Gender Crusades

By Paul R. AbramsonJuly 28, 2022

Gender Crusades

Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist by Frans de Waal

I REMEMBER A time not long ago when it was sufficient, customary even, to end an email with a salutation, followed by one’s name. First and last names were the norm, but if appropriate, the first name alone might suffice. If status or affiliation were relevant, one could add a credential and then attach a title, but overdoing the latter might be counterproductive, gilding the lily so to speak. When Erik Erikson and I discussed the possibility many years ago of his coming to UCLA to give a lecture (I’ve been a psychology professor at UCLA since 1976), I discovered that his CV was one page. A lonesome folio, one might say. Absent were titles, awards, affiliations, and regalia of any sort. What remained were a list of his books, which pretty much said it all.

Curiously enough, something new has crept into our designatory protocol: adding one’s pronouns after all of the other trappings. She/her, for example, or they/them. It’s not clear to me why this convention ever took off. Yes, of course, it’s important to document the presence of nonbinary folks among us. But even so, why does everyone else have to follow suit? Hetero types have yet to come up with an acronym that would correspond with LGBTQIA and, even if they did, it would come off as an insult. Like the bumper stickers that say All Lives Matter.

The point being that we want to acknowledge — and thereby recognize — hidden forms of diversity as well as eliminate the blatant contours of inequality without reducing the gesture to a hackneyed prompt. A Black person doesn’t need to broadcast their blackness because skin color is self-evident. The same is not true of sexual orientation and gender identity. These folks have good reason to make their presence known, and their numbers evident.

I’ve often taken to wearing a T-shirt that says Mighty Lesbian. I bought it at the Human Rights Campaign Action Center and Store on Castro Street in San Francisco, which now occupies Harvey Milk’s original Camera Shop. “I’m a mighty lesbian” is the usual response I get, accompanied by a big smile. On occasion, I’m also asked if it’s the name of a band, to which I reply, “No, but it would be a good one.” Either way, it seems more proactive to me than putting my hetero pronouns after my given name on an email. And for that matter, if I’m asked to fill in my gender pronouns, I always enter undecided. Not because I’m undecided about my gender pronouns, but because I’m undecided about the value of adding those pronouns to my signage on an email.

I do, nevertheless, have a favorite in the world of identity trappings. It comes from a civil rights attorney who was raised in Nicaragua. He automatically adds the following to all of his emails: I am brown, black, red, yellow, white and more. I am Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Atheist and more. I am gay, lesbian, straight, transgendered, female, male and more. I am an immigrant. I come from immigrants. I MAKE AMERICA GREAT. It is — to put it mildly — inclusive, while also delighting the recipient.

I’m bringing all of this up to make a point. The politics of gender are front and center in the worlds that I inhabit, as they should be. But this is a very privileged point of view. A drop in the bucket is the better metaphor where gender parity is concerned. All of which is grist for the mill in many contemporary Gender Studies Programs thriving in places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and UCLA. Sharing affiliations with Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Gender Studies Programs throughout the nation have made it a priority to deliver course offerings that justly frame their insights and disciplines, without sacrificing the benefits of innovation. “Feminist Futures: Contemporary S. F. by Women” and “Race, Gender, Sexuality & Contemporary States of Unfreedom” are just two classes drawn from Princeton’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Given this diversity of course offerings and thought, what are the prerequisites to Gender and Sexuality Studies? I’m not asking about the proscribed courses, nor even their reading lists. My question is, instead, about the indispensable texts, the books deemed fundamental. Countless choices come to mind, ranging from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble to Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought to Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (an especially fascinating ride, beginning with finding love through anal sex, a strap-on in this case). Then, of course, there’s Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, a mainstay of many of these programs. A personal favorite is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Tendencies, a book of striking essays, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” being a case in point.

I’d now like to make a new addition to this ever-growing pile of foundational texts: Frans de Waal’s Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist. A game-changer, potentially no less significant to the field than Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, but in a noncanonical fashion, and void of the usual tropes. The History of Sexuality is revered because it drew parallels between the infrastructure of criminality and the interdiction of sex, while simultaneously resurrecting sexual diversity by demonstrating that sex was, more fittingly, an essential construct to identity, health, and desire. De Waal’s Different achieves something equally distinctive, but by relying on an entirely different method. Rather than scrutinizing early Christian or Greek ethics and Victorian propriety, de Waal chooses, instead, to focus on our closest primate relatives: the bonobo and the chimpanzee. The showstopper — sex — isn’t his only focus. De Waal’s real interest is to shed light on the trinity: sex, gender, and their combination.

His methods are meticulous and labor intensive. Though the data speak for themselves, de Waal is an extremely attentive listener who has, literally, spent decades “sweating in the field, living under primitive conditions, risking malaria, snakebites, big cats, and so on, [and then] return[ing] [home] with bags full of smelly fecal samples to be analyzed by a laboratory.” Faint of heart, he is not; nor, for that matter, pontifical. De Waal moves slowly, painstakingly so, and rarely jumps to conclusions. When it turns out that he is wrong — failing to gather enough observations, for instance — he lets the reader know. That, alone, is a prized value in the world of science.

Preferring to stay close to the data, he does not spin theories. Take, for example, sex between two men or two women. You can say what you want, relying on whatever labels and categories come to mind, or any etiology that suits your fancy, but the fact of the matter, declares de Waal, is that there are many parallels between what we do sexually and what other animals do sexually. The striking difference, however, is our pointless need to carve up, and then label, sexual behaviors and orientations.

