An in-depth interview with Frans de Waal, author of "Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist"
Frans de Waal provided the photograph of himself featured above.
Primatologist Frans de Waal, who’s now C.H. Candler professor emeritus at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, wrote a book about a topic hotly debated in present-day popular culture. His new book, “Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist,” published in early April 2022, engages gender differences among primates — but also much more.
The author describes gendered forms of play, issues of identity and self-socialization, primate patriarchy, solidarity among female bonobos, differences in sexual signaling, how the different sexes go about mating, social hierarchies, cooperation vis-à-vis competition, same-sex sexual activities, altruism and the problems associated with dualistic thinking, to cite just a few themes he expounds upon throughout the thirteen chapters of the text.
I interviewed de Waal about the book in late March 2022, just before “Different” became widely available. His publisher provided me with an advance copy, which I read in its entirety before talking to the author.
Our interview focused on the book, and on bonobos in particular, because at the time I was working on a story about what inspiration we humans can glean from our sexually-inclined fellow primates. I went on to write about those great apes for a piece the outlet Giddy just published, and I used direct quotes from my interview with de Waal in that article. Previously, I wrote about bonobos for a piece Futurism published back in November 2021. Regular readers of Waywards might also recall I published a piece of bonobo-related social theory in this newsletter in mid-February. Perhaps you Waywards readers also checked out the essay I published in the newsletter in mid-March, an essay for which I drew heavily from the eighth chapter in de Waal’s new book.
My full interview with de Waal — more than an hour’s worth of dialogue — has been transcribed and lightly edited for clarity.
I considered limiting this post to paid subscribers. I also thought about putting half of the interview behind the Substack paywall. Instead, I opted to share the whole Q&A because I think de Waal is not only worth reading; he’s also a great conversationalist and a nuanced, scientific thinker. The interview allowed us to do multiple deep dives into material from his 2022 book. That in-depth discussion helped clarify what I had questions about after reading “Different,” and de Waal offered valuable insights into both human and bonobo behavior — gendered, sexually-influenced and otherwise — during our conversation. I find much of what he writes and has to say fascinating. I imagine Waywards readers will too. Since I don’t want to deprive anyone of the pleasure of reading all of what this primatologist turned public intellectual and author of more than 12 books had to share, this post has no paywall.
You can find my transcribed interview with Dr. Frans de Waal below the following image of the front cover of his new book.
James: In the new book, one of the things that you wrote is that, “Even if sexology is not my area, one can’t study bonobos and not delve into it. Conversely, sexologists urgently need to hear about other animals. They are utterly human-focused—as if our species invented sex. Part of the problem is sexology’s misconception that only humans enjoy recreational erotic activity.”1 What would learning about other animals, bonobos in particular, teach sexologists and how might it improve or enhance human sexology, in your view?
Frans de Waal: Well, first of all, it would teach them something about animals. For them, as for many people, the sex among animals is breeding; they call it breeding. The two cows are breeding or something like that, and that is such nonsense because first of all the animals don't know about the reproductive function of sex. For them it's just sex, you know? And, yes, they will get pregnant at some point, but that is not on their mind when they have sex. So that's the first thing. It's not breeding in that sense, and also there are animals like dolphins and bonobos who have sex for other reasons — for totally other reasons — and actually, for the bonobo, most of the sex has nothing to do with reproduction and occurs between individuals who cannot even reproduce. So there is a recreational side to [the sex they have] as well. So first of all, the sexologist would learn something about animals, but I think they would also learn something about humans because they see humans sort of separate from the animal kingdom, as if sex is elevated to an art in our species, which I don't think it is. It's not totally different. It is similar. It's on a continuum with what the bonobos and the dolphins and some other species do.
James: In the book, you also mentioned that in bonobos, “breasts don’t serve as sexual signals,” and that, “Breasts never turn the heads of male apes the way female behinds do.”2 What is it about female behinds that male apes like? Why are they drawn to that specifically?
Frans de Waal: I argue in the book that in the human species, the sexual signals … have moved from below to the top, and from the back to the front. And that's because we are a bipedal species, and that's how we walk around. We see each other from the front all the time. We focus very much on the face. We even have a tendency to cover the rest of the body. So the face has become the most gendered signal. And we can facially, easily recognize gender. Actually, within a second, with 100% accuracy, we can see if someone is a man or a woman.
So it has all moved to the front, and that's where the breasts come in, I suppose. The breasts have taken on some of the function of sexual signaling, even though that's also culturally determined, because we know that there are people who walk around — where women walk around the whole day — with their breasts exposed and no one gets excited about that. That's just how they live. I think there’s a cultural aspect to that as well. Chimpanzees and bonobos, they have these inflated genital swellings on their behinds, which I think we humans, we should be happy that we don't have because I think they're very cumbersome, and it's hard to sit on them, for example — things like that. When a female chimp is swollen, she has to look for a place where she can sit where that thing hangs on the side. They're a bit cumbersome, and they attract an enormous amount of attention [from] the males. The males are extremely interested in those behinds, and they follow a female around who looks like that because it advertises fertility, which means also that she's willing to mate with the males. At other times, she's not willing to mate with males, and it’s sort of mutual; the males are not particularly interested in her at that time, and she's not particularly interested in them. And so not much happens in that time.
James: You also discuss the now famous “bonobo sisterhood” in your book.3 And you mentioned at one point you're unaware of any bonobo colony led by a male ape,4 and so I was just curious if you could help me understand the relationship between male and female hierarchies in bonobos a little bit better. You hear [from] other folks — and I get this to some extent from your book — that females are in control, right? But what does that control look like and entail, actually? Are they making decisions for the males? Are they just keeping the males in line? Could you clarify that a little bit for me?
