WHERE once we thought of ape behaviour only in terms of sex and war, we now understand that our closest relatives live a much more nuanced life. A huge part of that understanding comes from the work of primatologist Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Over the past five decades, he has shown that cooperation is at least as important as competition in explaining primate behaviour and society. His work has revealed that the great apes might fight, but they also reconcile their differences. They have a capacity for empathy and a concept of fairness that de Waal proposes is the foundation of the human moral compass. He believes that chimps, bonobos and humans are simply different types of ape and that empathetic and cooperative behaviours are continuous between these species. Now, he has turned his attention to gender and identity in his new book Different: What apes can teach us about gender. We spoke to de Waal to find out what he has learned.
Rowan Hooper: You are well known for writing about the inner lives of chimpanzees and bonobos, but your new book is a bit different, because it discusses gender roles, gender identity and biological sex differences in both apes and us. What do we mean by gender in non-human primates?
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Frans de Waal: Well, some people insist that we have genders and chimps and bonobos have sexes, and that is the end of the discussion. I think that is nonsense. Gender as a concept exists mainly because we are a sexually reproducing species. Sex is predominantly binary – male and female – plus a small percentage of people who are intersex. Imagine if we reproduced by cloning and were all basically identical. No one would have even conceived of the concept of gender.
Aspects of gender, such as social roles and gendered behaviour, represent the cultural side of biological sex. Gender in this respect is not male or female, but rather masculine, feminine and everything in between. It is a much more fluid concept than biological sex.
This concept of gender roles and behaviour may also apply to apes, because they are cultural beings, too. They develop slowly and are adults by 16 years of age, so there is an enormous amount of learning that goes into their behaviour, which includes their sex-typical behaviour. Like our children, the young pick up aspects of their gender roles from the adults around them.
In your book, you say that while gender roles and gendered behaviour can be influenced by culture, gender identity seems to arise from within. You write about a chimp called Donna who seems to exemplify this. Can you tell us about her?
Donna, who is biologically female, is very masculine in her appearance and her behaviour – and unlike the majority of female chimps, she likes to hang out with the males. I do not know how she identifies and I can’t ask her, but she looks like a male and acts like a male most of the time.
You also have biological males who are big, but are not interested in being high-ranking. They avoid confrontations. They can be well accepted in the group, but accepted as a male who is not involved in male politics. So we have this variability in individuals. Few individuals act like Donna, and few males act non-typically, but it is important for us to recognise that science hasn’t been looking into the issue of how individuals express sex-typical behaviour. Once we start explicitly hunting for it, our perceptions may change and gender non-conforming behaviour in primates may turn out to be more common than we thought.
What we might call gender-stereotyped play is seen in young primates. There are reports of young female chimps in captivity playing with dolls, and some in the wild using a wooden log as a doll and even building a nest to put it in. Male chimps, when given a choice of toys, tend to play with toy trucks and trains. What is going on here?
With the males, people have speculated that it is because these are movable objects and males are more physically active in their play. With females, it is easier to explain: they have a lifetime of maternal care for infants in front of them, and picking up a doll or a log in the forest and holding it like an infant is a way of training themselves. And they imitate their own mum.
It seems as if you are saying that there are certain behaviours that may be influenced by biological sex.
There are certain sex differences that shine through the gender differences. It helps us see that you cannot get around biology. So, for example, males tend to be more physically violent than females. This is true for all the apes that I know and is true for all human societies that we know, so that is a behaviour that is heavily influenced by biology.
However, I would never argue that a biological predisposition towards a certain behaviour means that you have to accept it – we can ask “how do we work towards a different behaviour?”
How can studying primates help us understand more about human sex differences?
It can help show us when our assumptions are wrong – sometimes we assume sex differences that aren’t there. For example, it is often assumed that women are less competitive, less hierarchical, less good at being leaders. But all social mammals and birds that I know of have female hierarchies and alpha females. The term “pecking order”, for instance, comes from hens, not roosters. In comparison with other primates, it doesn’t hold up that women cannot be leaders.
It’s the same with the idea that men are not nurturing, which is often assumed – it doesn’t really fit with the other primates. It is true that male chimps and bonobos don’t show much infant care, but if, for example, an orphaned youngster is begging for attention, the males are perfectly capable of caring for them and may adopt the youngster, sometimes for years.
We touched upon gender identity with Donna. What can primates teach us about that?
Gender identity is intrinsic: it expresses itself very early in life, usually before puberty, and is seemingly irreversible. We have evidence that . So, unlike gender roles and behaviour, gender identity is not a social construct; it is part of who we are, and this applies to everyone. By studying other species, we can learn about the variability in gender-typical behaviour. There is so little that we know because scientists have, like society at large, overlooked individual variability. We have emphasised the typical expression and downplayed the diversity.
