Men say they envy women the depth of their friendships, their ability to emote with and engage each other. Men are also stunned when they see the ferocity of a failed friendship between women, the staggering thickness of the anger and bile. "Picking a fight can actually be a way for men to relate to one another, check each other out, and take a first step toward friendship," Frans de Waal wrote in Good Natured. "This bonding function is alien to most women, who see confrontation as causing rifts." It's not because we are nice and want to make nicer. Women know, from their experience and from their harrowing girlhood, that rifts often are hard to heal, and can last, and can consume them.
The fierceness of female friendships and the unease with which we regard other women are in my view related phenomena, and are the legacy of dissonance between our ancient primate and our neohominid selves and of our inherent strategic plasticity, the desire to keep all options open. Other females are a potential source of strength, and other females can destroy us. Or flip it around, as the English salonist Elizabeth Holland did, when she wrote at the turn of the nineteenth century, "As nobody can do more mischief to a woman than a woman, so perhaps one might reverse the maxim and say nobody can do more good."
In our primal primate brain, the world is gynocentric. The great majority of primate species live in social groups, and the core of those groups is female. The overwhelming rule of thumb is that females stay in their natal homes throughout their lives and males disperse at adolescence, so as to prevent inbreeding. This is true for macaques, howler monkeys, lemurs, patas monkeys, vervet monkeys, capuchins, squirrel monkeys, most baboons, and on and on. Outside males petition a group to gain entry, and the females permit them or forbid them citizenship. Females do not want a surplus of males around them, because males as a rule are underemployed, having little to do with care of the offspring, and they are easily bored and prone to picking fights with each other. Moreover, males often harass females. It's a common reproductive strategy. They want to mate with females and prevent them from consorting with other males, and so they harangue fertile females, roughing them up, pushing them around, trying in any way possible to circumscribe their activity. Females get tired of that perpetual harassment, and the best way to prevent the problem is to limit the number of resident males in the first place. Among rhesus macaques, for example, the group ratio of adult females to adult males is about six to one; among howler monkeys, there may be as many as ten females for every resident male. Bachelor monkeys prowl around the periphery, seeking vacancies, opportunities, and signs of local disarray.
Female primates are used to being surrounded by females, then, and they count on females to keep their world familiar and bearable. In species where females remain in their birth group, they depend on their close female kin to protect them from the aggressiveness of other females, who may be either unrelated or more distantly related. In a given group, the various members of the matrilines compete with one another and squabble over food, sexual behavior, or the excessive interest that females take in one another's young. The cohabiting females have their hierarchies, and when coalitions of female kin are rallied to a cause, the cause is generally to prove a point to the females of a vying matriline.
Even so, the disparate matrilineal strands will join in common cause to thwart the aggressiveness of males. "In species in which females normally remain in their natal groups, female-female coalitions typically involve close kin and are usually directed against females and juveniles from other matrilines," the primatologist Barbara Smuts has written. "In striking contrast, when the target is an adult male, females often form coalitions with females to whom they are not closely related. Such coalitions can mobilize very quickly in response to male aggression, since any females nearby can be recruited." In pigtailed macaques, patas monkeys, chacma baboons, olive baboons, blue monkeys, vervet monkeys, and again on and on, female alliances form with the dark speed of a thundercloud. Females gang up on males when they attack, herd, or frighten females. Females turn on a male who solicits sex from an obviously unwilling female. Swiftest of all are the unions that form when a male threatens or appears to threaten an infant.