Frans de Waal: Well, female but numbers are collectively dominant. They're not individually dominant. If you have a zoo — and I've seen situations like that — if you have one male and one female, which of course is a very small group because normally bonobos live in a group of 50 or something so; but let's say you have a zoo where they have one male and one female, then usually the mail is dominant. Because the male is bigger and stronger than the female and has canine teeth, which the female doesn't have. The male is definitely better equipped for fighting than the female. But as soon as you add a second female, that ends, because the two females will immediately band together and they will keep that male under control together.
And, of course, in a normal group, you have more than two females; you have, like, maybe 25 females, and they band together. There's a clique usually around the alpha female, who has a small clique of high-ranking older females, usually, who support her, and they dominate everything. They dominate the food; if there's food around, they have priority. They also determine travel direction, which in the forest is of course very important. I think that's mostly done by the females. They have a big effect on the hierarchy among the males. The males are very dependent on their mothers. And even into adulthood, they remain dependent on her. And they get protection from her, and a high-ranking female, her sons may be high ranking as well. And so there's a transfer — from the females to the males — of power, which also means that if that mother dies, that happens at some point, then these males they are out of luck, and they may lose their positions because they don't have the protection of their mother anymore.
So the females have an enormous say in the bonobo society, and the females are, I think, very aware of their collective power. That's also a reason why the females always stick together. For example, before they build their nests at night — because chimpanzees and bonobos every night they build a nest in a tree and sleep off the ground, which is a smart thing to do, given the predation that's going on — so they sleep a high up in a tree, and the females, the field workers tell me (I’m not a field worker, so this this comes from observations by others in the field), they say that the females call each other before they go build their nests so that they build all the nests in a cluster of trees that are close together. I think that's probably, partly, that cohesiveness of the females, is partly because they know they need to stick together in order to keep the positions that they have in society.
James: You said that you're not a field worker, but you [have] been in the past is that, right?
Frans de Waal: No. I've been to many places, so in that sense I'm familiar with primates in the field, and I'm also curious about it, but most of my work is in captivity.
James: You also mentioned in the book that you've talked to other primatologists about whether male bonobos live good lives. You wrote, “I am used to talking to zoo curators, though, who worry about their male bonobos.”5 Could you expound upon that a little bit — why there's some question whether male bonobos enjoy a good life or not?
Frans de Waal: For scientists, that's a strange question because we usually don't ask these questions. We don't talk about zebras and wonder if the males have a good life or a bad life or something. We don't have theories about that either. For us, it's just that's how these animals live, and we need to explain why they live this way.
But since at zoos there are so many male bonobos that have a miserable life, and we know now how to solve that; we know that the whole reason that that happens at zoos is because we move males around. We take a male from a group, we move them to another zoo, he ends up with females that he doesn't know, and these females beat up on him. If he had stayed in his own group, where his mom lives, nothing would have happened; he might have had a very good life because his mother protects him. That relates to how they live in the field, and we know now — and many zoos follow that advice — we know that if you want to move a male around, you move him with his mom. That's the way to do it if, if you do need to move them.
But it's actually better to move females around because that's what happens in the wild. Young female bonobos, they leave their group; they join another group. That's the natural process, and we should mimic that in zoos. The male bonobos, some happen to have a bad life because of our management policies, basically. That's why I sometimes ask the field workers, “What do you think, how are the males doing in your group?”
In the wild, the males have no trouble. They can just regulate their distance to the females. If the females are in a good mood today, they will mingle with them. If the females are in a bad mood, they will stay out of the way, and they come back later. The males in the wild, they don't have trouble.
If you go to zoos that have a lot of space — there are zoos, for example, in Europe there's a zoo that has one hectare forest for the bonobos, and that one hectare is two and a half acres, so that's a pretty big space, and it's forested — under those circumstances, the males have a perfectly good life. It’s only when you have the wrong management policies and small spaces, smaller enclosures, that you get trouble for the males.
For me that's always an interesting question — and also because there are many men, human men, who can't understand how you could have a good life if you're not dominant, even though they probably all live in families where there's a few dominant women around. They feel that men need to be dominant and ought to be dominant, and otherwise, life is not good for them. Well, I’m not sure what to do with that because the bonobo male, first of all, has an enormous amount of sex with a lot of females, so that seems like a good thing, you would think. And second, the hierarchy, also in humans, I would say is mostly within gender. The males worry about deposition among other males. “Am I at the top, or am I at the bottom?” That matters to them. But the dominance over females, or the dominance by females, that's a sort of secondary issue.
I would say in human society too we worry much more — because the competition is always within genders; between there's not so much competition — but within gender we worry about our status, more than between genders. Women worry about how they rank among other women and men how they rank among other men. That's the main concern, and I think for the other primates that's also the main concern
James: One thing I read in your book that I didn't know from, say, watching your Ted Talk,6 [or from] seeing you on The Colbert Report way back when — seeing you on TV at some point, I didn't realize how tall you are. I think you said you're 6-4. I’m a very short guy. I'm only 5-2 [barefoot]. So that stood out because then you discuss height and the importance of height in terms of status and stuff, and so that was really interesting to me.
Frans de Waal: The Dutch are the tallest people in the world. So if I go to the Netherlands, I'm just completely average. I’m not tall; I'm not short. But our people, yeah, are people much taller, and the younger generation is very tall and. Tall is sort of interesting to me because, if you walk into a group of people, you first notice people at eye level, other tall people. I think that biases man. That's one of the reasons I mentioned that men pay a lot of attention to each other, more than to women. And there are evolutionary reasons for that, because the danger for man comes from man, not from women. So we always watch each other. But in addition, since we are taller than women, that facilitates the fact that we see each other more. So we look over the heads of women, basically, at each other. I think the size difference between men and women is a sort of interesting thing to explore, and in our species, it is reflected in how tall we are. In chimpanzees who walk on hands and feet, it's a bit different because the tallness is not an issue. It's more like the bulk, the size of somebody.
