Aku tambahin homoseksualitas dan perilku seks menyimpang lainnya pada kera
bonobo deh ....  biar kita bisa berkaca.

salam,
Ari Condro

Bonobo, The Forgotten Ape (review)

Bonobo, The Forgotten Ape: Franz De Waal & Frans Lanting, University
of California Press, 1997, ISBN 0-520-20535-9

Bonobo chimpanzees are fashionable these days. It is a mark of their
cachet that a coffee table book has been dedicated to them. This book
is definitely a coffee table book. It is outsized, has well written
text in a popular style, and a large number of stunning photos.

There is one problem with it as a coffee table book. If you have
small children and you leave it about you had best be comfortable
about answering explicit questions about the birds and the bees or in
this case, about the sex life of the chimpanzee. We are talking
serious chimp smut here. Consider it as an alternative to _Our
Bodies, Ourselves for Six Year Olds_.

It wasn't until fairly recently that it was even realized that there
was more than one species of chimpanzee. It has only been in the last
couple of decades that serious studies of chimpanzee social behaviour
have been undertaken. These studies have been illuminating and
disconcerting.

There had a belief, expressed in tones both of sorrow and pride, that
humans were uniquely damned as killer apes, unique in their savagery
and their prediliction for warfare. (Ants can be conveniently
explained away as being insects and therefore not counting.) Alas for
the pride of the damned - the common chimpanzee shares the ignoble
traits of his (and here "his" is the appropriate pronoun) human
cousins. Our cousins are tool users who engage in internecine warfare
from time to time, machiavellian politics, and various other unlovely
forms of behaviour that we thought were the exclusive preserve of
homo sapiens.

The doyens of pop exposition of the biological origins of human
nature beat their drums. True, we are not unique, but we are killer
apes. It runs in the family, so to speak. Patriarchy, warfare, greed,
politics, they are all in our genes. Alas for determinism. Our other
cousin is a firm practioner of the "make love, not war" approach to
life. It was the fashion among pop expositors to count us as a
uniquely sexy species. It turns out that we are quite staid and
sedate in our ways.

Heterosexual sex, female homosexuality, male homosexuality, oral-
genital sex, mutual masturbation, even deep-tongue kissing, they do
it all - frequently. With enthusiasm. It's part of their social
repertoire. Are things getting tense? Make love and relax. Even more
disturbing for those who would ground "the way things are" in
biological determinism, our kissing cousins (and kiss they do) have a
female dominant social structure. Horrors and gee-willikers.

As a filip for the vegetarians it is worth noting that bonobos eat
very little meat compared to the common chimpanzee, who is an
enthusiastic hunter when he gets the chance.

Fashionable indeed. What better role model for the latest styles in
social engineering could one ask for? (Are there bonobo clubs among
our young wherein our cousins life-style is emulated. I expect so.)
Perhaps, however, one should not rush to quickly to judgement. We are
not, after all, either common chimpanzees or bonobos. If biology has
more to say to about our behaviour than we might like to admit it is
also true that the possible variations are probably greater than we
imagine.

Franz De Waal is an honest scientist. If he tantalizes us with the
current theories about the hows and whys of the different modes of
sociality and sexuality of our cousins, he also is careful to point
out the objections to these theories and their speculative nature.

As I said, this is a coffee table book. The photography by Frans
Lanting is truly magnificent.





This page was last updated January 10, 1998.

----- Original Message -----
From: "bmuncar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Nimbrung. Pernah baca (sorry source-nya lupa), bahwa sebenarnya tidak
ada manusia yang 100 persen heteroseksual. Jadi besar kemungkinan bila
tinggal di komunitas sejenis terjadi hubungan sejenis pula.
Oh ya, Mbak Rita, yang diteliti memang pinguin. Selain itu ada lagi
penelitian yang menyimpulkan bahwa binatang juga bisa tertawa...





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