Sexy Apes
I’ve decided to go
on the record before I begin my analysis. This may seem cowardly,
and it is. Lest I be accused of all sorts, I’d like to say that I
fully support a woman’s right to be safe and feel safe in every
environment: I abhor violence against women (or indeed against anyone
for that matter): I believe we should all treat women as if they are
our Mother, sister, niece, auntie, daughter or best friend. I
support a woman’s right to be heard if they think they are not
being given proper treatment under the law and I support laws to help
women to achieve equal treatment.
Now, having said
that the world we live in has changed beyond all recognition. There
is no doubt that things are changing. Most notably our view of the
relationship between men and women. Add in the Me Too movement and
the emasculation of normal relationships and you have created a real
toxic environment for our children to negotiate.
Megan Markle
complains of racism in the Royal family. Many people think racism is
the scourge of our society. Black Lives matters gleans not just
headlines, but also action. In the UK, the Sarah Everhard case has
galvanized women to take to the streets in protest at what they see
has institutionalized sexism and misogyny.
Vocal women assault
the senses with strident denunciations of sexism blighting not just
the work environment, but also our most intimate personal
relationships.
The world turns, but
we question whether we are turning with it.
Before I launched
into the debate proper, I decided to go back and do a little
research. Firstly, I renewed my acquaintance with The Naked Ape,
by Desmond Morris. This 60's masterpiece should be required reading
for all those whose normal modus operandi consists of half clocked
and half baked platitudes about the human condition without any real
understanding. If you are in that tribe, you may, profitably stop
reading now.
Secondly, I had
another look at the modern equivalent: Sapiens by Yuval Noah
Harari. Separated by quite some time nevertheless these books both
have a lot to say about the subject at hand and contain some very
cogent insights.
The key feature of
both books is to remind us that at our core we are creatures that
can't escape our genes: our heritage will find us out every time.
Part of that
heritage concerns the relationship between the sexes. It is easy to
forget that for 99.99 % of the history of the “carbon units”
currently infesting this planet we were only moderately successful
hunter gatherers. Each sex had relatively stable and well defined
roles in society. Men were hunters and tool makers, women were
caregivers, child care operatives and food gatherers. We did this for
thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of years.
Now we are expected
to adjust to a completely different expectation about our roles in
society without time (biological time) to adjust. It’s asking a
lot. And, the evidence is that it is not working very well either.
Some personal
experience. When I used to teach PHSE (Personal Health and Social
Education) as an adjunct to my primary duties as Head of English. I
typically had a mixed group (gender-wise) of 25 15 year olds to
explain not just human relationships but also the thorny topic of
sex. You think this might be easy? Go on, I dare you, give it a
try!
My technique was
simple, if somewhat unusual. Before class, I would write “SEX”
in very large letters in the middle of the white board. In the
bottom left hand corner, in very small letters I would write
“reproduction”. As the pupils arrived, they would look at the
board and the boys would all snigger and some, not all, of the girls
might look uncomfortable or amused. To start the lesson I would
point to the large letters and say SEX, then I would point out the
small letters and say reproduction. I would explain that SEX is what
you think you are doing, but mother nature has a different plan, for
reproduction is actually what you are doing. My example was a
crocodile infested river which I would draw (very crudely) on the
board (under the SEX ) and I would ask a simple question of all the
boys. “If on the other side of the river was your favourite Page 3
Pin Up (picture a scantily clad lady with no breast covering at all)
calling for you to come over - would you jump in the river?
Almost to a man they
would shout “Yea, man everyday and twice on Tuesday!” Or,
something very similar. The testosterone levels were so close to
hitting the roof: they would not mind that their female classmates
were in the room. They were showing off! That’s generally what 15
year old boys do. After calming them down a bit, I could usually get
them to agree that maybe they would be better off trying to build a
boat or raft and then try to cross. Useful lesson number one. First
rule of being a Homo Sapiens: self-preservation. Second rule:
procreate the species. How about removing the crocs? Would you then
make a bee-line for the other shore? Agreed? All male hands were
immediately in the air. Many girls genuinely found this shocking.
My claim to fame? At that point I would go for the jugular. "Now,
boys imagine she was not a supermodel but one of your classmates?"
Much consternation from the boys. To say they would only paddle
across for a super model would be to crush their chances of sex with
any of their erstwhile and much more Ilocal, and therefore more
available, girl friends. Looks like a Harry met Sally moment.
Testosterone levels plummeted and a more conciliatory and responsible
look sheepishly came over the collective visage. Repeat Rule One and
Two. Jobs a good-un!
