The social/sexual psychology of primates, continued
(writing in progress)
(writing in progress)
I have previously mentioned that monkeys have remarkably little sympathy/empathy/compassion/altruism/caring-and-sharing. Further to this, I see that primates, in general, also have desultory courtship.
For example, a chimpanzee’s idea of courtship is to recline against a tree in the presence of females some distance away, display an erection, and then communicate threat to the female in question, so that she comes over to the male if she wishes to avoid being beaten up. In other words, the male not only lacks courtship, he has a kind of anti-courtship in which he compels the female to be performative by means of menacing innuendo.
Bonobos are famous for their genital contact. However, I suspect that if one reads more deeply on this topic one will find that even in the ‘love-ape’ there is minimal courtship. Using genital contact as a social lubricant does not necessarily mean that courtship is well-developed. I suspect that it is poorly developed in the bonobo, as in other primates.
In orang-utans, fully mature males are attractive to females on account of their great size and secondary sexual features. However, they do not need to court. The other males (adult and sexually motivated but not fully mature) routinely rape females. Either way, courtship is not something that orang-utans seem to practise.
These are just initial examples.
Hans Kummer makes this point specifically for the hamadryas baboon, in his book 'The Sacred Baboon'. I.e. that Papio hamadryas (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/43535-Papio-hamadryas) lacks anything that can really be described as courtship, and is typical of monkeys and other primates in this way.
Again, in a way courtship is actually perverted in Old World monkeys including baboons: what happens is that males must copulate several times in fairly short succession (minutes but not hours apart) before ejaculation is triggered. I.e. far from engaging in ‘warming up’ of the female, or giving her ‘foreplay’, the masculine approach to mating is to ‘warm himself up’, with her as the sex-object. Furthermore, in the mounting position he places his whole weight on the female (which is usually half his body mass in baboons), by standing on her calves, not on the ground. Chivalry/gentlemanliness does not seem to be a concept for primates.
In Hans Kummer’s own words (page 221), and please bear in mind that he was the most rigorous or scientists:
“Courtship among higher primates is generally a rather shabby affair. There are very few exceptions such as the capuchin monkeys, where a couple cuff, chase, caress one another’s chest, sit close and seek each other’s eyes before they finally mate...But this pleasant state of affairs is all the female’s doing; before the male joins in she courts him for hours and even days by following him with the corners of the mouth drawn back, cooing and trying to catch his eye. Among most primates, however, sex is a matter of seconds. He smacks his lips or flicks his tongue in and out, she presents or not, and then either it happens or it doesn’t. The male chimpanzees at Gombe, who form no pair bonds [unlike the hamadryas baboon], look at the receptive female from a distance of ten to twenty yards, sit so that their erection shows, and shake a little tree back and forth with one hand in a mild threat. She has to come to him. Evidently, courtship is perfunctory not only among the hamadryas, with their long-term marriages, but also in primate species in which the female has opportunities to choose another male instead.”
The following thoughts occur to me.
A failure to court is not tantamount to psychopathy. However, it is consistent with the lack of ‘caring and sharing’ that seems typical of primates. Again, I suppose that psychopathic men (approx. 1% of the males of the human species) are incapable of real courtship, although they probably can go through the motions well enough to fool some women. But my point is that courtship is about romance, and a psychopath cannot, I assume, feel romantic. Similarly, my point is that monkeys are incapable of romantic experiences as far as we can see, and in this corroborates their ‘quasi-psychopathy’ as I have sometimes been tempted to describe the syndrome.
I would also like to point out that, just as some human individuals are psychopathic and thus ‘monkey-like’, it is also easy to overlook that some or many human cultures lack courtship, or at least lack courtship before marriage (I cannot say for sure that courtship is absent in these cultures in romantic affairs, which often are extramarital). In many cultures, marriage is an arranged business in which the last thing on the man’s mind seems to be romance or courtship. Inasmuch as it is ‘normal’ or ‘typical’ for humans (outside the misleading and rather schmaltzy impression given by popular culture) to use the minimum of courtship prior to reproductive sex, our species is not that much different from most primates. Westerners may like to think that we belong to a species with ‘finer feelings’ and well-developed courtship, but this is questionable. Anyway it is easy to think of many other lineages of animals (including most birds) which have far better-developed courtship than humans, and genuine choice by the female (as opposed to coercion by the male and by family).
Rather than being the same thing, I see the quasi-psychopathy of monkeys as being a facet of the same syndrome of which the desultory courtship of monkeys is another facet.
Admittedly, canids (which seem to show so much more sympathy/caring-and-sharing than do monkeys) do not have elaborate courtship either. But my point is that the difference between monkeys and canids is that the social structure of the monkeys is so extraordinarily elaborate, and their sexual dimorphism so much greater than in canids, that it is reasonable to expect courtship in primates even if it is absent in canids. However, such does not seem to be the case.
Humans can be as venal as saintly. And some of the most egregious cruelty is committed by those who think they are being kind.
The bottom line seems to be that primates, in general, are remarkably ‘basic’ in their emotional lives despite their braininess, and the complicated interactions that are so conspicuous in their societies.
Although we are a relatively romantic species, we also have a brutal, non-romantic side in some (many?) marriages and relationships. Is wife-beating only practised by psychopaths? As a species we are more caring than baboons, but I wonder if our extremes (e.g. wife-beating and wars) make us more brutal than baboons in many instances? It seems obvious that humans are more varied in behaviour than other animal species. This seems to be our niche - extreme variation from individual to individual, and culture to culture. It that enables us to form complex societies, including extroverts, introverts, artists, analysts, etc. This diversity makes for many different jobs and roles. But why the hell do we need to be so diverse along a continuum from brutal to caring within our own homes?
Is it possible that, whereas baboons are rather simply psychopathic/sociopathic by human standards, humans are actually POLARISED in the sense that we exhibit not only far more cognitive empathy but also far less cognitive empathy than even baboons.
Rwanda might illustrate this principle well. Who could doubt that if one visited virtually any of those families, a week before the killings stared in 1994, one would have been received with humility, gentleness, hospitality, generosity, and serenity? Yet those same people a week later were hacking each other to death, inflicting harm from which their society even now, decades later, has yet to heal?
So, it may be true that there is virtually nothing ‘saintly’ about baboons, and that in that way they fall short of us. But, on the other hand, there is nothing anywhere near as sociopathic about them as is manifest in our wars, our genocides, our sexual and child abuses, and our religious manias.
(writing in progress)
Comentarios
Añade un comentario