In the wake of the monkey syntax story, the ancient human/early monkey sex revelation, the ongoing monkey/robot hypothetical question, and several great contributions from readers (especially Dominic Fox/Padraig), a pictorial reflection on monkeys, men, women, robots.

1. the monkey-robot sans human



[This painting is by Eric Claridge, who also used to be in a band that I like called 'The Sea and Cake' (oddly enough, I named my school's literary magazine after them). Anyway, now he also paints these splendidly weird animal pieces.]

The monkey-robot coupling without human mediation (taking at face value for a moment the generalising claim that women pick monkeys over robots and men robots over monkeys) is expressed by Zizek thus (thanks to Padraig for the quote): "What Lynch does [in Lost Highway] by staging inconsistent fantasies together, at the same level, is, in the terms of Hoeg's novel [The Woman and the Ape], something akin to confronting us with the unbearable scene of the "ideal couple" underlying this novel, the scene of a male ape copulating with a female cyborg." Further, that 'Peter Hoeg's novel stages sex with an animal as a fantasy of full sexual relationship, and it is crucial that this animal is, as a rule, male: in contrast to the cyborg-sex fantasy, in which the cyborg is, as a rule. a woman, i.e. in which the fantasy is that of Woman-Machine (From Blade Runner to Nip/Tuck).



But, Padraig continues: 'Does this not materialize two standard vulgar notions: that of a woman who wants a strong animal partner [masculine purity myth], a "beast," not a hysterical impotent weakling, and that of a man who wants his feminine partner to be a perfectly programmed doll meeting all his wishes [feminine purity myth], not an effective living being.'

As k-punk put it a while back re the second point: 'The more disturbing thought is that men would always in practice prefer a robot to an actual woman - and this is why the libidinal economics, if not yet the technical feasibility, of The Stepford Wives are horribly credible.'



It certainly looks as if the monkey-robot union fuses two poles of clichéd desire whilst evacuating the, ahem, 'primate scene' of the typically hairless fleshy bearers of these fantasies. Whilst there is certainly much to be said for the 'masculine purity myth', the delirious female capture at the hands of a man overcome by animality, two pieces of recent research point to an odd paradox at the heart of this fantasy. First, the news that women's judgments of men's facial masculinity accurately reflect men's testosterone levels. Women appear to be attracted to men with high levels of testosterone for short-term relationships and nothing more. Testosterone, of course, is responsible for the growth of body hair, beard growth, deep voice, development of the penis, aggressiveness, sexual behavior - In other words, those things that make men into something approximating a randy gorilla - a rumble in the jungle but not a suitable papa for the little ones...



But depictions of the woman-simian mutual attraction are nothing new of course (indeed, an appropriately-sized monkey might provide a useful, if unconventional, practice-partner without risk of pregnancy - at least not for the past 5.4 million years if new reports are anything to go by, ha - though not of disease of course, though the mutation of a certain monkey virus into HIV in humans is more likely to have come from eating 'bush meat' than bestiality).



So - overtly 'monkeyish' men are not the most 'useful' of sexual partners (if we take the cheap cultural evolutionary point for a second). Second is the not-entirely-unrelated story that women fancy artificially prettier men, that is, photoshopped pics of men with a 'feminised' jawline, symmetrical features, and the clear skin that forms the contemporary saleable content of everything from airbrushing to spot cream ads. The asymmetrical, the bearded, the dark-skinned, the slightly odd of face...the criminal/terrorist/simiancontinuum...is to abhorred (pushed just a little bit) for the good of the species which is not a species, the European: 'I myself gaze with dread upon that Larousse dictionary of 1932, passed onto me by my parents, wherein, under the heading - viewed as universally unproblematic - of the hierarchy of the races, the skull of the black man is positioned between that of the gorilla, on the one hand, and the European on the other' (Alain Badiou, The Century). With regards to the question of dangerous classification, the discovery of 'monkey syntax' might unhinge that other great arrogance that language is the sole preserve of the 'civilised'...and indeed, if the two words that indicate 'monkey meaning' might usefully be compared to something like binary code (zeros and ones/'pyows' and 'hacks') then we have even less to be proud of...



