Frans de Waal on Gender

What is gender? How different are men and women? Are differences due to biological sex or to culture? How do they compare with what is known about our fellow primates? Do apes also culturally learn their sex roles or is “gender” uniquely human?
 
Shermer and de Waal discuss: sex and gender in humans, primates, and mammals • who you identify as vs. who you’re attracted to • binary vs. nonbinary vs. continuum: how fuzzy can human sex categories be for a sexually reproducing species? • gender differences in physical and mental characteristics • why would homosexuality evolve? • chimpanzees and bonobos • what is the “purpose” of orgasms in women, nipples in men? • myths of the demure female • rape in humans and other primates: what is the purpose — sex, power or both? • murder, and human violence: how do men and women differ? • dominance and power • rivalry, friendship, competition and cooperation • maternal and paternal care of the young • same-sex sex • monogamy, polygamy, polyandry, etc. in humans, primates & mammals • grandmother hypothesis • primates & primatologists, humans & anthropologists: bias in science • the future of primates and primatology.
 
Frans de Waal has been named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. The author of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? among many other works, he is the C. H. Candler Professor in Emory University’s Psychology Department and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
 
About the Book
 
In Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal draws on decades of observation and studies of both human and animal behavior to argue that despite the linkage between gender and biological sex, biology does not automatically support the traditional gender roles that exist in human societies. It certainly doesn’t justify the gender inequalities in those societies.
 
Using chimpanzees and bonobos to illustrate this point — two ape relatives that are genetically equally close to humans — de Waal challenges widely held beliefs about masculinity and femininity, and common assumptions about authority, leadership, cooperation, competition, filial bonds, and sexual behavior. Chimpanzees are male-dominated and violent, while bonobos are female-dominated and peaceful. In both species, political power needs to be distinguished from physical dominance. Power is not limited to the males, and both sexes show true leadership capacities.
 
Different is a fresh and thought-provoking approach to the long-running debate about the balance between nature and nurture, and where sex and gender roles fit in. De Waal peppers his discussion with details from his own life — a Dutch childhood in a family of six boys, his marriage to a French woman with a different orientation towards gender, and decades of academic turf wars over outdated scientific theories that have proven hard to dislodge from public discourse. He discusses sexual orientation, gender identity, and the limitations of the gender binary, exceptions to which are also found in other primates.
 
The Michael Shermer Show. Skeptic, May 24, 2022

 

Today we welcome Dr. Frans de Waal, a Dutch American biologist and primatologist known for his work on the behavior and social intelligence of primates. He is a professor in Emory University's psychology department and the Director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Chimpanzee Politics, The Age of Empathy, The Bonobo and the Atheist, and Mama's Last Hug are among his most popular books that have been translated in over 20 languages. His latest book is called Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.
 
In this episode, I talk to Frans de Waal about sex and gender. As a primatologist, he shares his research findings on the biological differences between male and female primates. Despite obvious distinctions between masculine and feminine behavior, great apes have no trouble accepting non-binary individuals—a behavior we humans need to practice more of. Dr. Frans clears up what alpha male really means and debunks the “natural order” of male supremacy. We also touch on the topics of socialization, power, altruism, reproduction, and equality.
 
The Psychology Podcast.  May 19, 2022

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Primatologist Frans de Waal's first publication 'Chimpanzee Politics', something a lot of us in the UK probably feels well accustomed to watching as of late. Harry Lewis interviews Frans about his resarch and findings...

 
Frans - Yeah, I think so, because the gender is the cultural side of the sex binary and, you know, the sexual binary itself is already complex enough. It's not really a binary, it's like an almost binary, and gender is more the cultural expression, the social norms, the education, all the cultural overlays. Gender is usually divided in masculine and feminine terms and everything in between. So, there's a much more flexible concept that relates to what you learn during your lifetime. Primates like the chimpanzee are adult when they're 16, so have a very slow development and learn a lot of things when they're young, some of which is from adult females, some from adult males. They also have a cultural transmission of how you behave as a male or a female in society. In that sense, they are gendered too. For example, we have evidence that young females pick up more behaviour from their mums than young males do. Young males often look around and look at adult males, I call it self socialisation, they emulate adult males more than they emulate their mum, and so self socialisation leads to a transmission of, let's say, cultural norms about how you behave as a male or a female.
 
Harry - So, in this chimpanzee community, if we're talking about the young, what are those behaviours?
 
Frans - The evidence that we have comes mostly from these culture studies that we do, which is mostly on what you eat and how you eat things because it's easy to measure. Tool use, for example, the field workers find easier than social behaviour. From a recent study of orangutans in the field, in the forest, we found that young females ate exactly the same foods as their mums. There are thousands of plants and fruits out there, but they have exactly the same diet as their mums. On the other hand, young males, the sons, they have a much broader choice because they mimic the behaviour of the males that they see. And so, we have evidence of this self socialisation ID. Another important point when you talk about gender is gender diversity. We have individuals who are more homosexual than heterosexual in their behaviour, we have individuals who don't exactly fit the roles that you usually see. You may have, for example, a big adult male who doesn't want to play the macho game, doesn't want to be the dominant male, and doesn't even engage in confrontations with other males and stays out of all of that. And you may have females, I described in my book a female named Donna, who, from very young, was into wrestling and mock fighting the way young males usually do. She sought out adult males to do it with, and when she grew older she grew into a male like character. She had the big shoulders, the big hair, the big head, the big hands of a male. And she associated with males - she hung out with them the whole day. From a distance, she would swear she was a male. And so, that same gender diversity that you see in human society where not everyone fits the mould exactly, is visible in the other primates. That's also why I think the word gender is applicable to them.
 
