![]() ![]() And, unlike chimps, it?s not the bonobo males but the females who have the power.? The Kinsey Institute claims on its Web site that ?every bonobo?female, male, infant, high or low status?seeks and responds to kisses.? And, in Los Angeles, a sex adviser named Susan Block promotes what she calls ?The Bonobo Way? on public-access television. ![]() The Washington Post recently described the species as copulating ?incessantly? the Times claimed that the bonobo ?stands out from the chest-thumping masses as an example of amicability, sensitivity and, well, humaneness? a PBS wildlife film began with the words ?Where chimpanzees fight and murder, bonobos are peacemakers. ![]() In recent years, the bonobo has found a strange niche in the popular imagination, based largely on its reputation for peacefulness and promiscuity. ?Help Gaia and Gaia will help you,? he chanted into a microphone, in a booming voice that made people jump. Wind told me that he once wore a chimpanzee T-shirt to a bonobo event, and ?got shit for it.?) (The chimp-bonobo division is strongly felt by devotees of the latter. (During one of Wind?s several visits to G.S.U., Peter Gabriel, the British pop star, was also there Gabriel played a keyboard, another keyboard was put in front of a bonobo, and Wind played flutes and a small drum.) Bonobos are remarkable, Wind told me, for being capable of ?unconditional love.? They were ?tolerant, patient, forgiving, and supportive of one another.? Chimps, by contrast, led brutish lives of ?aggression, ego, and plotting.? As for humans, they had some innate stock of bonobo temperament, but they too often behaved like chimps. He said that he had encountered bonobos a few years ago at Georgia State University, at the invitation of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a primatologist known for experiments that test the language-learning abilities of bonobos. He was a musician and a former practitioner of ?metaphysical counselling,? which he also referred to as clairvoyance. I spoke to a tall man in his forties who went by the single name Wind, and who had driven from his home in North Carolina to sing at the event. ?Bonobos are into peace and love and harmony,? Coxe said, then joked, ?They might even have been the first ape to discover marijuana.? Images of bonobos were projected onto the wall behind her: they looked like chimpanzees but had longer hair, flatter faces, pinker lips, smaller ears, narrower bodies, and, one might say, more gravitas?a chimpanzee?s arched brow looks goofy, but a bonobo?s low, straight brow sets the face in what is easy to read as earnest contemplativeness. She showed slides of bonobos, including one captioned ? MAKE LOVE NOT WAR,? and said that the apes, which she described as ?bisexual,? engaged in various kinds of sexual activity in order to defuse conflict and maintain a tranquil society. Sally Jewell Coxe, the group?s founder and president, stood to make a short presentation. The event was arranged by the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, an organization based in Washington, D.C., which works in the Democratic Republic of Congo to protect bonobo habitats and to combat illegal trading in bush meat. ![]() According to the restaurant?s take-out menu, ?Wild bonobos are happy, pleasure-loving creatures whose lifestyle is dictated by instinct and Mother Nature.? A flyer for the event depicted a bonobo sitting in the crook of a tree, a superimposed guitar in its left hand, alongside the message ?Save the Hippie Chimps!? An audience of young, shoeless people sat cross-legged on a polished wooden floor, listening to Indian-accented music and eating snacks prepared by Bonobo?s, a restaurant on Twenty-third Street that serves raw vegetarian food. On a Saturday evening a few months ago, a fund-raiser was held in a downtown Manhattan yoga studio to benefit the bonobo, a species of African ape that is very similar to?but, some say, far nicer than?the chimpanzee. ![]()
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