It cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated.
—Mary Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792
“I asked my mum to be cut,” says Hibo Wardere, a forty-six-year-old woman from Mogadishu, Somalia, who now lives in east London. She was age six at the time, she continues, as we sit in a small, dark café near her home. She had no idea what she was asking for, of course, only that the other girls were bullying her for being the last one left. They told her she was dirty, that she stank. So she begged her mother for a procedure that, little could she have known as a small child, would cause her unimaginable pain and lifelong trauma: female genital mutilation.
Cutting of young girls is the norm in Somalia. There’s a belief, says Wardere, that the practice dates back to ancient Egypt, when male slaves were routinely castrated before they worked in the households of the pharaohs. Nowadays it’s common through large swaths of Africa and a few corners of the Middle East. The countries with the worst records include Egypt, Sudan, Mali, and Ethiopia, along with Somalia, where barely a girl escapes the knife. The United Nations World Health Organization estimates that more than 125 million women and girls alive today have undergone female genital mutilation in the countries where it’s most concentrated, and almost all became victims before the age of fifteen.
The mutilation itself can take many horrifying forms. But the most common cuts fall into three categories. The first is the partial or total removal of the clitoris. The second includes this, plus the partial or total removal of the smaller, inner folds on either side of the vaginal opening. The third is the wholesale narrowing of the vagina’s entrance by cutting and sealing the folds on either side, like a pair of lips being hacked and sewn shut. This final type, known as “infibulation,” is often the most damaging of the three, leaving women with only a tiny gap through which to pee and pass menstrual fluid. It can be so small that they sometimes have to be cut open before they can have sex or give birth.
Infibulation is what was done to Wardere.
It happened forty years ago, but she remembers it as vividly as if it had been this morning. She grew up assuming that being cut was something to be proud of. It was a feeling reinforced when her female relatives threw a party in her honor to celebrate the big moment. They cooked her favorite food. They told her she was about to become a woman. In her six-year-old innocence she excitedly imagined that this might mean finally trying on her mother’s makeup. “They made you feel like something amazing was going to happen,” she tells me. “It was not like that. It was the beginning of a nightmare.”
In Somalia, female genital mutilation is often carried out by a respected female elder, who’s likely to have cut hundreds of girls already. Wardere recalls the woman who did it to her. “Her eyes haunt me even today. She instructed my mother, my aunties, and other helpers to hold me down, and they did. My mother looked away, but the others did hold me down. Then she ripped my flesh as I screamed and struggled and prayed to die. She just kept on going. It didn’t bother her that I was just a child. It didn’t bother her that I was begging for mercy.” Wardere’s torn flesh lay on the floor. The life sentence had been served. The cut was cruel enough, but she would also suffer recurrent urinary infections and scarring. The flashbacks would haunt her forever.
An entire decade would pass before she finally understood the point of it all. She never stopped asking her mother why she had allowed her to be cut. When she was sixteen, she was told that it was to put her off having sex before marriage.
For many millions of women, the agony of infibulation is quietly absorbed as an unavoidable part of life. In this silence, the practice continues to be inflicted on the next generation, the one after that, and so on, as it has for millennia. But Wardere refused to accept what had been done to her. “I decided I can’t keep quiet,” she says. When she arrived in England in the late 1980s, age eighteen and alone, fleeing civil war in Somalia, one of her first decisions was to seek medical help so she could be opened up.
She went on to marry happily and have seven children. In the last few years she’s taken the brave step of speaking out about her experiences, and even detail them in an autobiography, Cut: One Woman’s Fight Against FGM in Britain Today. As a prominent activist, she talks regularly in schools about the risks of genital mutilation and to urge girls not to become victims like her. This hasn’t come without a price: Wardere has lost friends. When it was revealed that she refused to have her daughters cut, people warned her they would be considered impure. “They said nobody will marry them, that they’re sluts.”
The puzzling thing about female genital mutilation is that there seem to be no winners. Not men, not women. Wives have reported depression and domestic abuse because their husbands can’t accept that they don’t want to have sex. One young man admitted to her that he couldn’t bring himself to sleep with his wife on their wedding night because she had undergone infibulation and he was scared of hurting her. If men would accept brides who weren’t mutilated, she notes, the stigma might go away. Yet, however damaging it might be to their wives and their marriages, few men stand up against the practice.
