Male bonobos, too, may mount each other, but generally perform a brief scrotal rub instead: standing back-to-back, one male rubs his scrotum against that of another. They also show so-called penis fencing, a rare behavior, thus far observed only in the field, in which two males hang face to face from a branch while rubbing their erect penises together as if crossing swords. The sheer variety of erotic contacts is impressive, especially if we include the sporadic oral sex, massage of another individual's genitals, and tongue-kissing.
The same within-group use of sex seems to extend to relations between groups. This is quite a contrast with chimpanzees, in which males are known to patrol the borders of their territory and occasionally invade their neighbors', setting off lethal battles. In bonobos, there is not a single report of this level of intercommunity violence. Instead, peaceable mingling of communities seems to be the rule, including mutual sex and grooming.
The Two Laws of Puritanism
The bonobo's sexiness has been a mixed blessing for its public reception. The problem first emerged shortly after the last world war, when the same German scientists who came up with the bonobo's unusual name felt a need to explain that this ape often mates face to face. In those days, this was an unmentionable detail. Eduard Tratz and Heinz Heck had to resort to Latin, saying that chimpanzees mate more canum (like dogs) and bonobos more hominum (like people). They added that female bonobos are anatomically adapted for this position: the vulva is situated between her legs rather than oriented to her back, as in the chimpanzee.
Nowadays, in the same Munich where Tratz and Heck made their pioneering observations, one can watch young professionals from downtown enter the Englischer Garten for a lunch break, sit down in the grass, take off their clothes, neatly fold them by their side, and continue their conversations in the nude. Because they are not doing anything else than what happens daily on European beaches, no one blinks an eye. Continental European attitudes have indeed changed radically since the 1950s, making them quite different from those in my adoptive country.
I realize that to complain about "Americans" is a not an altogether endearing European pastime, but it is impossible to discuss bonobos without a word about puritanism. Although I have lived in the United States for two decades, and have a genuine fondness for the country and its people, I will never get used to the equation between sex and sin. The guilt and suffering-not to mention the hypocrisy-this association creates are beyond me. I would gladly avoid this topic if it weren't for the question that persistently arises when people first hear of bonobos-namely, why this species isn't more widely known. The answer is, at least in part, that they remind us too much of a side of ourselves that we fight hard to control. Instead of being hardworking and chaste they lead promiscuous, hedonic lives. If they are our closest relatives, better keep them locked away!
Now, I know many Americans who are quite open-minded about sexual matters, but unfortunately their society is not. I will call this the First Law of Puritanism: the whole is more puritanical than its parts. The tension between public morals and private thoughts tends to be overlooked by public servants and the media, who customarily err on the conservative side when judging the acceptability of behavior or materials. Thus, they may try to hang a public figure for his transgressions only to discover that the majority of people feel that a mere reprimand would doss
The Second Law is that sexual repression is harder to see from the inside than the outside. Americans are so used to living in a country where toilets are called restrooms, where even gynecologists don't see naked patients, where one can get arrested for breast-feeding in public, where pinups come in swimsuits, and where comedians shock audiences into convulsive laughter by merely dropping the name of a taboo body part, that they don't realize how peculiar all of this looks from the outside.89 A possible exception are Americans who have traveled abroad, where they may have visited a Japanese bathhouse in which removal of all clothes is obligatory even in the presence of the opposite sex. They may also have seen free and open prostitution in Amsterdam and Hamburg, or met people who simply shrug their shoulders at the sex lives of their leaders.
The most recent example where I felt out of touch with American attitudes was a 1999 cover story in Time magazine, bravely entitled "The Real Truth About the Female Body."90 To illustrate this truth, Time offered us one cover photo plus five photos inside the magazine of nude women. It managed to do so without revealing a single nipple or genital area. The bodies shown were muscular and androgynous: one had to look hard to make sure they were female. The magazine went so far as to include a foldout body with arrows pointing at its various parts, but since the woman in the photograph held her arms crossed in front of her, the arrow intended for her breasts sadly hit an elbow.
Because it deliberately expunged all femininity from the female body, this layout would have provoked screams of protest if featured in an equivalent European magazine, such as der Spiegel or l'Express. Time got its share of protest, too, but this was because by American standards they had gone too far! In a subsequent issue, the editors noted, "Many readers felt that nude pictures of women, however tastefully done, have no place in a general-interest magazine."91
And so, in sexual matters, the two North Atlantic continents have drifted apart, even though they share in many ways the same background. Together they differ from non-Western peoples, such as the Hawaiians, for whom sex has been described-in rather bonobolike terms-as "the salve and glue for the total society," 92 and from some Brazilian tribes, where men and women carry on multiple affairs in the woods around their villages. This is not the place to review the thousands of human sexual practices; suffice it to say that on a global scale of permissiveness and openness much of the English-speaking world, with its Victorian heritage, occupies a position at the squeamish end.
