Apes of Wrath

[Michael Ragland]

This is an anthropological article by a feminist but it has some
interesting information on differences between primates in sexual
relations with females and juxtaposing this to human primates. The
author concludes, "Freedom from male control-including male sexual
coercion-therefore requires women to form alliances with one another
(and with like-minded men) on a scale beyond that shown by nonhuman
primates and humans in the past. Although knowledge of other primates
can provide inspiration for this task, its achievement depends on the
uniquely human ability to envision a future different from anything that
has gone before." However, since we are most like chimpanzees I don't
think the author's vision is realistic short of GE.

MR

http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/~reffland/anthropology/
origins/apeswrath.html

Discover Magazine 08/95
Commentary - Apes of Wrath
Barbara Smuts
 
Some female primates use social bonds to escape male aggression. Can
women?
Nearly 20 years ago I spent a morning dashing up and down the hills of
Gombe National Park in Tanzania, trying to keep up with an energetic
young female chimpanzee, the focus of my observations for the day. On
her rear end she sported the small, bright pink swelling characteristic
of the early stages of estrus, the period when female mammals are
fertile and sexually receptive. For some hours our run through the park
was conducted in quiet, but then, suddenly, a chorus of male chimpanzee
pant hoots shattered the tranquillity of the forest. My female rushed
forward to join the males. She greeted each of them, bowing and then
turning to present her swelling for inspection. The males examined her
perfunctorily and resumed grooming one another, showing no further
interest.

At first I was surprised by their indifference to a potential mate. Then
I realized that it would be many days before the female's swelling
blossomed into the large, shiny sphere that signals ovulation. In a week
or two, I thought, these same males will be vying intensely for a chance
to mate with her.

The attack came without warning. One of the males charged toward us,
hair on end, looking twice as large as my small female and enraged. As
he rushed by he picked her up, hurled her to the ground, and pummeled
her. She cringed and screamed. He ran off, rejoining the other males
seconds later as if nothing had happened. It was not so easy for the
female to return to normal. She whimpered and darted nervous glances at
her attacker, as if worried that he might renew his assault.

In the years that followed I witnessed many similar attacks by males
against females, among a variety of Old World primates, and eventually I
found this sort of aggression against females so puzzling that I began
to study it systematically-something that has rarely been done. My
long-term research on olive baboons in Kenya showed that, on average,
each pregnant or lactating female was attacked by an adult male about
once a week and seriously injured about once a year. Estrous females
were the target of even more aggression. The obvious question was, Why?

In the late 1970s, while I was in Africa among the baboons, feminists
back in the United States were turning their attention to male violence
against women. Their concern stimulated a wave of research documenting
disturbingly high levels of battering, rape, sexual harassment, and
murder. But although scientists investigated this kind of behavior from
many perspectives, they mostly ignored the existence of similar behavior
in other animals. My observations over the years have convinced me that
a deeper understanding of male aggression against females in other
species can help us understand its counterpart in our own.

Researchers have observed various male animals-including insects, birds,
and mammals-chasing, threatening, and attacking females. Unfortunately,
because scientists have rarely studied such aggression in detail, we do
not know exactly how common it is. But the males of many of these
species are most aggressive toward potential mates, which suggests that
they sometimes use violence to gain sexual access.

Jane Goodall provides us with a compelling example of how males use
violence to get sex. In her 1986 book, The Chimpanzees of Gombe, Goodall
describes the chimpanzee dating game. In one of several scenarios, males
gather around attractive estrous females and try to lure them away from
other males for a one-on-one sexual expedition that may last for days or
weeks. But females find some suitors more appealing than others and
often resist the advances of less desirable males. Males often rely on
aggression to counter female resistance. For example, Goodall describes
how Evered, in "persuading" a reluctant Winkle to accompany him into the
forest, attacked her six times over the course of five hours, twice
severely.

Sometimes, as I saw in Gombe, a male chimpanzee even attacks an estrous
female days before he tries to mate with her. Goodall thinks that a male
uses such aggression to train a female to fear him so that she will be
more likely to surrender to his subsequent sexual advances. Similarly,
male hamadryas baboons, who form small harems by kidnapping child
brides, maintain a tight rein over their females through threats and
intimidation. If, when another male is nearby, a hamadryas female strays
even a few feet from her mate, he shoots her a threatening stare and
raises his brows. She usually responds by rushing to his side; if not,
he bites the back of her neck. The neck bite is ritualized-the male does
not actually sink his razor-sharp canines into her flesh-but the threat
of injury is clear. By repeating this behavior hundreds of times, the
male lays claim to particular females months or even years before mating
with them. When a female comes into estrus, she solicits sex only from
her harem master, and other males rarely challenge his sexual rights to
her.