And the reason for this is simple. The torture continues because it does what it was always intended to do. A woman who has been cut as a child will almost certainly remain a virgin when she’s older. It would be too painful for her to be anything else. And once she’s married, a husband can be confident that she’ll be a reliably faithful wife. Throughout history, mutilating a girl’s genitals has been the most viciously effective means of assuring a man that his children will be his own and not someone else’s. It’s as brutal a manifestation of sexual jealousy and mate guarding as anyone has ever seen.
The practice has been absorbed into some cultures so fully and for so long that women now have little choice but to give it their full cooperation. Without it, they risk being ostracized. Girls put pressure on each other to be cut, like they did when Wardere was six years old. Mothers take their own daughters to be cut, like Wardere’s did. And female elders do the cutting. “It’s all instigated by women. Men have nothing to do with it. But who are they doing it for? That’s the question,” she tells me. “It’s all about control. They don’t trust you with your own body.”
In the café where we’re meeting, older Somali men sit at neighboring tables sipping their coffees. She speaks loudly, refusing to be cowed. “They are doing it for him! It’s all about him, it’s not about you.”
“A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night.”
Female genital mutilation is only one way in which a woman’s sexual agency is repressed. There have been countless others throughout history.
The agonizing practice of foot binding, which is thought to have begun as a fashion fad in Imperial China in the tenth century, persisted into the twentieth. Young girls’ feet would be so tightly wrapped in cloth that their toes would curve inward, leaving a pointed stump as tiny as three inches long. Historian Amanda Foreman has described how foot binding became a symbol of chastity and devotion in a society that prized obedience to men, centered on the teachings of the philosopher Confucius. “Every Confucian primer on moral female behavior included examples of women who were prepared to die or suffer mutilation to prove their commitment,” she writes in Smithsonian Magazine. Like infibulation, it became so integral to Chinese culture that women became the mistresses of their own oppression. It was finally eliminated under pressure from China’s Communist Party in the 1950s. There are a small number of older women alive even today with deformities caused by it.
As old forms of torture disappear, new ones swiftly roll in. In Cameroon and some parts of West Africa, girls between the ages of eight and twelve today suffer a procedure, often at the hands of their mothers, known as breast “ironing.” A grinding stone, broom, belt, or another object is heated, then used to press a girl’s budding breasts flat. The goal is to keep her looking like a child for as long as possible, so people assume she hasn’t yet entered puberty. Aside from the psychological impact and immediate pain, breast ironing can cause long-term medical problems including scarring and difficulty breast-feeding, according to Rebecca Tapscott, who documented the practice for the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University in 2012.
Some methods of control, meanwhile, are deceptively subtle. Women in traditional Dogon communities in Mali use “menstrual huts” to seclude themselves during their periods. Beverly Strassmann at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and her colleagues discovered through field research, including many hundreds of paternity tests, that men who followed the traditional Dogon religion were four times less likely to be cuckolded than Christian men, whose wives didn’t use the huts. It suggests that menstrual huts have allowed men to covertly track their wives’ fertility.
Primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy believes that all this—the systematic and deliberate repression of female sexuality for millennia—is what really lies behind the myth of the coy, passive female. She raised this, somewhat controversially, in her 1981 book The Woman That Never Evolved. Stepping outside the usual bounds of biology and viewing human behavior from a historical point of view, she asked whether scientists had approached the question of women’s sexuality entirely the wrong way. Could it be that women and their evolutionary ancestors weren’t naturally passive and monogamous, with a tiny sex drive, the way Charles Darwin and Angus John Bateman had assumed? Might it instead be the case that for thousands of years women had been compelled by men to behave more modestly?
Sexual jealousy and mate guarding are powerful biological drives seen throughout the animal kingdom, as biologist Robert Trivers learned in his observations of pigeons from his Harvard University window. If behavior like this had been exaggerated by humans, woven into society and culture, it might explain why women now appear to behave as modestly as they do. Like the female pigeon uncomfortably pecked back into her place by her mate, women may not be naturally passive and coy at all but just constrained in the ultimate interests of their mates. According to Sarah Hrdy, this explains the mismatch between science’s old assumptions about female sexuality and the broad range of sexual behavior we actually see.