Given that the English language dominates the information flow in the modern world, this has not been to the advantage of the bonobo. When the Make Love Not War hippies of the animal kingdom knocked at our door, they were left standing outside by a mortified family. The author of the same Time article about the female body, Barbara Ehrenreich, felt that the bonobo's peculiarities were better left alone. Similarly, a British camera crew traveled all the way to the remote jungles of Africa to film bonobos only to stop their cameras each time an embarrassing scene came into view.
The crew was assisted by Takeshi Furuichi, a Japanese scientist extensively familiar with the role of sex in bonobo society. When Furuichi politely inquired why they did not document any of it, the answer was "our viewers would not be interested."
What's Wrong with Those Males?
The beauty of sex is that however much a society tries to suppress it, it won't succeed. Sex always bounces back. People will keep doing what nature has instructed them to do, no matter how many Sodom and Gomorrah sermons they receive. They know their own weaknesses, and moreover they have not failed to notice how the great moralizers of society do not always live up to their own standards. Hence the First Law of Puritanism: what society as a whole denounces may well be acceptable, or at least forgivable, in the hearts of most individual members.
The bonobo is a case in point. Not only are some minorities, such as homosexuals and polyamorists, for obvious reasons fascinated by these lusty apes, mainstream America seems to have embraced them as well. It turns out that the initial reluctance of the media reflected a misjudgment of public sensitivity: bonobos appear rather less shocking and offensive than anticipated. I remember telling U.S. television producers that I had shown uncensored bonobo footage on Italian, German, and Dutch prime time television. Why can't the same be done here? Some producers would meet the challenge, promising that they could do the same on American television. At the last minute, however, they invariably chickened out. The documentary would show frolicking bonobos but freeze the image as soon as they adopted positions in which something sexual was imminent. The narrator would lead the viewers astray with some vague statement, such as that bonobos are
remarkably friendly with each other. I began to dub it the coitus interruptus treatment.
After years of this, I had the luck of running into a kindred spirit who had gone through similar frustrations. One day in 1994, Frans Lanting, a celebrated wildlife photographer, told me about the hundreds of pictures of bonobos he had taken during a National Geographic expedition to the Congo. Most of them had never seen the light of day for reasons that by now should be obvious. When I saw the treasure trove of wonderful shots taken under the most trying circumstances (there is nothing worse for a photographer than black animals in a dark forest), I immediately realized that the pictures presented a momentous opportunity. As Dutchmen of the same age living in America, Frans and I had a quick rapport, and we decided to work together on a book about the bonobo to raise public awareness of this special ape.
The goal was to tell the full story. In our minds, this didn't necessarily imply emphasis on sex and eroticism, because there is much more to bonobos than that. But it did mean that we would not let ourselves be censored. Thus, the first report we put together was for a well-known, richly illustrated German magazine. GEO had no trouble printing an undiluted account, with erect penises, pink genital swellings, "homosexual" acts, and all.93 The next trial balloon was Scientific American, which to its credit didn't change a word-except for stylistic reasons-of my text, and reproduced all of Lanting's photos. By then, we felt the time was ripe for a book. We found an American university press prepared to accept our condition that no censure would be applied. Perhaps not accidentally, the publisher was located in Berkeley. They held their word, resulting in Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape (1997), which reached a large audience without provoking a single peep of moral outrage that I know of.
In writing this book, I saw it as my first task to draw in as many bonobo experts as I could. The peacefulness of our research subjects notwithstanding, our little field has not been without the usual infighting among close scientific colleagues. I wanted none of that reflected in the hook. So, I conducted interviews with many of my colleagues so that they could say what they had to say in their own words. This way, I also hoped to avoid giving the impression that I had discovered everything on my own. I am not a field-worker, and researchers such as Takayoshi Kano, the Japanese scientist who for twenty-five years operated a field site under the most trying conditions, deserve a great deal of credit for what we know today about bonobos.
A sabbatical in Europe allowed me to devote my time to writing. I alternated my hours behind the computer with train trips around Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands to test my message on all sorts of audiences. The high point of my European lecture tour-or perhaps it was the low point-occurred when an older, highly respected German professor stood up after my lecture and barked in an almost accusatory tone: "What's wrong with those males?!" He was shocked by the dominance of females. Given that bonobos thrived for thousands of years in the African rain forest until human activity began to threaten their existence, there really seems nothing wrong with them at all. And in view of their frequent sex ual activity and low aggression, I find it hard to imagine that males of the species have a particularly stressful time. My response to the professor-that bonobo males seemed to be doing fine-did not appear to satisfy him. The incident, though, shows how profoundly the bonobo is challenging assumptions about our lineage.
Uncomfortable Scientists
I received the first hint of this ape's unconventional social order when I revisited the San Diego Zoo one year after my initial study. Originally, Vernon, an adult male, had been housed alone with Loretta, an adult female whom he had dominated. But when I returned, Louise, an older female, had been added to the group, and she and Loretta now clearly bossed over Vernon. In fact, Vernon had to beg the females to share food with him, and Louise sometimes chased him. I found this odd, since Vernon was a muscular male who not only was larger than Louise or Loretta but also possessed the sharper canine teeth of his sex. As I came to know more captive groups of bonobos, however, I found that female dominance was the rule rather than the exception.
