Empty Nest by design: A guest post

Thanksgiving with friends. Not family.

Something big was happening in America around 1971, the year I graduated from college.

It wasn't an event. It wasn't in the news. It was an idea drifting out into the zeitgeist and changing lives. Women in my circle of friends were deciding that they would have great careers and exciting lives of significance. They decided they wouldn't bear children.

There was a combination of reasons for a shift in expectations about childbearing. Paul Ehrlich's book, The Population Bomb laid out a moral argument for childlessness. America began having "Earth Days." Educational institutions changed; it switched from unusual to normal for women to enter the professions. Betty Friedan had written The Feminine Mystique describing women's frustrations with being a stay-at-home wife; my friends, male and female, had read it. Soon Gloria Steinem will be founding Ms. Magazine. The Vietnam War was underway and there was the thought that maybe it was cruel to bring children into such a messed-up world. Good contraception was available. The idea of sex between consenting adults disconnected from marriage and pregnancy.

Ideas in the zeitgeist translate into personal behavior  as preferences and expectations and self image. Who am I really? For many of my classmate friends in high school and college, it resulted in their not having children, or having very few and having them "late" by prior standards. That Norman Rockwell painting of grandparents hosting a Thanksgiving feast for a large family at a long table is nostalgia and cliché; not description.

College classmate Erich Almasy describes his journey. 

Erich Almasy and Cynthia Blanton on a trip to Nepal. Dole Foods was a client of their consulting firm.

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

A Life without Progeny

Peter asked me to expand upon the comment I made about children, and my lack thereof. A recent news article pointed out that over 75 percent of people over age 72 are white and that less than 50 percent under age 18 are. MAGA and white supremacy will go away as we Boomers die off and the races of color who have made the United States a true melting pot take their fair share. 

Children. Probably the most momentous decision any couple or even an individual makes. I met my life companion (so hard to come up with the proper expression) as I was leaving college to venture to Alaska and later, Egypt. Cynthia had taken a year off (now euphemistically called a gap year) to earn enough money to finish her senior year. She had broken up with her boyfriend of many years three days before we met and was on the rebound. Needless to say, I pounced, and since I had made clear that I was about to become a world traveler, she decided it was an easy one-night stand. How wrong she was. We spent a good part of the night talking, and came to common agreement on many things that seem to daunt couples of much longer duration. We agreed on religion (none), politics (liberal), and children (none).

The last perspective seems an odd one for people aged 21, so a little background may help. Cynthia was a child of separation. Her parents were not the best of friends and may have gotten married because Cynthia came along. This was not uncommon in the late forties and early fifties before birth control was readily available to women, and that makes such a difference! Her father led a pretty much independent life and her mother had a lot of trouble coping. My parents also had me prematurely. In fact, as I much later found out, they weren’t married until I was four months old. Theirs was a combative marriage. Both were well-educated, opinionated liberal individuals, my mother from northern Wisconsin and my father a Jewish refugee from Vienna, Austria. The latter was something I didn’t fully understand until his death in 2004.

Cynthia’s rejection of motherhood was understandable given her upbringing. Mine, less so, since I was a largely happy child whose parents spent time both educating and nurturing -- until the end of my freshman year in college, when my mother had a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed (poorly) with bipolar disorder. This amazing woman (a feminist before the word was coined) was suddenly gone from my life and I found myself drifting away from my father and younger sister. Living in Boston while they lived in Los Angeles made this distance easier. I seldom thought of family.

I eventually returned from my adventures, and Cynthia and I embarked on our POTOSLT (Persons of the Opposite Sex Living Together) relationship, which lasted 24 years. With no children plans, we didn’t need holy matrimony, and we married in 1995 only because the company I joined did not provide health insurance for unmarried couples. So romantic! 

We now live in Mexico and celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday with the families of two Mexican friends (brothers who married sisters) and their four adorable children. Thanksgiving is not a Mexican holiday, even though the turkey, sweet and white potatoes, green beans, cornbread, and even the pumpkin pie all originated here. In our almost 55 years together, have we missed the sound of little feet, growing into adults, followed by more little feet? No. We have worked together, traveled together, fought together, and enjoyed life and love together. She is my best friend, although her dog Max and my dog Tomás try to claim precedence. Over the years, many friends and acquaintances have questioned our decision, speculating that we would regret it. Some people just aren’t cut out to be parents. It’s not that we don’t have family. Cynthia is very close to her younger sister and I have finally become close to mine. In fact, my sister Lisa and I will be traveling to Vienna in August to discover more about the relatives we lost in the Holocaust.