He is also not a practitioner of multisyllabic pidgin, a droll term coined by Cynthia Ozick for overwrought academic writing. De Waal’s prose is concise and straightforward. His sensitivity to the prevailing zeitgeist that surrounds sex and gender is evident. For example, de Waal believes that being transgender is both intrinsic and constitutional, constitutional being the opposite of socially constructed. Transgender is a trait, de Waal explains, that taps into the essence of who you are.

None of this will strike the informed reader as remarkable. And it’s not meant to be. De Waal’s unique contribution is something else entirely: mountains of data, uncontaminated by parental or cultural expectations nor limited to self-reports and their all-pervasive biases. Having spent decades working with apes, de Waal declares: “I have known quite a few whose behavior was hard to classify as either masculine or feminine. Even though they form a minority, nearly every group seems to have one.”

To better illustrate his point, de Waal introduces a chimpanzee named Donna. He has known Donna since she was an infant and was fascinated by the fact that “she grew into a robust female who acted more masculine than other females.” Even her physique, he explains, was different. Her head was larger, and her face was typical of the roughhewn features of a male. She’d even sit posed like a male, de Waal asserted. Having now seen Donna’s photograph in de Waal’s book, I’d have to agree. Donna is, indeed, different. “Male” immediately comes to mind, though de Waal assures the reader that her genitals are female.

De Waal provides many such examples, each illustrating what other primates can teach us about sex, gender, and the imprecise merger between them. The variability in gender dominance is another conspicuous illustration. Females rule as much as males do, with bonobos demonstrating the former and chimpanzees the latter. Sex, as might be expected, is not limited to opposite-gendered partners. It’s more like a free-for-all, especially for female bonobos. The largest clitorises, de Waal goes on to say, are evident in species noted for their multipurpose eroticism, such as bonobos (again), humans, and dolphins. Dolphins, we’re informed, hold the bragging rights in the size department. Even the workings of the clitoris show variability. In young female bonobos, for example, the clitoris stands out frontally, almost like a little pinky finger. A large clitoris, for that matter, has been the culprit in the misidentification of the gender of other primates. The choice of how to engage in sex — the preferred position — is determined by the form and positioning of the genitals. Female bonobos favor face-to-face, whereas male bonobos fancy coming in from behind. Though sexual intercourse among bonobos may start according to the male’s desire, the female often quickly turns it around to favor her own preference. Even before the sex has begun, male and female bonobos will heatedly negotiate preferred positions by gesturing and vocalizing.

There’s no end, in fact, to the fascinating details that emerge from this book, all carefully tied to supporting explanations, historical context, the prevalence of misinformation, the tendency to censor, the power of mindless biological determinism, and whatever else might be necessary for de Waal to make his point. Humor, and the curious anecdote, are never far behind. None of this, however, rises to the level of a foundational contribution to the study of sex and gender. The value of his book is the mortar that holds it all together: the underlying rationale for comparing human behavior to that of other primates. Are gender stereotypes intrinsic to primates? Are males more hierarchical and better leaders, while females are more pacifistic, sociable, and less sexually active? De Waal’s data suggests the answer is no. Minor differences are either evident or there are no differences at all. And for that matter, female competition among primates is frequently intense and their sex lives no less adventurous than those of males. Even role reversals are evident among other primates. Males can be remarkably nurturing and females often emerge as great leaders. Our biology, whatever the contribution it makes to who we are — and how we behave — is nonetheless more flexible than many people think. Apes are products of their environments, adopting many of the habits of those who surround them, and like humans, have a talent for watching and learning.

The only misstep that I can detect — an exception that proves the rule, perhaps — is an example that de Waal uses to illustrate the ill-advised mind-body divide, the dualism conceit whereby the mind is the lofty tower in contrast with the serviceable body. The folly of this partitioning is regrettable, but what especially concerns de Waal is how dualism now serves as a rationale for dismissing biological research out-of-hand when the subjects of sex and gender emerge. It’s a legitimate gripe on de Waal’s part, but I don’t believe, as he implies, that modern feminism still retains that feature. Though undoubtedly some modern feminists privilege the mind over the body, as do many other people, contemporary feminist artists, to take one example, place the body first and foremost in many of their artworks: Judy Chicago’s late 1970s The Dinner Party being an iconic example, with the dinner plates serving to spotlight the vulva. Many other feminist artists underscore this point as well, including Tracey Emin, Hayv Kahraman, Ana Mendieta, Wangechi Mutu, Catherine Opie, and Betty Tompkins.

That being said, Different is a towering achievement. Not simply does it cut through many Gordian knots that persist in the worlds of sex and gender, but de Waal manages to do so without relying on a higher authority such as a beloved theory. His data-based approach may not immediately appeal to audiences that prioritize complex reasoning and nonintuitive departures — readers who may also raise eyebrows about the wisdom of comparing de Waal to a brilliant French philosopher, as I have done — but the value outweighs the risk. We ignore important works at our own peril, especially if our goal is to better understand the many nuances and overt displays of sex and gender. A primatologist of de Waal’s stature has much to contribute to these discussions.

¤


Paul R. Abramson is a professor of psychology at UCLA. He is the author of With Pleasure: Thoughts on the Nature of Human Sexuality and Sexual Rights in America: The Ninth Amendment and the Pursuit of Happiness.

LARB Contributor

Paul R. Abramson is a professor of psychology at UCLA. He is the author of With Pleasure: Thoughts on the Nature of Human Sexuality and Sexual Rights in America: The ninth amendment and the pursuit of happiness.

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