James: From what I gather, female bonobos engage in quite a bit more sexual and erotic activity on average than, say human women and chimp females, especially if you include practices like the GG rubbing.7 And you just mentioned that male bonobos have quite a bit of sex. I can't recall if you noted this in the book or not, but do male bonobos have more intercourse than male chimps? Or is it comparable?
Frans de Waal: No, they may have more because the females are fertile — they advertise with swollen genitals more than [the female chimpanzees]. Female bonobos, they have these swollen genitals also sometimes when they're pregnant, when they are lactating — so they're not fertile; it's false advertisement, basically. They have these swollen genitals, and they have sex with males, and with females at times [when] the female chimpanzee has shut down her sexuality. The female chimpanzee advertises only when she’s fertile, and that is maybe for three months, for three cycles, and then she gets impregnated again. Then she becomes pregnant and has a baby, and she's not she's not having sex. In these three months, [when] the female chimpanzee is fertile, yes, she has an enormous amount of sex, and a lot of males have sex with her. So in that short period, there is an enormous amount of stuff going on and the males have lots of sex with her, but outside of that fertile period, there's not so much — as bonobos keep going, so to speak, all the time.
de Waal drew a number of pictures for the new book, including his sketch above of two female bonobos engaged in genito-genital rubbing.
James: You also wrote in the book about female bonobos preferring face-to-face copulation8 and males sometimes not being on board with that initially, and it causing some confusion. You use the term “Karma sutra apes”9 to refer to the bonobos, given all the different ways that they'll engage in intercourse. So, I was curious [about] a couple things. One, do chimps ever engage in face-to-face copulation?
Frans de Waal: I don't think I have seen it myself, even though I have seen a lot of copulations within chimps. But it has been described for adolescent chimps. I don't think the adults will do it, but the young ones, they have so many explorations, and they do so many strange things. I think it has also been described for gorillas, even though the adult gorillas, I don't think they do it. But in adolescence, when young apes are exploring these things, yes they will engage in that. In bonobos it's actually quite common. It is a difficult position to do in the trees. But, for example, in captive settings, where they have, usually, a lawn or something — they live on land — it's a very common position.
In the middle of “Different,” the reader will discover several pages of photographs, including the picture from the book I took a photo of and have embedded above, which shows belly-to-belly — something approximating face-to-face — bonobo intercourse.
James: So when the bonobos are having sex [using] all the different postures that you described, are these always really quick copulations? Because I gather that's the norm. Do they ever have [sex that lasts longer], like humans do, or is it always very quick?
Frans de Waal: It’s very quick. It's 10 seconds, 15 seconds. That's the typical copulation, the typical sexual contact between them. Longer sexual things are only for masturbation; that may take a lot longer. But sexual contacts are always brief, and they are much more integrated in their life than people think. I know people, often when they hear about bonobos, they fantasize that they have sex the whole day, which would be oh so wonderful if we had that too — that's how they react. I'm not sure. It would be exhausting in some ways, I would think. But for the bonobos, it's built into their life. They meet each other, and they have a quick sexual contact, and then they sit down and they groom each other. It’s like a greeting. It’s also something to resolve tensions between individuals. So there's a small conflict about something, they have a sexual contact and it's over. It is completely built into their social life. And it looks extremely relaxed. It doesn't look like an obsession. Sex is not an obsession for them. They have it a bit like we pat each other on the shoulder or something.
James: You use that term “relaxed” in the book to describe it as well,10 and I kind of want to return to that too. Another question that I had, though … With the rapidity and the quickness of the copulation among bonobos, how often are they reaching climax and actually producing ejaculate?
Frans de Waal: Oh yeah, that's hard to tell. They do scream at the climax sometimes. If that's the indicator then there's actually quite a bit of climaxing going on. But ejaculation is hard to say. We sometimes see evidence that it has happened. We know that many primates can ejaculate many times. So it's not like something that they do once a day or so. They can ejaculate five, six times in a day or more. It probably happens quite a bit.
James: You also wrote that “[w]hen a bonobo male and female copulate, the male’s speed of thrusting goes up or down in response to the female’s facial expressions and vocalizations. He may stop thrusting altogether if she avoids eye contact or signals boredom by yawning or grooming herself.”11 From what I gather, male chimps are rarely, if ever, as attentive to females as bonobos are during intercourse, is that right? And then, are bonobos males more attentive to the bonobo females than [human men] are to women? Is that accurate?
Frans de Waal: Well, I think, since the bonobos fairly often mate face-to-face, automatically there's more emotional exchange between the male and the female. And in addition, of course, a lot of the sex is between females. And those sexual contacts are also face-to-face. There is an enormous amount of exchange of information going on. And I do think that the [bonobo is] a much more empathic character than the chimpanzee, and so the male and the female pay more attention to each other than in the chimpanzee. The chimpanzee male, he mates from behind, usually. I've never had the impression that [male chimps] pay a lot of attention to what's happening to the female. They may, on occasion, but I don't see a lot of evidence for that. With the exchange in bonobos, that has been filmed, and I think [there are] two studies on that [wherein they] videotaped the interactions between male and female. You slow down the video tape and you can really see the exchange that's going on, and you can see if the partners look at each other or don't look at each other, and so on. And yes, the bonobos do pay attention to each other.
James: In “Different” you also suggested that our hominid triad (humans, chimps and bonobos) “shifted beautification from the male to the female,” and you claimed, “Most beauty in nature exists thanks to female taste.”12 Could you explain that a little bit more, and is that true for both bonobos and humans?