What we will no doubt learn is that other primates tolerate variability a lot better than human society. This is an important lesson: human society tries to monitor and police the expression of sex and gender identity and roles to a much greater degree than other primate societies do.
Bonobos are famously very sexual, having sex with each other all the time – males with males, females with females and males with females. But what kind of variation in sexual preference do we see in chimps?
Bonobos are perfectly bisexual. But in other species, too, we see quite a bit of homosexual behaviour, and some individuals are more inclined to it than others. Biologists are very used to this kind of variability. We understand that no two trees are alike, even if they belong to the same species and grow in the same forest. But, somehow, human society is not happy with variability. We hear things like: “Why are you not acting like a man?” We get upset by variation, even though we should accept that everyone is different.
Even in animals, we don’t talk about variability in sexuality that much.
There is a certain shyness about sex. Violence and dominance and territoriality, no problem. But not sex and eroticism – scientists shy away from talking about this. I notice that when I talk about the bonobo clitoris, scientists get nervous. I always think that is very unfortunate.
It surprises me that scientists are still effectively behaving like the Victorians.
Yeah, but we have a long history of denying female sexuality. You know, the idea that females had a passive sexuality – that goes back to Freud and all sorts of other people who denied female sexuality. As a result, bonobos were ignored because their behaviour makes scientists uncomfortable and doesn’t conform to the dominant narratives in anthropology that stress male affairs, such as hunting and warfare.
Studying ape behaviour is changing our thinking in this respect. You talk about how it helps form a feminist Darwinism – tell us about that.
The first goal of Darwinian feminism is to pay attention to the female. If you look at books about human evolution, they are always about male qualities like warfare, territoriality and hunting, and there is very little discussion about what the women were doing in all that time. Some have said that the fittest individuals in our lineage were the men – as if the women were just dragged along in the evolution of the beautiful human male. Pay attention to the females and then you get to understand things like female choice and female sexuality.
The anthropologist Sarah Hrdy paid attention to why female chimps have so much sex, not just with one male but with multiple males. She realised that if infanticide is a big risk, then having sex with lots of males may help you because males won’t attack your offspring. Males don’t know about paternity, but seem to avoid attacking offspring of females they have had sex with. And if that is their rule, then it is a perfectly good strategy for the females to have sex with a lot of males – a female chimp who is having sex with a lot of males is protecting herself.
Do we know why chimps evolved down a male-dominant, aggressive route and bonobos became peaceful and sex-loving, with high-ranking females? Humans seem to be somewhere in the middle.
There is speculation that bonobos lived in an environment where they had no gorillas, so they didn’t need to compete with them for the ground vegetation, and that they maybe had a richer forest. More food around allows more individuals to travel together, as they don’t need to spread out to find enough food. This advantages the females, as they have a strong tendency to defend each other against males, and being together allows them to do this collectively.
So it is thought that the ecology of the bonobo allows closer female relationships compared with that of the chimpanzee. That may be one reason why female bonobos have taken the dominant role. Chimps in West Africa are more bonobo-like in the sense that they travel more together and the balance of power between male and female has shifted somewhat towards the female. There is more female leadership visible and less sexual coercion.
If you look at the recent history of primatology, we have Jane Goodall’s work on tool use, Toshisada Nishida’s work on cooperation and your work on empathy and the inner lives of primates. They all seem to be undoing patriarchal assumptions of what was happening.
Yeah. [The discredited 20th-century British zoologist] Solly Zuckerman was largely responsible for those assumptions. People still often believe that, in primates, the male is the boss. The male decides. The females are basically the slaves of the male. What kind of nonsense is that! It comes from as a result of randomly throwing male and female hamadryas baboons together in an enclosure. In the wild, these primates live in groups of one male and several females, but the zoo put nearly 100 males together with a handful of females. It became a bloodbath. Then he, and others after him, presented this kind of behaviour as representing the natural order in primate society.
Are you prepared for any controversy over your book?
I thought while writing it that the biggest objection could come from those who deny any biological influence on gender identity or gendered behaviour, and have elevated gender to a purely cultural thing. We can try to remove biological sex from the gender concept, but we will never fully succeed. Sex versus gender is like nature versus nurture – we know that the two are intertwined and should always be discussed together, as neither can do anything on their own. There is no behaviour that is pure nature, without environmental influences, and no behaviour that is pure nurture, without biological influences.
But, in retrospect, I think my book is more likely to upset people who have the traditional view of just two genders and two sexes.