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Thanksgiving 2025: The vineyard is going dormant.

Skip this post: 

It is about the vineyard again.

We got our first frost on Friday, November 20.  

We got a second frost on Sunday, and it froze again this morning.  

My Pinot Noir grapes were the earliest to ripen, and the earliest for the leaves to turn color and drop. This is how they looked yesterday, next to rows of Cabernet Sauvignons.  Pinot Noir is on the right.

This is the third year after planting, so we expected either no harvest or a small one. We picked the Pinot Noir grapes on October 6, and expected to pick the slower-ripening Malbec's ten days later. I had such high hopes. It was a crop so heavy that we needed to drop half of it to the ground a month before the intended harvest. I was proud.

September 2 photo

But about three days before the day for picking, starlings found us and wiped out the Malbec crop. They ate them all. Pow!

Here they are yesterday in an oak tree next to the vineyard:

The photo doesn't tell the story. There are thousands -- maybe tens of thousands -- swooping around in murmurations. They swoop in, chatter a while, then swoop out. They are beautiful if they aren't destroying one's crop.

I will need to figure out some kind of netting to protect the two later varieties of grapes, the Cabernet Sauvignons and Malbecs. That is a problem for next year. Now I am trying to feel good about relaxing and letting nature take its course. I have drained the irrigation lines so they won't freeze. The weeds aren't growing. There are no herds of elk making trouble. I need to let go, chill out, and let the season do its work.

Plants have their own schedule. The Malbecs still have their leaves, but they have turned brown. The Cabernets are still green and growing. I took this photo yesterday:

Side by side, Cabernets on the left

In my youth it was common to get a first frost in late September or the first week of October. Frosts devastate a melon field. A September or early October frost takes a lush field of green and turns it black. Vines wither immediately. Melons are exposed. It would look eerily like a field of skulls. For about two days following the frost, I could pick and sell the melons that had gotten ripe, but melons get the sugar and flavor that makes them delicious from a healthy living vine, so a frost is the sudden death event for a commercial harvest. I didn't want to sell an OK melon. I wanted to sell great melons.

Maybe it is just "weather." Maybe it is "climate." But this year is beyond all my experience in getting a frost this late. I planted melons in early May. The field came ripe in mid-August. A frost did not end the season; the field died slowly, of old age. 

I am leaving the melon field untilled, at least for now. It is not an attractive field in this condition, but I did not see any interest in the crop by starlings, and the melons have seeds that other birds will like so I will leave them until I see starlings.

It is healthy for me to look up from politics from time to time. Long after I am gone, and long after Trump is gone, this land will be here, as will be the tilt of the earth, the trip around the sun, and the seasons. 

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Thanksgiving 2025: No grandchildren

Empty nest:

I posted this for Thanksgiving 2024. The two sons will be joining us this year, too. Nothing changed, except that everyone is a year older. 

The same facts remain: Children are expensive. Housing is expensive. It takes two incomes to get by.

2024 Thanksgiving post:

 

"Over the river, and through the wood,
To Grandfather's house we go;
the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through the white and drifted snow."
     Lydia Maria Childs, "Over the River and Through the Woods," 1844

This Thanksgiving we have two sons in the house, ages 43 and age 33, both single. No grandchildren.

My wife and I are part of a Boomer phenomenon --  people in their seventies with children but not grandchildren.

The two sons home for Thanksgiving aren't unusual in being childless well into adulthood. About 25 percent of American men over 40 are childless. Women are delaying childbearing, choosing education or career as a first priority. An increasing number of women don't want children. At 1.66 children per woman, the U.S. is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Some women get around to it as their fertility clock runs low; some don't. At age 35-39, 22 percent of women are childless.

There are a lot of reasons for not having children. Children are expensive. They disrupt an education/career path. Household formation starts later, when people pair up and buy a home. Expectations and norms have changed, so childlessness is normalized. And contraception made childbearing a choice.

My grandmother is one of 10, the little girl toward the right, standing beside her mother holding the infant. There are eight children in the photo. Two more are still to come. Children were assets who could help with farm chores.  

Housing has gotten expensive relative to earnings. Since 1950 the general rate of inflation raised prices by a factor of 13. It takes $13.10 to buy what a dollar bought in 1950, at the height of the baby boom.

Housing inflated even more.

