Gay chimps

Let’s abolish gender. The males are physically a lot stronger, even the best-trained female athletes only reach average male strength. They’re always connected. At Lola ya Bonobo, they were raised with other infants and human substitute mothers. They spend a prodigious amount of time doing rough-housing and mock fighting, called “rough-and-tumble play.”

Professor de Waal says it’s found among all primates, including in human studies.

Chimpanzees are very male dominant, first of all, but they’re also very dominance-oriented. And so it’s a very important part of the group structure. And Newt Gingrich recommended it to the Republicans at the time, and I think that’s how the word got entrenched in political language. So there’s a huge difference in physical strength, but otherwise the differences are not nearly as great as we see in many other primates.

Now, gender, gender has to do with expectation.

And unfortunately, in English, we have begun to confuse these two – gender and sex – because English unfortunately has only one word – having sex and being of a certain sex – has only one word for that, and that’s why people, I think, have started using gender now.

And then in the bonobos, of course, we have this situation that the alpha female is alpha over everyone, including the males.

And so I described in my book, Mama’s Last Hug, how Mama, the alpha female, would bring parties together, literally drag a male to another male, to get them to groom each other and so on, and so fixed the relationships in the group.

HOST: Like the myth that a primate patriarchy is deterministically encoded in our human biology, it turns out that male care for offspring is common among primates, and gender diversity and gender potential are pervasive and accepted.

And what’s that got to do with gender equality?

Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, MA/New York, NY.

Grueter, C., & Stoinski, T.S. (2016). We see the attraction to infants in young females. I’m a biologist by training even though I’ve been in the psychology department for 25 years.

HOST: It’s telling that one of the worst slurs you can hurl at someone is to call them an “animal.” As the professor of psychology Nick Haslam observes, yes, we are animals – but we’re animals who like to believe we’re not merely animals. 

Of course, he notes, calling someone a snake or a rat or a toad is very different from calling them lion-hearted or eagle-eyed.

And if you look at the other primates – and they sometimes use this argument – if you look at the other primates, it’s mostly a female job to take care of offspring, and males do very little except protecting the offspring sometimes. It relates to genitals and sexual dimorphism, size, secondary characteristics, all biological characteristics, hormones and so on.

That’s actually quite common in the primates and in the bonobo, I would say, they don’t have a preference for one gender or the other – so we do have that kind of individuals. Sandel and Reddy suggest it may be possible that these behaviors are more frequent at Ngogo, potentially due to the large number of males at the site, and the heightened tension due to neighboring chimpanzee communities on all sides.

And so this whole nonsense of that care for offspring is not naturally present in the males, I think, is nonsense.

HOST: Another potential Professor de Waal finds among primates is gender variability. American Anthropologist 121 (2): 487-479.

Now something about male affairs and how we got into the patriarchy, basically, the story that the natural order between men and women is that men are dominant over women because look at all the primates.

And then the business people picked it up and they wrote business books about how to be an alpha male, and reduced alpha male basically to bullies. But what about chimpanzees?

For a long time, we have known that same-sex sexual behaviors among chimpanzees occurred, but they were considered rare.