and I have now written The Naked Bonobo. Someone needed to.
     Marlene Zuk, in her 2002 book Sexual Selections, called bonobos the dolphins of the new millennium. I don’t think bonobos have yet reached the level of appeal achieved by the dolphin but they might be getting there, and that’s reason enough to seek out what we really know about them.
     Zuk remarks that when we look for reflections of ourselves in other species we easily miss seeing what those species are actually doing. This was well illustrated recently when images of a male kangaroo apparently grieving over a dying female, spread around the globe. But then we were informed by an expert that the male kangaroo was actually trying to have sex with the dying female, and his sexual intentions may well have been what caused her death.
     Nature fluffified may lift our spirits but reality has the habit of knocking them back down again. And this can be so whether our spirits are lifted by a March of the Penguins-style monogamy story or the free-lovin’ one of the bonobo. A cute story can be made of any species’ behaviour.

     So, what are bonobos actually doing?
     The real bonobo turns out to be an ape rather different from the one currently being portrayed in the media. The image of the bonobo we are currently being fed is one of constant friendly sexual contacts leading to a chilled-out, caring, sharing society: the ultimate make love, not war species. Very cute.
     It turns out, though, that while sex (in terms of some sort of genital contact) does help avoid most serious physical aggression, it is often not friendly. For example, Takayoshi Kano, who led the early research at the Wamba research sites, writes that when males approach each other it is not with friendly intentions but the male’s intention is one of dominance, and the prevailing mood is hostile. Most male sexual contact is in the context of aggression: the attacking male “may spring on a male, who, cut off from escape, is grovelling and screaming, and the attacker will mount or rump-rub the victim. Or the attacker may confront his victim, suddenly facing the victim’s buttocks and demanding mounting or rump-rubbing.”
     We would call this kind of behaviour in humans sexual assault, but in bonobos we call it making love!
     Forced sex is not what we have been led to believe occurs in bonobos, yet this kind of forced mounting of males occurs, Kano says, frequently. And though Kano did not see forced heterosexual sex, this too has occasionally been seen by other researchers. What’s more, ‘bending over’ (adult males are not much interested in face-to-face sex) is a common response from either sex towards an aggressive adult male. It is not friendly, casual, chilled-out sex leading to lower levels of violence; it is agitated, aggressively displaying males being calmed, willingly or not, by others.
     It’s not that ordinary soliciting of sex does not occur, but sex during times of social stress and anxiety accounts for most bonobo sex. And when it comes to bonobo heterosexual sex, it is the young, adolescent, low-status females who are involved in most of that sex, and precisely because they are low-status. Add to this that much of the bonobo sexual behaviour smorgasbord we hear about, such as fellatio and kissing, is almost exclusively the behaviour of sexual immatures, and bonobo sexual behaviour becomes less and less a reflection of our own.
     Whether homosexual sex, heterosexual sex, sex between adults and immatures, competition, aggression, or female status, we are long overdue the facts and figures on what the bonobos are actually doing. This is what The Naked Bonobo provides.