A prominent Pakistani Facebook personality, Qandeel Baloch, has been brutally murdered by her own brother, in an ‘honour killing’. To be an independent woman in an Islamic place is to invite your own close relatives to kill you. Not only was Qandeel killed by her own brother, her parents, who were present, did nothing to … Continue reading Qandeel Baloch: killed by Islam.
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Does this man have the right to use a women-only space just because he claims he ‘identifies as a woman’?
Restroom rights again
The issue of ‘transgender’ access to female-specific spaces continues to boil up. So let’s look again at what is being said and why it is a problem.
While women-only toilets and other similar spaces may have originally been invented out of misogyny and male entitlement (more intended to keep women out of male spaces as men out of women’s), the fact is that they have come to be seen as a place of refuge, safe havens for women who spend all their lives enduring the proprietorial gazes and more, of the men around them.
The United Sates of America, as we have noted here before, has an appalling track record of misogynistic as well as transphobic and homophobic violence. A woman’s rape, according to recent data, is reported once every six minutes there and the level of under-reporting may be as high as 80% or more. Women in patriarchal cultures are under constant threat of rape, and that is why the safe spaces issue has become important.
The regressive left, with typical stupidity, has seized on this as an issue of ‘transgender rights’ and nothing else. This is a lie. There are two issues here. One is whether women have a right to safe spaces where they can perform private functions without interacting with men, and the other is whether a person born male who ‘self-identifies’ as a woman, can simply overthrow any such right. In other words, does just saying he is a woman allow a person who is externally identifiable as a man to enter a space reserved for women who were born female?
The matter is whether men’s ‘right’, to call themselves anything they like and demand to be treated as such, over-rides women’s right to feel safe. In other words, it is a simple matter of power and hierarchy. Giving people born male who simply ‘self-identify’ as women permission to enter women-only spaces, just says that men’s rights matter and women’s don’t. That simple.
Part of the problem is the idiocy of ‘identity politics’ which contends that we are whatever we say we are and there is an end to it. That’s absurd. If identity counts, it is what we can be identified as by others, not by ourselves. Science progresses on the accurate observation, identification and classification of phenomena from an independent observer’s point of view. Unfortunately, philosophy and politics conspire to muddy issues which are scientifically clear.
Sex and gender are not the same thing. Sex is predetermined and innate, for almost all of us, excepting those few with specific intersex conditions. But we are not talking about them here. The rest of us are either born male or female.
Similarly, there are only two genders, feminine and masculine. One is either a woman or a man, or in some cases, sometimes a woman and sometimes a man. Gender, unlike sex, is not innate. It is a set of learned behaviours. It follows therefore that it is entirely possible for a person born male to learn to be a woman, and for a person born female to learn to be a man. These individuals are transsexual.
Most of the research that exists — and I am talking about proper research, not academic philosophical twaddle — has been done on male to female transsexualism rather than female to male. The principal researcher whose work informs the current scientific consensus on this is Dr Ray Blanchard, an unsung hero of sexology.
Blanchard was responsible for determining whether patients arriving at his clinic, the Clarke Institute in Toronto, were eligible for surgery to change their physical sex organs from male to female. He called these people ‘transsexual’, which remains the correct scientific term, because they wanted to transform their physical sex.
Blanchard therefore used the term ‘transsexual’ to mean ‘a person who desires to change their physical sex’. The term ‘transgender’ is meaningless in this context; Blanchard was looking at physical reality, not metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. He is a scientist and was applying proper scientific taxonomy and rigour. (It is telling that resistance to his findings, invariably on spurious grounds, comes from a deeply anti-scientific culture, the United States.)
This group was the only one Blanchard studied, and his results have to be taken in that context.
From long before Blanchard, however, researchers had been aware that not all people, who were born male but presented as women, desired Genital Reconstruction Surgery. Dr Harry Benjamin, in the 1960’s, posited a 7-point scale (these are frequently used by biologists) in which only the two most extreme required GRS. Since these scales are typically weighted towards the centre, this means that many individuals had to some degree a gender that differed from their birth sex, but who did not desire or require GRS. In other words, many transwomen have penises.
Benjamin did not look deeply into the causes of this dichotomy between gender and birth sex. He was a medical doctor and his aim was to relieve the suffering of his patients.
