Sigmund Had a Monkey

I’ll say it again: imitating human beings was not something which pleased me. I imitated them because I was looking for a way out, for no other reason.

Franz Kafka, A Report for An Academy, concerning the author’s previous life as an ape My mother tells a story. You can decide if you believe it or not; I have no reason to doubt it’s true. It seems that her father’s mother’s father, in other words, my great-great grandfather, Sigmund Rosenthal, had a pet monkey. As a boy I tried to leverage the lineage by invoking Sigmund’s simian to convince my mother to allow me get a chimpanzee. After all, given our ancestral history, it was practically a birthright, no? I clearly needed to share life with a primate of my very own.

Sadly, the denouement of the family monkey saga did not help my case. The creature whose name has been lost in the family memory vault would follow Sigmund around the house, my mother recounts, doing what monkeys do, as we all know, which was to ape him in every possible way. This included sitting on my great-great grandfather’s shoulder as the old man shaved. Perhaps to dissuade me of my whimsy of owning a chimp—though to this day my mother swears she did not make this next part up—she did not, alas, shield me from the discouraging conclusion to this family lore. As you may have already guessed, one day when Sigmund was at work the monkey found the razor and, no doubt trying to emulate his human male, well, that was the first and last time he shaved, too.

Needless to say, other than watching them at zoos, the closest I’ve come to communing with monkeys has been to live vicariously through primatologist colleagues who study animals in forests and savannahs and jungles and are kind enough to return with their chronicles from the wild, regaling us, the anthropological cousins, with the latest discoveries about our primal kith and kin. And as always when the primatologists recount their scientific parables, we learn of bizarro habits and routines and the theories that link them to those of other species, best of all the human varieties.

Besides our distinct study populations, there is another common source of dialogue (and sometimes tension) between these physical anthropologists and their cultural anthropologist brethren like me: they more often look for universal commonalities among and between species, while our preoccupation is more likely to be salient social, political, and cultural differences despite obvious physical similarities.

Sometimes anthropologists talk about lumpers, as in those who lump all humans together, or even all mammals together, to emphasize commonalities, usually traceable to evolutionary histories. What is shared in phylogenetic origins, endocrinology, and ethology, our common humanity, animality, and shared life on earth. The more the lumpers can say about all primates at all times and places, the happier most of them are. And reasonably so.

On the other side are the splitters, those who tell us that such generalizing about humans and animals too often can cover over not just differences but inequalities. Not that all difference necessarily equates to better or worse—for instance, as to whom you love or whether you pray five times a day or not at all. But that talk of commonality can be used to obscure why some have and some have not.

Certainly, it is a matter of scale and perspective, as we all can appreciate the similarities and differences within and between species. And we could say that because lumpers and splitters ask different questions, they come up with distinctive answers. What’s more, the tension between overgeneralizing shared characteristics versus succumbing to facile variations on universal features can be healthy when lumpers and splitters are not merely talking past each other. There’s even a name for our obsession with nonhuman animals, zoophilia, and it comes in a myriad of forms.

My friend Roberto in Mexico City provided a tutorial on human–animal associations one day as he repaired radiators with his acetylene torch and fun-loving smirk. “What does a woman need to feel complete, Mateo?” I asked him to school me. “First, a cat in the kitchen,” adding in case I did not follow the allusion, “That’s someone who can help her with the cleaning and food.” He continued, “Second, a Jaguar at the door. That means a good car. Third, a tiger in bed. And fourth, an ox who supports her!” The renaissance man to the rescue!

Elsewhere on the tree of learning, the zoophilic poster boys (or are they whipping boys?) du jour are surely male primates who get represented by researchers to the lay public as displaying a range of apposite though invariably negative models relating to mammalian maleness, siring, fathering, neediness, bossiness, malevolence, and always punctuated by periodic paroxysms of petulance. Bonus points when claims about silverbacks can be made apropos their human male counterparts.

Perhaps Bruce Springsteen said it best,

Well did God make man in a breath of holy fire

Or did he crawl on up out of the muck and mire

Well the man on the street believes what the bible tells him so

Well you can ask me, mister, because I know

Tell them soul-suckin’ preachers to come on down and see

Part man, part monkey, baby that’s me ¹

But I come not to defame, bury, or praise nonhuman animals. What does annoy me is when humans use and abuse use them to cross over species in order to make claims about innate male dispositions of animals of all shapes, sizes, and Y chromosomes. That’s how we end up giving men a morphological free pass to tyrannize and confer on them hormonal impunity as a defense.