The benefits of female solidarity are significant enough that in some cases when it is the young female who leaves her birthplace and must seek acceptance elsewhere, females aggressively, irrepressibly petition the friendship of the females in their newly adopted residence. This is true for cottontop tamarins, for example, among whom new female immigrants devote themselves tirelessly to the care of the resident females' young. And it is famously, brazenly true for bonobos, the Venusian apes. Females disperse at adolescence and must make their way in the world without the support of their mothers, sisters, and aunts. They must ingratiate themselves with a group of unrelated, mostly female apes. They ingratiate themselves with grooming and with sex. They pet the fur of resident females and pick out fleas. They rub their prominent genitals against the presiding genitals. If the local females reciprocate, the solicitor can stay. If they reject her, she must go elsewhere and find other pelts to pick and other pelvises to rub. In their sexually reinforced bondage, female bonobos gain an extraordinary degree of strength. They recapitulate the power of natality, of living within the matriline, and perhaps outdo it. The threat of infanticide by marauding males is a source of relentless anxiety to the females of many species—lions, langurs, rodents, seals, common chimpanzees. Nobody has ever seen a case of male infanticide among bonobos. The bonobo sisterhood is an artifice, constructed among nonrelatives without the mortar of genetic kinship and thus in need of perpetual behavioral reinforcement—the making nice, the making lewd, proving and proving again that we're all friends, we're all in this together. Vigilance becomes habit, and vigilance keeps the male fangs at bay.
Not all female primates are beholden to other females. Among common chimpanzees, females spend much of the day out on their own, scrounging for food, accompanied only by their dependent young. They don't forage with other adult females the way most monkeys do, and the way bonobos do. Chimpanzee dispersion patterns are variable. If a female is the daughter of a powerful female, she can stay in her natal group and derive the benefits of living near her kin. If she is the daughter of a low-status female, she generally must leave at puberty and find her way into another group, a band of strangers, and she must do so without the benefit of bonobo bonding rituals. When a female chimpanzee immigrates into a new group, she works hard to establish her reputation. She challenges resident females by grunting and hee-hawing at them, flapping her arms, making aggressive faces, or, on occasion, striking at them, pushing them, pinching. The period of settling in is brief, and after a few weeks the new female has her slot, her standing in the hierarchy, and it doesn't change much over time. Her relationship with other females is attenuated. They may come to her aid if she's attacked by a male, or they may not; female chimpanzees are under much greater threat of male coercion and harassment than many female primates are. But her nonkin female peers won't bother her either, and that's a comfort. And if she was able to prove herself a Viking maiden at the outset and was able to rise to a position of high status in her adopted gynocracy, her daughters will be allowed to stay in the troop, and she'll have launched a matriline, and that, at least, will keep her heritage strong.
We humans have within us a polychromatic phylogeny, a series of possible pasts. In the distant background are creatures like the Old World monkeys, for whom a gynocentric society of competitive but coexisting matrilines is the norm. Closer to the fore is the anthropoid past. Genetically, we are equidistant to bonobos and chimpanzees, and they are both our nearest living kin. We diverged from the bonobo-chimpanzee line about six million years ago, and we don't know if the common ancestor of the three of us great apes was more bonobo or more chimpanzee in its style and social structure. Among chimpanzees, males unequivocally dominate females. Among bonobos, the fabricated sisterhood gives females the edge over males. Among chimpanzees, males wage war against other troops of chimpanzees, s
ometimes to the point of committing genocide. Among bonobos, warfare is quite rare, although not unheard of. Chimpanzees have a keen appetite for monkey flesh; bonobos eat little meat. On the face of it, then, chimpanzees sound more hominid than bonobos do, yet the fossil evidence suggests that bonobos rather than chimpanzees are most like the primogenitor species from which the three of us sprang. In other words, bonobos may be a more ancestral species, while chimpanzees—and we—are the derived apes. Many evolutionary and anthropological reconstructions of protohuman societies have relied extensively on analogies between us and chimpanzees, as though we evolved from a chimpanzee-like ancestor. This assumption is open to question. In our restless lunges at metaphor, it is arbitrary to choose chimpanzees and ignore bonobos. The bonobo phylogeny is a legitimate sister archive, worth rifling through to collate and comprehend our own. "Our lineage," said Frans de Waal, who has written about bonobos, "is more flexible than we thought."
