Our closest relatives are chimpanzees, which can be frightening to think about. For starters, they occasionally go ape shit and eat their own babies. They’re also eager to kill other primates. Hunting and eating cute little monkeys is a regular and organized activity. More recently, they’ve also gone after human babies and small children in Uganda. It is the direct result of deforestation, which has decimated their habitat. However, experts disagree on the specifics of whether baby-snatching is a case of them defending their territory or, gulp, looking for an alternative food source.
Our primate kin resemble us in a number of other ways when it comes to brutal criminal acts. In addition to infanticide and other forms of murder, chimps engage in wife-beating and rape. Of course morality is a peculiarly human invention, so I don’t suspect that chimp rapists, domestic abusers, and murders get defensive while rationalizing their behavior or look for ways to drown their guilt. For as awful as we find all those actions, there’s a much simpler logic for the chimps who flout our legal codes.
I’m hungry.
I’m in charge here.
My kids, not yours, shall inherit this vast kingdom.
And that’s that.
But there’s one primal, sexual crime that seems to make no sense, even for devil may care chimpanzees: pedophilia. After all, what’s to be gained from sexual activity with a partner too young to breed?
To find the answer, we must cross the mighty Congo River, leaving behind the vast African domain of common chimpanzees, and enter the smaller homeland of Bonobo chimpanzees; it turns out chimps don’t swim very well, so the Congo to the north and the Kasai River to the south carve out a bountiful range for the Bonobos that is free of competition from common chimpanzees, though it is being invaded by humans and gravely disrupted by the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Much has been made over the years of Bonobo chimps, those randy peaceniks of the primate world. Unlike the uber-violent, child-eating, monkey-hunting, common chimp, Bonobos mostly eat fruit, they live in matriarchal clans, and there is only one reported instance of cannibalism in the wild, which is a pretty good record, even by human standards.
Though they are not committed pacifists or vegans, they are quite capable of being kind and altruistic toward each other. And there has never been a verifiable instance of a Bonobo killing a fellow clan member, either in the wild or in captivity, though males can be quite murderous towards outsiders.
They also seem to really like sex. M/F, M/M, F/F, M/F/M, F/M/F, F/F/F, M/M/M: Craig’s List hasn’t come up with enough categories for them. They shun monogamy and develop no permanent, exclusive sexual relationships, with mother-son sex being the only taboo. The discovery of new, abundant feeding grounds often results in an all-out orgy. They’re also the only non-human animal, so far as we know anyway, to French kiss, engage in oral sex, and have sex face-to-face. Give `em a few years and they’ll probably invent birth control.
But before you go putting the Bonobos up on some free-love pedestal, there’s also this. Pre-pubescent females are part of the sexcapades. Pedophilia is indeed part of Bonobo sexuality, and it’s not coerced.
Yesterday, The New York Times ran an article on a recent push in Japan to develop tougher child pornography laws. Compared to other wealthy nations, Japan is not 
only pretty lax on the issue, but also has a thriving industry of manga comic books and videos. Consumers spend billions of dollars a year purchasing materials in which young girls are portrayed in highly sexual situations, though without displays of explicit sex acts. Pubescent real life models, such as 13 year old Akari Iinuma, are posed and photographed in shockingly suggestive manners. There are pre-pubescent models as well. Comics and anime (cartoons) portray pre-pubescent girls in a variety of sexual situations, such as being married to grown men.
I’m a straight man, and personally, I prefer women who look like women, not like girls. And in absolutely no way whatsoever is this article trying to say anything remotely like, Bonobo-style sex with children is A-OK. The truth is, I have no patience for the commodification of a thirteen year old girl’s premature sexualization, much less the sexualizing and commodifying of pre-pubescents.
But on some level, I am sympathetic to Japanese lawyer Takashi Yamaguchi, who defended the rights of the manga artists to publish illustrations and animation when he said: “Depicting a crime and committing one are two different things. It’s like convicting a mystery writer for murder.”
I’m guessing that a cartoon portraying children in sexual situations is about as upsetting to me as a cartoon disrespectfully portraying the prophet Muhammad might be to some devout Muslims. But I don’t think either cartoonist should go to jail for drawing or even selling those cartoons.
Some will counter with that such material promotes actual pedophilia. To me, this is along the lines of saying slasher movies promote actual serial killing. My instincts tell me it’s largely not true, so I’d like to see some hard proof first.
Just last month on this very website, in the aftermath of the shooting in Tucson, I took Sarah Palin to task over her now-infamous gun site image. Likewise, manga artists need to understand that their actions are reprehensible and may even promote horrid behavior by random nut jobs. But I just don’t think Sarah Palin or manga artists should be put in a cage for publishing what they have published. They have the right to be tacky, immature and selfish.
Though putting the lot of them in a cage with some Bonobos . . . that could be interesting.