Frans de Waal: The sexual selection theory of Darwin is basically that, apart from natural selection, which are adaptive traits that you use to get food or to escape predators — you know, your color, what you eat and so on — apart from natural selection, there's the sexual selection, which is done by mates. So if I’m attractive to [females], I will get more females approaching me. Like, let’s say as a peacock — the classic example is the peacock tail, which is a totally non-functional structure. From the peacock’s perspective, it doesn't do anything except [attract] females. The whole function of the peacock tail is to be attractive to females. Sexual selection works on signals that attract mates, and in most animals, that's in the males. That's why in most animals the ornamentation, and the color, and the singing, and the dancing is done by the males who need to attract females. The females are sort of the ones who select the best possible male and that's why these characteristics are in the species.
Now, I think it can also work the other way around, and I think that's what happened in bonobos, humans and chimpanzees is [that] the female has the ornamentation. Because if males are attracted to it, and if that's the way for females to attract males, it can also work the other way around. In bonobos and chimpanzees, the females have these sexual swellings, the genital swellings. That's their ornamentation. Humans don't have these swellings, but we have other ways of ornamenting ourselves, by hanging things around us, or in our ears or noses or wherever we put the ornamentation — or lipstick, or makeup or the way we dress. In humans, the self embellishments, so to speak, is more a female thing than a male thing. And interestingly enough, in bonobos and chimps we sometimes also see that in the behavior of the females, that they drape something around [the] neck and walk around with it. [There are] all sorts of studies on that. Most of them are anecdotal. But it's almost always females. It's females who ornament themselves more than the males. So that tendency seems to be present in bonobos and chimps too.
James: So I wonder if you could also go into a little bit more detail about key similarities and differences regarding hierarchies among male chimps, bonobos and humans? And in particular, I’m curious how you understand the male hierarchy or hierarchies among humans. Because it seems like you could think about status individually and then, of course, there are social hierarchies, institutionalized hierarchies, like socioeconomic ones, pretty gross [racial hierarchies, historically], etc. I’m curious how you understand the ways that human hierarchy or hierarchies are similar to bonobos and chimps and then the important differences.
Frans de Waal: The most outspoken hierarchies you see in the military. And in the military, of course, it's mostly men, even though now that has changed, but there was usually mostly men, and they would signal the hierarchy also with the uniforms and the stripes on the uniform. So you could immediately recognize what rank somebody is, and so that's the most outspoken form. The other ones that you mentioned, like let's say racial hierarchies, well that's not an issue that we are dealing with in the other primates. And most of what we see is face-to-face. In chimps and bonobos, the hierarchy is always individualized. It's always based on who it is, and they know each other. In the military, of course, you can walk into a place and immediately see what the hierarchy is [about] even for individuals that you've never seen before. That doesn't happen in chimps and bonobos. They need to know each other. They have a history of encounters, and they have learned, “This is my place. I'm not dominant over this individual, but I can dominate that individual.” It’s all individualized. And it's not advertised with clear-cut external signals, like in the military. But it is advertised in behavior.
All primates, and I would say almost all animals, they have behavior that indicates your status. So, for example, a dog will roll on its back, which indicates that [the dog is] submissive towards you. And among wolves, that's also how the subordinates, when they meet the alpha male, they will react like that. All animals have signals to indicate what the status is — what a high status is and what a low status is. And they exchange these signals the whole day.
In chimpanzees, for example, if that stops, if you have males who have been signaling the hierarchy every day, multiple times, and one day one of these males stops doing that, that usually means that he's going to challenge the alpha male. That usually means he's not gonna be submissive anymore. He has decided that it's time to change the relationship, and then you get the trouble between the males and the status competition. That's a big political process and I described it in other books — the coalition's involved in that complex process.
But normally in everyday life, there's always this exchange of status signals, and it's [done more] among males than among females, at least in chimpanzees and bonobos, and that is, I think, because the males are more confrontation prone. The males have more need to exchange the signals all the time. Because the females in chimps and bonobos, they have a hierarchy based largely on personality and age. There’s not a lot of reason to challenge that. So if, for example, in the chimpanzee colony that I worked with, Mama, the chimpanzee, was an alpha female for 40 years. She was blind, and she could barely walk anymore, and she was still the alpha female, even though younger females could easily have toppled her. Younger females were clearly physically capable of dominating her, but that never came up with them, because they had so much respect for her. The female hierarchy is based on basically different principles than the males.
The males, if someone weakens and certainly if he were to turn blind, they would exploit that. They would get his position at some point. So the dynamic for the males and the females is quite different.
I know that in the human literature, in the psychology literature, it's very often presented as if in the human species, the males are more hierarchical than the females, which for me as a biologist is a very strange statement because you know the pecking order comes from hens, [it] doesn't come from roosters. Pecking orders are visible everywhere in the animal kingdom, and females are just as much into it, as the males. You look at let's say a monkey troop. Let's say 100 baboons. The females have a very strict hierarchy. Hierarchies in nature are as much [a] female as male thing.
When people have tested it in humans — there are studies where they put, for example, five people of the same gender into a room, and they have them resolve issues or discuss issues. And they measured the hierarchy in these human studies by looking at who interrupts whom. So you have these five people talking with each other, and if I frequently interrupt you, and you don't interrupt me, I’m considered dominant over you. And if that's the criterion you use, it is true that men form rank order much more quickly than the women. So the men settle in a hierarchical pattern very quickly. But the women always end up having a hierarchy too. It’s a bit slower, but they do it too. I don't know where this comes from, that we think that women are not so much into status. Also in daily life, in how big your house is and your car, and your status in your company, I think, women are just as sensitive to that as men. But we have this persistent myth that it's a male thing.
James: I have two follow up questions to that very, very rich answer. Lots of ideas now are flowing through my mind; [I’m] trying to think through it [all]. What do you make of what are sometimes referred to as social Darwinist arguments, for example, like saying, “Because we see hierarchies among chimpanzees, for example, it's natural, and so we shouldn't care that there are a few people who have billions of dollars and there are others who have nothing and are homeless, right? Or that we shouldn't try to make workplaces more egalitarian or democratic, or that people shouldn't have more say in the decisions that affect them at work. None of that matters because these hierarchies are natural.” You've heard, probably, those simplistic arguments. What do you make of those?