Harry - I think that's really interesting that you say that those blurring of boundaries is the same in human populations, but we do really love to put people in boxes, don't we? We like to say it's black or white?
 
Frans - That's so unfortunate. In human society, we are a symbolic species. We love labelling: you are a man, you're a woman, you're homosexual, you're heterosexual. If you fall in between these boxes, too bad for you, we can't handle you in our society. The beauty of primates, they're not ideal in every respect ideal, they can sometimes be brutal, but they tolerate these individuals. For example, Donna was perfectly well integrated in her community. I've never actually noticed that they are intolerant of individuals who are slightly different than they are. Homosexual behaviour as well. I also study bonobos and I describe extensively bonobo behaviour, I consider them bisexual because they don't even seem to have a preference for one gender over the other. For them, that's not a major issue.
 
Harry - And Frans, just briefly, what else is there that we can learn from the gender of your primates?
 
Frans - One other thing that I think is important to learn comes from the fact that people always think the natural order is men dominate women, males dominate females: our two closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, in one of them, the male are dominant, the other one, the females are dominant. Even in societies where the males dominate physically, they are not necessarily the most powerful individuals politically. In my previous book, I described Mama, the chimpanzee, who was a female for 40 years, and saw a lot of alpha males come and go during her lifetime. She was an central and powerful character in the community, even though she was physically incapable of beating up males. I think that's an important message: we should distinguish physical dominance and power, and that there's plenty of leadership and power in females in primates.
 
Harry:
Frans de Waal, thank you ever so much.
 
 
Gendering primates : Gender isn't specific to homosapiens..... Interview with Frans de Waal, Emory University. The Naked Scientists, May 5, 2022.

 

Sex and gender have come to represent one of the hottest fronts in the modern culture wars. Now, on to this bloody battlefield, calmly dodging banned books, anti-transgender laws and political doublespeak, strolls the distinguished Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal, brandishing nearly half a century’s worth of field notebooks and followed, metaphorically speaking, by an astonishingly diverse collection of primates.

 
Given the world it enters, de Waal’s new book, Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender, would arguably have failed if it didn’t stimulate debate. It seems safe from death by indifference, however, since it is dividing opinion even before it is published.
 
 “I found the book to be as wise as it was humane,” the American primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy told me, while US palaeontologist and writer Riley Black , a non-binary trans woman, is disappointed the author didn’t attempt a more radical overhaul of sex.
 
Princeton University primatologist Agustín Fuentes, meanwhile, is full of admiration for de Waal’s descriptions of ape behaviour, but feels the book falls short when it comes to humans. Given the author’s public visibility and his masterful storytelling skills, Fuentes told me, this was his opportunity to present a thorough and thoughtful discussion of the latest research. “Unfortunately,” he said, “that’s not this book.”
 
What this book is is an attempt to put the biology – the sex – back into gender. For too long, de Waal thinks, gender was regarded as a purely social construct and talk of inborn sex differences was taboo. “The fact that we have genders is related to the fact that we have sexes and sexual reproduction,” he told me, ahead of a tour to promote Different. “That’s an undeniable fact, in my opinion, even though the gender concept is obviously more flexible than the two sexes that we have.”
 
Sex (male/female) is approximately binary, he argues, while gender (masculine/feminine) is a spectrum. The fact that the latter grew out of the former should not stop us questioning the cultural components of gender, some of which are based on a misunderstanding of biology, nor rejecting gender-based discrimination. Different doesn’t mean better or worse.
 
He makes this case by reference to the non-human primates he has observed for decades, but the book is also a plea to us to look beyond chimpanzees when searching for parallels in our nearest primate relatives. We are just as close to bonobos, the “Kama Sutra apes” for whom sex is as banal as a handshake, though much more fun.
 
It was only by accident, de Waal reminds us, that explorers stumbled on chimps first and they became our go-to model of primate behaviour (some Victorian prudishness helped). Since chimps are generally more aggressive than bonobos, this skewed emphasis gave rise to an unjustifiably bleak view of human nature, he feels, which has only begun to lighten up in the last few decades. In his unfashionable optimism about humanity, he compares himself to a frog he once spotted in an Australian lavatory bowl. Like the frog, he has clung on through periodic deluges of cynicism and despair.
 
Among his accumulated titles, de Waal is professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and from the first pages of Different you know you’re in the presence of someone who feels beyond the slings and arrows of the culture wars. “You wouldn’t write a book like that if you were 40 and trying to get tenure,” remarks Meredith Small, an anthropologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and an admirer.
 
The typical primate society is at heart a female kinship network run by older matriarchs
He’s well-known enough to feel comfortable sharing personal reflections on growing up as one of six brothers and describing himself as a feminist who nevertheless refuses to denigrate his own gender. He’s also critical of what he sees as the contradictions of modern feminism, in particular, the idea that gender is socially constructed until it comes to gender identity and sexual orientation, which are innate and immutable.
 
Primatology is a relatively young field that was founded by men but came to be dominated by women, which means it is acutely aware that who is looking is as important as what they see. This cisgender, straight, 73-year-old white man is no exception. He describes how the field broadened its horizons thanks to the feminisation that has happened over his career. “When the women came, we got more interested in female-female and mother-offspring relationships,” he told me. “Female choice became an important issue.”
 
