Bonobo Sex

Last night I went to the latest event in USC’s Visions and Voices lecture series. The theme was “Point of View.” One talk was about whether there’s really such a thing as objectivity in reporting, and another was about the cinematography in Hitchcock’s Notorious, but any impressions I might have formed on those topics have been completely obliterated by the third talk, which was a very graphic discussion of bonobo sex. What did this have to do with “point of view”? Who cares! It’s bonobo sex! I’ll spare you graphic details, but I’ll just note in passing that the average duration for bonobo sex is apparently 9-15 seconds, so guys, don’t feel bad. Actually, the talk did have a lot to do with point of view, since the person presenting it was USC’s only “Feminist Darwinian Scholar.” She said that feminists have traditionally been hostile to biology, since biology has so often been used to push a view of the “natural order” in which males are dominant. But according to her, if you bring a feminist perspective to biology you start noticing things that’ve been overlooked or misinterpreted by male researchers. For example, bonobo females have a lot of sex with each other. Researchers have traditionally tried to come up with all sorts of tortured rationalizations to explain this behavior as something other than sex for pleasure, though that’s obviously exactly what it is. In fact, bonobo females have actually evolved to have pleasurable sex with each other — the female bonobo has developed a large, distended clitoris for the sole purpose of being able to rub it against the clitoris of other females. (Okay, I guess I was sort of lying about that whole “sparing you the graphic details” thing.) This scholar also talked about how as bonobo females age, they tend to form “Mean Girls“-esque clicks that dominate their tribe. Male researchers have tended to underplay this, insinuating that the males could easily be in charge, but they just choose not to be, rather than the more obvious and straightforward explanation that the females are, in fact, dominant.