeable people know of four different species of ape that is the gorilla, orang-utan, gibbon and chimpanzee. What is not so well known is that there is another species of ape called the bonobo. This is probably because it was only first discovered by Europeans in 1929 and was considered then to be only a subspecies of the chimpanzees. More recent research has shown it to be very different from the chimpanzee. Being more lightly built and having legs and arms of about the same length. Because of this it has the body structure more like a human than any other ape. As all other apes have arms much longer than their legs. But the main difference is in the way it behaves, which again is more like human behaviour than other apes.
One of the first surprises about this ape is that it is very sexual in its behaviour. It is the only animal observed other than humans that use sex for pleasure as well as reproduction. Because like the human female the bonobo female will still have sex even when her body is not ready for fertilization. It also indulges in homosexual sexual behaviour with both sexes doing this and can copulate face to face. (Though this is not as big as a surprise as it would of been in the past, as also the orangutan has also been observed to copulate face to face).
In many other animals and apes aggression between males and sometimes females is quite commonplace. Most animals overcome this aggression by having a strict hierarchical system where everyone knows its place. With the animals with lesser social status giving way to those with higher status. Where the animal's place in the system is controlled by its strength and aggression. So fights do break out when an animal of lesser status wants to achieve higher status in the pecking order. This means in many species because the females are smaller than the males, end up at the bottom of the pecking order. But bonobo males are larger than the females yet in spite of that it is the males who end up at the bottom of the hierarchy. This is because for the bonobo females the slogan, “the sisterhood is powerful” does work for them.
Bonobo aggressive behaviour is far less than other animals because of the way they use sex. In the article by Frans B. M. de Waal, it compares the different behaviour of two females and a male chimpanzees with male and two females bonobos when they come across some food to eat. In the case of the chimpanzees the food was bananas. Their behaviour was very straight forward, the male chimpanzee fed first until he had enough and he then took away as many bananas as he could carry. Then the dominant female fed herself, while the subordinate female got nothing.
In the case of the bonobos it was sugar cane, but their behaviour was more complex. The first thing the two female did was to indulge in sex by rubbing their genitals together. While the male bonobo displays his erect penis to them, but they ignore him. Then the two female fed together equally and only when they had finish, was the male allowed to feed.
This is normal bonobo behaviour where there is a dispute or the possibility of one, the first thing they do is to have sex together, which defuses the animosity. In this situation the natural aggression of the male works against the male bonobo in contrast to the way it helps the male chimpanzees. As the female bonobos are less aggressive it is easier for them to bond with each other, which they reinforce through sexual bonding. It then makes it easier for them to gang up on males. Who although do also bond together through sex, still cannot cooperate and work together in the way the females do.
As the bonobo males are bigger than the females they stand a better chance in a one to one situation but even here, they are not dominant. In a conflict say over food, the female will immediately have sex with the male, then afterward he allows her to take away half the food available. Which seems to be the first case observed in the animal world of prostitution. Female bonobos will also encourage males to help in looking after their children in return for sexual favours. Which also sounds very much like human behaviour. So this it seems is how the slogan 'make love not war' can work in practice, by having disputes settled by sexual bonding. How effective this is can be, is assessed by comparing the bonobo's behaviour with that of the chimpanzees. Both animals share about 98% of the genetic makeup of humans and we were all the same animal as little as eight million years ago.
Bonobos have controversially been called a living early human fossil. This is because the body structure of the bonobo looks similar to that of a australopithecine, a early pre-human with similar length arms and legs. It is speculated that the bonobo is more similar to our common ancestor the australopithecine than either the chimpanzee or the human. With the human later growing longer legs and a more upright stance while the chimpanzee growing longer arms and becoming more of a tree dweller. As our body is shaped by our behaviour over evolutionary time, it is a reasonable guess that how the bonobo behaves today, is more like how our common ancestor the australopithecine behaved in the past.