1950 housing advertisement 

Those 1950 houses would have been small -- about 1,000 square feet. One bath. No dishwasher. No air conditioning. No garage. They would not have been to current code on insulation. There would not have been a city requirement of curbs and gutters and capture of rain water into a storm drain system. But at the general inflation rate of 13.1, the larger of the two homes, plus some closing costs, would cost about $110,000 in today's dollars.

My parents had three children. In 1955 they moved from a small rental into a Medford subdivision. The subdivision consisted of homes of about 1,100 to 1,300 square feet. They had one or one-and-a-half bathrooms and a one-car garage. They were owned by families similar to mine: a husband, a wife, and two or three children. 

Google Maps photo

This house in the photo is similar to the house my parents bought: three bedrooms, one bath, and 1,183 square feet of space. It has a one-car garage. Zillow estimates a current price of $324,500. This price is three times the inflation-adjusted $110,000 current value of the houses in the ad.

No single factor explains the fertility rate, and therefore the paucity of grandchildren, but the cost of housing affects choices young adults make. They face a much higher hurdle for creating new households and the physical and psychological "nest" into which a new baby, or a second or third, fits.

Thanksgivings are smaller now. And grandchildren don't arrive by horse-drawn sled, if they arrive at all.

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Populism versus the swamp.

Marjorie Taylor Green is MAGA. Trump is not.

MTG and Zohran Mamdani have something in common. They are economic populists.

They are canaries in the coal mine.

In Russia, Marjorie Taylor Greene would have been thrown out of a window. In the USA, she is merely scorned and threatened. She was a nuisance and a threat. Now she is a message: Don't cross Trump. 

She was too MAGA for Trump and the GOP.  She was too much like Mamdani.

Donald Trump made the GOP a MAGA party. He taught Republican voters to like what he likes: a tone of resentment, a policy of lawfare retribution against Democratic villains, and a suite of populist policies featuring America First nativism, opposition to "woke" cultural values, and recentering White native born Americans as the default American. To make that work as a majority party Trump needed to add a dimension: anti-elitism. There are two realms for elitism, cultural and economic. The cultural portion was easy and popular with his base: attack universities, criticize the media written by smarty-pants, and turn the Kennedy Center into a showcase for country music. The hard part is the economic elites. At first, Trump sounded like Bernie Sanders, attacking economic elites. He said he didn't need them. He said he understood them well enough to disempower them. He said he would drain the swamp. He talked a good game to get elected in 2016.

He didn't follow through. And in this second term, he abandoned draining the swamp of economic elites. He stopped anti-trust activities. He made the government a shareholder in businesses. He allied with economic elites and then flagrantly sought their tribute. He celebrated their purchase of his meme crypto coin. He sent a powerful signal with tech billionaires on stage at his inauguration. He sent a stronger one in accepting their offers of gold tribute. He looked like a conquering warlord from ancient wars of conquest. His association with big business sends a muddled message to GOP voters. Yes, Trump was a winner. But Trump's triumph is personal to Trump. There isn't clear trickle-down benefit for taxpayers and consumers. Inflation is real. Those billionaires are in it for themselves, and they are throwing their weight around and Trump lets them do it.

Three events converged in time. It helps explain MTG's very public move. One was the shutdown over the issue of affordable health insurance for working families. The second was Trump's effort to protect himself and other wealthy men from whatever is in the Epstein files. The third was the shocking election of Zohran Mamdani despite every effort of the moneyed interests of New York City to stop him. Mamdani showed the power of economic populism, the power that MTG spoke of in the conclusion of her resignation announcement.

. . .  the Political Industrial Complex of both parties is ripping this country apart. . . and instead the reality is that they, common Americans, The People, possess the real power over Washington. . . . 

That is a message with appeal to both Democratic and Republican voters. It is the MAGA message, but it isn't the Trump message anymore, because Trump chose to ally with the business establishment. Those lobbyists and establishment donors and bankers and tech billionaires support Trump. They also support the federal and state officeholders who have Trump's back. They protect him from impeachment. They praise and defend him, even when he does things that are outrageous, blatantly illegal, or unpopular. Those business elites fund campaigns, either for you or against you. If you cross Trump you cross them.

Trump can keep a populist GOP together, notwithstanding being in the money swamp, by making culture issues the centerpiece of his message. But Mamdani is the canary in the coal mine. MTG noticed it and so did Trump, who hastened to make-nice with Mandami. The public wants more than cultural populism; it wants economic populism. 