Frans de Waal: Well, apart from the fact that you cannot go from one is natural to us to how we ought to behave — it may be natural for me to kill somebody under certain circumstances; that doesn't mean that we should be approving of it and think it’s wonderful that I do that — so apart from that problem, I've done quite a few studies on inequity. There's this famous video clip that is going around the Internet of the two monkeys, where one monkey receives grapes, and the other one receives cucumber. You may have seen that. If you look up on the Internet, “Fairness and monkey,” you will get that clip. And if you have two monkeys side by side and they do the same task, and you reward one of them with cucumber slices and the other one you reward with grapes, the one who gets the cucumber slices will start to object, even though normally if both of them get cucumber, he's perfectly fine with that. That’s a perfectly good reward. But if the other one gets grapes, which are so much better, they start to object to the inequity. And so inequity is not always positive in the minds of primates.
Even though they have hierarchies where some of the individuals have more privileges than others — that’s the definition almost of a hierarchy — even though you have these hierarchies they are sensitive to inequity because inequity undermines cooperation. If you have high levels of inequity, cooperation becomes very difficult. For example, if we, the two of us, if we go out hunting regularly and we cooperate together and you always take everything and leave me only a few scraps, I need to protest against that, or I need to leave you and get a better partner, because that's not a good basis for cooperation, if you take everything. I'm not willing to cooperate with people like that, and the same is true for other primates. They need to have a sort of equal division of resources. It doesn't need to be perfectly equal, but there needs to be some [equality] between them, otherwise they cannot cooperate.
If people say it's okay to have a bunch of billionaires in society because hierarchies are normal and natural, I would argue, well, cooperation is also normal and natural, and cooperation requires that there is some sharing of resources going on, otherwise it falls apart. If a few people take all the resources — like the oligarchs in Russia, so to speak — if they take all the resources, your society is under enormous stress, because it undermines cooperation in the society. So yes, we do experiments on the inequity aversion, and that's present in other primates.
James: In the book, you also touched on some of the covert or maybe not-so-openly-discussed hierarchies that can emerge in even progressive social movement organizations, and I think maybe you even encountered that to some some degree in your own experience.13 And so I’m wondering if there's anything that we can learn from our fellow primates about how to minimize maybe some of those problematic hierarchies — or how to address them?
Frans de Waal: Yeah, I’m not sure how you avoid them. I brought that up more to indicate that we humans, we often delude ourselves. We have a certain desire of how we would want to behave, and then we talk ourselves into thinking that's how we behave. So for example, in the student movement of which I was part in the 60s, our ideal was of course a society without hierarchies and without status, where everyone had the same voice, completely democratic. And we talked ourselves into thinking that that's how we were, even though, in practice, if you looked at us, and I looked at my fellow human students almost as a primatologist, if you looked at that, there was clearly a hierarchy. There were clearly some big shots who [made] all the decisions, and we, like sheep, we followed them.
There was a clear hierarchy, but we were sort of in denial about it, in the same way that I also mentioned that women at that time — I’m not sure that's still the case — but at that time they had this delusion that women are nice to each other, and they love each other, and they are sisterly, and it’s all so wonderful between women. Everyone knows that that's not always the case between women. But they talked themselves into that, and I think with gender we have that same tendency. We have a way of how we look at gender.
Of course, some people have a conservative view, and they want men to be strong and women to be obedient or whatever. That’s, let's say, the conservative view. But you also have the progressive where everyone is equal, we're all the same. We talk ourselves into these things, even though we're not all the same. But we talk ourselves into that.
And so I use it as an example of how even scientists who are supposed to be objective in this regard, they talk themselves into certain [ways] of looking at human behavior. For example, because you mentioned hierarchies, I'm a biologist, but I’ve lived for 25 years or 30 years as a professor in psychology, and the psychology textbooks barely [talk] about hierarchies and power and dominance. It's almost like it's not there. It's almost like that's not part of what the human species does, and I think it's because psychologists are very uncomfortable with the whole concept of hierarchy.
James: That’s interesting. I’m going to try to return to some of that too, but I had noticed there's some other things that I really want to make sure to ask. You noted in the book, and I think we've already touched on this a little bit, but you noted that male chimpanzees studied by the British primatologist Caroline Tutin, that they masturbated as often as once per hour.14 Is that a common amount of masturbation among male chimps, and do they do that as much as male bonobos do, or more?
Frans de Waal: I’m not sure about the masturbation. If males have no access to females, yeah for sure, they would masturate once an hour. That wouldn’t surprise me at all. But if there's a female around that they could copulate with, I'm not sure they’re doing that. I think it depends on the circumstances. What is interesting also is that because people always assume that the males have a stronger sex drive than the females, the females masturbate too.
And especially in bonobos, female masturbation is very common. … The clitoris is often forgotten in the whole story. We all focus on the male and the penis and so on, but female bonobos have a very prominent clitoris, which they stimulate quite a bit, [and] which is also clearly visible from the outside. Dolphins also have a large clitoris and I think the fact that these very sexual species like bonobos and dolphins, who have a lot of non-reproductive sexual contact, the fact that the females have a large clitorii, I think is significant. That means that the sex means really something for them. It's very important to them, otherwise, why would they have this large clitoris?
That relates to the debate that [we] had 20-25 years ago about the human clitoris because the human clitoris was pooh-poohed by the medical profession, and then there were books coming out saying that the clitoris of humans was non-functional; yeah, it was a nice thing to have, but we didn't need the clitoris because the female orgasm is not necessary for fertilization. That's how people thought at the time. So they were sort of pooh-poohing the clitoris going back to Freud who didn't even want to hear about the clitoris and considered clitoral stimulation, clitoral pleasure, as sort of childlike. A real woman didn't need that, and if women focused on the clitoris, they had to be treated by the psychiatrist because there was something wrong with her. There’s an interesting history to that. We have systematically denied female sexuality, and I think it's very interesting that the bonobo female has such a big clitoris.