His entrancing descriptions of apes illustrate this. There’s Princess Mimi, the “bonobo with staff” who grew up pampered in a human home and was mystified by the retinue of males with obvious erections she acquired on meeting her own kind; the gender-nonconforming chimp Donna and the gay capuchin monkey Lonnie, both of whom were fully integrated into their respective colonies; Mama, the wise kingmaker among chimps; and the rhesus macaque love triangle of Orange, Dandy and Mr Spickles.
 
Through these characters de Waal brings to life the complexity of sex and social behaviour in other apes. He recounts, for example, how Nikkie, a young and possibly overpromoted alpha-male chimp, was chased up a tree by a bunch of disgruntled underlings who wouldn’t let him come down.
 
“After about a quarter of an hour, Mama slowly climbed into the tree. She touched Nikkie and kissed him. Then she climbed down while he followed close at heel. Now that Mama was bringing him with her, nobody resisted any more. Nikkie, obviously still nervous, made up with his adversaries. No other chimp in the group, male or female, could have brought about such a smooth closing.”
 
Mr Spickles was the alpha male of a large macaque troop; Orange was the alpha female. The males all looked up to Mr Spickles, the females to Orange. But Mr Spickles enjoyed his privileged status largely thanks to Orange, his staunchest political ally.
 
When mating season came around, Orange would pair up with Dandy, a handsome male almost half Mr Spickles’s age. If Mr Spickles tried to chase Dandy away, Orange would simply seek her younger mate out again. But if Dandy was tempted to flaunt his youth and vigour in front of Mr Spickles, Orange would loyally take up position next to the ageing alpha. “Orange carefully balanced two preferences,” de Waal writes. “One concerned political leadership and the other sexual desire. She never confused the two.”
 
Both males and females strive – non-consciously – to maximise their evolutionary fitness, but because they differ biologically their methods for achieving this goal differ too. Protecting offspring from male infanticide is a common female preoccupation, de Waal says, which is why one rule holds across species: “The typical primate society is at heart a female kinship network run by older matriarchs.” Beyond that, however, there are as many models of relations between the sexes as there are species.
 
Males and females are both hierarchical, but these hierarchies are based on more than just physical prowess or fighting ability. Prestige, which is less visible, counts too. Hierarchies are always at least partly coercive, but prestige always has a component of altruism and community-mindedness to it, as Mama and Orange showed. In most primates, the alpha female ranks below the alpha male. He has strength but she has choice. (Bonobos, uniquely, have reversed this order: females invest everything in the sisterhood, which collectively dominates the group.)
 
We have no evidence that any species other than our own knows that sex leads to progeny
As a result, the female has been underrated, an argument the British zoologist Lucy Cooke also made recently, in her acclaimed book Bitch. But de Waal thinks we’ve gone wrong at a deeper level. He challenges the idea that non-humans are “natural” while humans are “cultural”, arguing that nature and nurture are inextricably entwined in both. Apes may have gender as well as sex – there are hints of cultural variation in the way the sexes behave in non-human primates, though he says it hasn’t been studied enough yet – but you can’t take the sex out of human gender.
 
In this domain as in so many others, de Waal says, we’re more similar to other primates than we think. (Years ago, he coined a term for those who warned against anthropomorphising other primates: “anthropodenialists”.) Yet humans do seem to be unique in one way. We are apparently the only ape that attaches labels to sexual or gender diversity and prejudices to the labels. In other primates, he says, “I don’t find the kind of intolerance we have in human societies”.
 
He expects blowback from two broad camps – the feminists whom he overtly criticises in the book and those conservatives who claim that men are men and women are women and never the twain shall meet, wrongly asserting that science supports their position. But he also has critics closer to home.
 
Black says he fails to ask the most fundamental question: what is biological sex? “Is it chromosomes or hormones or gametes, or some combination thereof, or is it a concept we need to go back and start over?” she asks. Until we’ve answered that question, she feels it’s unreasonable to assume that sex is essentially binary, even if de Waal does allow for some blurring and acknowledges non-binary and transgender people.
 
Fuentes wonders why he overlooks a large body of research on human sex and gender – work by the American neuroscientist Lise Eliot, for example, showing that male and female brains aren’t that different, or British psychologist Cordelia Fine’s probing of the complex feedback loops that exist between sex and gender.
 
To read these and other researchers, Fuentes says, is to understand that the non-human-natural/human-cultural division is a straw person argument. Moreover, in the introduction to Different, de Waal explains that he will not discuss areas of human behaviour for which there are no animal parallels, such as economic disparities, household labour and dress. “But you can’t discuss gender without these!” Fuentes says.
 
These controversies will undoubtedly dominate discussion of the book once it comes out, so now seems a good moment to flag up some of de Waal’s quieter but still thought-provoking observations, such as: “Most beauty in nature exists thanks to female taste.” Or: “We have no evidence that any species other than our own knows that sex leads to progeny.”
 
And whether or not you agree with him, Different is worth reading for its anecdotes alone. The description of two grizzled male chimps who were normally sworn enemies, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, forming a barrage between a newborn and a young alpha male with possibly infanticidal intent, is one of many that will be hard to forget.
 
 
Frans de Waal: ‘In other primates, I don’t find the kind of intolerance we have’. By Laura Spinney. The Guardian,  April 17, 2022.