Her point is reinforced by the ways in which women are treated around the world. Besides horrific practices like female genital mutilation, few places exist that don’t exercise a moral double standard. Passersby tut at the teenager who dares to bare too much flesh. Neighbors whisper about the single mother whose children have different fathers. From how she dresses and carries herself to how promiscuous she is, most societies expect a woman to behave more modestly than a man.
When this standard isn’t enough to limit her behavior, humans have gone to elaborate lengths to enforce it. The most aggressive include forced marriage, domestic violence, and rape. One member of the gang who violently raped and killed a student on a bus in India in 2012 claimed to the BBC in an interview from prison that it was her own fault for taking the bus in the first place. As far as he was concerned, she was the one who had transgressed. “A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night,” he told the reporters. “Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes.”
This double standard is even written into the laws of some countries. In Saudi Arabia, women’s sexual freedom has been effectively removed because of the long list of things they’re forbidden to do, including driving, mixing with men in public, and traveling without a chaperone or a man’s permission. Although this takes repression to an extreme, the expectation of female modesty runs through many major religions. The hijab and burka worn by some Muslim women are demonstrations of this. The orthodox Jewish concept of tzniut similarly requires both sexes to cover up their bodies, but for married women in particular to cover their hair.
For Sarah Hrdy, the way female modesty is so deeply entwined with human culture like this, even to this day, has its roots in the ancient sexual repression of women. When developing this idea, she originally took her cue from a feminist psychiatrist called Mary Jane Sherfey, who had studied in the 1940s under Alfred Kinsey, the sexologist famous for overturning popular assumptions about people’s sexual behavior. In 1973 Sherfey published an incendiary work of her own, exploring female orgasms. It was entitled The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality. Her conclusion was that the female sex drive had been vastly underestimated, and that women are in fact naturally endowed with an insatiable sex drive. Sherfey added that society itself was built around the demand to keep women’s sexuality in check.
She wrote, “It is conceivable that the forceful suppression of women’s inordinate sexual demands was a prerequisite to the dawn of every modern civilization and almost every living culture. Primitive woman’s sexual drive was too strong.” Its enormous strength was matched only by the incredible force that men through history had deployed to restrain it.
Unfortunately for Sherfey, she was largely dismissed by the scientific establishment, partly because her bold deductions went a little too far against the grain, but also because she made genuine scientific and anatomical errors. Don Symons, the anthropologist who has argued that the female orgasm didn’t evolve for a purpose and that females have no biological reason to want more than one mate, was especially unimpressed. Sherfey’s “sexually insatiable woman is to be found primarily, if not exclusively, in the ideology of feminism, the hopes of boys, and the fears of men,” he wrote.
Sarah Hrdy, meanwhile, believed Symons was being unfair and that Sherfey, while wrong on many counts, had hit upon something important. Females could be sexually assertive. “Understand, Sherfey was writing years before primatologists knew much about sexual behavior in wild primates, certainly before we guessed at the existence of orgasmic capacity in nonhuman females; yet Sherfey’s wild hunches anticipated future discoveries,” Hrdy wrote in Human Nature in 1997.
The females of some monkey and ape species, we now know from a number of different sources, do appear to experience orgasms. In 1998 Italian researchers Alfonso Troisi and Monica Carosi published a paper in the journal Animal Behaviour describing orgasms in female Japanese macaques. They spent more than two hundred hours observing the monkeys in captivity, in which time they recorded almost the same number of copulations. In a third of these, females showed what they described as a “clutching reaction,” which they interpreted as orgasm. This was associated with “muscular body spasms and, sometimes, characteristic vocalizations. When displaying the clutching reaction, the female arched her neck and/or reached back to the leg, shoulder, or face of the male and clutched his hair,” Troisi and Carosi explained.
In the summer of 2016, evolutionary biologists Mihaela Pavlicev, at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and Günter Wagner at Yale University, concluded that animal studies do indeed suggest that the female orgasm originated for a purpose. In their paper published in the Journal of Experimental Zoology, they outline how orgasms trigger a surge in hormones, which may in the past have been linked to ovulation—the release of eggs—as well as helping eggs implant in the uterus. Female cats and rabbits, for instance, actually need physical stimulation to release their eggs. In humans today, orgasms and ovulation aren’t connected, but according to Pavlicev and Wagner, they may once have been.
By this logic, if orgasms aren’t a vestige of male physiology and women really can have strong sex drives, then there must be another explanation for women being perceived as innately chaste and modest. Mary Jane Sherfey believed that something was holding women back from being the powerful sexual creatures they were born to be. This something was human culture.