James: You mentioned that during their mating season, the female rhesus monkey, [those female monkeys will] prepare for female male intercourse by sexually stimulating each other, and when they do, the social hierarchies among them tend to go out the window and dissolve, at least temporarily.15 I’m curious, does the GG rubbing among female bonobos perform a similar function? Do hierarchies [become] less rigid when they're engaged in those kind of erotic activities?
Frans de Waal: I’m not sure that the GG rubbing has much of a relation to the hierarchy. There was a time where some primatologists said, ‘Well, maybe they do GG robbing and then the female on top — because they're often face-to-face — the female on top must be the dominant [ape].’ I've never noticed [that], and I think people have actually looked at that. I don't think there's much of a validation with the hierarchy of who initiates it and how it is done. It is much more a positive social interaction between the females. It's a bonding interaction between them. We now also have evidence from studies on, I think, bonobos in the field, on oxytocin. Oxytocin is a hormone. It’s called a cuddle hormone. It's the hormone that comes up if you have close bonding and contact going on. [As a result of that bonding and contact], the females are more affected by sex with other females than by sex with males. Emotionally, it seems that for females bonobos, sex with females is more important than sex was males. It's a more important thing to them, even though from a reproductive perspective, of course, the sex with the males is the only [type] that matters.
James: Regarding bonobos, you also wrote, “That females preferentially seek each other out for sex and are emotionally more invested in it than in mating with a male fits the structure of society run by a tight sisterhood,” and that: “Female bonobos need to resolve conflicts and foster cooperation and sex is their social glue.”16 I’m wondering, is there anything that humans can learn from what bonobos do in that regard, in terms of strengthening our own social bonds, whether it's among among women — which as you point out, the “bonobo sisterhood,” you attribute the.greater power and influence of female bonobos in large part to that, as do many primatologists — so I'm wondering in terms of strengthening our own social bonds and also in terms of resolving conflicts and fostering cooperation, assuming we think there's room for that and more of that in human society, is there anything we can learn from the way that bonobos use sex or otherwise relate to each other to improve that?
Frans de Waal: I think human society, especially in the West, is so uptight about sex. I could, of course, recommend that women have more physical contact — doesn't need to be sexual — but more physical contact. But we live in a society that's very uptight about these things, and so that's not going to happen anytime soon. Sexual relations between females is a very important bonding mechanism, and I would say, between males also. And of course in humans that’s sometimes expressed when you have a whole bunch of men together on a ship, for example. Then, these things are expressed. No one talks about it, obviously, but we know that these things happen. I think both in human males and human females physical contact and sexual stimulation can be part of the bonding mechanism.
James: This is very much related to what you just said, but in case there's more you wanted to add, you also wrote, “The sharp boundary in human societies between the social and sexual domains is artificial. It’s a cultural invention that, despite moral and religious exhortations, is prone to leakage.”17 Given that it is a cultural invention that maybe doesn't always hold up, I’m wondering if you think it then should be reconsidered or reconfigured, or if we should critically reflect upon it if there's reason enough to do that, and if it would benefit us to make that boundary less sharp or no?
Frans de Waal: We could loosen up a bit, you know? Because people are very uptight about these things. For example, for children, I recently received a book, a handbook on child development or something like that on children, written by psychologists. Sex didn't occur in there. Apparently child development has no sex; there's no sexual behavior in children. It doesn't exist. And I find that very strange, especially given my primatology background because young primates are always experimenting with sex, even though certainly the males cannot ejaculate — it's before their time. They are really reenacting sexual encounters and having fun with it. It's basically in a playful context. They’re not obsessed with it. It’s just something that they do, and I'm sure children do the same thing. But since it is such an enormous taboo, I think the parents barely know what they're doing, probably. So we could loosen up a little bit on that, instead of declaring this kind of behavior off limits.
We are very controlling as far as sexual expression is concerned. Very, very controlling in the sense of how you dress, and what you do, and what you touch and what you don’t touch. It's a clear obsession, and in some cultures it's of course [a little different]. In the US, or let's say in British-American culture, it's even more obsessive than in others. There's a particular puritan obsession in the British-American culture that is for me very alien. But everyone thinks it's completely normal. Everyone thinks it's normal, for example, that you call a toilet a restroom, or that you call pooping a bowel movement; you think that's very normal. But you have created a language that avoids reference to physical features, to physical processes. And that's maybe also a reason why the word “gender” has become so extremely popular so quickly is because it avoids using the word sex. You can say, ‘What is the gender of this person?’ That sounds so much more civilized than saying, ‘What's the sex of this person?’, which refers to the genital, so to speak. British-American culture is particularly restrictive in this regard and thinks this is perfectly normal, this is how it ought to be. But [there are] other people who don't feel that way.
James: At one point you refer to teamwork among men as “the hallmark of human society.”18 And so I wonder if you could briefly reiterate why you think it's “the hallmark” of our society and [explain] to what extent you think that teamwork among men in particular is beneficial, if you do think it is, and if it's something that should be encouraged, or discouraged? Because I think especially today we hear arguments maybe for both. And also, how it compares with chimps and bonobos, and if there's any gender differences in terms of the effectiveness or the frequency of teamwork?
Frans de Waal: There's not many species where the males work together. It happens in the lions, in the dolphins, in the chimpanzees, in baboons. I can name them because there are so few of them. There's a handful of species where males do things together, support each other, have political coalitions — or, as in the case of lions, the males, often brothers — they don't need to be brothers — they take over a pride together and things like that, but there's only a handful of species [wherein the males work together]. There always remains competition among those males, but at least they work together.
