About two years ago, I finally got on the air for the first time with Ira Flatow on his Science Friday show. One of the subjects of his show was the bonobo ape and its sexuality. I haven't been thinking about sex so much, but about cultural dissonance. According to Ira, Japanese researchers had less difficulty studying these primates' complex sexual behavior but Westerners found a great number of their acts unconscionable. So when the question came around about which of the apes are most like humans and the most intelligent, the Japanese picked the bonobo. Meanwhile, Europeans and Americans alike settled on the chimpanzee. As time moves forward, it may turn out that the Japanese were right. A cultural interpretation of the meaning of sex acts is inevitable, no matter what our biology. We may never know.
As I reflect on cultural dissonance in the context of empire, we also may never know how our acts may ultimately be interpreted, or whether a question of the value of any particular act can and will be perceived as we expect. I mean how many Americans have ever heard of a bonobo ape much less consider it more intelligent than a dolphin or a chimp? The very idea is foreign.
Nevertheless in considering this matter of ape sexuality I have become moderately curious about how much of our own sexuality derives from observation of animals. Surely we humans have watched dogs, pigs, sheep, horses, cats and cattle copulate since the beginning of civilization. Often our health and wealth has depended on knowing when such activities were going right or going wrong. Surely our concepts of male dominance and female submission in things sexual comes more from horses more than say, black widow spiders or salmon. But what we say, what we think and what we do are surely divergent. After all, horses don't masturbate. Are we indeed like monkeys? Probably more than we'd like to admit.
Another great matter of sexual import which has passed through the old bean this weekend has to do with my anticipation of the great female prophet. My daughter asked about world religions and I pointed to my old, and fun reference on such liberal arts matters, An Incomplete Education. This book reminded me that there were approximately 650 million Roman Catholics. Knowing how much the Virgin Mary means to Catholics, having audited catechism myself, I wondered what a huge impact it would be to the world if some future Council of Nicea decided to make the Holy Spirit female.
A female pope would change the world in ways we cannot imagine. In this way, I tend to believe that all feminism is pre-historic. The day will come.