These chimpanzee and hamadryas males are practicing sexual coercion:
male use of force to increase the chances that a female victim will mate
with him, or to decrease the chances that she will mate with someone
else. But sexual coercion is much more common in some primate species
than in others. Orangutans and chimpanzees are the only nonhuman
primates whose males in the wild force females to copulate, while males
of several other species, such as vervet monkeys and bonobos (pygmy
chimpanzees), rarely if ever try to coerce females sexually. Between the
two extremes lie many species, like hamadryas baboons, in which males do
not force copulation but nonetheless use threats and intimidation to get
sex.

These dramatic differences between species provide an opportunity to
investigate which factors promote or inhibit sexual coercion. For
example, we might expect to find more of it in species in which males
are much larger than females-and we do. However, size differences
between the sexes are far from the whole story. Chimpanzee and bonobo
males both have only a slight size advantage, yet while male chimps
frequently resort to force, male bonobos treat the fair sex with more
respect. Clearly, then, although size matters, so do other factors. In
particular, the social relationships females form with other females and
with males appear to be as important.

In some species, females remain in their birth communities their whole
lives, joining forces with related females to defend vital food
resources against other females. In such "female bonded" species,
females also form alliances against aggressive males. Vervet monkeys are
one such species, and among these small and exceptionally feisty African
monkeys, related females gang up against males. High-ranking females use
their dense network of female alliances to rule the troop; although
smaller than males, they slap persistent suitors away like annoying
flies. Researchers have observed similar alliances in many other
female-bonded species, including other Old World monkeys such as
macaques, olive baboons, patas and rhesus monkeys, and gray langurs; New
World monkeys such as the capuchin; and prosimians such as the
ring-tailed lemur.

Females in other species leave their birth communities at adolescence
and spend the rest of their lives cut off from their female kin. In most
such species, females do not form strong bonds with other females and
rarely support one another against males. Both chimpanzees and hamadryas
baboons exhibit this pattern, and, as we saw earlier, in both species
females submit to sexual control by males.

This contrast between female-bonded species, in which related females
gang together to thwart males, and non-female-bonded species, in which
they don't, breaks down when we come to the bonobo. Female bonobos, like
their close relatives the chimpanzees, leave their kin and live as
adults with unrelated females. Recent field studies show that these
unrelated females hang out together and engage in frequent homoerotic
behavior, in which they embrace face-to-face and rapidly rub their
genitals together; sex seems to cement their bonds. Examining these
studies in the context of my own research has convinced me that one way
females use these bonds is to form alliances against males, and that, as
a consequence, male bonobos do not dominate females or attempt to coerce
them sexually.

How and why female bonobos, but not chimpanzees, came up with this
solution to male violence remains a mystery.
Female primates also use relationships with males to help protect
themselves against sexual coercion. Among olive baboons, each adult
female typically forms long-lasting "friendships" with a few of the many
males in her troop. When a male baboon assaults a female, another male
often comes to her rescue; in my troop, nine times out of ten the
protector was a friend of the female's. In return for his protection,
the defender may enjoy her sexual favors the next time she comes into
estrus. There is a dark side to this picture, however. Male baboons
frequently threaten or attack their female friends-when, for example,
one tries to form a friendship with a new male. Other males apparently
recognize friendships and rarely intervene. The female, then, becomes
less vulnerable to aggression from males in general, but more vulnerable
to aggression from her male friends.
As a final example, consider orangutans. Because their food grows so
sparsely, adult females rarely travel with anyone but their dependent
offspring. But orangutan females routinely fall victim to forced
copulation. Female orangutans, it seems, pay a high price for their
solitude.

Some of the factors that influence female vulnerability to male sexual
coercion in different species may also help explain such variation among
different groups in the same species. For example, in a group of
chimpanzees in the Tai Forest in the Ivory Coast, females form closer
bonds with one another than do females at Gombe. Tai females may
consequently have more egalitarian relationships with males than their
Gombe counterparts do.