Democrats backed away from economic populism when it was advanced by Bernie Sanders. His ideas were new and the country wasn't ready. Sanders was a trial balloon. Mamdani is a second trial balloon. His economic populist message was unstoppable this time. But there is room for caution. After all, this was New York City, not New York State or a battleground state like Pennsylvania. But the message is clear: Economic populism has appeal. There may be an opportunity for an economic populist to take over a party and win the White House.

We have history to examine. FDR did not get elected amid happy days and prosperity. That is the condition for caution and stability. FDR was elected amid a devastating financial crisis. Business interests lost credibility. They needed rescue. Rescue came at a cost for them. The public made new rules to shape the economy and the distribution of national income.

Both Democrats and Republicans have laid the groundwork for a populist reset of the American economy. It will take a crisis to light the fuse. America has them from time to time. Something triggers it, and there are ample triggers.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene is the real MAGA deal

     "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned."
          William Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 1697

"I refuse to be a battered wife."
          Marjorie Taylor Greene, last Friday

Trump embracing MTG. She was his biggest fan. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been betrayed, and she is furious. Betrayed by Donald Trump. Betrayed by the House GOP. Betrayed by the fakers and grifters who hijacked the MAGA movement.

She is angry because she is sincere. She is a populist, a woman of the people, and a true believer.

She was dangerous to Trump. He needed to exile her. 

MTG's speech announcing her resignation from Congress on January 5 is an extraordinary political document. It lays out the MAGA world view, and does it far better and more consistently than does Trump. He has a fragile coalition to lead. The MAGA worldview is pragmatically useful and it folds a constituency into the Trump movement. Trump cannot break with those supporters, nor can he embrace the full MAGA suite of beliefs. After all, the Trump-shaped GOP includes the donors and lobbyists in the "Chamber of Commerce Republican" set, the pro-Israel Zionists, big banks, big pharma, big tech, defense hawks, and Republicans willing to defend Trump's interest in the Epstein matter. Trump needs to compromise and shade his language and behavior to keep his fragile coalition together. MTG does not need to compromise. She gets to be 100 percent herself, and as such she is the tip of the MAGA spear.

Here is MTG's spoken announcement, a 10 minute video.

https://youtu.be/ubU-J-p_8Gc

Here is a written transcript: Click.

She speaks of betrayal. She expects Democrats to be vile, godless, communist, abortion-loving, trans-enabling, legal and illegal immigrant-enabling, banker-loving, foreign-aid-supporting, public-broadcasting-funding globalists. In short, swamp dwellers. She is no ally of Democrats, but they didn't betray her. They were being their evil selves. The betrayal comes from Republicans. She thought they were different. But she learned that they, too, are part of the swamp. 

My only goal and desire has ever been to hold the Republican Party accountable for the promises it makes to the American people and put America First, and I have fought against Democrats' damaging policies like the Green New Deal, wide open deadly unsafe border policies, and the trans agenda on children and against women. . . . 

If I am cast aside by MAGA Inc and replaced by Neocons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Military Industrial War Complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class that can't even relate to real Americans, then many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well. 

There is no ‘plan to save the world’ or insane 4D chess game being played. 

When the common American people finally realize and understand that the Political Industrial Complex of both parties is ripping this country apart, that not one elected leader like me is able to stop Washington's machine from gradually destroying our country, and instead the reality is that they, common Americans, The People, possess the real power over Washington, then I'll be here by their side to rebuild it.

The Trump-MTG alliance floundered over two issues that came to a head this month. One, Republicans are allowing subsidies for health insurance exchanges to lapse. That will price her constituents out of health insurance. Two, Republicans were blocking release of the Epstein files. MTG identified with the young women, not the powerful men who preyed on them. 

MAGA-thinking is a majority inside the GOP. That is why Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and the GOP establishment needed to call her a kook without disagreeing with her.  She wasn't wrong. She was disloyal. A political movement needs a spokesperson and leader. She was emerging as the better, clearer voice for MAGA, and she was loyal to MAGA, not Trump. That made her dangerous to Trump. 

MTG is not wrong in complaining about the excessive power of elites. She is not wrong about the swamp. She isn't wrong about the military industrial complex. Some of her complaints sound like Bernie Sanders'. Right populism and left populism overlap. She would not be a third-party voice. She would be the voice of a reformed non-swampy GOP. That is a problem for Trump's GOP. He made peace with the swamp and is neck-deep in it.