The behaviour of the chimpanzees is of the traditional patriarchal society. Chimpanzees only have sex to fertilize the females when they are on heat. This is the ideal of the patriarchal Christian Church who has tried to enforce this type of behaviour for hundreds of years. Claiming that sex outside of marriage or even sex only for the sake of pleasure is ‘sinful’. So it is strange that the Christian Church has never held up the chimpanzee as an ideal of moral virtue.
Male chimpanzees tend to bond through fear and mutual protection, with a group of males holding on to a territory against other groups of males. There is even sometimes war between these different groups over land and many males get killed because of it. The effect of this, is there are always more females in a community than males as many male get killed through violence. Males not only show aggression to other groups of males but to each other, as they will charge each other or show off their strength to try and intimate each other to gain more status in the pecking order. Aggression is also shown towards females who have to give way to males in all disputes.
In contrast the bonobo society nearly all aggression is defused through sexual bonding. It has been observed in zoos where a cardboard box is thrown into the enclosure and more than one bonobo shows interest in it. They then briefly mount each other before playing with the box together. Or if one jealous male chases away another male near a female, the two males will then reconcile with each other by engaging in scrotal rubbing together. The same will be true if two adult females have a dispute over the behaviour of one of their children, they will reconcile by rubbing their genitals together. Male bonobos rarely fight each other over status. A male bonobo stays attached to his mother all his life and his status in society depends on the status of his mother, whom he will look to for protection from any aggression from other bonobos.
Apart from the fact that chimpanzee do not get married or ‘pair-bond’. Its society is very much like a normal human patriarchal society. And until bonobo behaviour was studied properly, chimpanzee behaviour justified the patriarchal society as being ‘natural’ for humans. So it is of interest that when primatologists first started to study bonobos in zoos during the 1950s the first findings were completely ignored by the scientific establishment until the 1970s. Even today most people are unaware of the behaviour of the bonobo or even that such a creature exists. The reason for this silence is because the bonobo's behaviour undermined all our patriarchal beliefs about human and pre-human behaviour.
If the bonobo is a very sexual ape than it has to be said that so is the human. Although patriarchal societies have attempted to enforce only sexual relations in the confines of marriage, many human have always had urges to want more than this. So in all patriarchal societies none have been able to prevent prostitution. While always in secret and sometimes quite openly both men and women have had relationships outside of marriage. In very recent times with the decline of the patriarchal society, marriage is breaking down in western countries. Which has resulted in many people frequently changing sexual partners, having ‘one night stands’ or even joining sex-clubs, going to sex-parties or advertising for sex in contact magazines.
So why do many people have the urge to have sex with many different partners? To the degree that the patriarchal society with all its laws, religious propaganda and social censure failed to stamp this behaviour out. The only reason could be is that before the patriarchal society took control with all its laws to restrict people's behaviour. People must have behaved very similar to how a bonobo behaves.
It is well know that many couples when they have a ‘flaming row’ or even one partner become violent with the other. They will afterwards ‘make up’ by having sex together. To the degree that some couples claim that they enjoy a turbulent relationship because they enjoy the making up afterwards so much. So this is similar to bonobo behaviour even if it is not so regular and more extreme. This also might be a explanation for S/M behaviour, that also involves violence by one partner on the other before a reconciliation takes place by having sex afterwards.
Another interesting point is that some people have ‘romantic evenings’ together. This involves sharing a meal together, either at a restaurant or sometimes at home, then having sex together. Which is also similar to what bonobos do, though they tend to have sex before the meal and not afterwards.
So like the bonobos, humans do associate conflict and food with sex. In times of war it used to be, and still is, in many parts of the world, that when a conquering army takes towns and cities with civilians till in them, all the women and even sometimes the men, are raped. So does this come from our ape past where we still associate violence with sex?
So this might be the reason why all over the world patriarchal cultures discourage promiscuous sex, and homosexuality as sex does defused violent behaviour. Perhaps in ancient matriarchal societies women did form a powerful sisterhood through lesbian sex. And this might be why women find it so difficult to form a powerful sisterhood in modern times. Because of anti-sexual patriarchal customs, women are hesitant about forming lesbian relationships with other women. This suggests humans did once behave like bonobo apes.
