What Bonobos Can Teach Us About Sexual Assault
If you’ve read National Geographic or seen a documentary about chimps, you’ve heard that we can learn a great deal about ourselves from our very close primate relatives Pan troglodytes.
Observing a troop in Gombe, Tanzania, Jane Goodall discovered that chimps have personalities, intimate relationships, and agendas. Her work and that of scientists who followed in her footsteps also taught us that chimps are a male-dominant species, prone to not-infrequent violence, with males harassing and sexually coercing lower-ranking female troop members. Aggression, many primatologists, academics, and nonexperts extrapolate from our body of knowledge about chimps, is in our “nature,” as is the dynamic that we humans are living out “a continuous, five-million-year habit of lethal aggression,” driven by a male will to dominate strangers and females. We can expect male dominance and male sexual coercion of females, we’ve been taught, because we’re “wired” that way.