Sherfey’s line of thinking wasn’t new. It stretched far back in feminist and political ideology.
“Couched in superstitious, religious and rationalized terms, behind the subjugation of women’s sexuality lay the inexorable economics of cultural evolution which finally forced men to impose it and women to endure it,” she wrote in The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality. “Generally, men have never accepted strict monogamy except in principle. Women have been forced to accept it.” From the smallest laws to the most sweeping religious doctrines, she argued, cultures everywhere had tried to burn away every last scrap of female sexual freedom. This subjugation was the root of the moral double standard, the punishments, and the violent brutality that women continue to live with today.
In the nineteenth century, the German philosopher, journalist, and socialist Friedrich Engels, who famously collaborated with Karl Marx, had already drawn connections between the economic and political dominance of men and their control of female sexuality. He described it dramatically as “the world historical defeat of the female sex.” He went on, “The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.”
Just when in human history societies might have shifted from being fairly egalitarian to no longer equal is hard to pin down. Melvin Konner, anthropology professor at Emory University in Atlanta, tells me that when hunter-gatherers began to settle down and abandon their nomadic ways of living, between ten and twelve thousand years ago, things would have changed for women. With the domestication of animals and agriculture, as well as denser societies, specialized groups emerged. “For the first time you had a critical mass of men who could exclude women,” explains Konner.
Systems of male control—patriarchies—emerged that exist to this day. And as they accumulated land, property, and wealth, it would have become even more important for men to be sure their wives were unswervingly faithful. A man who couldn’t guarantee his babies were his own wasn’t just being cuckolded but also risked losing what he owned. Mate guarding intensified.
Historian and feminist Gerda Lerner explored the subject in her landmark 1986 book The Creation of Patriarchy. Studying women in ancient Mesopotamia, a region spanning parts of what is modern-day Iraq and Syria, one of the cradles of human civilization, she pointed out that there was a strong emphasis on virginity before marriage. After marriage, a wife’s sexual behavior was heavily policed. “Male dominance in sexual relations is most clearly expressed in the institutionalisation of the double standard in Mesopotamian law. . . . Men were free to commit adultery with harlots and slave women.” Wives, by contrast, were expected to be completely faithful to their husbands.
Women, in no small way, were treated as the property of men. “Women’s sexual subordination was institutionalised in the earliest law codes and enforced by the full power of the state,” concluded Lerner. This included wearing the veil. Married, respectable women in the Assyrian empire in northern Mesopotamia, which existed until around 600 BC, were expected to cover their heads in public. Slave girls and prostitutes, on the other hand, were forbidden from wearing veils. If they broke this rule, they faced physical punishment.
Lerner suggested this subordination of women may even have given ancient civilizations their first model for slavery. “In Mesopotamian society, as elsewhere, patriarchal dominance in the family took a variety of forms,” she wrote in The Creation of Patriarchy. “The father had the power of life and death over his children. . . . He could give his daughters in marriage. . .or he could consecrate them to a life of virginity. . . . A man could pledge his wife, his concubines and their children as pawns for his debt; if he failed to pay back the debt, these pledges would be turned into debt slaves.”
Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy tells me, “Sexual jealousy is everywhere, even in nonpatriarchal societies. But it’s so exaggerated in patriarchal societies because they’re defending all these other interests.” She has firsthand experience of how this feels. When she wanted to marry, Hrdy was forced to elope because some members of her conservative Texan family disapproved of her choice of husband. “Men still thought they had the right to tell me who I should marry. They thought they had the right to control my inheritance. They assumed that they owned me. Really it was about property, with women included as property.”
Over thousands of years, this has had profound consequences for how women behaved and how they were then perceived. As patriarchies grew and spread, women gradually lost the power to earn a living, own property, lead a public life, or have much control over what happened to their children. The only freedom they were afforded were within the cages that had been created for them. So they were left with little choice but to behave in ways that served the system. A modest, coy woman who appeared to be chaste would marry well and prosper, while the less modest woman would be shunned.