She is free now to start a political movement that is the logical successor to Trump. She might fade away. She reports that her life has been threatened. But I expect she will stay in the arena. It is exhilarating to be the center of attention, and she appears to have all the narcissism that animates Trump. She also has principles and an agenda.

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Easy Sunday: Southern Oregon is not a news desert

There is curated news in Southern Oregon.

It isn't the "good old days" of strong local newspapers, but it isn't zero, either. 

Curated news means that someone with credibility on the line reviewed the information and put their personal and institutional credibility on the line.

Local residents need to work harder and spend some money, but local news is available. For a century the Medford Mail Tribune, with a couple dozen news reporters and editors, gave a comprehensive report on local events. The Trib shriveled in size, then got nasty, then suddenly disappeared.

Good news: New news sources have sprung up in the vacuum.

Some legacy news sources remain: KOBI-TV has a local news operation broadcasting on channel 5. The station remains in local ownership with deep community roots. Their news is integrated with their website and Facebook page. It is ad-sponsored, i.e. free to the consumer. It has the inherent benefit and problem of TV news: Stories hold attention by their visual elements. If necessary, and if there isn't a burning car or a ski slope to catch the viewer's attention, the visual will be a person standing outside the door of a public meeting, explaining what just happened; but a long news clip is a few seconds, not a few minutes. TV news works better for highlights and headlines, not details. TV news has its place, but it is not a newspaper.

https://kobi5.com/category/news/local-news/

For details, one needs the written word. The pleasant surprise for me is the Grants Pass Daily Courier. I subscribe. There are five editions a week, available as a delivered newspaper and on line. The physical newspaper, which I get, costs $360/a year. I consider it worth it. I like holding a paper. The paper covers both Jackson and Josephine County news, plus wire service and cooperative agreements for state and national news. It is the real deal.

Old timers in Southern Oregon may remember the Daily Courier as a deeply biased, conservative, small-town Fox-Tea Party- Murdoch-style paper. It changed. The Daily Courier is reasonable. Balanced. Informative. The digital edition is $159/year, following some promotional offers to get one back in the habit of reading a daily local newspaper.

Rogue Valley Times

The Rogue Valley Times arose when the Mail Tribune folded. It started out strong when it was owned by an Oregon publishing group, but a year ago that group, including the RV Times, got sold to the Carpenter Media Group, an investment company. It is the familiar story of newspapers owned by investment companies: They promptly hollowed out the newsroom. The RV Times' news coverage is hit and miss, but a news consumer must pick up news from where one can, in bits and pieces. Once the various promotional deals run out, the cost of a subscription is about $208/year. 

Ashland.news

Ashland.news is a community-supported nonprofit newspaper, published online. It focuses on news in Ashland and Talent, Oregon. It has reporters, editors, and columnists. Access is free, and the news is updated as events happen. Readers who want news delivered can subscribe to its newsletter: https://ashland.news/newsletter/.  Ashland.news began four years ago and is thriving. Readers make voluntary contributions to pay for the service. It is the public broadcasting model: The information is free, and if you want it to continue you are urged to donate. Over a thousand people do so, in a mix of subscription-equivalent donations and major donors.

https://theashlandchronicle.com

The Ashland Chronicle is another non-profit news source, again primarily serving Ashland. They patch together original reporting from professional journalists and editors, news releases from Ashland institutions, and letters and comments from local readers. It is free.

I don't claim that being well informed on local news is easy or cheap. It isn't. Patching news sources together, with paid subscriptions to the Courier and RV Times, and voluntary donations to Ashland.news and the local public radio station, Jefferson Public Radio, which also has a local news department, adds up. For upstate Oregon news, including state government news, I also subscribe to and recommend Oregonlive.com -- the old Oregonian newspaper. A digital subscription starts at $139 for the first year -- but then jumps up in price. Be aware.

It is a new world for journalism. Ads don't pay the bills. We do. If we want news, we pay for it. The alternative is to be misinformed by social media rumor, public relations hackery, and clickbait.

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Donald Trump's inner chimpanzee

"In many ways we are just apes, dressed up in clothes."

         Hogan Sherrow

Trump dominates women. Some he bosses around; some he insults; some he ogles; some he gropes and has sex with. He is open about his male chauvinism. It is part of his brand: a tycoon in business, the alpha male deal-maker, a Lothario.