I think human males are really special in the sense that we have massive cooperation going between [men]. Of course nowadays in society the businesses are mixed, and you have men and women working together. But in the old days, it was all man. And not just in the army, where you would expect men to work together, but also in businesses, it was all done between men, and they exchanged goods for money and so on, but also within corporations there [were] men working together. And then if you go to hunter-gatherer society, it's men hunting together. That's, of course, how it probably got started — men hunting together. Our species is the only primate species that brings down prey that is larger than ourselves. So chimpanzees hunt, and they capture monkeys and duikers and animals like that, sometimes, but they never bring down an animal bigger than themselves the way human hunter gatherers can bring down a mammoth. It's just incredible that that's a possibility, and that's only possible because men work together. No man can do that on his own. So that's a very special characteristic of our species that is sometimes overlooked. In anthropology that is emphasized. The anthropologists very much emphasize human male cooperation. In psychology, the males are often depicted as not very cooperative and more competitive, and I don't agree with that. I think men are very competitive, but they're cooperative at the same time. It's as if people cannot grasp the concept of being both at the same time. But that's what men do. They are both rivals, and they work together at the same time.
James: In the book you wrote, “This is my peacemaking/ peacekeeping hypothesis: males are good at making peace once conflict has erupted, while females are good at keeping the peace by suppressing conflict. Since males cycle with ease through fights and reunions, they don’t think twice about confronting each other. Most of the time, it’s no big deal. On the other hand, for females, conflict seems emotionally disturbing and nearly impossible to put behind them. The damage is so great that they develop a preemptive attitude.”19 I wanted to clarify, is that hypothesis chimp-specific, or does it apply or have implications for other primates like bonobos and humans?
Frans de Waal: I think it may apply to humans as well, even though most psychologists don't think this way. They don't study men and women together [when it comes to] these processes, most of them. But there is literature showing that women, for example, are more disturbed by conflict at the workplace than men. So men get over it more easily than women, and women are very disturbed by it, and it may cause burnout and they may want to move [jobs] and things like that if there's too much competition or if they have certain rivals at work that they don't get along with. I think men get over that a little bit more easily. But there's not a whole lot of data on the humans. I must say that that's a sort of neglected area — conflict resolution in humans and then especially how it's different by gender. But in chimpanzees it's very [clear] that the males cycle through these things all the time — conflict, reconciliation, getting along playing together, then conflict again; they do this all the time.
And there are studies of human children. Older studies, because I don't think nowadays many people do these studies. But in the older studies of children, people looked at the school yard and looked at how children got along and what they did together, and these studies also indicate that boys have an enormous amount of conflicts, but also they play together and they get over it quite easily. And girls don't play in these big groups that the boys have. Girls have more friendships one-on-one; they have a best friend, and they hang out with their best friends all the time. If in a girl’s game, a conflict arises, it often is the end of the game. It's very hard for them to continue after that, whereas boys just will go on. They have a conflict over let's say the rules of their sports game, and then they discuss the rules and then they go on. So there are older studies of children that indicate that boys and girls have different ways of resolving conflict.
James: In chapter 11, you suggest human and animal altruism has roots in maternal care.20 Does that apply to both male and female primates today? Does it apply equally? And does the greater capacity for emotional empathy that you noted that females tend to possess, does that allow for, [or] does it affect altruistic behavior at all?
Frans de Waal: I think empathy in the mammals got started with maternal care, and that's why females have more empathy than males — emotional empathy. And yeah, it translates into wanting to help others; it translates into helping behavior, and so I think females are in that regard more generous. Obviously they are very generous with their offspring, with their children, and that's true for all the mammals. Very protective and altruistic. But it extends also to other relationships, and so I think that is an empathy difference that is not always recognized. Because in terms of cognitive empathy, where you take the perspective of somebody else, which is a more complex process — I imagine myself in the situation of somebody else, and I try to understand the world from their perspective — at that level men, I think, are as good as women. There's not much of a difference between the two. It’s more at the emotional level, like, do I feel your emotions? If you are crying, am I affected by your crying? You know, the emotional connection it's at that level that women have a big advantage and have more empathy than [men]. I think that’s a substantial difference, and that results also in more generous behavior towards individuals.
The above photo of a bonobo mother nursing is featured along with the other photographs in the middle of the book, between pages 156 and 157.
The sketch by de Waal , picture above, which shows a human mother nursing a baby, is found page 257 of “Different,” in the eleventh chapter of the book, which focuses on maternal and paternal care of the young.
James: I liked what you did in the final chapter of the book, where you unpack our tendency toward dualistic thinking.21 You mentioned how it has minimized the importance of our bodies and thus of our biology and our evolutionary history. And then you noted that even certain strands of feminism today are perhaps even guilty of that kind of dualistic thinking. I’m wondering what you think can be gained by overcoming that dualism? And how can we best learn to, or teach each other to, think in less dualistic fashion, so as not to downplay or devalue or deprecate our bodies? Because I’m assuming bonobos don't have this problem of dualistic conceptions, and it seems like they value their bodies quite a bit and treat them quite well. Maybe we could learn something from them. So just wondering what your thoughts were.
Frans de Waal: We have a long history in the West of man, especially, saying that the mind is something else than the body, and I think for a male that's easier to maintain as a position because we don't have hormonal fluctuations going on, cycles going on. Maybe that's why we can think that our mind floats above the natural world, and it’s not connected to our body. I also think that that's the reason why men, for example, it's only [men] who want to freeze their brains when they die, so that their minds stay preserved. I don't think anyone's going to do anything with those frozen brains at some point, but there are people who do that. That's the whole concept that that mind and body are separate, and men have traditionally also used that to explain that they are superior beings because of course the male mind was always considered as more important and more sophisticated than the female mind. They looked at women and animals and anybody else as inferior in that regard.
