Twisty Faster of I Blame the Patriarchy digs up a howler of a sociobiology-oriented “research” article from the BBC.
Chimpanzees enter into “deals” whereby they exchange meat for sex, according to researchers.
It goes without saying, since “male” is always the default, that by “chimpanzees” the article means male chimpanzees, and that by “sex” it means “copulation.” Female chimpanzees do not, apparently, exchange meat for sex. Their role is not active. The females passively accept meat from males whereupon they are adjudged to be under an obligation put out over the long term. The article portrays them as recipients of male largesse and as receptacles.
After various not-inappropriate fulminations Twisty quotes the author committing a classic fallacy of appeal to (self) authority.
This has got me really interested in humans,” [said researcher/chimp voyeur Cristina Gomes]. “I’m thinking of moving on to working with hunter-gatherers.”
Tempting as it is to flame the implicit racism in the idea of “moving on” to hunter-gatherers and skip straight to the part about how a primate researcher qualified enough to make credible pronouncements about chimpanzee sex-for-food behavior has no more qualifications to study humans than a veterinarian would be qualified to treat people.
Heck, let’s skip that part too and go straight to the part where people who call themselves scientists ought to think twice before anthropomorphizing animals in ways that confirm dominant paradigms about human society.
Stephanie Coontz, who was and is a radical Trotskyite and hard-core radical feminist professor at the school I went to, used to tell her students that the difference between science and propaganda is that propagandists look for evidence that supports what they believe while scientists look for evidence that disproves what they believe. By her criteria Ev-Psych flunks the “it’s science” test stem to stern.
Not to try to get too (lower-case) twisty about it or anything but of course people who are so indoctrinated with patriarchy they think their justifications are scientific are going to assume that offering of food and/or sex has to be some kind of proto-prostitution. They can’t help themselves! Same with the original BBC article’s, um, wrong claim that female chimps don’t hunt. It doesn’t fit patriarchal ideology so they say it doesn’t happen. (It’s hard to Google for counterexamples at the moment because so many knee-squeezingly twittish sites are talking about this Christina Gomes character’s work but if you scroll down far enough you start seeing actual scientists saying they’re not only perfectly capable but innovative and sophisticated at it.**)
Anyway, what really chaffs my armpit hair is that while everybody’s running around trying to prove that we’re all helpless against patriarchy because monkeys, or ducks, or microscopic parasitic worms do it too they’re missing the chance to look for different metaphors in animal behavior we could, I dunno, use to subvert patriarchy.
I mean… if one is going to bother anthropomorphizing why not say female chimps decide that males that can hunt are just less boring? Or smell better? Or remind them of their mothers who brought them food when they were little? I mean, sure, patriarchy can’t see anything but hapless females and male coercion but… last I looked that was a problem with observer bias, not what might actually be going on.
[** Consider that researchers studied chimps for generations before noticing they ate meat at all, let alone killed and ate meat, let alone involved it in mating behavior. So… exactly what are the odds the first recorded instance of a female chimp improvising a spear to stab and fish out hibernating squirrels is the first time a female chimp has done it? Small? Or really, really small? —fl]