One morning in January 1961, following a breakfast of baby cereal, condensed milk, and half an egg, a male chimpanzee from Cameroon known to his handlers as Ham was strapped into a pressure-controlled capsule, loaded aboard a NASA rocket, and shot into space. No human had yet been where he was headed. At the time of Ham’s foray to the stars, physicians still feared that crucial bodily functions (including swallowing and cardiac activity) might not weather the weightlessness of astronautic flight. When Ham returned to Earth’s surface with only a bruised nose to show for the adventure, he entered history as the first hominoid to endure outer space.
 
Chimpanzees—along with their cousins the bonobos—are our closest living relatives. Little wonder we are prone to view them as human prototypes. At least 96 percent of our DNA is shared, and we have many anatomical traits in common, including some of the same blood groups and skeletal features such as delicate sinuses. Using a chimpanzee to aid in “human rating” a NASA space vehicle for astronauts was a test of our mutual fragility. It was also a symbolic gesture, marking space travel as the culmination of our evolutionary trajectory into social beings and tool-users sophisticated enough to leave Earth. One way to understand the moment when Ham was flung into that inhuman realm where the universe skims the planet would be to say that we were, as a species, looking to our ancestral past to forge the frontiers of our future.
 
The story of our evolutionary congruence with primates is perhaps our most powerful collective origin myth. It has a lineage that is scientific: The prehistoric ancestry of Homo sapiens shares a bough of the tree of life with several primates, including gorillas and orangutans, but most recently forked from that of the chimpanzees and bonobos, about 6 million to 8 million years ago. But that lineage isn’t purely a matter of science. The conjoined heritage of apes and humans has been put to political use, invoked by those seeking to explain aspects of human society as an intractable function of our inner ape. Others have been motivated by that very debate to assert fundamental differences between people and our primate kin.
 
Now in his 70s, Frans de Waal, the preeminent Dutch American primatologist, has a career’s worth of perspective on the major through lines of simian research, and an abiding interest in how his field’s findings have been drawn on to support narratives of intrinsic human tendencies. De Waal’s own work with chimpanzees in the 1980s loaned the term alpha male to the zeitgeist. He has decried its contemporary connotations of chest-beating chauvinism as a departure from the actual strategies of chimp leadership, which can include more generous and prosocial deeds than acts of bullying.
 
Issues of sex and gender have been on de Waal’s mind for decades. In Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, de Waal is concerned with the ways in which we look to primates for precedents of communal life and social cohesion, dynamics that are intimately tied up with movements for equality in our human world. Until surprisingly recently, the notion that the prehistory of patriarchy stretches back to a time before humans were human—that a zoology of patriarchy exists—was leveraged to perpetuate discriminatory aspects of culture, situating them as daunting or obdurate scripts of nature. To understand how primatology was partway captured by sexist ideologues, and how it is being freed from those strictures, Different suggests, we must look not just to scientists’ shifting mindsets, but also to social and political concerns that inevitably shape research and its reception.
 
When Ham arrived back at Cape Canaveral the next day, he was delivered to a scrum of reporters and photographers. He screamed with such ungoverned agitation that he soon had to be removed. However distressing Ham’s outbursts appeared, onlookers may not have been surprised to see him acting beastly. The earliest accounts of chimpanzee temperament portrayed the animals as placid, forest-dwelling frugivores, but their profile started to shift during the Cold War, based on observations of males in the wild vying ferociously with one another over territory and status. Scattered reports of infanticide among primates were later borne out by fieldwork.
 
After World War II, the brutality of apes had become an anthropological preoccupation that promised answers to the question: Does our capacity for depravity divide us from the animal kingdom, or does violence lie at the core of our nature, an upshot of our evolution? Such unease only intensified as the brinkmanship of nuclear powers threatened to tilt into even more catastrophic conflict. Against this backdrop, a corrosive vision of primate life grew more vivid: Front and center was a portrait of male tyranny, aggression, antagonism.
 
Fuel for this conviction can be traced back to the 1920s and the notorious carnage at Monkey Hill, a captive-primate colony at the London Zoo. The Monkey Hill enclosure had been designed with the latest thinking on animal welfare in mind. Rather than consigning apes to stuffy, shadowy cages where lung diseases ran rife, the open-air attraction featured artificial-rock monoliths furnished with heat and light. To this impressive diorama, the zoo sought to introduce an equally impressive animal. Amid a popular craze for all things Egyptian (King Tut’s tomb had lately been discovered), it settled on the hamadryas baboon, a creature that appears in hieroglyphics and, rendered as a deity, on pharaonic jewelry.

 
With the benefit of hindsight, as de Waal tells it, the exhibit was doomed from the get-go. In their natural habitats in countries such as Somalia and Ethiopia, hamadryas baboons form polygynous groups. Marauding, virile males snatch juvenile females from their kin before they become reproductively mature and amass “harems.” But the zoo wanted only resplendent males, which can weigh nearly twice as much as females and sport a frost-gray ruff around a narrow, pumice-pink face. About 100 were ordered. When the baboons arrived, the zoo staff found that the batch included a handful of surplus females. On release, a bloody furor unfolded. The males grievously injured or killed one another; they butchered or maimed more than half the females, and some copulated with corpses. The event would be retold over the years as an archetypal narrative of male supremacy and barbarity and abject female subservience. This, some were quick to pronounce, was what the animal within us looked like: We’re naturally led to dominate and oppress, or to be oppressed.
 