There is a very cruel custom in many Islamic countries called genital mutilation or clitoridectomy which is the removal of women’s clitoris. Why they do this is never explained. But lesbian sex is focused on the clitoris. When two women have sex together they stimulate the clitoris, either with the tongue, finger or they rub their clitorises together. But it would be impossible to do this if their clitorises are removed. This strongly suggests that genital mutilation is all about preventing women from having lesbian sex together. So does this mean women in matriarchal times did form a powerful sisterhood through lesbian sex?
This barbaric custom does point in that direction, because why else would they do this? Mohammedanism was started at about 600 AD, but what many people don’t know is that the tribe where Mohammed was born, the Koreshites, worshipped the Goddess Kore and her shrine was in Mecca. So he lived in a tribe that was still matriarchal although it was beginning to crumble by that time.
The Koran was originally the teachings of the Goddess Kore but was later rewritten by Mohammed, after he was forced to leave Mecca and live in Medina. There he put in many ideas and scriptures he learnt from the Jews. His ideas were so popular he eventually was able to command an army that was able to conquer Mecca and then the whole of Arabia. Starting a world wide religion. Even the word Allah comes from the Arabian Goddess Al-Lat. Allah was a later male version of Al-Lat. Her symbol was the crescent moon that is seen on Islamic flags. While Mohammed was conquering Arabia he had all the shrines to the Goddess Al-Lat destroyed.
This means Mohammed the founder of Islam, was born in a matriarchal society and so he may have observed women forming a strong sisterhood through lesbian love. So to prevent this genital mutilation was started to stop women bonding this way. He probably knew about clitoridectomy as it was used long before Islam, but now this religion uses it far more than any other patriarchal religion.
Though whether women can come together through lesbian sex in modern times is debatable. Heterosexual and lesbian women disagreed with each other in the Feminist Movement. Betty Friedan one of the founders of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1960s referred lesbians as the “lavender menace,” because she feared that “man-hating” lesbians would give feminism a bad name. Lesbians generally are more extreme and outspoken in their opinions and have had to separate from mainstream feminist organizations and call themselves radical feminists. So a sisterhood between lesbians and heterosexual women looks unlikely.
In the past, when people used to worship Goddesses the patriarchal priests condemned the priestess of Goddess temples as being prostitutes. When the Romans first conquered Britain many of the Celtic tribes were still ruled by Queens. Their behaviour was seen as being very scandalous by later writers, as some of these Queens would openly have sex with large numbers of different men.
So it does suggest that the old matriarchal societies were far more sexual than the later patriarchal societies whom fought a loosing battle against sexual expression. Which does suggest that a matriarchal society could perhaps be as sexual as a bonobo society. With people bonding together through sexual behaviour, allowing people to be more intimate with each other. Which will in turn will create a closer, more caring and more loving society.
War has been ‘normal’ throughout recorded history, where there has never been a time when there hasn't been a war going on in some part of the world. Many people have written about the senseless suffering of war, and have look unsuccessfully for ways to prevent future wars. The study of both the chimpanzee and bonobo societies shows there is an alternative to war. In the non-sexual chimpanzee society, conflict and war is normal. In the very sexual bonobo society conflict in rare. So because of the study of these different ape societies we find that the slogan ‘make love not war’ does work.
Bonobos are not the only female dominated primate, the rhesus macaques monkey also has a matriarchal social structure. Like the bonobo the rhesus macaques females do stick together in a powerful sisterhood. So that if a larger male was to pick on a lone female and she gives a distress call, then every other female in the area will come to her aid and beat up the lone male. Though the rhesus macaques are not as sexual as the bonobo and like most other animals only mate when the females are on heat.