Blanchard, however, was interested in the causes and very quickly confirmed that, as previous researchers like Freund had noted, there were two distinct profiles of persons presenting, seeking to have their physical sex changed. He was able, over years of methodical research, to categorise these into ‘homosexual’ and ‘non-homosexual’ transsexuals. The first, which he termed ‘HSTS’ were uniquely attracted to men from an early age, typically long before puberty. They may have thought themselves to be gay boys at some stage, but this was an unsatisfactory and uncomfortable role to play and they would transition into women, often in their teens and nearly always before the age of 30. They were so naturally feminine in their looks and comportment that they would routinely be taken for women. It was easy for Blanchard to identify and plot the correlation between these individuals’ sex drive and their gender identity. In other words, HSTS transsexualism is based in male sexuality. However, because HSTS are uniquely attracted to men, they pose no sexual threat to women at all.
This is an HSTS or True transsexual, the delightful Kevin Balot. Nobody would be surprised to see her using a women-only space, because that is what she obviously is.
Blanchard then asked if male sex drive might be the stimulus behind the other, non-homosexual group. These had no sexual or romantic interest in men prior to transition, were typically much older, often married, and were not feminine in any way. They usually had great difficulty ‘passing’ as women, if they could at all.
Blanchard was able to show that this second group were otherwise normative heterosexual men who had a condition called an Erotic Target Location Error. Most of us are attracted to other people, no matter what our specific preferences are. These individuals, on the other hand, were attracted to themselves, but in the form of women. They typically had a history of dressing up as women to masturbate, and thus had been sexually confirming their condition by sexual reward, often for two or three or more decades of their lives. Although they often claimed to have wanted to ‘dress up’ as girls before puberty, this was never out of desire for male partners, but out of desire for themselves, as girls. Thus autogynephilia is also a product of male sex drive.
To recap: all male to female expressions of transsexualism are rooted in male sex drive, but there are two completely distinct forms, HSTS and AGP. The former have no sexual interest in woman while the latter do, though their primary erotic or romantic desire is for themselves, in the form of women.
This taxonomy remains the scientific consensus, although nomenclature differs a little. Numerous attempts have been made to scientifically disprove Blanchard’s core conclusions, and all have simply confirmed them.
Unfortunately, autogynephiles often resent the scientific description. To try to get round it, they have developed thing called the ‘brain sex’ theory. This is complete bunk and has no scientific basis, but it has become popular because many autogynephiles are good at manipulating a largely ignorant media.
To understand the resentment it is necessary to understand the development of autogynephilia. The subject has to invent a female character within himself to become attracted to. Through the years of sexual reward, this character becomes stronger and stronger until, one day, it takes over. Now as far as this pseudo-feminine personality is concerned, it always was a woman — and so it was, since the male brain it exists within created it as such. This is the real reason why autogynephiles, who are frequently not in the slightest bit feminine but indeed ultra masculine, claim they were ‘always women inside’.
The most extreme forms of autogynephilia can be treated with GRS. As is said, one gives the subject the body he wants so that it cosmetically conforms to the mental image that the pseudo-feminine constructed personality within the subject expects. The feelings of anxiety dissipate, and the subject can lead a more comfortable, if hardly normal, life. Blanchard’s great contribution to the lives of autogynephiles was in giving a supported scientific justification for performing GRS on them. Little enough gratitude did he get.
Clearly, an autogynephile who has had GRS is not a rape threat to women, because his penis has been removed. It would seem churlish and unkind to make a person who had gone to these lengths use a man’s facility.
However, as Benjamin noted, there is a developmental scale. Not all autogynephiles want GRS, and even if they do, they must pass years living in the appearance of women, before they can. At the same time, these individuals are gynephilic (clue: the hint is in the name). In other words, while they are attracted to themselves as women, they are also attracted to other women. Proof of this is in how many get and remain married. So a pre-operative autogynephile, that is to say, one who retains his penis, remains a potential rape threat.
Now, this was not really too much of an issue. Most autogynephiles are far more excited by their erotic fantasy of being women than by the idea of forcing themselves on other women. Indeed, many have great difficulty in having sex at all, at least with others. So once again, there is little danger to women incumbent on allowing them to use women’s facilities.
The problem has come about because autogynephile activists resent the actual science that describes them in favour of the completely bogus and unsupported ‘brain sex’ theory, that posits, against all the evidence, that gender exists in the brain and is innate. Because of this they have promoted the notion of ‘self-identification’. They basically say ‘only I know whether I am a woman or not, so only I am qualified to say.’
