I read an article about the Bonobo chimpanzees. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re a subspecies of chimpanzee. In any case, they’re a species of primates – apes. Their society, if you’ll allow the expression, is based on sex. They don’t have a lot of aggression and hostilities among them. That’s not what I have a problem with.

Actually, I also read a column in one of Sweden’s major newspapers, strangely enough a conservative one, and the guy was raving about how gay penguins and Bonobos shattered the world view of some extreme right wing conservatives. Again, I don’t a have problem with that. Let the narrow minds expand, painful or not.

No, what I don’t like about the Bonobo society, is something else I read in that article. It was more or less verbatim like this: “The price the females have to pay for not having ‘wars’ is to be constantly available for sex”. In other words, they’re required to constantly provide sex – for the males, presumably. Is that a way to run a society? Since some people put forward the Bonobos as some kind of positive example to us, homo sapiens, should we follow their example? Do we placate the ‘beast’ (don’t take this literally, guys, I love you, it’s just a figure of speech) by putting out? Come on, that’s depressing.

The article about the gay penguins etc, also mentioned how males in a certain species of river dolphins (I hope I didn’t get that wrong – I’m not really good at science) like to mate with each other using their blowholes. (Ouch! If that’s true, how do they keep from drowning?) So maybe the column writer got that wrong too. But he also mentioned that they sometimes have sex with sharks and giant turtles. I mean, please. Again, the writer of that column seemed to think that this was something positive. Should we accept people having sex with animals too? Or is that only ok for animals? Come to think of it, maybe it is, between animal species, as long as both species are perfectly in agreement. Which is so NOT the case when so called humans have sex with so called animals. But anyway, do we want our society to be like that? I think not.

Again, the other day I read an article about human homosexuality. Very interesting reading. The scientists had studied twins – identical, I assume, though I don’t think the article specified that. Some of them had different sexual orientations even though they were in other ways practically identical. There was a lot more in the article but what caught my attention was this: gay males and straight males are different, but not when it comes to sex. Now what does that mean? I took it to mean that while they have different interests, hobbies, hairstyles, fashion sense etc, they act very alike when it comes to pursuing a partner. The only difference is that the gay males were more successful in realizing their goals. Because, presumably, other males share their eagerness to have sex.

Bearing in mind all these articles I read, something struck me. Let’s all be more tolerant of homosexuality and bisexuality as long as all participants (two or more) are in agreement. Consenting adults and all that. And shouldn’t we be even more tolerant of male homosexuality or bisexuality? Why? Because, while I’m not saying that we females don’t like sex, it’s usually men who want more of it, and more often than most females. Or in any case in a different way (more focused on sex, less on relationships). So couldn’t our society learn to be more accepting of casual sex between guys, who later in life find a female partner and start a family? That would spare us females the necessity of ‘putting out’ or being forced to accept violence, aggression and wars. Because if you think about it, that sounds a lot like blackmail.