The Bonobo Sisterhood: The Ms. Q&A With Ashley Judd and Diane Rosenfeld
(a lengthy, fascinating and important read about preventing sexual violence. And I urge every person to read the book.))
The Bonobo Sisterhood: The Ms. Q&A With Ashley Judd and Diane Rosenfeld
7/27/2023 by Carrie N. Baker
A Ms. conversation with legal scholar Diane Rosenfeld and activist Ashley Judd reveals what some of our closest relatives can teach us about preventing sexual violence.
Harvard Law professor Diane Rosenfeld argues in The Bonobo Sisterhood that women can protect one another from sexual assault; actor and #MeToo activist Ashley Judd. (Harvard Law School)
Among Homo sapiens’ closest evolutionary cousins are primates called the bonobos. Inhabitants of the Congo Basin, these endangered great apes have a unique social order in which females protect one another from male aggression. As a result, male bonobos exhibit very little sexual aggression toward females. Inspired by learning this about the bonobos, Harvard Law School’s Diane L. Rosenfeld has published a new book, The Bonobo Sisterhood: Revolution Through Female Alliance, in which she argues that women can protect one another from male sexual aggression by breaking down barriers among themselves and unleashing their power as a unified force.
Rosenfeld served as the first senior counsel in the Office on Violence Against Women at the U.S. Department of Justice in the 1990s. She has taught at Harvard Law School since 2004 and is the founding director of its Gender Violence Program. During the Obama administration in 2011, Rosenfeld helped inspire the Department of Education to declare that Title IX requires universities and colleges to address sexual violence on campus, leading to hundreds of investigations across the country. But she argues that patriarchal law will never end sexual violence, and that women need to come together to make the cultural change necessary to stop male sexual aggression.
Actor and activist Ashley Judd wrote the foreword to The Bonobo Sisterhood. Judd met Rosenfeld when she was a student at Harvard’s Kennedy School in 2010. A longtime advocate for gender equality and the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and girls, Judd was one of the first women to speak publicly against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein (convicted of sexual assault in 2020 and rape in 2022), helping to propel the #MeToo movement.
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Diane Rosenfeld’s The Bonobo Sisterhood cover (art by Shepard Fairey) and a bonobo, human’s closest evolutionary cousins. In stark contrast to other primates, by forming female alliances, they have evolutionarily eliminated male sexual coercion. (Jason Coleman / Flickr)
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The Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Morrison that Christy Brzonkala did not have the right to sue the men who allegedly gang-raped her as a college student. (C-SPAN)
Baker: How do we create a bonobo sisterhood?
Rosenfeld: Start with adopting the bonobo principle and let it animate your behavior. No one harms your sister; everyone is your sister. Then think about how to break down barriers between women by confronting how much time we spend judging ourselves, and how much we are socialized to judge ourselves and one another. Instead of judging another woman for what she’s wearing, for example, replace the thought with a more generous one, such as “That might not be my fashion choice, but she has the right to wear whatever she wants.” Self-esteem is such an important component of all of this because men use the corrosion of self-esteem as a tool to keep their partners subordinated and under their control. I’m in the process of creating the Bonobo Sisterhood Alliance to lift up each other’s work, provide resources and have a place to go to share stories and ideas. I’m also creating a Pro Bonobo Legal Action Network with my students through the years who are now working at law firms. I hope this book inspires women to immediately create bonobo sisterhood communities starting with five people they know, then seeking out a bonobo sisterhood self-worth-defending class and getting trained in self-defense.
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https://msmagazine.com/2023/07/27/bonobo-sisterhood-ashley-judd-diane-rosenfeld/