# Pedophilic Animals - Especially Great Apes **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 19, 2006, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pedophilic-animals-especially-great-apes/357454 "2006-05-19T20:39:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![WhyNot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c77e96/32.png) [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2006, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pedophilic-animals-especially-great-apes/357454/21 "2006-05-21T13:24:44Z")
> [@John Mace](#): > > That still doesn’t make any chimps or bonobos “homosexual”, in the human sense of the term. Well, what do you think "homosexual means, then? To most of us, it means someone who prefers to have sexual relations with a member of their own physical sex. Prefers, but not excludes opposite sex. Oral and digital count, as well as genital and anal. I think it’s a perfectly good term to use for a female who arrives at climax with other females much more than with other males. 90% is certainly “much more”. Limiting it to estrus-only encounters is not something we do with humans - plenty of homosexual women have sex when they are not fertile due to time of month or age. It’s still sex with another woman. I don’t see why it should be a requisite for a bonobo if it’s not a requisite for a human. There are other terms for homosexual individuals which are loaded with connotation, and I agree that it’s probably not a good idea to call a monkey a “fag”, “queer”, “dyke” or “queen”. Those have lifestyle, political or social associations beyond the description of their gender choice in partner. “Gay” is even pushing it. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2006, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pedophilic-animals-especially-great-apes/357454/22 "2006-05-21T15:22:18Z")
> [@kimera](#): > > I don’t know how much we are allowed to quote here, but you can read the book yourself if you think I am misinterpretting it. > > Here’s more from that first chapter I quoted. > From the chimp section > > I just lent that book to my brother, so I can not double-check your statements, but you have said misleading things about that book in another thread. Both of the examples in Bruce’s books are about female bonobos/chimps. They come to climax during lesbian sex and they ignore males, even when they are in heat. If you are going to accuse me of saying “misleading” things, I’d appreaciate it if you give the quote and explain why you think it’s “misleading”. How do you determine that a female bonobo has come to climax? As I noted above, de Waal states that he has never seen two males come to climax (which is an ojectively observable phenomenon). I take that as a more significant observation because it’s something we can all agree on. > [@](#): > > I do not remember that, in fact, I remember that he called bonobos “pansexual” which is a distinctly human term. I looked through my other books for references and I found a statement of his on pedophila. He is quote by Meredith Small in a 1992 Discover article saying I doubt that de Wall ever said that we at one time “lived like bonobos”, because there is no evidence that we ever did. Anyone quoting him as having said that either doesn’t understand what his work is about, or is deliberately trying to misrepresent him. (If anything, the evidence leans more towards us “living like gorillas”.) All I can say is that he certainly doesn’t think so now, given his cautious statements about such matters in _Our Inner Ape_ (published in the last year or two). He did use the term “bisexual” to describe bonobos, but in a kind of oblique way. I don’t have a copy of his book at hand, but when you re-read it, you will see how he cautions against using human sexual terms to describe bonobo or chimp behavior. > [@](#): > > In the article, Meredith Small describes two female bonobos who turn down a male’s request for sex and sneak off to have sex with each other behind a tree. Futher on in the article, she talks about how a female, despite being in heat, ignores a male’s request for sex. I don’t think that a female bonobo in heat is as different as we might like to think. Females often ignore advances from certain males, even when they’re in heat. The problem with chimps and bonobos is that they are so promiscuous. Bonobos use sex acts the way we humans might say “hello”. It’s simply impossible for us to separate out sexual attraction from sex acts, as we can in humans. And it’s sexual attraction that is the defining characteristic of homosexuality in humans. If you really wanted to find evidence of human-like homosexuality in our close relatives, you’d look for it in apes that form permanent (or at least very long term) bonds between the sexes (as most humans do). That could either be in a gorilla harem or a gibbon pair-bond. If we were to find a male gorilla who tried to assemble a harem out of younger males (larger males would fight him off), or if we found documented cases of male/male or female/female gibbon pair bonds, I think we could call those examples of homosexual behavior. ---
**Author:** ![kimera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f0a364/32.png) [@kimera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kimera)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2006, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pedophilic-animals-especially-great-apes/357454/23 "2006-05-21T23:24:29Z")
> [@John Mace](#): > > If you are going to accuse me of saying “misleading” things, I’d appreaciate it if you give the quote and explain why you think it’s “misleading”. In [this thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=365668&page=1&pp=50), you gave “Our Inner Ape” as a cite for your statement that “[Bonobos] still “go at each other” more than humans do.” I bought that book, read it, and did not find that statement, in fact, the book seems to imply the opposite. > [@](#): > > How do you determine that a female bonobo has come to climax? We don’t need to, all we need to do is look at partner preference. I agree that bonobos use sex so much, it can become confusing. However, there is a difference between a bonobo who rubs herself against a male to avoid a possible argument versus a female who ignores the advances of a male and then sneaks off to have sex with a female. The female in the second example clearly had a preference for having sex with that female at that time. As you say, it is attraction, not action. But how can you look at that example and not say that that female was attracted to having sex with the female at that point in time rather than the male? If a female chimp is completely ignoring males - even while she is in heat - and only going after females, then we can assume that she has a attraction towards females. I can’t believe that you are suggesting that female bonobos don’t climax during lesbian sex. Just look at their faces! We know they can orgasm, they make faces and sounds as if they are orgasming, and the particular size and shape of female bonobo’s genitals are such that bonobo females can get off a lot easier from GG-rubbing compared to human females. There are even some researchers who believe that the current shape, size and position of female bonobo genitals evolved specifically for lesbian sex. Check out Blount’s excellent article “Issues in Bonobo Sexual Behavior” originally printed in “American Anthropologist” for a more detailed description. > [@](#): > > If anything, the evidence leans more towards us “living like gorillas” We are much more closely related to chimps and bonobos than gorillas. Our diets are much more similar to bonobos/chimps than to gorillas. Futher more, male gorillas weigh twice as much as female gorillas due to their social structure. Early _Homo_ had a sexual dimorphism very similar to chimps and bonobos with males only 1.35 times the size of females. If we want to know more about what our ancestors were like, I think the bonobos and chimps are much closer than gorillas. > [@](#): > > He did use the term “bisexual” to describe bonobos, but in a kind of oblique way. I don’t have a copy of his book at hand, but when you re-read it, you will see how he cautions against using human sexual terms to describe bonobo or chimp behavior. Actually, he used the term [“pansexual”](http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=pansexual) which I found very interesting since it was the first time I had seen the term used by a legitimate source. I thought it was just used by gender queer kids on the internet. He said it was a very fitting term for bonobos because they are _Pan_ after all. > [@](#): > > If you really wanted to find evidence of human-like homosexuality in our close relatives, you’d look for it in apes that form permanent (or at least very long term) bonds between the sexes (as most humans do). And why can’t we use that female chimp that I referred to earlier? She was refusing to mate with males, she was only sexual with females, she had a close relationship with another female and that female’s offspring, and she even defended her female lovers from sexual advances by males. Although late in her life she occasionally mated with males, the vast majority of her partnerships both sexual and romantic were female. Although chimps and bonobos are very promiscuous, they do have preferences and favorites. Although the vast majority are bisexual (or pansexual), I see no problem with labelling an individual who mostly seeks members of the same sex for sexual activites as homosexual. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pedophilic-animals-especially-great-apes/357454.md?page=1)