The lemurs of Madagascar are also matriarchal, but unlike the bonobos and rhesus macaques the females do not need a powerful sisterhood to dominate the males. It seems that subservience to the female is the instinctive behaviour of male lemurs. It has been theorised that the reason for this, is a long dry season in Madagascar which lasts about 8 months of the year. In that time there is very little food and so for any lemur species to survive, it seems that the lives of the females are more important that the males.
The way Darwin’s theory of evolution has been interpreted you would think that the most important entities in the survival of any species, are alpha males. But this is all smoke and mirrors, because the survival of any species depends on the health and survival of its mothers. It is clear that evolution has shaped a man’s body to be bigger and stronger that females. But in nearly every other way women’s bodies are better designed for survival than men’s bodies. The reason for this is that mothers are the ones where the fetus grows in their bodies and will feed and care for the infant while they are unable fend for themselves, until they are old enough to look after themselves.
So on an island like Madagascar with a long dry season where all animals starve. In any lemur family group if the larger males commandeer all the food for themselves and leave nothing for the females so most die of starvation. Then in the long term the lemurs in that group cannot survive. This is because with fewer females every year surviving there will be fewer young being born and in time that group will die out. The reason is that primates don’t give birth to large numbers of young with each birth and so each female is limited in how many young she can produce. (Groups of lemurs are officially called a ‘conspiracy’ which is a bit weird, and may be about a bias against them as lemur groups are dominated by females.)
Whereas if we have the opposite situation, where the males are submissive and allow the females to feed first. Then most females will survive in the group and if the males die first, it will make very little difference to the group’s survival. This is because one male can fertilize all the females that are available. So the group can continue to survive even if the majority of males die every year. This means through evolutionary pressure the behaviour of males is dictated by the long dry season. Where aggressive males who hog the food for themselves, the off spring they fathered will die. Whereas the lemurs where the male were submissive to the females, their off spring are the ones that continued to survive, even if they die of hunger.
Which means in evolutionary terms males are expendable and surplus to requirements, but females are not. This could have happened in human evolution. One of the theories of why we now live in a male dominated world is because of farming. Male archaeologists like to claim it was men who invented farming with no evidence for this, but if was far more likely it was invented by women.
Before the agriculture revolution people were hunter/gatherers, with men doing the hunting and women the gathering. Women were gathering seeds and would observe that any seeds that gets spilt on the ground would grow into a plant. So women would start planting spare seeds they had gathered. So it means more food they can gather next year. Slowly this practise would evolve into farming giving humans an abundance of food.
But before this happened food was in short supply and seasonal while we lived in hunter/gather tribes. So at times of scarcity the people may have realised the importance the mothers in the survival of the tribe and she was given preferential treatment. We get a glimpse of this in the many stone female statuettes that has survived from the stone-age, dated between 38,000 to 14,000 years ago. The most famous is the Venus of Willendorf. Many have voluptuous figures with large breasts and some even look obese. There were very few statuettes of males and to explain this, male pantheologists have speculated that these statuettes were stone-age pornography. Something totally denied by feminists.
The problem is that these statuettes were carved long before the agriculture revolution when food wasn’t so plentiful, as it later became. This suggests that the mothers of that period got the majority of the food available because so many are fat suggesting they were the dominant sex. Another problem with them is that hunter/gather societies don’t stay in one place unless living in the middle of a tropical rain forest, where food is easy available all times of the year. They have to move around gathering and hunting for food. Walking long distances every day wouldn’t be very easy for obese women. So were they carried on some form of primitive sedan chairs? If they were, it does suggest they had the status of a queen.
So there would have been evolutionary pressure on stone-age men to behaved like lemur males. Because like with lemurs any tribe where the males were dominant and took most of the food for themselves, would slowly die out during times of food scarcity. But there may have been another reason why matriarchal stone-age tribes stood a better chance of survival, and that would be that women would be fairer in they way they governed.
At the end of the last century I came across a book called, “Bad Samaritans: First World Ethics and Third World Debt” By Paul Vallely. The author is a Christian journalist who was upset by how badly famine aid was shared out, because as usual, most aid never gets into the hands of those who most need it. The book is a gloomy read, as he exposes the corruption of governments, the banks and the aid industry. But then in Chapter Eight he gives one uplifting story.