It's unfortunate that dualistic view of the mind being separate from the body was to some degree adopted in the feminist movement by saying that, “Well, we can change our behavior because … the only difference that exists really between men and women is between the legs, and the rest is sort of irrelevant. And so that means that we have the flexibility to be whatever we want to be.” The gender concept became also sort of divorced from the body. It's like gender is up to you, what gender you have or how you express it is up to you; it’s not connected to what your body tells you, even though I think our body is extremely important.
Our mind of course, if you think that the mind is located in the brain, the brain is part of the body, and the brain is very much integrated with the body. There’s nothing separate in the brain. If you eat the wrong thing, your brain is going to be affected. Your brain is affected by everything that happens to your body. And so to think that your mind is sort of independent of these things is a delusion, I think.
It’s a bit surprising that this masculine type of dualism got adopted to some degree within the feminist movement. I think it's not nearly as strong anymore now [as] it used to be — the dualistic stance, but it is still to some degree there. When people say that gender is constructed, I still feel that is a dualistic statement when I hear that.
James: One last thing. I interviewed Martin Surbeck, [whom] you mentioned in your book, and also Kirsty Graham, who's another primatologist. And something that I've been trying to just confirm with everybody I speak with about this — [everyone] who is an expert in bonobos — [is] if it's still true that there's no instance of lethal violence among bonobos in the wild.
Frans de Waal: There's only one instance of an unconfirmed report. A couple of years ago, a paper came out on lethal violence among bonobos and chimps. It had 152 cases in the field, 152 cases of which only one concerned bonobos, and that one case was unconfirmed. So it was not observed; it was deduced. That gives you a little bit of an idea of the enormous gap between chimps and bonobos. It may happen on occasion in bonobos. I don't exclude it, but it must be extremely rare.
James: Well, for real this time, I will stop with the questions. Thanks again.
Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2022), 38.
de Waal, Different, 75.
Ibid., 103.
Ibid., 117.
Ibid., 123.
de Waal also delivered a second Ted Talk a few years after he gave his first.
The practice of GG rubbing is described in de Waal’s new book: “Bonobos engage in sex in every possible partner combination, and female-female sex carries special significance. It is the glue of their sisterhood. The most common pattern is GG rubbing (genito-genital rubbing), also called the hoka-hoka. One female wraps her arms and legs around the other and clings to her. While they face each other, the two press their vulvas and clitorises together, rubbing them sideways in a rapid rhythm. The bonobo clitoris is impressively long. Females carry big grins on their faces and squeal loudly during GG rubbing, leaving little doubt about whether apes know sexual pleasure.” See: de Waal, Different, 107.
“Female bonobos prefer face-to-face copulation and often invite males by lying on their backs, legs apart, a position that guarantees the stimulation of their frontal vulva. The evolution of male bonobos, however, must have been lagging behind. They favor the classic doggy position. This can cause comical confusion. If a male starts from the back, midway the female quickly turns around to get to her favorite missionary position. No wonder bonobo copulations are preceded by lots of gestures and vocalizations to negotiate positions. These Kama Sutra apes mate in every conceivable posture, including some that we’re incapable of, such as hanging upside down by their feet.” See: de Waal, Different, 134.
Ibid.
“Lest this quick overview leave the impression that bonobos are an oversexed species, I must add that their erotic activity is utterly casual and relaxed. Due to our human obsession, we may find this hard to grasp.” See: de Waal, Different, 295.
de Waal, Different, 138.
Ibid., 140.
“True egalitarianism is indeed hard to find, and our student protest movement, was a case in point. The front man had a habit of showing up late to mass meetings and striding into the auditorium followed by his acolytes. It was as if the king had arrived. The buzz in the room would die instantly. While we waited for him to take the podium and do his rabble-rousing, members of his inner circle would perform a warm-up act.” See: de Waal, Different, 78. de Waal wrote about thinking back to when he participated in a group struggling for women’s rights. “It was an eye-opener for a young man who was naive about the other gender. It taught me that women aren’t always bound by friendship and love. They frequently undermine each other in a way that would be detailed in 2001 by the free-thinking American feminist Phyllis Chesler in Women’s Inhumanity to Women. Chesler documented the gossip, envy, shaming, and ostracism to which women subject each other. This had escaped attention because women are taught to deny this side of themselves. In hundreds of interviews, Chesler found that most women recall having been victimized by other women but deny ever doing the same to others. This is logically impossible of course.” See: de Waal, Different, 230; Phyllis Chesler, Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman (New York: Nation Books, 2002). He added he noticed a similar “delusion” during the student protest movement decades ago. “While this movement had a clear-cut hierarchy of leaders, followers, and minions and hence was anything but egalitarian, everyone cheerfully pretended that it was. Similarly, women may live a ‘good girl’ delusion even though they can be quite mean to each other. We humans sometimes develop a curious amnesia about our own behavior.” See: de Waal, Different, 230.
As de Waal pointed out in an aside during the interview (omitted in the above transcription in the interest of concision), Tutin focused more on copulation rates, which your Waywards publisher glossed over at first, conflating that with masturbation. But as de Waal noted in the book in relation to Tutin’s work, males masturbate more than females. “The British primatologist Caroline Tutin observed more than one thousand copulations in the wild in Tanzania. Some males ejaculated on average oncer per hour, and younger males did so more often than older ones. In many primate species, males masturbate more than females and seem ready for sex anytime.” See: de Waal, Different, 161; Caroline Tutin, “Mating Pattern and Reproductive Strategies in a Community of Wild Chimpanzees,” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 6 (1979): 29-38.
de Waal, Different, 289.
Ibid., 295.
Ibid., 305.
Ibid., 231.
Ibid., 243.
Ibid., 259-261.
Ibid., 307-317.