And that is all fine and dandy except that the ridiculous ‘Identity Politics’ fly-by-nighters have transformed this into ‘a man is a woman if he says he is’. It doesn’t matter how he lives or how he presents, as long as he says he’s a woman, we have to go along with that. And thus a woman’s right to a safe private space is trumped by a man’s ‘right’ to say he is a woman. That is simple misogyny, but this is the cornerstone of the restroom/toilet/bathroom debate: is a man a woman just because he says so?
It’s a ridiculous assertion.
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A transgirl performing a traditional Sinulog dance in the Philippines. Pic: Rod Fleming
Almost all credible authorities, according to GIRES in the UK, now agree that the baseline minimum for gender non-conformity as ‘at least 1%’ and this has been borne out, again according to GIRES, by recent studies in New Zealand, The Netherlands and Belgium.
Now ‘gender non-conformity’ is a broad church and by no means all of these would identify as transgender. However, research carried out by Professor Lynn Conway and also by the Williams Institute for Law, part of the UCLA, suggests about half of these are, for a prevalence of around 1:200. This is supported by census results from Malaysia, which put the incidence there — a country that is officially very hostile towards transgender — at 1:170 of male-born individuals.
This should tell us two things: transgender is innate and appears in all populations at roughly the same rate; and that as such it is a part of normal human variation.
Of these transgender populations, the vast majority are what is called by science ‘Blanchard HSTS’, ‘Early Onset Androphile’ or ‘transkids.’ These are almost always, uniquely, attracted to men. They appear as transgender very young and frequently begin dressing as girls, wearing their hair long and, in recent decades, taking feminising hormones in their early teens. They should not be confused with another, much less frequent type of MtF transgender, known as ‘autogynephiles’. These latter are fetishistic transvestite men, for whom dressing and pretending to be a woman is a sexual thrill: think Bruce ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner. (We will deal with these elsewhere; they are almost entirely restricted to white, middle-class Western men and globally are a tiny population.)
But why are MtF transgenders so obvious, and so open, outside the West?
While we were researching ‘Why Men Made God’ I spent much time in the Philippines and was lucky enough to be invited into the company of Filipino families. I was fascinated to observe the ‘two-group’ social model, which we described in the book, in full operation, and indeed I incorporated some of my observationst. This model was particularly obvious at large family gatherings. Here, the men would congregate around one or more tables — often drinking heavily — while the women and children socialised completely separately. There were never any women or children at the men’s tables. Because I am obviously a man, I was directed to the men’s group and observed from there, as the rising tide of alcohol — in the form of ‘Empi’ or Emperador brandy — rose to my gills.
This separation of two groups, however, was not to do with alcohol. As a foreigner and a guest — a person of important status in a Filipina household — I was also invited to join women’s drinking parties on several occasions and I can attest that Filipina women party just as hard as the men do.
One of the things that I did notice, in the large, mixed parties as well as in the women-only ones, was that while the men’s group was made up exclusively of adult men presenting as straight, the other group was of women, children and gays. When women socialised independently of men, there were always a number of gays or transgenders there too; they never, ever appeared in the ‘men’ group activities.
(The term ‘gay’ in Filipino culture does not mean quite what it purports to mean in the West. There, it signifies a person born male who identifies internally as a woman and who desires men romantically and sexually. The notion of the ‘egalitarian gay’ where manly manly men lust after other manly manly men, is regarded as risible throughout Asia and while there are some implantations of this Western model, they are reviled by the vast majority of gays there.)
So this leads us back to ‘what makes a woman?’ The simple answer ‘chromosomes’ will not work, since a small minority of women, who have a condition called Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or CAIS, are actually XY karotype. Similarly, he argument ‘possession of a female reproductive system’ would cause a problem with CAIS women, who have vaginas, but none of the other female reproductive system. In any case, this explanation does not satisfactorily answer why it is that women and men are so markedly different in so many non-physical ways, such as how they socialise.
At the same time, a purely essentialist approach — it’s down to chromosomes or genitalia at birth — does not allow for what we now know to be between half to one percent of the born-male population, who are to all intents and purposes, women. These are the HSTS transgenders I referred to earlier, the transkids.