As Sarah Hrdy shows in her own writings on the subject, there’s plenty of evidence for this. Throughout recorded history, virginity and faithfulness have been universally celebrated as female virtues, and rigorously policed. In her 1999 book Mother Nature, she spans the globe with her examples. In India, there was the centuries-old Hindu practice of sati, in which widows sacrificed themselves (through choice, or not) on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Among the indigenous Maya people in southern Mexico and Central America there were terrifying tales of a demon who seizes and rapes women who behave immodestly. And in ancient Greece, women were taught to behave self-consciously through their dress and the way they carried themselves, their eyes downcast in the presence of men. “For the ancient Greeks, a woman’s animal nature lurked at the core of her being. It was deemed necessary to ‘tame’ her,” Hrdy writes. Aristocratic women, whose families had the most to lose by way of property and wealth, had practically no freedom at all. They were kept indoors, veiled, and in the shadows.
The shadow cast over women has never gone away. From the Mesopotamians to the ancient Greeks all the way to the present day, societies have restricted and punished women who have dared to breach the moral standard. By Charles Darwin’s time, thousands of years into this regime, ideas of female nature had thoroughly adjusted to the new normal. Humans began to see women through a lens of their own creation. The job was done. Victorians, including Darwin, believed that women really were naturally coy, modest, and passive.
Female sexuality had been suppressed for so long that scientists didn’t even question whether this modesty and meekness might not be biological at all.
“One of the first things that I noticed was that females were attacking males.”
Even if humans once lived egalitarian lives long ago, was male domination of women inevitable? That’s the question our complicated history and biology leave us asking. Does the biological drive that men have to guard females, combined with the fact that they’re on average bigger and have greater upper body strength, mean that human societies would have always ended up with men in charge? Is patriarchy hardwired into our biology?
This may be impossible to answer, but science does have a perspective on it. The clues, some researchers believe, may lie in our primate past.
“The evolutionary perspective. . .reminds us that patriarchy is a human manifestation of a sexual dynamic that is played out over and over again, in many different ways, in other animals,” writes anthropologist Barbara Smuts at the University of Michigan in a 1995 paper in the journal Human Nature. Smuts was known for her detailed field studies of monkeys and apes. She was a female pioneer in primatology, with many of her students themselves going on to have important careers in the field. This paper is particularly special, though, because it explores one of the thorniest aspects of our past: the possible evolutionary origins of patriarchy.
In her paper, Smuts details how far male monkeys and apes often go to sexually restrict the females of their species by force. Across the primate world, she explains, you can see evidence of male domination. When females are in the fertile phases of their sexual cycles, males tend to be far more aggressive. One example is the rhesus macaque, which lives in large troops. Males are about 20 percent bigger than the females. Researchers have observed that when a female macaque tries to mate with low-ranking males in the hierarchy, higher-ranking males try to block her by chasing or attacking her. Sarah Hrdy’s observations of infanticide among Hanuman langurs in India are another example of males using violence to coerce females into mating with them. Mountain gorillas, according to Smuts, use the same tactic.
Hamadryas baboons in northern Africa are even more aggressive and “try to maintain control over females all the time,” she writes. “When a female strays too far from her male, he threatens her by staring and raising his brows. If she does not respond instantly by moving toward him, he attacks her with a neckbite. The neckbite is usually symbolic—the male does not actually sink his teeth into her skin—but the threat of injury is clear.” Orangutans provide another striking example of male coercion. For them, resisted mating appears to be the rule rather than a rare exception. Half of matings take place after long and brutal struggles with females.
But one of the most interesting cases for those who want to better understand humans is the chimpanzee. Along with bonobos, chimps are our closest genetic relatives in the primate world. Different estimates have dated our last common ancestor to be living eight to thirteen million years ago (the last ancestor shared by humans and dogs, by contrast, was possibly as far back as a hundred million years), which means we have a great amount in common. Researchers have noted that chimps are hierarchical, and males can be ruthlessly vicious toward other males when they’re trying to establish themselves at the top of the order. Males show aggression toward females, too, although this aggression is about sexual coercion and mate guarding.
According to research published in 2007 by a team of prominent anthropologists, including Martin Muller, then at Boston University, more aggressive male chimps manage to mate more than the less aggressive ones. Even a low-ranking male will become aggressive when a female refuses him. Barbara Smuts has noted that the primatologist Jane Goodall once saw a male attack a female six times in five hours in the desperate effort to get her to mate with him. “Chimpanzees have been characterized in terms of their intercommunity warfare, meat eating, infanticide, cannibalism, male status-striving, and dominance over females,” according to Craig Stanford, a professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, in a 1998 paper in Current Anthropology. He adds that female chimps can be described as “essentially reproductive commodities over which males compete.”