He visits a refugee camp called Tendelti on the borders between Sudan and Chad. He had been frustrated in how aid is distributing in many of these camps. This was because what generally happened was that the local Sheiks would commandeer all the food for themselves. Then they would wheel and deal the food aid in their trust, for their own benefit and not care about the community they rule.
What was different about Tendelti was that all the able-bodied men had gone to fight in a wars or find work in cities, leaving only the women, children and a few old and crippled men. The women then reorganised everything very differently to what the men would do. To quote a paragraph from this book. -
“The women had devised a new system to concentrate most on those children who were most in need. Everyone else would live off mokheit and the other scant famine foods to which the desert people turned at times of desperation. Slowly the condition of the children, which Oxfam nurses had described as ‘appalling’ when the camp was first established, was beginning to improve. ‘We have organized a special sitting for the children who will not eat on their own so that we can make sure that they do take some food,’ said Aleem Hassan Mamadan, who had been elected by more than two thousand members of the Asangor tribe, one of the hardest-hit groups of these cross-border peoples. Her husband and her four children had died in the famine. She and four other children survived. She was finding time to look after them as well as take part in the organization of the camp. Other women were equally impressive. Fatuma leader of a group of a thousand Arab tribeswomen who had trekked en masse across the desert from Chad to Tendlti seven months before; in addition to her own two children she had adopted a third, a child whose mother had died in the drought and whose father had been killed in the war. Halima Mohammed Hassam, though only aged twenty-two, was the leader of 1,200 Marareet tribespeople and had similarly adopted two children of a murdered family.‘It is not difficult to manage without men,’ said Matka Mohammed, a handsome women who led the 1,300 Zagawe tribeswomen in the camp. Her cheeks bore the ritual scars of a warrior family.”
These women then tells the author that men are useless and only good for one thing. He then goes on to try and square what he witnessed in Tendelti with his Christian beliefs. This book shows clearly how badly men do rule our world and how much better is could be if women ruled instead. It demonstrates that unless a community lives in an area where food is always available most times of the year. Male rule is so incompetent that any tribe they rule, will quickly go extinct in the stone-age if there is seasonal food scarcity.
So female rule continued into the Neolithic age when farming started, but with a more reliable source of food now available there as less evolutionary pressure for males to obey women. Then when violent patriarchal tribes began conquer these peaceful farming civilizations, the mismanagement of the new patriarchal rulers didn’t result in mass starvation because of the surplus of food that farming created. The community still survived because mothers could still be fed, even if they were pushed down the pecking order.
So is the femdom desires in many men a throw back to our stone-age past? They could be, but are these desires now not needed in our modern age? After all the human race can now survive all right even if we are ruled by corrupt and incompetent men. The problem is that male rulers are still capable of destroying our world like we saw in the cold war. The threat of nuclear warfare has never gone away and all it requires is that nuclear weapons get into the hands of someone who is either stupid or insane to start a nuclear war. As Albert Einstein once said. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Suggesting that a nuclear war will take us back to the stone-age.
The fact that male rulers threaten each other with nuclear war and were unable to make some sort of peace deal to ensure a nuclear war won’t happen. Does call into question the competence and sanity of male rulers and why we need women rulers instead. If that’s the case can matriarchy save the world? It could if men get organized and decide they prefer to be ruled by women and not corrupt and incompetence men.
Bibliography
Bonobo Sex and Society: The behaviour of a close relative challenges assumptions about male supremacy in human evolution - Frans B. M. de Waal – Scientific American, March 1995
Beauty and the Beasts: Women, Ape and Evolution - Carole Jahme
The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace through Pleasure - Dr. Susan Block
Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape - Frans B. M. de Waal
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence - Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson
Bad Samaritans: First World Ethics and Third World Debt - Paul Vallely.
Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection – Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
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