But what if we hadn’t anchored this debate in the behavior of chimpanzees and baboons, and had begun otherwise, with different members of the primate family? De Waal is joined in pursuing this provocative line of inquiry by Lucy Cooke, a British documentary filmmaker with zoological credentials (and the author, in 2018, of The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales From the Wild Side of Wildlife ). Her new book, Bitch: On the Female of the Species, ranges more widely across natural history, species, and varieties of sexual relationships than Different does. Cooke charts the rising influence of feminism on the “phallocracy” of evolutionary biology over the past several decades, arguing for the power of more recent female-led science to, for example, reframe core beliefs about sexual selection, maternal instinct and self-sacrifice, and proclivities for monogamy or nymphomania. In doing so, she introduces us to a marvelous zoetrope of animals—not just primates, but venomous intersex moles, hyenas that give birth through their clitoris, filicidal mother meerkats, and postmenopausal orcas. Where Cooke and de Waal come together is on the subject of bonobos, our lesser-known close relations, and what their biological blueprint may have to tell us about our own.
 

Bonobos, rain-forest dwellers that live wild exclusively in the Democratic Republic of Congo, were distinguished from chimps only in 1929. Before that, they had been deemed pygmy chimpanzees, and were believed to mirror chimps in all ways save their diminutive size. Behaviorally, the species are poles apart. A bonobo troop is organized around ranking coalitions of females; power is stratified according to matriarchal authority, and so is access to food. High-up bonobo mothers make matches between their own sons and females to whom they are allied. They wield this control even though males are larger and stronger than females. What gels the community is not physical coercion, implicit or otherwise; it is sex. Bonobos are rightly famous for engaging in frequent sexual activity, much of it nonreproductive (occurring in same-sex pairings or during windows when females cannot conceive).
 
They kiss. They French kiss. Bonobos practice oral sex and frottage; on one occasion, a female bonobo was observed making use of a knobbled stick as a stimulatory toy for masturbation. Females are said to orgasm, which was once thought a rarity in the animal kingdom, though evidence now supports the theory that female chimps, orangutans, rhesus monkeys, stumptail and Japanese macaques, and even tiny tamarins also experience pleasure and possibly climax. Bonobo copulations are short, about 13 seconds, but the animals often position themselves face-to-face and hold eye contact throughout. This comparatively harmonious suite of behaviors proved so challenging to androcentric models of primate dominance that early researchers, seeking to integrate bonobos into their existing frameworks, were forced to rely on patently contrived explanations: They chalked up female preeminence, for example, to strategic male deference, or ape chivalry.
 
Had we learned of bonobos first, de Waal observed in 2006 in Scientific American, we would “most likely believe that early hominids lived in female-centered societies, in which sex served important social functions, and in which warfare was rare or absent.” Our picture of the monopolist alpha-male chimp might also have changed if a wider set of observations had colored it. Many of the data on wild-chimpanzee interactions come from East Africa, but troops living in the Taï forest, in Ivory Coast, clash less frequently; their conflicts are not so brutal and the females are subject to less of a power differential—a dynamic de Waal partially attributes to the greater vigilance and cooperation needed to fend off predatory leopards. Male chimps at West African sites have also been seen adopting the dependent young of a deceased or missing parent, a shouldering of fatherly duty at odds with newborn killings witnessed elsewhere.

 
A corrective is now under way, and if female dominance in the animal kingdom was once overlooked or quashed, in some quarters it is lauded with the language of empowerment. Yet, as de Waal observes, and as Cooke amplifies, there is something reductive in its own way about supposing that a matrilineal society will tend toward a cordial sorority of disseminated power, in which consensus is brokered by affinity. To hold that women are natural peacemakers given to placation is to neuter women’s rage, to turn “female” into a partial, defanged category, foreclosing on the full range of motivations available to males—including status seeking, resource hoarding, nepotism, and vanity. Intransigence, too, is human.
 
Female ascendancy in the animal kingdom does not, as a matter of course, result in nonviolence. Both books show that aggression exists in bonobo society, directed principally by females. Scuffles might end with fingers or toes bitten clean off, punctured testicles, and deep lacerations. Among western lowland gorillas, Cooke writes, females will sometimes harass silverback males and interrupt their copulations with subordinate females. In the late 1970s, Jane Goodall’s research on chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, showed that infanticide wasn’t only a male prerogative: The mother-daughter pair Pom and Passion also attacked the young of others, and ate them.
 
The most striking example of female-to-female intimidation comes from savanna baboons. Cooke describes ascendant females tormenting their underlings, obstructing access to water and food, and snatching their babies away only to overhandle and then neglect the infants. This hierarchy has a physiological effect: Lower-ranked female baboons breed later in their development and ovulate less frequently. What’s more, because female baboons pass their status on to their daughters, subordinate ones are best served by having sons, who not only are spared the raids but are more able to climb the social ladder. And biology accommodates: Through an evolutionary mechanism yet to be fully explained, these baboons give birth to more males than females; their social position essentially sex-selects their fetuses.
 
Were we to seek out a broader vantage on simian life, as Cooke suggests we must, we would find several other paradigms of sexual difference and interrelation. New World monkeys—tailed primates that inhabit the Americas—offer alternative snapshots of collaboration and cooperation. Male black-headed owl monkeys share equal, if not more, duties in rearing their offspring. During the pregnancy of his mate, a male cotton-top tamarin also puts on weight—he will shed it later, carrying their twins on his back. His levels of estrogen and prolactin (hormones associated with birth and bonding) rise in tandem with hers. Some lemurs, natives of Madagascar, have shared child-care arrangements that permit mothers to socialize, forage, and eat without distraction. They build nests for their young, where sentinel adults—typically unrelated, not only females—watch over them.
 