If a scientist had only ever studied chimpanzees, he or she might conclude that this is the natural order of life for the great apes. It’s alluringly easy to draw parallels between patriarchal humans and macho male chimpanzees.
But according to Barbara Smuts, scientists have to be careful about this. In her 1995 paper on the evolutionary origins of patriarchy, she points out that, despite all the male aggression we see in the primate world, females aren’t helpless victims. They rarely submit willingly to male control. They actually have their own clever ways of exerting power over males. “Although male primates typically are larger than females, this does not mean that they always win when they have conflicts of interest with females,” she writes.
And there’s one particularly strong example of this. It’s the other primate with which we share as close a relationship as we do with chimpanzees.
The bonobo enclosure at the enormous San Diego Zoo in California attempts to approximate as closely as possible conditions in the wild where these creatures are from: the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There’s a high waterfall, steep canyons with sunny and shady corners, and ropes that mimic hanging branches. The baby of the group, a fluffy, black two-year-old, leaps from one end to the other, following her mother. One of the older females sits comfortably, chewing on a long twig and occasionally peering at visitors through the glass barrier. To my eyes at least, the animals seem content.
All, that is, except one.
“I think he’s traumatized,” says Amy Parish, a primatologist who teaches at the University of Southern California. She has been studying bonobos in captivity for twenty-five years, starting her career at the University of Michigan in the 1980s as a student of Barbara Smuts. Parish tells me that the unhappy bonobo is a male named Makasi. We watch him a little longer. He’s crouched alone to one side, with an arm resting on his knee. He softly licks his hand, which seems to be hurt. When he slopes off after a while, looking somewhat cowed, he keeps his injured hand protectively close to his head.
Bonobos are unusual in the ape world for being a species in which females dominate, with the oldest females appearing to be highest in the pecking order. Attacks by females on males are quite common.
“In bonobos it’s very important for males to have their mothers with them for life,” explains Parish. “We have this pejorative idea that when males are especially close to their mothers, that they’re momma’s boys and that’s a bad thing. But in this case, unlike chimps—where males separate really clearly from their mothers at adolescence in order to join the male dominance hierarchy—in bonobos, males maintain their relationship with their mother for life. She intervenes in his fights, protects him from violence; he gets to mate with her friends; he gets access to otherwise exclusive female feeding circles. So there’s a really big upside for males.”
Makasi’s injuries were caused by a female called Lisa. “A good portion of his finger is completely raw and the skin is gone. Several of his toes have parts missing, and apparently he has other injuries. . . . But it’s not uncommon that when males are injured that also there are injuries on the testicles or penis or anus,” she tells me. “Poor Makasi here was nursery reared. He doesn’t have a mother in the group who’s willing to protect him, so he’s vulnerable all the time. So he has very good reason to be cowed and afraid and to keep his distance. To be careful.”
Parish originally began studying bonobos to understand the role of friendship between male and female primates. Barbara Smuts had done similar work in baboons, but bonobos were something of a mystery. Until 1929 they weren’t even understood to be a separate species from chimpanzees. Many decades later, when they were finally studied up close, bonobo behavior turned out to be utterly different from that of their chimp cousins. “For forty years, the chimpanzee researchers had the corner of the market on man’s closest living relative,” explains Parish. “We built all our models of evolution based on a chimp model: patriarchal, hunting, meat eating, male bonding, male aggression toward females, infanticide, sexual coercion.” Bonobos turn this all on its head.
“One of the first things that I noticed was that females were attacking males,” Parish continues, as we sit on a bench next to the bonobo enclosure. “Every zoo would have some explanation. Like, oh, this male bonobo was ill when he was a youngster, and a female keeper took him home to nurse him back to health. And she must have somehow ruined him, made him soft or spoiled him. There was a zoo in Germany that didn’t even believe human females were suitable keepers for apes. Every zoo had some kind of folkloric explanation for what was ‘wrong’ with their male, because it didn’t seem like that was the proper way for males to behave, or for females for that matter. It seemed like a reversal of the natural order of things.”
