The Sisterhood is Powerful article

Back in the 1980s, feminists had the slogan, “the sisterhood is powerful”.  This seemed to be a good idea and was used in the Greenham Common Campaign, when women surrounded the Greenham Common military base in Britain to prevent it using cruise missiles. 

Yet women were not able to make the idea of sisterhood work in their normal lives and the whole idea gradually faded away.  So why not?  Perhaps the reason is that the whole patriarchal system has been designed to break up the sisterhood.

Sisterhood works very well for the bonobo ape.  The general public generally knows that the closed related species to humans is the chimpanzee.  But fewer people know that another ape, the bonobo is also as closely related to us.  What is interesting in both species, is that the chimpanzee is a male dominated and the bonobo is female dominated.  It seems the bonobo females dominate the males through sisterhood. 

Like in humans and chimpanzees the male bonobos are larger than the females.  Yet if a male attempts to use his larger size to bully or intimidate a female, every female bonobo within hearing range will rush to her defence and drive the male away. 

This is in total contrast to chimpanzees, where if a larger male, bullies or beats up a female she is totally on her own and no other female will dare intervene.  So for this reason it is easy for male chimpanzees to dominate females but with bonobos the females have countered this through a powerful sisterhood.

So could this work for humans?  It could, but a mentioned before the patriarchal society has been designed to undermine the sisterhood through marriage and taboos on sexual behaviour.

In most animals species, they only have sex when the female is in season, but this is not true with bonobos, chimps, dolphins, humans and some species of monkey.  Bonobos seem to have sex all the time because they use it to defuse tension.  It seems that when bonobos have a dispute they ease the tension by having sex together.  This includes not only sex between male and female but same sex as well.  It seems all bonobos are bi-sexual. This is why bonobos are called the, make love not war ape.

So it is patriarchal customs that prevent this.  Most patriarchal societies advocate marriage which means all females are encouraged to marry a man.  So like with the chimpanzees in that relationship in any dispute the man has the advantage of his greater size and strength to get his own way.  And as we live in separate houses the woman cannot call on the help of her sisters if the man was to use violence and intimidation.

In recent years many of the strict taboos about marriage have eased and this has helped women.  In the past if a woman was married to an abusive man it was very difficult for her to get out of the marriage.  But now with easy divorce and not a social stigma if a couple doesn’t get married, it means that it is a lot easier for women to leave abusive men.

All patriarchal societies also have taboos about sexuality.  They do not encourage women to have sex outside of marriage, and also up until recently all homosexuality was made a criminal offense.

So what would happen if we were to follow the bonobo example and have a far more liberal attitude towards sex?   This was tried out in the 1960s in the hippy movement with their love-ins and sex was freely available.  Unfortunately, they were also liberal with drugs and it was drug taking that destroyed the hippy movement because most hippies ended up as drug addicts.

One of the ideas that come from the hippies and later the New-Age movement was the idea of living in communes.  What seems to happen was the in time the men argued among themselves and left the communes and it end up with female only communes. 

So perhaps if women could live in communes and be bi-sexual then they can come together in a powerful sisterhood.