In the annals of our primate pasts, females are drawn to other females for strength. The females may be related or they may not be, and they may have to prove themselves or they may have been born to greatness, but the recurring theme is one of coalition and desire, of an aggressive need for female alliance. Here is the possible cradle of the fantasy best friend, and the reason that we care so much about girls and our position in the peerage, and that our female friendships feel like life and death as we steer our rickety little canoe through the breakers of childhood.
Female primates are not goo-girls, and they fight, and they're hierarchical and greedy, and they can be murderous toward each other. Nevertheless, the primate norm is a chronicle of female interdependence, of (dare I dip into archaisms?) female solidarity, and here is where we differ from most of our primate cousins. The question is, why? What does it mean, and does it matter? In the majority of human cultures today, and historically and presumably prehistorically as well, women do not live and have not lived in anything like a gynocracy. Nor do they inevitably rally to the cause of women's rights or think it is in their best interests to do so, with the result that, as the historian Gerda Lerner has noted, women are "ignorant of their history" and have had to "reinvent the wheel over and over again," the wheel being "the awareness of women that they belong to a subordinate group; that they have suffered wrongs as a group; that their condition of subordination is not natural, but is societally determined; that they must join with other women to remedy these wrongs; and finally, that they must and can provide an alternate vision of societal organization in which women as well as men will enjoy autonomy and self-determination." The subordination of women is not natural, not at all, and it is different in kind from anything seen in nature among other primates, who, as we've seen, join with other females on a habitual basis as well as spat with other females on a habitual basis, the predominant theme being barter and mutual, aggressively animated respect, gal to gal.
Evolutionary theorists such as Barbara Smuts and Patricia Adair Gowaty lately have emphasized the great efforts that the males of many species go to as they strive to control and monopolize female sexuality, to call it their own. The theorists have described the toll that the diverse forms of male coercion and male harassment take on females. Male chimpanzees slap, kick, and bite to force females to obey them, to follow them if they're going somewhere. If they see a female consort socializing with another male, they attack the female rather than the male. Male dolphins swim in violent synchronous patterns, slapping their flippers on the water and breaching the surface in unison, all to intimidate and corral fertile females for themselves. A female olive baboon can expect to be severely wounded by a male at least once a year—her flesh gouged, a piece of ear bitten off. Males and females of many species, particularly primates, may also get along, form friendships, and be affectionate and gentle with one another over a lifetime.
Aggression, placation, no matter: male efforts to manhandle female sexuality are at best limited. Whatever the female suffers at the hand of a male, or whatever she doesn't suffer, she is still, in a basic sense, an independent operator. That is, she feeds herself. She is not fed. She is not supported. She is on her own. A male may try to control her movements and her sexuality, but he can go only so far. Really, how much can he restrain her or manipulate her when she, in the end, will be out there foraging for her lunch, and will be the exclusive parent for her young, and will not need him for her daily survival? A male chimpanzee may be dominant over a female in certain one-on-one encounters, and he may be able to chase her away from the best cache of fruit if the two of them are within visual and olfactory range of each other. Nonetheless, the female can and does move on, to find another source of food. A male chimpanzee may punish a female with kicks and grunts when he finds her pulling ticks from a lesser male's coat. He may want to dictate the terms of her sexuality, and why not? It is in his reproductive interest to try to do so. He is not being mean for meanness's sake. He wants to procreate, and he's not a yeast cell—he can't just divide in two. He needs female chimpanzees if his genetic legacy is to survive, and if he has to beat them and squawk at them as he strives to get his way, he'll beat and squawk. Yet females are unfazed and unpersuaded. A recent DNA study of a group of chimpanzees in the Tai forest of Africa's Ivory Coast showed, to the astonishment of primatologists, that more than half the offspring in the clan had been fathered by males other than the males in residence. Primatologists did not expect to see such evidence of female restlessness. Female chimpanzees are hardly chaste, and when they are in estrus they are sexually quite active, but it was thought that they restricted their activities to the males within the group. They did not. Somehow, despite the vigilance of the local males and their regular use of intimidation, scowling, grunting, and slapping upside the head, the females had sauntered off and mated with outsiders. Who the outsiders were remains unknown. Presumably the females had their reasons for leaving home base and seeking foreign affairs. And when they returned, their lives were the same—the daily grind, the daily foraging, the nursing of the young.
