Word: bonobos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...share this interest in infertile, social sex with a few other species: dolphins, bonobo apes and some birds. But even if sex is too good for human beings to give up, more and more people will abandon it as a means of reproduction. Many people born from in-vitro techniques are themselves infertile--they inherit the infertility from their genetic parents. So infertility is bound to increase, and with it the demand for IVF. Add to this the demand from gay men and women and from those with private eugenic motives--ranging from not wanting to pass on inherited disease...
Plus--need it be said?--the human sexual impulse, like that of the bonobo, is not as tightly coupled to reproduction as certain pro-family moralists like to think. Even in so-called primitive hunter-gatherer societies, such as that of the Australian Aborigines, women have always managed to invent forms of contraception--herbal drinks, pessaries to block the cervix, oils to bog down the sperm. Then there is homosexuality, a reproductively senseless but nevertheless deeply compelling sexual strategy for millions of both sexes. Not to mention masturbation, celebrated by rapper Foxy Brown's chart-topping song...
Always searching for a glimmer of hope in the darkness, I was delighted to read of the new book Demonic Males [BEHAVIOR, Oct. 14] about research on the bonobo apes. Their female-dominated culture appears to be conservative in the truest and best sense. May they survive and prosper! ELIZABETH A. TEDFORD Cresskill, New Jersey...
...your story on the bonobo great apes, I would like to note that for the past 50 years I have studied the social behavior of monkeys and apes. Popular books on the subject, preoccupied with male power and violence, repeatedly underplay the central role of the female in human evolution...
Next to the chimpanzee, Wrangham places its sibling species, the pacifistic bonobo...