Bitch: On the Female of the Species

by Lucy Cooke

Amongst male chimps it’s a very different story. Rank is determined partly by physical strength but crucially by tactical coalitions with other males. Alpha male status is frequently challenged and highly unstable. Power struggles generally involve complex and shifting alliances that de Waal has compared to human political manoeuvring.

Mama’s power came from her command of the sisterhood. Every male in the Arnhem colony knew they needed Mama on their side because she represented all the females. This made her a powerful ally, but she was far from impartial. She’d take sides in male power struggles, choosing to support one male against another. If one female in the group dared support the wrong male, they’d find themselves in trouble with the boss until they switched allegiance to Mama’s favoured candidate.

You have physical dominance, which clearly in many species is male. Then you have rank, which is communicated more between males and between females than between the sexes.’ Rank is measured by who submits to whom, which chimps do by bowing and pant-grunting. These outward signs of status reflect what de Waal calls the ‘formal hierarchy’ and act like military stripes on a uniform. ‘Finally, you have power,’ de Waal told me, ‘meaning how much influence you have on the social processes in the group, which is much harder to define.’

Barbara Smuts, the distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, has documented how in rhesus macaques and vervet monkeys, for example, a male’s quest to achieve and maintain dominance is strongly influenced by the support of high-ranking females. Female vervet monkeys remain in their birth group and form strong lifelong bonds with their kin, while males disperse and join other, unrelated groups. This gives the females a huge amount of power. Matrilines of related females form the stable core and cooperate against male domination. Females will prevent certain males from joining the group and drive other males out, occasionally wounding or even killing them in the process. ‘They are essentially female groups. Males may float in and out, but the alpha female is the central figure and has a lot of power,’ de Waal told me.

Amongst capuchin monkeys, for example, it is the diminutive females that more commonly display leadership when it comes to foraging and group movements not the alpha male, challenging the age-old assumption that dominance and leadership are one and the same.

The more female matrilines are studied, the more group authority they command, influencing societal outcomes in ways that have traditionally been underappreciated when viewed through the prism of physical dominance, and thus chipping away at the assumed autonomy of the alpha male.

Unlike female vervet monkeys, once a female chimp reaches puberty, she leaves her birth troop and surrenders to a nomadic life, foraging alone in the forest.Any females she meets along the way will be viewed as competitors, so they don’t bond. If she happens to join a group, there will be no familiar family members to connect with and her only significant connection will be with her offspring.

Male chimps form the core of the troop, and over the course of their lives they develop complex relationships and supreme social muscle. Dispersal patterns, then, can be a neat way of predicting the dynamics of power in social primates. The influential Harvard University anthropologist Richard Wrangham formulated this observation into a much-cited theory that expects the sex that stays in their birth group to always develop the strongest mutual bonds.

In addition to chimps, non-bonded female primates include gorillas, colobus monkeys and hamadryas baboons (Papio hamadryas) – whose females are the least emancipated of the bunch, with the dubious honour of being dubbed ‘the most wretched and least independent of any non-human primate’ by the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

Almost all were female-on-male attacks. Parish cast the net wider and discovered shocking tales from zoos all around the world. At Wilhelma, a zoo in Stuttgart, Germany, for example, two females attacked a male and bit his penis in half (a microsurgeon repaired the damage and the male went on to reproduce). Each zoo had their own folkloric story about what was ‘wrong’ with their males because this pattern of aggression wasn’t what people thought was ‘natural’. Parish looked at the data through a different lens and came to the landmark realization: this was a species with female dominance.

Male bonobos are very close to their mothers, whose rank and authority offer their sons protection against bullying by other females. Makasi’s mother was not at San Diego Zoo, leaving him vulnerable to attack. In the wild, males will likely have their mother close by in their social group. So, whilst the threat of female aggression is very real, bonobos are actually much more peaceable than their chimpanzee cousins.

Chimpanzees are famously territorial. When neighbouring groups meet, the scene is extremely hostile: males tear about with their hair on end, their body language set to intimidate. They scream, bang on trees and will even kill each other.

‘Sex is the bonobo’s answer to avoiding conflict,’ de Waal added, which is why these unconventional apes have been dubbed the ‘make-love-not-war’ hippy ape.

‘There’s no bonobo that’s exclusively heterosexual or homosexual. They’re all bisexual,’ Parish told me.

Bonobos stare deeply into each other’s eyes, passionately kiss using tongues, practise oral sex and even fashion sex toys.

When bonobos do have heterosexual sex, they often do so in the missionary position. This is not really seen in any other primates. Chimpanzees virtually never have sex face to face, whereas bonobos do so in one out of three copulations in the wild.

The first suggestion that the sexual behaviour of bonobos in some ways mirrored our own arrived way back in the 1950s, but the scientists involved chose to obscure their controversial findings by reporting in Latin.

These early studies were studiously ignored by the international scientific establishment. It wasn’t until the sexual liberation of the 1970s that the full glory of the bonobos’ sex life started to go public. The bonobos’ novel approach to harmony and hierarchy has been observed in the wild, as well as in the more artificial social situations afforded by zoos. Female bonobos in Congo’s LuiKotale forest have even been recorded using specialized gestures and pantomime to convey their desire for a bit of G-G.

Like chimpanzees, bonobos share almost 99 per cent of their genetic make-up with us. They both have equal right to claim status as our closest cousin. The ancestor of chimps and bonobos diverged from our ancestral line a mere eight million years ago. The two Pan species then diverged from one another much later, which is why they appear to be so much more similar to each other than to us.

The bonobo keeper commented how she always feels special if Loretta gives her a nod and I wondered how the ageing matriarch would register Dr Parish’s presence. The two females first met in 1989, when Parish was a fledgling PhD student and Loretta a youthful matriarch. Parish went on to spend all daylight hours, seven days a week, for several years documenting Loretta and her group. Since that study she’d paid regular visits. The primate and the primatologist had watched each other mature, become young mothers and practised elders.

Loretta clocked Dr Parish and made an instant beeline towards her. The bonobo stood upright on the other side of the glass, her soulful amber eyes stared deeply into Parish’s and she made a succession of subtle nods with her head. Parish nodded back using the same shared language of acknowledgement. Loretta then leaned into the glass, placing her head against it. Parish did the same and the two mock-groomed one another through the glass for over twenty minutes. At one stage Loretta placed her hand on the glass and the scientist placed hers against the bonobo’s, as if the glass were not there.

I felt a lump in my throat. I was not alone. The surrounding zoo visitors were equally transfixed by these two old friends showing their love for one another. We were all awestruck into a respectful silence, and, in my case, trembling. Afterwards Parish told me I had indeed witnessed something special. She and Loretta had not seen each other for over a month; they didn’t normally have such intensely emotional and protracted greetings.

It was an intensely special relationship. This wise old female had helped Parish decode the secrets of her peaceful matriarchal society, and helped us humans understand, once and for all, that patriarchy and violence aren’t necessarily burnt into our DNA.