Cooke and de Waal are both invested in showcasing a range of animal behaviors—including mate choice and gender expression—that usefully redraw the boundaries of “natural” sex difference. In Different we meet Donna, a captive chimp that de Waal describes in our human parlance as asexual and gender-nonconforming. Whether identity markers like “butch” and “femme” have any currency for chimpanzees is clearly an inscrutable matter, but as de Waal is at pains to point out, the norms of gender are impressed upon young chimps by their elders. Sex-typical customs are not entirely a matter of biological destiny: Some are nurtured, some are learned; extraordinarily, there are gendered habits that resemble fashions. De Waal collects anecdotes of female-chimp self-adornment—grass blades tucked inside an ear and crushed fruit smeared over the upper body. Labor can be gendered, and can stem from expertise that is taught. Daughter chimps will pay keen attention to their mother’s efforts to extract termites from a mound using twigs selected for the task. Mothers share their favored grub-spearing tools with their female offspring and instruct them, but not so much their sons: Male chimps are less likely to master the skill, or even attempt it. If these can be said to be cultural phenomena, then they are not coercive; chimps that diverge from the settled habits of their sex are not fated to be pariahs.
 
 
De Waal’s accounts of chimpanzee interactions show some aspects of gender to be performative and communal in animal worlds, and he resists categorical absolutes when it comes to the sexes, eager to unpack the pronounced inequalities they have led to in the human world. At the same time, though, he emerges sure that, at root, biological sex and gender are linked—that sex difference is neither the pure product of upbringing and socialization nor a matter of choice. One lesson de Waal takes from his studies is that striving for a genderless society is more than anathema; he regards it as arrogant. In his view, sex and power can be decoupled, but to do away with difference altogether is to cut ties with nature and suppose ourselves to be beyond animality.
 
Cooke, too, argues that greater respect should be paid to difference—but where de Waal frames Homo sapiens as a tailless ape, she is motivated to find new ways for humans to see themselves reflected in nature. With a broader set of examples to pull from, she dedicates more attention to nonbinariness, sexual fluidity, and queerness in species of crustaceans, reptiles, birds, and fish. As it turns out, the planet’s wildlife abounds with varied examples of family-making, shape-shifting, and connectedness (or celibacy) that can help recalibrate pejorative and exclusionary understandings of who is entitled to see themselves reflected in nature.
 
As I read Different, and Bitch too, I was struck by the number of instances in which the traditionally gendered behavior and biological functions of humans mold the lives of primates in care or captivity. Women are brought into zoos to breastfeed their babies as a demo for naive apes with young who do not yet know how to nurse. Cooke does a stint as a stand-in mother for a juvenile monkey that nests in her hair as she sleeps—an experience that brings her to reflect on her own maternal urgings, or lack thereof. In Different, an orangutan male stalls in his development and fails to acquire the fleshy flanges (cheek pads) of maturity until after the retirement of a senior zookeeper, when the change is at last triggered—as it would be in the wild, following the decline or death of a dominant orangutan male.
 
I came to wonder whether primates of different species within audible and olfactory range—if not in visual contact, as at a zoo—also influence one another. If chimpanzees have a worldview inflected by what we call patriarchy, are they blind to the sisterhood of bonobos? If bonobos have a matriarchy, would they consider the sexual obstructions of female lowland gorillas to be traitorous? These triangulations are playful, of course, though they illuminate one thing apes could contribute to the development of human society: an expansion of empathy arising from our affinity with the animal kingdom.
 
Yet not all affinities are helpful; some are harmful. Having retired from the U.S. space program, Ham had difficulty settling into the life of a zoo animal, given how habituated he had become to people. And it’s perhaps worth noting that our evolutionary closeness with primates has changed human sex lives, in ways that have radically altered the course of history: We can’t forget that AIDS is a zoonosis, a disease that crossed species, from chimpanzees to human beings. At their core, Different and Bitch both pursue a question that does, in the end, set us apart from the animal kingdom. We are the sole primate to explore how much our self-knowledge owes to a history of science.
 
How Primate Research was hijacked by sexist ideologues. By Rebecca Giggs.  The Atlantic, May 6, 2022. 

You’d have to be brave or clueless to enter the public debate on gender. Frans de Waal is not clueless. A renowned primatologist, he has spent thousands of hours observing apes and monkeys in the wild and captivity. De Waal has published hundreds of peer-reviewed research articles and a dozen books on animal behavior, including the 2005 bestseller “Our Inner Ape,” which made the case that qualities thought of as solely human — such as empathy and altruism — are shared by our closest primate relatives. In his new book, “Different,” de Waal turns again to the ape world, this time to explore the connection between gender and biology.
 
As I said, brave. Whether he’s convincing is another matter.
 
Most of “Different” is devoted to our closest evolutionary cousins, the bonobos and chimpanzees, but it includes instructive and entertaining examples from other primates too, such as baboons, macaques, spider monkeys and the fatherly cotton-topped tamarin. Based on his studies, de Waal’s central premise is that males and females behave differently and that those behavioral differences have some basis in biology. He is not the first to propose this, but as a biologist who studies animal behavior, I was curious how de Waal presented his observations and what new evidence he could bring to a discussion that has become deeply politicized.
 