Another classroom
example: I always assessed the demeanour of the young ladies in my
class as they trooped towards the door. If more than one was crying,
I knew I was in for a long lesson. One day, to my surprise a tall,
gangly girl ( I will not name names) came to the door more upset that
crying and said, “Sir, Joe (not his real name) just hit me!”
Quick as a flash I retorted, “you know what that means? He fancies
you!” Worked like a charm!
Were it that simple,
but this does illustrate some of the pitfalls of trying to pile
modern society on top of our ancestry. This is not to say, of course
that we are prisoners of our genes and must continue to countenance
men’s assaults on women or make light of them. But, modern culture
actively encourages a more male-centric view of not just society, but
also a woman’s place in it.
Some modern examples
you may be familiar with:
When Harry Met
Sally (Rom-Com which in the end proves exactly what the
characters have been trying to avoid - men and women cannot be
friends without sex butting in)
Spartacus
(whoa! What's he doing here? Remember how the gladiators were
introduced to the various slave sex partners they were alloted?)
Tom and Mrs Tom
Brady (You think it’s odd to see a Brazilian supermodel as an
example of how the sexes operate now? I think not. How many
successful, handsome men partner up with what are generally accepted
to be beautiful women? How many grains of sand are there on a
beach?)
The Donald and
Melania Trump (ditto for the Bradys, just substitute the handsome
for lots and lots of money!)
Watership Down
(Rabbits, are you kidding me! Yep, the story is all about how the
boy rabbits, after many adventures find that they have no does and
risk life and limb to get some) The list is almost endless.
An American
Werewolf in London (this was on TV recently and I didn't watch
it, but I did see a scene where the girl, played by Jenny Agutter,
invites the werewolf guy home and after explaining that she doesn't
really do this sort of thing, she shows him that there is only one
bed and he is going to be in it with her. I suspect you can see where
this is going.
Just flicking
through the TV channels I see an episode of King of Queens
advertised where one of the characters has a chance to sleep with a
beautiful woman but his mate tries to sabotage the sex.
The point is almost
100 %of popular culture involves some aspect of boy /girl sexual
encounters and the subsequent consequences. The real problem is that
males have a erroneous idea of how the relationship between the sexes
actually works. Males think they choose women – therefore they
engage in inappropriate behaviour in the mistaken belief that this is
how you get a mate. Wrong! Women do the choosing and always have
done.
Meanwhile let's
get back to my chosen sources : The Naked Ape and Sapiens.
Both agree that for most of our evolutionary history we were a rather
unimportant, somewhat fragile species living in Africa. We shared our
habitat with a number of species of Homo. Only in the last 40 000
years have we been the lone hominid species on earth. The key feature
of Sapiens: the feature which separates us from our closest relatives
among the apes is our family relationships. We don't rely on a
dominant male to protect the group. Uniquely among primates, we share
the females among the group of hunters. Lacking the physical tools to
dominate other hunters, say lions, we evolved to work together to get
food which would otherwise be unavailable. To do this we work
together and sharing females is not just desirable - it is
imperative.
Swapping the roles
and perspectives to the female side, the need to have a hunter to
provide for her and her offspring means that she will readily trade
sex for security. The most attractive and successful hunter may be
desirable to females, but her first choice is mitigated by the fact
that while he will certainly welcome the chance to father her child,
he most likely will not be around to provide for her and the child
during the ten years it takes to bring it to maturity. And, most
importantly, he will not be able to get the other hunters to
co-operate if he simply steals all the girls. For that you need a
father who may not be the most attractive, but who will be around to
provide for you and the children.
Therefore it is
clear: women have been trading sex for security for at least 70 000
years, and we ignore this basic fact at our peril.
From The Naked
Ape:
“There are one
hundred and ninety-three living species of
monkeys and apes.
One hundred and ninety-two of them are
covered with hair.
The exception is a naked ape self-named
Homo sapiens. This
unusual and highly successful species spends
a great deal of time
examining his higher motives and an equal
amount of time
studiously ignoring his fundamental ones. He
is proud that he has
the biggest brain of all the primates, but
attempts to conceal
the fact that he also has the biggest penis,
preferring to accord
this honour falsely to the mighty gorilla.