Only among humans have males succeeded in stepping between a woman and a meal, in wresting control of the resources that she needs to feed herself and her children. Only among humans is the idea ever floated that a male should support a female, and that the female is in fact incapable of supporting herself and her offspring, and that it is a perfectly reasonable act of quid pro quo to expect a man to feed his family and a woman to be unerringly faithful, to give the man paternity assurance and to make his investment worthwhile. "I am convinced that male control over productive resources needed by women to reproduce lies at the heart of the transformation from male-dominated male philopatric primate societies to full-fledged patriarchy," Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has written.
We don't know when this transformation took place, when women found themselves butting up against a male breastplate every time they tried to locate food or a place to curl up and slumber. By the standard model of human evolution, the long dependency of children necessitated increased paternal investment in a child's welfare, and women wanted, needed, demanded male help in rearing children; males could provide that help by hunting and bringing home meat, which is rich in calories and appeals to the hominid tongue so smartly. By this scenario, the origins of marriage, the human pair bond, and of female dependency on males are ancient, hundreds of thousands of years old, from an inchoate epoch that evolutionary theorists refer to as the "environment of evolutionary adaptedness," when we supposedly became us, genetically and predispositionally. And by this scenario a woman began seeking in a man the signs of wealth and prowess and the wherewithal to support her and her children, while a man began seeking in a woman the signs of fecundity, a youthful capacity to breed a large brood, as well as the signs that such fecundity would be reserved for him, the provider: if he was to invest in her and her offspring, he did not want to be investing in offspring that were not his.
Now the conventional model of man the hunter is under persuasive attack, called into question by Kr
isten Hawkes and many others, whose recent analyses of traditional foraging societies suggest that male hunting counts for very little in the daily sustenance of their families and that a network of women gathers most of the calories to keep the kinfolk fed. The new work suggests that among ancestral humans, women still had a strong degree of autonomy, as chimpanzee females do, as the females of all other primate species do, and that "the patriarchy," the "nuclear family"—call it what you will, but it is the dependence of women on men for their bacon and bread—is, at least on a large and codified scale, a fairly recent event in human prehistory. The transformation may be one of the fruits of the agricultural revolution, as a number of historians and evolutionary scientists have proposed. "With the advent of intensive agriculture and animal husbandry, women, by and large, lost control over the fruits of their labors," Smuts has written. "Foraging and nomadic slash-and-burn horticulture require vast areas of land and mobile females, making it more difficult for men to control women's resource base and to restrict women's movements. However, when women's labor is restricted to a relatively small plot of land, as in intensive agriculture, or is restricted primarily to the household compound, as in animal husbandry, it is easier for men to control both the resource base upon which women depend for subsistence and women's daily movements."
The real innovation, if you want to call it that, in the evolution of patriarchy was the perfection of male alliances. Among most primates, females form alliances and males do not. Among chimpanzees, males form rudimentary alliances with each other, and they sometimes control females, but the alliances are usually unstable, and females resist—and they can resist, for they are self-supporting. Among humans, men are brilliant at allying themselves with other men, politically, religiously, intellectually, emotionally. Such alliances have served many purposes and have enriched and glorified and defiled our strut across this mortal stage, but not the least reason for male collaboration has been to extend and refine what chimpanzee males attempt in crude fashion, which is to control the means of reproduction, which of necessity involves the control of women. We think of male dominance as the corollary of male superiority in size and strength, but most male monkeys are larger and stronger than female monkeys and still they cannot subdue the females. Female alliances keep females free. When men learned the value of befriending other men, when they saw that their interests converged more often than they conflicted, whoops, there went female freedom.
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