Gender itself is a construct of behaviours and expectations, almost none of which are fixed. Other than motherhood and the necessity to nurse and care for children, there is nothing that we associate with the gender construct ‘woman’ that is innately so. Other cultures, where there are more than two genders, demonstrate this too. Gender is fluid because, unlike being air skinned or blue eyed, it is a social, not a biological construct. It is a function of culture.
So ‘what makes a woman’ must be more than the possession of a vagina or XX chromosomes. Since gender is constructed and not innate, then it follows that it must be learned. And where and when is it learned? In childhood, through socialisation.
This is where the observation of social interaction in Asia becomes so important. Remember, one group contains only adult men; the other, everyone else. So there is a group of ‘men’ and a group of ‘not-men’. Gays fall into the latter group. They are never part of the ‘men’ group, because they are ‘not-men’. This is not just a function of orientation as a somewhat skewed Western perspective has it. Rather, a gay’s orientation is a function of her gender — which is, no matter what she looks like, always ‘not man’.
Blanchard demonstrated that HSTS transgenders are on a scale of variation with gay men (as they are called in the West; in Asia that would be an oxymoron). This close association, within the Asian model, means that all gays, whether transgender or not, are related and are, in social terms, part of the ‘not-men’ group: in other words, in terms of socialisation, they are women. These individuals grow up socialising with girls and woman and adopt the gender expressions that are naturally found within this group as their own.
That is why HSTS are so feminine: their childhood socialisation was within the ‘not-men’ group, within which the authority figures are all women. When the women, children and gays congregate together, separately from the ‘men’ group, at the centre of the group is the matriarch, usually a grandmother or great-grandmother, but perhaps the eldest sister or some other woman identified by a mysterious ranking system that exists within the matriarchy. Gays and transgenders grow up within this group and learn, and maintain throughout their lives, the gender construct that is their badge of membership.
‘Lola’ surveys her domain.
What Westerners may not realise, because of the vicious misogyny of the Western patriarchy, is that to remain part of the ‘not-men’ group is an honour. Boyish boys are excluded from it when they become adult, because men are inferior to women. Why are they inferior? Because they are brutish and violent and they cannot make babies. They lack the most important power of all. They can kill, but they cannot create.
While they may be sexually desired by those in the ‘not-men’ group, they are not part of it. The ‘men’ group is made up of outsiders looking in. The real action takes place in the ‘not-men’ group, presided over by the matriarch, who disposes her beneficence in the form of loving smiles and words and, frequently, gifts. She is ‘Mother Christmas’ and indeed, is an incarnation of the Goddess herself.
Gays, which group includes transgenders, have an honorary right to remain in the privileged ‘not-men’ group, because they have learned how to be women. They behave like women and this gives them the gender ‘woman'; they are tolerated within the group even though they lack the power to make life, because they do not offend those who do.
Following on from this they may adopt other behaviours consistent with being a woman: growing their hair long, wearing make-up, adopting ‘feminine’ body-language and so on. This gives them the right to remain a part of the ‘not-men’ group as they get older, and not to have to become part of the ‘men’ group. These actions symbolise a desire: to remain a ‘not-man’. This reinforces their adoption of gender roles and behaviours that they associate positively, in their culture, with women. This is why they are often so feminine and strive to be as beautiful as they can be — it is only in part to attract male partners: it is also a badge of affirmation, a sign of their membership of the honoured group, of being ‘not-men’ themselves.
When Western feminists point to socialisation as how it is that a ‘woman’ can be, they are right. What they fail to recognise is that, especially outwith the white, Anglo-Saxon, Western patriarchy, gays and transgenders share exactly the same socialisation patterns as women. Furthermore, once outside the protection of the ‘not-men’ group, gays and transgenders become targets for aggressive men. The patriarchy is very strong in Asian culture, but its compass is limited in one crucial regard; its authority does not obtain within the home or the family. So, while within that home, and the ‘not-men’ group that dominates it, gays and transgenders are generally safe, as soon as they step outside they are at risk from men who resent their very existence.
This resentment is because, by choosing not to be part of the ‘men’ group, gays and transgenders question its foundation. They are saying ‘what’s great about being a part of the ‘men’ group? I’d rather be a girl with my sisters in the ‘not-men’ group.’ That, of course, is an existential menace and the male patriarchy responds, as it always does to such challenges, with a narcissistic rage response.