Essentially this was
a hunting-group of males. The females
were too busy
rearing the young to be able to play a major
role in chasing and
catching prey. As the complexity of the
hunt increased and
the forays became more prolonged, it
became essential for
the hunting ape to abandon the meander-
ing, nomadic ways of
its ancestors. A home base was necessary,
a place to come back
to with the spoils, where the females and
the young would be
waiting and could share the food. This step,
as we shall see in
later chapters, has had profound effects on
many aspects of the
behaviour of even the most sophisticated
naked apes of today.
So the hunting ape became a territorial ape.
His wholesexual,
parental and social patterns began to be affected.
His old wandering,
fruit-plucking way of life was fading rapidly.
He had now really
left his forest of Eden. He was an ape with
responsibilities. He
began to worry about the prehistoric
equivalent of
washing machines and refrigerators. He began
to develop the home
comforts—fire, food storage, artificial
shelters. But this
is where we must stop for the moment, for
we are moving out of
the realms of biology and into the
realms of culture.
The biological basis of these advanced steps
lies in the
development of a brain large and complex enough
to enable the
hunting ape to take them, but the exact form
they assume is no
longer a matter of specific genetic control.
The forest ape that
became a ground ape that became a hunt-
ing ape that became
a territorial ape has become a cultural ape
And we must call a
temporary halt.
His whole body, his
way of life, was geared
to a forest
existence, and then suddenly (suddenly in evolu-
tionary terms) he
was jettisoned into a world where he could
survive only if he
began to live like a brainy, weapon-toting
wolf. We must
examine now exactly how this affected not
only his body, but
especially his behaviour, and in what form
we experience the
influence of this legacy at the present day.
The co-operative
spirit that is present in such pack-hunters
as wolves are
largely absent from the world of the primate.
Competitiveness and
dominance is the order of his day. Com-
petition in the
social hierarchy is, of course, present in both
groups, but it is
less tempered by co-operative action in the
case of monkeys and
apes. Complicated, co-ordinated
manoeuvres are also
unnecessary: sequences of feeding action
do not need to be
strung together in such a complex way. The
primate can live
much more from minute to minute, from
hand to mouth.
Because the primate's food supply is all around it for the
taking, there is
little need to cover great distances. Groups of
wild gorillas, the
largest of the living primates, have been
carefully studied
and their movements traced, so that we now
know that they
travel on the average about a third of a mile
a day. Sometimes
they move only a few hundred feet
The answer was the
development of a pair-bond. Male and
female hunting apes
had to fall in love and remain faithful to
one another. This is
a common tendency in many other
groups of animals,
but is rare amongst primates. It solved three
problems in one
stroke. It meant that the females remained
bonded to their
individual males and faithful to them while
they were away on
the hunt. It meant that serious sexual
rivalries between
the males were reduced. This aided their
developing
co-operativeness. If they were to hunt together
successfully, the
weaker males as well as the stronger ones had
to play their part.
They had to play a central role and could
not be thrust to the
periphery of society, as happens in so many
primate species.
What is more, with his newly developed and
deadly artificial
weapons, the hunting ape male was under
strong pressure to
reduce any source of disharmony within
the tribe. Thirdly,
the development of a one-male-one-female
breeding units meant
that the offspring also benefited. The
heavy task of
rearing and training the slowly developing
young demanded a
cohesive family unit. In other groups of
animals, whether
they are fishes, birds or mammals, when
there is too big a
burden for one parent to bear alone, we see
the development of a
powerful pair-bond, tying the male and
female parents
together throughout the breeding season. This,
too, is what
occurred in the case of the hunting ape.
In this way, the
females were sure of their males' support
and were able to
devote themselves to their maternal duties.
The males were sure
of their females' loyalty, were prepared
to leave them for
hunting, and avoided fighting over them.
And the offspring
were provided with the maximum of care
and attention. This
certainly sounds like an ideal solution, but
it involved a major
change in primate socio-sexual behaviour
and, as we shall see
later, the process was never really perfected.
Sexually, the naked
ape finds himself today in a somewhat
confusing situation.
As a primate he is pulled one way, as a
carnivore by
adoption he is pulled another, and as a member
of an elaborate
civilized community he is pulled yet another.
To start with, he
owes all his basic sexual qualities to his
fruit-picking,
forest-ape ancestors. These characteristics were
then drastically
modified to fit in with his open-country,
hunting way of life.
This was difficult enough, but then they,
in turn, had to be
adapted to match the rapid development of
an increasingly
complex and culturally determined social
structure.
Sexually the naked
ape finds himself today in a somewhat
confusing situation.
As a primate he is pulled one way, as a
carnivore by
adoption he is pulled another, and as a member
of an elaborate
civilized community he is pulled yet another.