To understand de Waal’s premise, we first must wrestle with some dichotomies that are notoriously muddy. One is the distinction between biology and culture. To neutralize this, de Waal turns to Hans Kummer’s analogy of drum and drummer. If you hear the sound of drumming, is it coming from the drum, or the drummer? The answer is obviously both; neither alone makes a sound. Likewise, human behavior is a result of the interaction between genes and the environment, between biology and culture, the drum and the drummer. But if we take the analogy a step further and ask, if we hear drumming from two places and they differ in their sound, is it because of a difference in the drum, or the drummer?
 
De Waal takes issue with those who argue that culture — let’s call that the drummer — is solely responsible for the differences we hear in the “sound” of gender. As a primatologist, he argues for a role of the drum. He points to differences in the behavior of male and female primates as evidence that biology explains more of human gender differences than many would like to believe. That is not necessarily a baseless argument, but de Waal never provides a concrete definition of “biology” for us to consider. It’s safe to assume it has something to do with genetics, but his clear definition of gender, as “the culturally circumscribed role and position of each sex in society,” seems to reject a role for genetics even as he asserts its biological basis.
 
That left me confused. What exactly is the drum in this scenario, and how might it affect the expression of gender? An explicit definition of biology, by way of hypothetical genetic mechanisms, would have gone a long way in supporting the central premise.
 
Another dichotomy that gets muddy is the distinction between males and females. De Waal provides a medical definition of sex, based on chromosomes — “XX for female, XY for male” — and genital anatomy. He doesn’t name the genitalia in his definition, but they come up regularly in reference to bonobo behavior, and we get the picture. But sex is more complicated than that.
 
At the cellular level, sex is binary: there are sperm and there are eggs. But understanding how that maps onto our chromosomes and our bodies is a work in progress. Gender is even more confusing — a mosaic of body parts, beliefs and behaviors that don’t separate neatly into two happy summer camps across the lake. De Waal agrees, writing that “gender resists division into two neat categories and is best viewed as a spectrum that runs smoothly from feminine to masculine and all sorts of mixtures in between.” We don’t yet know how or why people identify as “male” or “female,” why some people don’t identify as either and why people vary in the degree to which they identify as anything at all. So the central premise, that behavioral differences between males and females have a basis in biology, is undermined by muddy definitions of males, females — and biology.
 
Still, de Waal’s book is a valuable addition to the public discussion of sex and gender. Analyzing the behavior of close evolutionary relatives is a scientifically sound way to understand the origins of our own behavior. Evolutionary biologists regularly chart traits of interest onto evolutionary trees to test hypotheses about evolutionary origins, and the book gives us plenty to ponder from that perspective. One hypothesis de Waal discusses is the possibility of a genetic predisposition to learn the behaviors of your own sex — for example when girls imitate the nurturing behaviors of their mothers. None of the evidence he cites is conclusive but the book adds an important evolutionary dimension to one of the most complex issues of our time.
 
Even if “Different” doesn’t provide satisfying answers to our questions about gender and sex, it is still a valuable collection of amusing, heartwarming and sometimes heartbreaking anecdotes about our animal cousins. There’s the chimpanzee Kuif, who kept losing her babies from insufficient lactation, became deeply depressed and withdrew from society until de Waal taught her to bottle feed an orphaned baby, and she became a successful and devoted mother many times over. He also demonstrates how a “secondary sisterhood” of unrelated females dominate bonobo society; his detailed descriptions of female leadership in bonobos and chimpanzees are refreshing reminders of the difference between physical and political power. And whatever your views on the Kinsey scale of sexual orientation, ranging from 0 for exclusively heterosexual to 6 for exclusively homosexual, it’s fascinating to learn that every bonobo would score a perfect 3.
 
 The beauty of a book by Frans de Waal is that once you read it, you’ll never look at your own species the same way again. “Different” may not tell us how much of our behavior is genetic, hormonal, culturally driven, or all of the above. That’s an impossibly tall order given our current state of knowledge. But it will give you a lot to think about and, if you’re brave enough, plenty of fodder for debate.
 
What can the ape world teach us about gender and biology? By Tamra Mendelson. The Washington Post, April 21, 2022. 

This year marks the 40th anniversary of “Chimpanzee Politics,” a book that forced us to look at our simian cousins in a new light. The author, a Dutch primatologist named Frans de Waal, offered an unprecedented look at the social world of chimpanzees. Their lives are crammed with alliances, betrayals, and Machiavellian maneuvers. “Chimpanzee Politics” was also the debut of a gifted writer. De Waal turned what might have been a dry monograph into something that read more like a character-packed novel.

 
De Waal has been busy in the four decades since. He has studied other primates, such as bonobos, a species that split from the chimpanzee lineage about two million years ago. Unlike chimpanzee societies, in which males typically dominate, bonobo societies turn out to be run by the females.
 
De Waal has also found the time to write a string of books that have attracted readers far beyond primatology circles. In his recent works, such as “Mama’s Last Hug” and “Our Inner Ape,” de Waal has extended his gaze to humans, and argued that we may not be as special as we think. Apes have their own kind of politics. They have emotions and morality too.
 
In “Different,” de Waal turns his attention to gender. “Whereas it is true that gender goes beyond biology, it’s not created out of thin air,” de Waal writes. “There is every reason,” he writes elsewhere, “to see what we can learn about ourselves from comparisons with other primates.”
 