I asked Hogan Sherrow, an evolutionary anthropologist, why he thought Trump was the way he is, and then a more perplexing question: Why do American women tolerate Trump's behavior? He is so rude and demeaning to women. And yet a majority of White women voted for Trump; a larger majority of married women voted for Trump; and an even greater majority of Christian-identified women voted for Trump. Why aren't women repulsed by Trump? Do they see something they like in his behavior?

Sherrow graduated from Rogue River High School in Southern Oregon. He earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale. He studied primates, especially chimpanzees. He told me that male chimps beat up female chimps. They also mate with the ones they beat, and the females stick around in the group and receive future beatings. Sherrow said his observations about primate behavior help him understand politics in America. He does a variety of consulting work on behalf of climate politics and election campaigns. 

Guest Post by Hogan Sherrow

Donald Trump's inner chimp

When Donald Trump spat “Quiet, piggy” at Bloomberg White House correspondent Catherine Lucey for simply doing her job, he insulted not only her but every female journalist who has stood up to power and asked tough questions. While one of Trump’s allies tried to downplay the remark (“No one is perfect…”) and the White House claimed that attacking reporters is somehow “respectful,” most Americans found his behavior disturbing. As one reporter put it, “There is simply no excuse for it. The President…should be able to stomach a question he doesn’t like without flying off the handle. He’s not six years old.”

It's true, Donald Trump is not six years old, but he is a developmentally stunted bully, and his outbursts resemble primitive behaviors we share with our primate relatives. When he hurled his insult at Lucey, he displayed what could be called his “inner chimp.” Chimpanzees and bonobo, our closest living relative, shared a common ancestor with humans only six to 10 million years ago, a blink in evolutionary time. As a result, we share many behaviors with them.

Chimpanzees live in multi-male, multi-female, territorial communities. Males remain in their birth groups for life, and groups of males bond together to actively patrol and defend territories against other communities. Male chimpanzees also form dominance relationships with each other and an alpha male typically sits at the top. Every adult male chimpanzee is dominant to every female, and males regularly harass and attack females, often without provocation, to reinforce their dominance.

I once observed 12 male chimpanzees travel more than a mile through the forest when they came upon a female and her offspring feeding in a tree. After a dramatic display—hair bristling, bodies exaggerated—they charged up the tree and beat, kicked, and bit the female until she fell to the ground, screaming with her young. When the attack ended, she sat bleeding while the males calmly wandered off to groom each other.

This behavior is disturbingly familiar. The same dynamic that drives male chimpanzees to target females, asserting dominance over those they see as lower-ranking, parallels Trump’s pattern of disproportionately targeting female reporters. For both, females become convenient outlets for aggression and frustration. In Trump’s case, dehumanizing and belittling women of all ages has been a lifelong pattern.

Chimpanzee males are not inherently bad, or evil; they are acting out deeply ingrained evolutionary strategies. Female chimpanzees overwhelmingly prefer large, aggressive males as mates because these males defend territories effectively, increasing safety for mothers and offspring. Those same males then sire sons likely to grow into large, aggressive adults preferred by future females. This creates a feedback loop reinforcing male aggression and dominance as a successful reproductive strategy.

But chimpanzee behavior is only part of the story. Our other closest relatives, bonobos, live in multi-male, multi-female, territorial communities, like chimpanzees. Males remain in their birth groups for life, like chimpanzees. But bonobo social behavior dynamics differ dramatically from chimpanzees. Male bonobos do not form the strong bonds seen in chimpanzees. Instead, it is bonobo females who develop strong bonds with one another and with their sons. Female alliances hold significant social power; males do not dominate females universally, and overly aggressive males are socially controlled and sometimes injured by united groups of females.

These contrasting primate societies illustrate that behavior is not destiny. Chimpanzees show how aggression can be rewarded and perpetuated across generations. Bonobos show how cooperation, social bonds, and female solidarity can inhibit aggression and reshape group dynamics. In both species, female choice and collective action have the power to reinforce or transform social patterns.

The lesson for us is clear: harmful behavior persists when it is rewarded. Trump has spent his life benefiting from bullying and misogyny, facing few meaningful consequences for attacking women or other groups. If we want to break that cycle, we must refuse to tolerate or normalize such conduct. Like the bonobo females who stand together against aggression, we must stand together and deny bullies the social rewards they seek.

When Trump lashes out, he is not displaying strength or “manliness.” He is falling back on primitive tactics that thrive only when they are rewarded by the larger group. Undoing that pattern requires collective resolve—and a commitment to rejecting behaviors that demean, intimidate, or devalue anyone.

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