Chauvinism on parade in chimpanzee meat for sex story?
Eric Michael Johnson
Tuesday, 14 April 2009 19:47 UTC
I was just curious how people in this forum felt about some of the news articles on the recent study in PLoS One? For a summary see Male Chauvinist Chimps or the Meat Market of Public Opinion in The Primate Diaries.
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Replies
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“Typical!” is what I think. One has to ignore so much of this sort of rubbish in life, or one would go mad. I am glad that The Great Beyond wrote what it did (see Eric’s post for the quote/link).
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Thanks Eric. We went to the zoo last week, and listened to a talk about the penguins. The ‘explainer’ did a great job, which included explaining that you can’t tell their main breed of male and female penguins apart, so the zoo sends the DNA of newborns off for testing to determine sex. Until recently they had to wait quite a while for the results, and penguins would get named in the meantime – with inevitable errors. She said that as a result some female penguins had male names, and that one male had a girl’s name, adding: ‘But luckily he doesn’t know’.
I did stop and think about this :-) I guess that for a male, having a female name is a real loss of status, hence the sort-of apology/joke… I wish she hadn’t said it, but then maybe she was doing really well at getting her more general penguin information across, as I am now really intrigued about male and female penguins and want to find out more.
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Why don’t they call all the pengins names like Lesley, Lee, Jess, etc, which could be either gender? ;-)
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That would have solved it! I wondered what the naming system is. Now the dna results come back before the naming.
I am enjoying learning more about penguins: ‘Generally, penguins are not sexually dimorphic: males and females look alike’. Crested penguins are the only exception: apparently the males are more robust and have larger bills.
With the chimp story, I did wonder how it would have played if the females had been offering meat to the males… It is remarkably hard for us to remove the gender stereotype lens.
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I agree, Ruth, this sometimes comes up when one has a new colleague in a different office (in my case, we are spread out in several countries). One can email back and forth, and be quite surprised (in either direction) when one actually meets him/her in person and finds that he/she is of the other gender than one was imagining from the emails. It is quite an instructive way to have one’s own assumptions questioned!
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What kills me about stories like this is the assumption that any parallel can be drawn at all. Imho we have to be careful drawing parallels with out great-grandparents, let alone chimps. That’s the more basic fallacy here.
Of course we can have a chuckle about stuff sometimes (until Fox et al. get their execrably irresponsible mits on it): I remember there was an insect species (forget which — undergradness was a long time ago) where on eclosion the males just went bonkers (pun intended) racing around and trying to mate with twigs etc., basically anything longer than wide in a weird ironic twist on our Dr Freud’s particular obsession. And we all chuckled — dumb men, led from the waist ho ho. But good god we’d never dream of trying to draw any real parallels (well I suppose I couldn’t speak for all, but at least for the grown ups in the room).
And then of course there are the Randy Thornhills of this world, at which point nothing is funny any more.
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