There are scientists who talk about hummingbird prostitutes, ² a lot who refer to baboon and other primate harems, ³ and in a classic case of anthropomorphism, mallard duck gang rape. ⁴ Just to take the term gang rape for ducks, a crafty way of saying rape has nothing to do with politics but simply results from some preprogramed drive on the part of males to rape in groups, a trait that is especially prevalent among certain kinds of ducks with a surplus of eligible males who can otherwise find no sexual mate. ⁵ If challenged, even those who use these terms readily admit they are meant to be memorable more than precise, but they defend their word choice by appealing to the comedian’s techniques of exaggeration and surprise.

After questioning whether these three kinds of complex, historically grounded human relationships should apply to nonhuman animal behaviors in a class I taught on men and masculinities, a young woman shocked the class further with an example from another course she was taking: her professor had instructed them in the workings of “gang-banging bacteria.” ⁶ You just can’t make this stuff up.

All in good fun, of course. And this might make the study of nonhuman animals more user-friendly and easier to understand. Except if you happen to be a woman who has been the target of a very human gang rape—or any other assault for that matter. Why take these clever and transparently over-the-top comparisons so seriously? For so many reasons, not the least of which is the normalization of rape as a part of nature, from bacteria to ducks to humans. You can joke this way to a bacterium all you want, calling it a gangbanger or anything else, and I would wager my tenure that the bacteria will not be offended. Talk of rape and its ubiquity among living organisms in this way and listeners can draw lessons that are nothing short of criminal.

In 1972, Sherry Ortner published one of the most important essays in the history of anthropology and feminist studies, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture.” ⁷ In this provocative history of gender relations since time immemorial, Ortner captured the political challenge of second-wave feminism in the early 1970s: throughout the world and across the sweep of history, she concluded, women had always been more associated with nature and men with culture. Although scholars quickly engaged Ortner’s model with a thousand counterexamples showing there were no universally agreed upon terms, terms nature, and culture. As often as not, her critics emphasized women’s connections to culture in one or another society and historical epoch, and less that men were held anywhere to be especially closer to nature, however defined.

Ortner was trying to explain why men seemed in control of politics and much else in case after case in every corner of the globe going back as far as the archaeological record could see. Along with popping the wishful balloon that the matriarchy would be discovered somewhere, anywhere, anthropologists and others felt duty bound to account for widespread patterns like patriarchal relations. In a thoughtful follow-up paper, Ortner clarified that male dominance is “an unintended consequence of social arrangements designed for other purposes,” like pregnancy and lactation, and not simply the product of willful male power plays, duplicitous females, or any other form of intentional will. Yet things have changed.

I am less interested in the culture part of her argument than the nature part: when and where are men believed most closely connected to nature in the sense of biological compulsion? How and when men are described as closer to nature than women today is related in no small part to social acquiescence to genetic fatalism and a belief that human behavior is considerably beyond our ability to affect much less transform.

Biology can promise a parsimonious way to explain complex human experience, including male behavior. We sometimes place contingent weight on human animality because we think it reveals underlying causes of social relations.

Any account of human foibles and imperfections that precludes variation and its corollary of choice, as is found in many a reductionist paradigm, however, can lead humans to feel less responsible, or attribute less responsibility, for what we do in practice. There is even legal precedent in the United States for “hormonal” defenses for crimes committed “when biology goes wrong.” How much is magical thinking about scientific reason growing in societies around the world?

Many scholars in anthropology and the biological sciences have addressed the science of genetics and hormones, that is, the good and bad science, the hackneyed and cutting-edge science. We should also look at how, where, and why folk beliefs about biology and the popular use of biological language is on the rise today with respect to men’s instinctual ways, their innate behavior, their boys-will-be-boys risk taking. We can learn more, in particular how semireligious faith in pseudoscience about men’s natural state is of a piece in many societies with contemporary debate about gender and gender equality.

Certainly, biological determinism and what Ernst Mayr called “beanbag genetics” is not new. ⁸ Biobabble has for some replaced psychobabble as a catchall account of the way we live and why, fueling and rationalizing the backlash against feminism and gender equality discourses and changes, especially with respect to male violence and sexuality. Understanding the rise of biobabble is not simply a matter of growing scientific knowledge arriving in diffused forms in these societies, but rather the reemergence of a particular politics of biology and its categories. To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, more than ever we need to insist that biology is not men’s destiny either.

If late modernity is, in part, defined by the rise of scientific authority, DNA could seem to explain and order a confusing world. In fact, however, we often find little more than new science used to legitimate and justify old social relations, as the moral arguments of the day get played out in animal accounts.