This male resentment is very similar to the resentment that natal women feel everywhere. Asian gays are told in no uncertain manner that unless they join the ‘men’ group — which would mean undoing all their socialisation and changing their sexual orientation — then men will make their lives as miserable as they can — as men do to women. They are denied jobs, discriminated against and, if they can get work, obliged to accept worse terms and conditions than men would be expected to. They are insulted in the street. However it is not possible to unlearn one’s social conditioning, even if one might want to.
In the end, women, transgenders and gays are hated by the patriarchy for the very simple reason that women refuse to let men socialise with them, because they regard them as inferior.
This is the crux and it is outwith men’s power to control, something which men of course, utterly hate. That hatred is the foundation of the patriarchy, which is like a spiteful little boy’s response to being told he can’t play with the girls because he’s too rough. It is an entire social system founded on petulance, on men’s hurt feelings at being told that, no matter how much their mothers and sisters love them, they’re just not part of the club.
The ‘not-men’ group self-selects for inclusion. One is not part of the ‘men’ group by choice, but because one is put there by the ‘not-men’ group, essentially the women. This is a real power that women in these cultures — and it is seen all over the world — have over men. Gays and transgenders, in this model, are actually privileged. They have no desire to be part of the ‘men’ group. They want to remain outside it and within the group of women, children and gays. They reject manhood, masculinity and being part of the ‘men’ group. This is what men find offensive; and this offence may, when the power of women to suppress it is diminished, result in violence, even deadly violence.
Thus, in many senses, albeit not including motherhood, Asian HSTS MtF transgender have a very strong claim to be called a ‘second type of woman’ which is what they usually do refer to themselves as. They often look extremely feminine, they act like women and sound like them; but perhaps most of all, they are hated by the patriarchy in a very similar way to the way that women are hated. Gays and transgenders — they are essentially the same, with only detail differences of dress and hairstyle being different — are indeed women in terms of their gender, a social construct which they have learned from birth and through childhood.
Unfortunately, in the Western patriarchy, HSTS transgender women, who were until recently called ‘True’ transsexuals, have found their identity parasitised, colonised and erased by another group who claim to be transgender but who are in fact simply cross-dressing, sexually fetishistic men with a severe paraphilia: autogynephiles.
We shall discuss those in a future piece.
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Mother and Child. Pic: Rod Fleming
There is a difference between sex and gender; I am going to begin with sex (you’ll see why.) Sex refers to our physical, biological bodies. Usually, it’s how we are identified as babies, by the sex of our genitalia.
So are the sexes unequal? Yes, absolutely. Women are many many times more important than men. This is because the success, indeed the survival, of any population is dependent on the number, not of men, but of fertile mothers.
In China right now, a disaster is unfolding because of decades of legal restriction of family size to one, and a cultural misogyny which has seen female foetuses routinely aborted. This means that China simply doesn’t have enough women and it is facing financial — and possibly existential — collapse as its population ages. Doubtless the Chinese will soon be seeking net immigration on a huge scale; whether they’ll be able to persuade anyone is less sure.
One man can father hundreds or thousands of babies, but a woman can only carry perhaps 20 or so children in her lifetime and very few do that. Most women have far fewer children, which makes each individual mother more important. We explain how human society developed around core groups of women and children in Why Men Made God. Without children, humans cannot survive and the key to this is not men but women. This is why we developed a ‘two-group’ social structure, based around the mothers and children, with the men in a peripheral role.
Further and, as we discovered while researching, in most traditional (i.e. ‘hunter-gatherer’ or ‘forager’ cultures, it is the women who feed the tribe, not the men. For example, the amongst the !Kung San bush people, the women spend around three hours a day foraging and collecting food. They plant small gardens also. This is enough to feed the tribe.
The men hunt, but hunts are only successful 5% – 10% of the time, so actually, it’s a pastime and the people survive by the efforts of the women. Yes, the sexes are unequal: women are worth more than men.
Gender, on the other hand, is a social construct of behaviours, appearance and gendered roles. It is independent of sex, as transgender people prove. It is entirely possible to be born male, for example, and still have a feminine gender; indeed, this happens in about 1% of mail births, everywhere, according to GIRES.
We discovered that in traditional societies there are some gender markers. These include divisions of tasks by gender. The habit of women dressing their hair and wearing some sort of make-up appears universal, even in such traditional peoples as the Zoé, who wear no clothes.
