Heaven Forbid Their Thoughts Wander to the Wild Side!

As Nopornorthampton often points out, expression often successfully misleads us for the worse, particularly when we are young or vulnerable. Certainly there are certainties we can all agree upon to protect them from? Probably so, but the scope of these certainties are narrower than most in the mainstream believe, I suspect, even with respect to sex and what may be viewed as sexually stimulating materials.

The trash heap of history is littered with the discredited certainties of times past. So, who knows? Pervasive promiscuity may be good for us.

Let your mind take a walk on the wild side with me to the Congo, and go out, far, far out on a limb, literally.

What do we find? Well, we might find the renowned Bonobo Chimpanzees, a very close relative of ours on the evolutionary tree. As portrayed in a PBS documentary I saw (more than once) and related in Wikipedia: "The species is distinguished by an upright gait, a matriarchal and egalitarian culture … [Common] Chimpanzees and Bonobos both evolved from the same ancestor that gave rise to humans, and yet the Bonobo is one of the most peaceful, unaggressive species of mammals living on the earth today.”

“They show us that the evolutionary dance of violence is not inexorable ... Females are much smaller than males but can be considered to have a higher social status. Aggressive encounters between males and females are rare, and males are tolerant of infants and juveniles. The male's status reflects the status of his mother, and the son-mother bond often stays strong and continues throughout life. While social hierarchies do exist, rank does not play as prominent a role as it does in other primate societies.”

Sounds like they’re a bunch of politically correct men and women, to me at least. Indeed, the Noho utopia many dream of. But Bonobo’s are not renowned for being tree hugging liberals and dyed in the wool feminists. No, they are renowned because in Bonobo society casual incest, heterosexual, gay and lesbian sex is the rule, not exception. They have sex like in greeting each other men traditionally shook hands and women hugged. They have sex even more pervasively than that, really. There is no shame … (See, "Shame Me, Baby, Shame Me" below.)

Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo#Name to learn more, if you wish.

Could it be mere coincidence that it seems to me that the most patriarchal, violent and oppressive human societies tend to be also the most puritanical societies? May be the Bonbos are on to something. Bonobos certainly live among themselves better than most of us relatively puritanical humans live among ourselves. Indeed, “Bonobos, … are generally held to have superior intelligence to Common Chimpanzees.”

Humans, too??? Would we have something to learn from Bonobos that we should teach of kids, if we wish for them to live in a more peaceful and egalitarian world ...? Just wondering. :)

You never know ... “[t]he trash heap of history is littered with the discredited certainties of times past …”

Yours/AC