In this spirit, it’s important to take a closer look at Wrangham and Peterson’s theory. In reviewing the research on apes, these authors present a picture of male violence with a remarkably meaningful pattern, which is both shocking and familiar. In all three cases, the underlying premise is that of males using force in order to increase their chances of reproduction. The orangutan male does it by raping–most female orangutans are ***** regularly–and the chimpanzee does it by battering–all female chimpanzees get battered. As for the gorilla, this otherwise gentle and peaceful ape is apparently into infanticide. The really strange thing in the case of the gorilla is that after the male kills the female’s infant (from another male), the female may voluntarily join the killer and have her next baby with him. She may even spend the rest of her life with him. This, despite her strong and very affectionate bond with her infant.
The logic of gorilla infanticide, according to Wrangham and Peterson, is the same as that of the **** and battery exercised by their orangutan and chimpanzee cousins. The common theme is the female’s vulnerability and the male desire to control and dominate her so that he can get his way with her, ultimately, without resistance. In the case of chimpanzee battering, for example, the male seems to attack the female initially for the purpose of consortship. Apparently, after several such attacks the female ends up following him to the edge of the community’s range, where the two may travel together peacefully with no further signs of her having been coerced. In the case of chimpanzee infanticide, it seems that the very act makes the killer attractive to the mother of the killed baby–presumably because he can offer her protection from other male baby killers.
In terms of the comparison to humans, Wrangham and Peterson make one critical, if frightening, point. They explain that ape violence is not just some kind of innate impulse gone out of control. Rather, it’s been reinforced evolutionarily because it works, and it works not only because of female vulnerability but because apes are in fact intelligent. That is, unlike other species, their use of violence is guided by a cognitive understanding of how it will get them what they want in their relationships. What’s frightening, of course, is that we are even more intelligent and therefore can put our aggressive endowment into even greater use–which we have clearly done by progressively producing ever more destructive killing technologies. (back to top)
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Amazingly, even this purely psychological hypothesis seems to have an equivalent in the world of apes from which I’ve tried to separate. Apparently, the orangutans who **** belong to a special class of males who are physically small and are therefore not followed voluntarily by females. It’s scary and scientifically probably misguided to directly connect this to human ****. Yet one cannot help but speculate that if they could talk, these small male orangutans would tell a variation of the story told by aggressive men to their therapists. Of course the fact that they don’t have language–let alone therapists–is not incidental. Indeed, the capacity to think and talk about one’s story in words changes the story itself, not only at the time of the telling, but even beforehand, as its events and elements are conceived and developed in the person’s life. I will return to discuss these orangutans in relation to men a bit later, but for a more comprehensive discussion of the similarities and differences between orangutan and human ****, see Wrangham and Peterson.