As above, the efforts of the women in traditional societies actually tend to be more important. (This is not always the case, although it is so generally; in extreme regions, for example the Arctic, where foraging is more difficult, the hunt becomes more important. However, even there it is never all-important; that it is presented so is a function of patriarchal academia.) Gender in traditional cultures, which are frequently matriarchal, does not suggest that men are ‘worth more’ than women; if anything the opposite, as these cultures, we discovered, are frequently matriarchal.*
Gender within the patriarchy is different: it is a social construct designed specifically to disempower women and to reinforce the cultural understanding that women are the property of men, and their bodies may be bought and sold though a system called ‘marriage’. This is a contract in which a man gains proprietary rights over a woman’s body and fertility. In the older versions of the patriarchy a woman always ‘belongs’ to a man, either her father, her male relatives or her husband. (A few hours reading the Bible — Patriarchy 101 — will soon demonstrate this.)
In the modern versions this right of property is partially transferred to an external body called an ’employer’, and those exceptional women who learn to play the role of men well enough may be afforded some illusory patriarchal privilege — which ends at the ‘glass ceiling’. The patriarchy’s structures are designed to give the illusion of fairness while actually being the opposite. That is why so few women sit in legislatures: after all, they should be a majority, if ‘democracy’ actually had any meaning.
One way or the other, the woman’s freedom is removed altogether. That is the point of the gender construct. This being the case, the only way to make the genders equal (which I hope by now you understand that I would like to see, although I doubt if I shall live long enough) would be to completely destroy the patriarchy root and branch. That will require the destruction of its economic system, capitalism, at the same time.
The problem, of course, is that men use violence, particularly sexualised violence like rape but also homophobic attacks, and, as we see al over the world, concerted military attacks and other acts of the most obscene cruelty to maintain control. Just today I read of a 19-year old girl being stoned to death in Afghanistan for running away from the much older man she had been forcibly married to. (Western men need not point the finger: their patriarchy is quite as evil and wrong as the Islamic one, it’s just more media-savvy. It does its dirty work in the dark, not in front of cameras.)
At low level you can see it all over the stinking swamp that is YouTube comments; at a more serious level in the fact that a woman is raped in the US every six minutes. The patriarchy will fight tooth and nail to preserve its privilege and men, being the idiots we are, will largely go along with it.
Ending the patriarchy and replacing it with a modern matriarchy will be very difficult. But it must be done.
*We use Peggy Reeves Sanday’s definition of the matriarchy. This is not the patriarchy in reverse, as is sometimes claimed. That’s because women socially organise differently from men. It is rather a culture where women, especially mothers, are central. We discuss this at length in Why Men Made God.
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Bonobos chilling to the beat — as well as being pansexual and gender-fluid, bonobos like music. How cool is that?
When we did the research for Why Men Made God we spent a lot of time looking at how societies might have been structured in the era before the development of agriculture and the establishment of the patriarchy (I will be calling these ‘traditional’ societies.) Clearly, we can’t directly study the human groups that existed outside Africa between 50,000 and 5,000 years ago, because they no longer exist.
They left very little evidence. Although they did use stone and bone, a great deal of their artefacts were made of wood or leather and were perishable. The few that we do have are somewhat mysterious.
To try to shed light on this, we reviewed a wide range of anthropological literature. We especially concentrated on extant traditional societies, of which there are a surprising number, despite the attempts by the patriarchy, especially the Christian and Muslim ones, to eradicate them. (As a matter of fact, Islam has been less damaging to many traditional societies than Christianity, as we see from the number of traditional groups still living, and respected, in Indonesia.)
We reviewed the mythology that was recorded soon after the invention of writing in the culture that leads to the Western Patriarchy, which appeared in Sumer in the 5th Millennium BCE. We then compared this to modern mythologies which form part of traditional cultures.
We also looked at close relatives of humans, particularly our closest, the Dwarf Chimpanzee or bonobo, Pan paniscus.
Bonobos bonding
Bonobos have a fascinating social model. They are pansexual and gender-fluid. Males are not dominant and rape has never been observed in bonobo society, either in the wild or in captivity. Generally speaking, they have very relaxed, cool societies with notably low levels of aggression and stress.
In fact, bonobos use sex as the antidote to aggression and stress. Instead of fighting, they love each other, to be blunt. What is interesting is that when they do this, there is no dominance imperative: partners in bonobo sexual relations are equals. Females and males are equally likely to initiate sex. Furthermore, they have no defined preferences — they will as happily have sex with same-sex partners as with opposite.