The first of these
changes, from a sexual fruit-picker to a
sexual hunter, was
achieved over a comparatively long period
of time and with
reasonable success. The second change has
been less
successful. It has happened too quickly and has been
forced to depend
upon intelligence and the application of
learned restraint
rather than on biological modifications based
on natural
selection. It could be said that the advance of
civilization has not
so much moulded modern sexual be-
haviour, as that
sexual behaviour has moulded the shape of Civilization.”
We find that we are
extremely unprepared for modern life. Our Naked Ape behaviours are
too often at odds with our biological needs. In essence, we should
be called The Sexy Ape instead of the naked one. Sex is at the core
of what we do and how we do it. We are not “programmed” to
ignore our sexual preferences and become some sort of modern version
of a celibate saint. We are much more likely to be a version of
Donald Trump or Bill Clinton.
From Sapiens:
“Genus Homo’s
position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the
middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and
gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger
predators. It was only 400 000 years ago that several species of man
began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100
000 years - with the rise of Homo sapiens - that man jumped to the
top of the food chain. Other animals at the top of the pyramid like
lions and sharks evolved very gradually over millions of years. In
contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem
was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to
adjust. Most of the top predators of the planet are majestic
creatures. Millions of years of domination have filled them with
self-confidence. Sapiens, by contrast, is more like a
banana-republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the
underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over
our position - which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many
historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes
have resulted from this over-hasty jump.
Our eating habits,
our conflicts and our sexuality are all the result of the way our
hunter-gatherer minds interact with our current post-industrial
environment, with its mega-cities, aeroplanes, telephones and
computers.”
Returning to the
present debate, I put forward some well-known historical incidents of
rape.
Analysis of the
human genome reveals that some 2-6% of modern human DNA is either
Neanderthal or other closely related Homo species. Now, some of this
could well be the result of consensual sex, but most scientists agree
that it is more likely that our ancient ancestors (on both sides of
the divide) were the result of conquest or rape.
In literature: The
Rape of the Sabine Women
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Sabine_Women is among
the earliest references. Other references in literature are myriad
and well-known.
“Historically, in
war the instances of rape are innumerable and it is not hard to
imagine why. Take as an example, the Soviet occupation of Berlin at
the end of WWII:
As Allied troops
entered and occupied German territory during the later stages of
World War II, mass rapes of women took place both in connection with
combat operations and during the subsequent occupation of Germany.
Scholars agree that the majority of the rapes were committed by
Soviet occupation troops. The wartime rapes had been surrounded by
decades of silence. According to historian Antony Beevor, whose books
were banned in 2015 from some Russian schools and colleges, NKVD
(Soviet secret police) files have revealed that the leadership knew
what was happening, but did little to stop it. It was often rear
echelon units who committed the rape According to professor Oleg
Rzheshevsky, "4,148 Red Army officers and many privates were
punished for committing atrocities". The exact number of German
women and girls raped by Soviet troops during the war and occupation
is uncertain, but historians estimate their numbers are likely in the
hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million.”
It is not difficult
to see how or why this happened. The atrocities of the German Army
in Russia are well-known and well-documented, so when the Red Army
conquered Germany it was “pay-back” time. But, on a biological
level it is even more easily understood. Imagine you have fought
your way from the Elbe to Berlin and suffered hundreds of thousands
of casualties in reaching Berlin and your prospects of living are
poor. Remember Rule One and Rule Two? You may be dead tomorrow so
it’s Rule Two today, and if that includes rape, then so be it.
The fact is that in
most wars rape is a constant feature.
How does this shed
light on today? Firstly, we no longer live in small groups of
hunter-gatherers, so we have lost that vital link to our fellow men.
Too often we see women as objects and not as members of our tribes.
Example: I recently
learned of a group of militant misogynists and their impact on modern
culture - especially young men. I choose not to share either their
beliefs or their contact details, for whatever we think it’s all
too easy to find them on the internet. What did strike me was the
assertion at the end of the report that the majority of the men were
simply frustrated by their inability to attract or keep a mate. They
could not access sex, so they hated all women.
We have lost our
biological, social ability to co-operate in both society and in sex.
For that we have
already and will pay an increasingly high price.
Where do we go from
her? I wish I knew. Unless men can begin to see a woman as
someone’s mother, sister, etc. and somehow this triggers the
appropriate response; it is likely that there is no real answer. We
will continue to battle the downsides of modern culture with only a
few small successes along the way, and considerable pain for the
majority of the population – women who outnumber men.