Field-workers suspected the same for an even longer time. Yet bonobo specialists have been reluctant to make such a controversial claim-until 1992, that is. At the XIVth Congress of the International Primatological Society, in Strasbourg (France), investigators of both captive and wild bonobos for the first time presented data that left little doubt about the issue. Amy Parish, an anthropologist from the University of California at Davis, reported on food competition in identical groups (one adult male, two adult females) of chimpanzees and bonobos at the Stuttgart Zoo. Honey was provided in a place from which it could be extracted by dipping sticks into a small hole. As soon as honey was given, the male chimpanzee would make a charging display and simply claim everything for himself; only when his appetite was satisfied would he let the females fish for honey. In the bonobo group, in contrast, it was the females who approached the honey first. After some GGrubbing between them, they would feed together, taking turns with virtually no competition. The male could make as many charging displays as he wanted; the females were not intimidated, and ignored the commotion.94
At the same conference, field-workers confirmed that female bonobos dominate males. For example, at the provisioning site of Wamba in the Congo, males always arrive first and eat in a hurry, because when the females come they are forced to make room. Some scientists have questioned whether this pattern should be called dominance, proposing instead that male bonobos are tolerant and deferential. It's almost amusing: males are usually painted as competitive monsters, yet if they systematically lose battles with females it must be because they are nice guys.
However, if there is one criterion that we have used for every animal on the planet, it is that if individual A can chase B away from its food, A must be dominant. It is unclear why we should suddenly adopt a different standard for bonobos. Kano has forcefully rejected this argument:
Priority of access to food is an important function of dominance. Since most dominance interactions, and virtually all agonistic episodes [conflicts] between adult females and males occur in feeding contexts, I find much less meaning in dominance occurring in the non-feeding context. Moreover, there is no difference between feeding and non-feeding dominance relationships among the bonobos of Wamba. For example, approaches of dominant females often give rise to submissive reactions by grooming males such as grinning, bending away, etc.95
In the same way that investigators looked through cultural lenses at the bonobo's social organization, they have been unable to shake the prevailing moral biases when it comes to sex. Some went so far as to question the "sex" label for contacts between same-sex partners. True, social goals are often accomplished by such contacts, such as when dominance or affection is demonstrated in a sexual fashion. Yet they are still sex. In common language, sex covers all deliberate contacts involving the genitals (including petting and oral stimulation). It even includes broader categories, such as kissing or just showing off one's body in a suggestive manner. More than once, however, I have heard that GG-rubbing among bonobos doesn't deserve to be called sex-perhaps it is nothing more than mutual masturbation. Such an argument, however, overlooks the intensely social and apparently enjoyable nature of the interaction: when females rub their prominent clitorises together, they often bare their teeth in a wide grin, uttering excited squeals while they look each other in the eyes. If this is mutual masturbation, shouldn't heterosexual intercourse be reclassified as well?
In his book Biological Exuberance, Bruce Bagemihl cites a great many instances of what he sees as homophobia in the scientific literature. Routinely, adjectives such as "pseudo" and "sham" are added to labels for sex between partners of the same sex (as in "sham sex" or "pseudo-copulation"). Authors of otherwise serious papers sometimes express disappointment in a species that shows such "disgusting" behavior, or else a journal editor adds a footnote that provides an alternative, nonsexual elucidation. Perhaps the most imaginative speculation of this ki
nd was one that attributed a "nutritive" motivation to two orangutan males who regularly sucked each other's penises. Bagemihl notes:
When a male Giraffe sniffs a female's rear end-without any mounting, erection, penetration, or ejaculation-he is described as sexually interested in her and his behavior is classified as primarily, if not exclusively, sexual. Yet when a male Giraffe sniffs another male's genitals, mounts him with an erect penis, and ejaculates-then he is engaging in aggressive or dominance behavior, and his actions are considered to be, at most, only secondarily or superficially sexual.96
It is in this light that we may understand why an American primatologist, Craig Stanford, concluded in a recent critique that bonobos aren't any more sexual than chimpanzees. Perhaps due to lack of experience with bonobos, Stanford restricted his calculations of mating frequencies to heterosexual contacts, leaving out an enormous portion of the species' sex life. He also surmised that since the most detailed descriptions of bonobo sexuality come from zoo environments, it might all be an artifact of captivity. Perhaps these apes act so grotesquely because they are bored to death, or under human influence. However, under identical zoo conditions bonobos and chimpanzees act totally unlike each other. If captivity distorts the behavior of one ape, why not also that of the other? The inescapable conclusion is that it is something in the species, not the environment, that produces the bonobo's characteristic sexuality.97
The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist Page 11