Sex is a powerful bonding agent in bonobo society. It holds groups together and prevents division. This protects the group from falling apart and thus the individuals within it are more likely to survive. So sex has an evolutionary imperative alongside the reproductive one. In fact, bonobos don’t have sex to make babies, they have sex with their friends and for fun, because they like it. However, they have so much sex that there is no shortage of bonobo babies. Bonobos are evolved to be pansexual and gender-fluid, and we argue that this is the case for humans too.
It should be clear how this torpedoes the ‘homosexuality is an evolutionary dead-end’ argument. It might be, as far as individuals are concerned, but when everyone is having sex with everyone else, this is not the case. Being exclusively homosexual does mean an end to the individual’s genetic line, but this is not how same-sex sex works in either bonobo or traditional societies. The individual male only has to impregnate one female to reproduce his genes; and given the amount of sex in bonobo society, and the variety of it, this is easily achieved. The same, of course, holds true for females — if they give up having sex with each other occasionally to have it with a male, job done. Bonobos are naturally pansexual, to accommodate this, and we argue that the same is true of humans, and back it up with examples.
Further, bonobos are gender-fluid. This does not mean what some people think it does; it is not about wearing a miniskirt and sporting a beard. It means being happy to play either the penetrating or receiving role in sex. Bonobo males are routinely observed having sex, in which one penetrates and the other receives, and immediately after, having sex again and swapping roles. Then they will go off and have sex with females, who probably were having sex with each other in the meantime. Bonobo children are brought up by the group.
Bonobo females having fun sex.
We share over 98% of our DNA with bonobos and our traditional social models are almost identical. We wondered if we would find something in traditional societies that pointed to similar behaviours in humans and we found it.
All over the world, traditional societies exist that do not follow the patriarchal model, which is, men appropriate women as their mates for life; women in the patriarchy are the literal possessions, the property of men, initially their father, then their husband and brothers. Yet in traditional societies, this is not the case.
In many such cultures, same-sex activity is normal; frequently this is observed between adult men and boys. (Unfortunately, and probably due to the fact that the anthropologists doing the research were men, there is far less information about the women’s sexuality.) The adult men in these relations have women partners too. We cite quite a few examples and refer to over 400 sources in Why Men Made God that develop this.
We know of the Spartans that not only the men but the women had normalised same-sex relations, and while Sparta was a matriarchy, this appears also to have happened in more patriarchal pre-Abrahamic cultures too, which surprised me, frankly.
In fact, being gender fluid (in a sexual sense) and pansexual appears to be as normal for humans as it is for bonobos. However, bonobos have had to do without the curse of organised patriarchal religions, so are still happily having sex with anyone they like, while we invented a whole raft of ridiculous rules and conventions about it.
So in a way, this question is the wrong way round; it should be ‘When and why did strict monogamy and heterosexuality become enforced?’ and the answer to that we give in the book.
Now a caveat: we are talking about sex. The modern idea, that one is only ever attracted to a specific gender, is a modern idea, a by-product of the artificial sexual model imposed by the patriarchy. In fact, we should be having sex with all our friends and developing stronger bonds with them; instead we invented golf. However the patriarchy doesn’t want people being relaxed and loving each other; it wants people to compete, so they miss how it’s shafting them. Again, we explain this in far greater detail in the book than I can go into here.
Gender in the patriarchy is a construct which was developed and is used to suppress women. Gender, in fact, is how you are having sex at one specific moment in time. That’s all. In five minutes you might swap. It confers no advantage or superiority, and one gender is not intrinsically more attractive than the other. Most of what you have read or heard about this is a patriarchal lie.
With that in mind, it is disappointing to see how the modern gay ‘accommodationist’ movement has modelled itself on the patriarchy and imposes rules of behaviour on those whom is sees as being under its aegis. There is nothing that says ‘once gay always gay’ or that a man may not enjoy sex with other men, and also with women and vice versa. These are pseudo-patriarchal rules of behaviour invented by white gay male academics and activists who seek access to patriarchal privilege. I never thought that would happen; but then, the patriarchy is devious and good at perverting people to its ends.
People will not be happy and at peace until the patriarchy, and all its ridiculous rules and conventions, is utterly destroyed. Can’t come quick enough for me.
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