Parish decided to look through veterinary records at different zoos to see how widespread this phenomenon was. Serious injuries are always recorded, making it easy to spot any patterns. “It was just astoundingly in one direction,” she tells me. In a group where there were multiple females, “females were systematically. . .inflicting routine, blood-drawing injuries on the males in the group.” Evidence from the wild backs up the idea that bonobo females tend to hold the balance of power. As well as being dominant, they seem to mate freely with males from other groups, without fear of males in their own.
“I realized that these kinds of folkloric explanations in the zoos were probably not the real explanation,” says Parish. “That maybe the ‘natural’ pattern in bonobos would be that females are dominant over males, and that instead of a patriarchy it was a matriarchy.”
It was a radical suggestion. The word matriarchy has to be used advisedly. In bonobos, there are strong connections between unrelated females, and a matriarchy usually refers to networks of females who are related to each other. “When I proposed this idea in my paper, particularly the chimpanzee researchers were reluctant to accept that it might be true,” she says. Some still resist the idea that females can be dominant in the same way males are in other species. Female bonobos have been labeled as “troublesome,” Parish laughs, while males have been called “henpecked.” Others have told her that bonobo males aren’t dominated by females at all, but that they’re somehow deferring to them in exchange for benefits like sex.
It’s now widely accepted, though, that bonobo females do tend to dominate males. In this, they aren’t alone in the animal kingdom. Female elephants are another more well-known example. They make up stable, core groups into and out of which males move transiently, depending on the breeding season. Spotted hyenas also live in clans ruled by an alpha female. Adult males rank lowest and eat last and are smaller and less aggressive than the females.
Aside from dominance, another way in which bonobos mark themselves apart from chimpanzees is in their sexual behavior. For the relatively brief time that I watch them at San Diego Zoo, I see three or four brief, casual copulations. This is quite normal. Bonobos seem to use sex as a kind of everyday social glue. Males have sex with males, females have sex with females.
Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal, based at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has worked closely with Parish, has described how bonobos also engage in oral sex, tongue kissing, and genital massage. “Sexual interactions occur more often among bonobos than among other primates,” he writes in an article in Scientific American in 2006. “Despite the frequency of sex, the bonobos rate of reproduction in the wild is about the same as that of the chimpanzee. A female gives birth to a single infant at intervals of between five and six years. So bonobos share at least one very important characteristic with our own species, namely, a partial separation between sex and reproduction.”
One more difference is hunting. Female bonobos are usually the ones who hunt for meat, often forest antelope, Parish tells me. “They flush the young ones out amongst the tall grass, while the moms are off feeding, and they eat them. There are some reports of males under the branches of females, throwing temper tantrums because they so desperately want some of the meat and they can’t have any of it unless one of the females, usually the mother, wants to give them some. Or they can offer females sex in exchange for food.”
According to Parish, bonobo society works the way it does because females form powerful bonds with each other, even if they aren’t related. “The males can be friendly. They have sex with each other. But it’s nothing like the intensity or the scope that we see in the females. They sit together, play chase and play wrestle, groom, share food, and have sex.” The males are usually physically larger, but by virtue of their tight bonds, bonobo females manage to take charge. Observing the bonobos in San Diego Zoo, she found that of the time females spent affiliating with other bonobos, two-thirds was with females. De Waal has even described female bonobos as a “gift to the feminist movement.”
Their observations, though, still have a few critics. Chimpanzee expert Craig Stanford argues that animals in captivity don’t behave exactly the same as those in the wild, because they’re artificially forced into proximity with each other. “I’ve never seen a wild bonobo, and I work on chimps, but those of us who do fieldwork with great apes have tended to be a little skeptical of the view of those folks who say chimps are from Mars and bonobos are from Venus,” he tells me. “All of the female bondedness, female empowerment and sexuality, and all that stuff happen in a much higher rate and in a much more prominent way in captivity then it does in the real world, in the wild.”
Parish disagrees. Although she has only studied bonobos in captivity, she insists, “There’s nothing we see in captivity that hasn’t also been documented in the wild. Sometimes the weights are different because they have more free time on their hands in a zoo. They don’t have to go get their own food. But the repertoire is the same.” Animal experts Sarah Hrdy and Patricia Gowaty tell me they agree that bonobos are today widely accepted as being an unusually female-dominant species.
The stakes are high.