Such differences between groups especially characterize humans. Among
the South American Yanomamoe, for instance, men frequently abduct and
rape women from neighboring villages and severely beat their wives for
suspected adultery. However, among the Aka people of the Central African
Republic, male aggression against women has never been observed. Most
human societies, of course, fall between these two extremes.
How are we to account for such variation? The same social factors that
help explain how sexual coercion differs among nonhuman primates may
deepen our understanding of how it varies across different groups of
people. In most traditional human societies, a woman leaves her birth
community when she marries and goes to live with her husband and his
relatives. Without strong bonds to close female kin, she will probably
be in danger of sexual coercion. The presence of close female kin,
though, may protect her. For example, in a community in Belize, women
live near their female relatives. A man will sometimes beat his wife if
he becomes jealous or suspects her of infidelity, but when this happens,
onlookers run to tell her female kin. Their arrival on the scene,
combined with the presence of other glaring women, usually shames the
man enough to stop his aggression.

Even in societies in which women live away from their families, kin may
provide protection against abusive husbands, though how much protection
varies dramatically from one society to the next. In some societies a
woman's kin, including her father and brothers, consistently support her
against an abusive husband, while in others they rarely help her. Why?

The key may lie in patterns of male-male relationships. Alliances
between males are much more highly developed in humans than in other
primates, and men frequently rely on such alliances to compete
successfully against other men. They often gain more by supporting their
male allies than they do by supporting female kin. In addition, men
often use their alliances to defeat rivals and abduct or rape their
women, as painfully illustrated by recent events in Bosnia. When women
live far from close kin, among men who value their alliances with other
men more than their bonds with women, they may be even more vulnerable
to sexual coercion than many nonhuman primate females.

Like nonhuman primate females, many women form bonds with unrelated
males who may protect them from other males. However, reliance on men
exacts a cost-women and other primate females often must submit to
control by their protectors. Such control is more elaborate in humans
because allied men agree to honor one another's proprietary rights over
women. In most of the world's cultures, marriage involves not only the
exclusion of other men from sexual access to a man's wife-which protects
the woman against rape by other men-but also entails the husband's right
to complete control over his wife's sexual life, including the right to
punish her for real or suspected adultery, to have sex with her whenever
he wants, and even to restrict her contact with other people, especially
men.

In modern industrial society, many men-perhaps most-maintain such
traditional notions of marriage. At the same time, many of the
traditional sources of support for women, including censure of abusive
husbands by the woman's kinfolk or other community members, are eroding
as more and more people end up without nearby kin or long-term
neighbors. The increased vulnerability of women isolated from their
birth communities, however, is not just a by-product of modern living.
Historically, in highly patriarchal societies like those found in China
and northern India, married women lived in households ruled by their
husband's mother and male kin, and their ties with their own kin were
virtually severed. In these societies, today as in the past, the
husband's female kin often view the wife as a competitor for resources.
Not only do they fail to support her against male coercive control, but
they sometimes actively encourage it. This scenario illustrates an
important point: women do not invariably support other women against
men, in part because women may perceive their interests as best served
through alliances with men, not with other women. When men have most of
the power and control most of the resources, this looks like a realistic
assessment.

Decreasing women's vulnerability to sexual coercion, then, may require
fundamental changes in social alliances. Women gave voice to this
essential truth with the slogan SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL-a reference to
the importance of women's ability to cooperate with unrelated women as
if they were indeed sisters. However, among humans, the male-dominant
social system derives support from political, economic, legal, and
ideological institutions that other primates can't even dream of.
Freedom from male control-including male sexual coercion-therefore
requires women to form alliances with one another (and with like-minded
men) on a scale beyond that shown by nonhuman primates and humans in the
past.
Although knowledge of other primates can provide inspiration for this
task, its achievement depends on the uniquely human ability to envision
a future different from anything that has gone before.

Stephen Hawking quotes from Larry King LIve Weekend December 25, 1999,
9:00 ET

"I think the biggest challenge we face is from our aggressive instincts.
In caveman -- or caveperson days, these gave definite survival
advantages and were imprinted in our genetic code by Darwinian natural
selection. But with nuclear weapons, they threaten our destruction. We
don't have time for Darwinian evolution to remove our aggression. We
will have to use genetic engineering."

"I think genetic engineering with humans is going to occur whether we
like it or not. It will change our standard of what is human but it will
be a gradual change because there's so much we don't know and because
humans take time to grow up. We won't change much in the next 100 years
but we might after that."