[asymmetrical and hairy...run away!]

The monkey-ness of man, then, far from pointing to an ideal of the complete linguistically nonsensical ('he was all grunts!') sexual fulfillment of the heterosexual female, symbolises something like a consequence-less sexual encounter (precisely, nothing must be conceived); it - ahem - cannot be thought (the impossibility of the King Kong/blonde actress relationship, for example - size difference necessarily makes actual sexual union impossible; his rage must threaten the literal edifice of hairless human achievement, death to architecture!). The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape...

But these dark desires do not describe the neutured monkeys of contemporary 'cute capitalism' by a long way.

2: The "cute" monkey

From PG Tips to Paul Frank, Barry Ween to Sock Monkey, sexless cartoon simians and fancy-dress apes play a central role in the circulation of goods and images. If freak-shows are exploitative, then we'll replace Monkey Woman, Lobster Boy and Alligator Man with some chimps in dresses sipping tea and banging away at the old Joanna:



Not to mention sell expensive pyjama sets, clocks, pencil cases and other assorted tat with a 'classy' chimp design. After all, no one can copyright a monkey!



Similarly, someone once cynically remarked that if you want to sell a comic, put a monkey in it: for extreme and extensive evidence of this see monkeys and comics.




But cartoon/comic monkeys weren't always used merely to sell tea-bags and bougy trash. Rococo porcelain monkeys routinely mocked the pretensions of the bourgeoisie, as did a certain youthful Karl Marx, who also clearly recognised something crucial in the woman-monkey affiliation:

A young girl swooned at what she saw,
Flew on a monkey's breast and claws.
She batted her eyes, said timidly:
'O depths of exquisite agony!
O harmony! Delicious sorrow!
That monkey thrills me to the marrow!
I feel as if I were magnetised,
The ape played me; I loved him, hypnotised.
O monkey, speak, for I'm bewitched by you!
I just can't breathe, my head is spinning, too!" - Karl Marx, from The Viennese Ape Theatre in Berlin, Early Works.



3. Primatology: a woman's work is never done

Whilst we might want to do damage to the woman-ape couple as the ultimate hairy bearer of heterosexual female desire, there is nevertheless a strange affinity between women and primates at the research level: 62% of members of the world directory of primatologists are female, 90% of sanctuaries around the world are run by women, which could easily make it the most female-dominated of all sciences (or perhaps the only one that is). This is manifestly not because women are 'more nurturing', sensitive or kind (what could be less 'lady-like' than getting involved with a bunch of belligerent and antagonistic chimpanzees violently intent on attacking other animals and each other?). Sometimes, though, specifically female biology, for better or worse (usually worse), serves an, ahem, 'useful' purpose:


suckling monkey

Goodall early on in her studies observed 'two female chimps embark on a murderous, and cannibalistic, campaign against other females' young'. She was hardly put off her work, however, and remains one of the world's most famous living scientists.



Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas and Jane Goodall.

4. The domesticated monkey: women and apes revisited

Besides the historical racist/speciesist implications (actually all too contemporary if football match abuse is anything to go by), there's much to be said for the pre-cute-capitalist colonialist cultural domestication of monkeys...and, conversely, the role they played in the depiction of uppity women who asked for too much ('you'll make monkeys of us all!').

Mistress Margaret Brent, the earliest American woman to demand the right of suffrage. Booze and furry friends! the very edifice of society must surely crumble at the combined sound of drunken female laughter and monkey howls!.

Woman with a Monkey, Georges Seurat, 1884.

Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait with Monkeys, 1943.

#
Woman and Monkey, Pablo Picasso, 1954.

The more possessions a woman has, the smaller the monkey! - two little monkeys...immense amounts of stuff!





[some stuff on robots, I left them out... at some point! possibly].