De Waal starts with boys and girls. He rejects the idea that they play differently merely because of how they’re raised. He observes that young chimpanzees exhibit similar differences: The males tend to roughhouse, while females often pretend to carry infants.
 
For young primates, playing serves as training for adult life. Adult males tend to rely on muscle to dominate other males in their hierarchy. Adult females are largely responsible for caring for young. While these differences matter, de Waal says, they shouldn’t be used to defend simplistic notions about how men and women ought to behave.
 
Take the term “alpha male,” which de Waal himself helped to popularize. Much to his chagrin, some business writers came to use the term for a man who bullied his way into the corner office, crushing rivals along the way. “They forget to mention the skills that set a good chimpanzee alpha male apart, such as generosity and impartiality,” de Waal writes.
 
De Waal also points out that the roles of male and female primates have fuzzy, overlapping boundaries, not sharp borders. “Over decades of working with apes, I have known quite a few whose behavior was hard to classify as either masculine or feminine,” he writes. He’s seen muscle-bound males retreat from confrontations. He spent many hours observing a female chimpanzee named Donna who would raise her hairy coat like a male chimpanzee and showed no interest in mating with males. “The best way to describe her is perhaps as a largely asexual gender-nonconforming individual,” de Waal writes.
 
It might sound odd to hear the word “gender” used to describe a chimp, even if it’s a gender-nonconforming one. Sex is a matter of the chromosomes, hormones, eggs, and sperm. Gender has to do with the roles that the sexes play in a society — roles molded by culture.
 
Primates have cultures of their own. One group of chimpanzees may smash open nuts with rocks, while a nearby group uses sticks to fish for termites. Once primates invent a custom, it gets passed down through the generations as young primates learn it.
 
De Waal speculates that young male and female primates develop their gender roles in a similar fashion. They look to adults to learn how to behave. Young males are biased to learning from older males, he argues, while the young females look to their older counterparts.
 
If de Waal is right, then the behavior of males and female primates aren’t as hard-wired as we might think. Under certain conditions, they have the potential to start doing things we might expect from the opposite sex. De Waal observes how male rhesus monkeys never take care of infants — unless they’re alone with one without any adult females around.
 
The primate tales that de Waal uses to discuss gender are both fascinating and enlightening. He remembers rhesus monkeys he studied in the 1980s much more clearly than I remember a lot of the people I went to college with. But as an argument about humans, I found “Different” less satisfying.
 
De Waal sometimes stretches evidence to fit his claims. He argues that girls dress up in princess outfits because it feels good to conform to our own gender. For evidence he cites a single brain-scanning study of just 19 subjects.
 
“Imitating people of one’s own gender activates reward centers in the brain, whereas imitating people of the opposite gender does not,” de Waal claims. But the study itself showed that imitating the opposite gender did activate those reward centers. It’s just that the scientists saw a stronger response for the same gender.
 
The authors of the study did not claim, as de Waal does, that it’s evidence of an innate “feel-good bias” that locks in genders. They instead raised the possibility that boys and girls simply learn to act the way they’re encouraged to act by parents, teachers and other children.
 
When De Waal asserts that male apes and men are both judged by the width of their shoulders, he doesn’t even offer a footnote. After observing that male chimpanzees exaggerate their size by making their hairs stand up, he turns to men’s fashions. “We too pay special attention to male shoulder width, which is why suits have shoulder pads,” de Waal declares.

 
Professor de Waal, I have Joan Crawford on line one waiting to talk to you. Joan Collins is on line two.
 
Sometimes de Waal’s evidence for a link between humans and other primates feels more like free association. When discussing violence inflicted by men on women, he claims that unrelated women can protect each other just as female bonobos do. “The #MeToo movement comes to mind. So does the Green Sari movement,” he writes.
 
“Different” would have benefited from less free association and more sustained argumentation. I was not sure what to make of the fact that humans are like chimpanzees in some regards and bonobos in others. After all, they’re both equally related to us, belonging to a lineage that split off from our own around six million years ago.
 
When de Waal ventures further away on the primate tree, things get more confusing. In a chapter on parental care, he describes how cotton-top tamarin fathers put in a lot of effort raising young. (They can burn off 10 percent of their body weight lugging around their kids.) As we’re waiting to learn what cotton-top tamarin fathers can tell us about human fathers, de Waal loses interest. “These monkeys are quite distant from us, however, which makes them less relevant to human evolution,” he declares, turning to gibbons. Will cotton-top tamarins be on the midterm?
 
There’s a deeper problem with writing about cotton-top tamarins this way: They are different from their own close relatives. The ancestors of cotton-top tamarins started out as a species in which fathers offered little care at all. And then a mysterious combination of evolutionary factors pushed the ancestors of cotton-top tamarins onto a peculiar path.
 
We humans are peculiar too. We may not be quite as special as we’d like to think, but we have undergone some big changes since our lineage split from chimpanzees and bonobos. Our ancestors started walking upright, lost much of their hair, evolved big brains, and began speaking full-blown language. It is hard to tell from “Different” to what degree our genders have been shaped by history before and after our split from our fellow primates.
 
None of this is to take away the value of the stories of Donna and the rest of the primates that have filled de Waal’s life. If you don’t know your bonobo from your gibbon, “Different” has many surprises in store for you, surprises that will leave you humble about complex primate evolution has been, and how much we have yet to learn about how it shapes our lives.
 
Primate Societies Are Surprisingly Complex. So Are Their Gender Roles. By Carl Zimmer. The New York Times, April 5, 2022.