Me (reading item in the Chronicle): Have you ever heard of a primate called the bonobo?
Kate: No.
Me: This says it’s called ” ‘the hippie of the forest’ because of its preference for resolving conflict through sex rather than violence.”
Kate: How do they resolve conflict through sex?
Me: I need to find more information about that.
Kate: Make love, not war.
(Beyond our charming chit-chat and the lightweight item in the paper, the un-cute context for the story.)
Because I am weak-stomached I took Physical Anthropology to satisfy my biology requirement in college. Physical Anthropology is a different way for saying the study of where man came from physically and is primarily involved in studying primates “lower” on the evolutionary ladder than us. The Bonobos were one of the species we studied. Besides having many random sexual encounters they are also unique because they spend a considerable amount of time on two feet instead of four. Make love not war is a nice philosophy of course but I still think it would not be appealing to rub genitalia vigorously with whichever person one got into an argument with on the street, let alone on the battlefield, especially for a germ-phobe like me. Think about doing THAT with Saddam.
Bush and Cheney, Saddam and Tariq Aziz, all randomly humping their differences away. What a great image! And all walking on two legs, too!