Primate research is high profile because of the enormous implications it could have for how we understand human evolution. It’s tempting to want to categorize ourselves as being either like chimps or like bonobos, because the two species so neatly encapsulate the modern battle of the sexes. Judging humans by our patriarchal history, it’s easy to see why so many primatologists have compared us to chimpanzees. But is it possible that somewhere in our evolutionary history we were matriarchal like bonobos appear to be?
For primatologist Amy Parish, the existence of a primate species in which females tend to dominate is hugely important, if only because it opens the debate. “When we only had chimps in the model, it seemed like patriarchy was cemented in our evolutionary heritage for the last five to six million years, because we share so many traits in common with them. The kind of ‘man the hunter’ model, all of that was based on chimps. Now that we have an equally close living relative with a different pattern, it opens up the possibilities for imagining that it’s possible in our ancestry that females could bond in the absence of kinship, that matriarchies can exist.”
Bonobos aren’t the only primate species in which females cooperate. Hanuman langurs, as documented by Sarah Hrdy, for example, band together to fight off outside males intent on killing their infants. Some female primates are also known to use social relationships with males to defy control, according to Barbara Smuts. In one baboon group she studied in Kenya each female had a “friendship” with one or two males. “Friends traveled together, fed together, and slept together at night,” she explains. The male friend would protect her and her infants from other males, which meant that she faced less harassment. It’s an arrangement that prompted Harvard University primatologist Richard Wrangham to describe these males as “hired guns.”
The focus on dominance in primate behavior makes it easy to forget that there are also species out there in which the sexes coexist and cooperate relatively peacefully. Pair-bonded tamarins and titi monkeys, for instance, share child care between males and females. Titi monkeys don’t seem to have any kind of dominance hierarchy. In other monogamous species, such as gibbons and simiangs, male coercion of females is hardly seen.
A common mistake is to assume that males naturally dominate because they’re larger. And this makes intuitive sense. If any one sex can take control, isn’t it likely to be the one with the physical advantage? But this isn’t true. Gibbons of both sexes look similar, for example, but the males tend to be very slightly larger and don’t coerce females. Size is a product of many factors, including the need to physically outstrip opponents in the competition for mates. For females in particular, not all their energy can be driven into height or size because they also need it for reproduction and lactation. There’s not always a correlation between size and male dominance over females.
Indeed, Katherine Ralls, a zoologist and researcher at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, confirmed this all the way back in 1976: “Females are larger than males in more species of mammals than is generally supposed.” In her paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology she adds that, for a variety of species, size doesn’t seem to correlate reliably with which sex is dominant. The African water chevrotain, which is a type of deer, and many small antelopes, for example, have larger females who aren’t dominant. Meanwhile, the Chinese hamster, ring-tailed lemur, and pygmy marmoset all have smaller females that dominate the males. Bonobo females, too, are generally smaller than the males. “Their larger size is balanced by the fact that females cooperate against males, whereas males seldom cooperate against females,” notes Barbara Smuts.
The common thread that unites species in which females are particularly vulnerable to male violence is females being alone. An orangutan female, for instance, will travel alone with her dependent young almost all the time. Female chimpanzees, adds Barbara Smuts, spend three-quarters of their time alone, with no other adults present.
Human life is far more complex, of course. It can’t be generalized the way life in other species often can. But in this respect at least, we appear to parallel each other. In patriarchal societies, a woman will almost always leave her own family when she gets married and go live with her husband’s. Losing the support of her relatives makes her especially weak in the face of violence and repression. And this weakness is exacerbated when men form alliances with each other and control resources, such as food and property.
In the end, this is where the die seems to fall when it comes to male dominance over females. Female cooperation makes the difference. This doesn’t answer the question of whether male domination was always the biological norm for our species, the way it is for chimpanzees, but it does offer a perspective on the battle for equality today. For Amy Parish, the great apes are not just a window on our possible past but also an example of the different ways we could live in the future. Her work shows that male domination isn’t inevitable when females work together to establish their interests—the way that bonobos do.
“It’s certainly given me hope for the human feminist movement,” she tells me. “That here we can see females actually bonding with each other, maintaining those bonds, maintaining that loyalty. And then ultimately having the power in their groups. So I think they’re a great model for that. That yes, females can be in charge. They can control the resources. They don’t need to go through males to get them. They don’t have to be subjected to sexual violence or infanticide, all because they have the upper hand. And they do that by staying loyal to their female friends.”