Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Why do the females put up with all this? Certainly males are larger and stronger than females and can and will hurt them, if that’s what’s needed to get their way. But this is only in one-on-one interactions. Why don’t females band together to defend themselves against a sexually predatory male? If two or three aren’t enough, six or eight would be. This is known, but rare, in the wild. (It is the custom among the chimps in the Tai National Forest in the Ivory Coast.) But it’s more common when they’re in closer quarters, as in the Arnhem colony in the Netherlands. Here the social conventions are different. If a male solicits a female and she’s uninterested, she so indicates, and that, usually, is that. If he makes himself obnoxious, he may be attacked by one or more other females. It is astonishing that so striking a characteristic of chimpanzee life in the wild as male sexual oppression of females can to such an extent be reversed merely because they’re all crowded together in a minimum security prison. We’ve already seen how, under these conditions, restraint, coalition building, and peacemaking by females come to the fore. Societies in which females have something approaching equality are also societies that benefit from their political skills.

In a state of freedom—where it’s possible to avoid your rivals by taking your sweetheart on a little trip into the country, and where you can escape a bully by running away—the circumspection required in crowded conditions is relaxed. Here testosterone is at full throttle and gentlemanly behavior is uncommon. The primate expert Sarah Blaffer Hrdy¹⁰ speculates that, among wild chimpanzees, female compliance to male sexual demands is the single mother’s desperate strategy for safeguarding her children. The males, Hrdy proposes, nursing their resentment at any rejection, might attack the children of an unresponsive mother (perhaps at a later time), or at least not protect them against attack by others.* In the brutal world of the chimpanzee, she suggests, the female does what the males ask in order to bribe them, so they will not kill (and, who knows, if they’re in a good mood might even help save) her children.* If Hrdy is right, perhaps the males are not oblivious of the bargain struck. Do they threaten the children in order

to make the mothers come around? Do they attack children at random as a cautionary lesson for any mothers toying with noncompliance? Have chimp males organized a protection racket, with the females and the young as their victims?

Let’s leave aside the possibility of conscious extortion, and think for just another moment about Hrdy’s speculation. The females don’t provide food for the males. They don’t seem to be any better at grooming than the males. Perhaps the only commodity—certainly the most valuable commodity—they can offer to protect their children is their bodies. So they make the best of a desperate situation. Now a male is less likely to attack and more likely to protect her baby. But when circumstances change, when aggression is inhibited because of crowding, the females can finally say “No”—without having their heads handed to them for it.

Again, we must not imagine that chimps think all this through. They must have some other, more immediate reinforcement of their behavior. Hrdy raises the question of the selective advantage of orgasms, especially multiple orgasms, among female apes and humans. In a monogamous couple, what evolutionary benefit does it confer? she asks, and argues that none is apparent. But if instead we imagine the female copulating with many males in order that none of them harm her offspring, then, Hrdy conjectures, the orgasm—reinforcing successive matings with many partners—plays a vital role.

To what extent female sexual compliance is coerced by the males and to what extent it is entered into voluntarily and exuberantly is still not clear.

——