INTRODUCTION + CLEVER DICKS

An excerpt from the introduction and the first chapter of The Bonobo Gene

Men. Blokes. Guys. Idiots.

We can be some, all or none of these things. Depends when you catch us. And what you catch us doing.

Are we Merely Male?

Bad behaviour. Offensive behaviour. Can most often be summed up as “stupid behaviour”.

Why? Is there really a built in character trait particular to males that might explain, if not excuse a lot of this stupid and egregious behaviour?

And what are “men” these days? Well, that’s a subject for a different book.

This book will look into the history of poor male behaviour, the reasons for it, look at whether it’s on the rise, and maybe float a theory or two…

Most men will recognise themselves at some point.

And I hope women will look at their husbands, partners, sons, brothers and work mates, then laugh and say, “Look, that’s you!!”

And given recent speculation on gender, its origin and importance, we raise the question, “in the future, will men even be necessary? Is there a future for men?”

One thing that seems to get missed these days in all that’s said about gender and the sexes is that, very generally speaking there still appears to be a fair amount of attraction between men and women.

And let’s be honest – while most men have a natural propensity for idiocy, the mere male can still reach astonishing levels of brilliance, be it in the arts, business or on the sporting field.

For every drunken buffoon spotted pissing on a fence, one can openly point to the classy genius of Roger Federer. 

For every shifty politician or dodgy salesman, we can offer the dishevelled but brilliant young Australian blokes who created Atlassian.

Whether you like it or not, a lot of the time many women still like men, and the world continues to spin on its axis.

Boy meets girl. Woman meets man. They’re not the trendy, much ballyhooed couplings so talked about today, but they still happen. Of course there are countless permutations between the sexes. Always have been, always will be.

While we examine some of the history and reasons behind Dumb Male Behaviour, let’s hope some of the more extreme examples become less frequent and, yes, dumb.

A kind of Dick Détente, if you will.

And finally, no book about incomprehensible male behaviour would be complete without some kind of roll call of penile infamy.

Now I’m not for one moment suggesting that men as a group are stupid. That would be absurd. However, when you look at some of the evidence and behaviour of a lot of men, you do sometimes scratch your head.

I am going to put it down to a theory. It is a theory with very limited research, and is yet to be proven.

It’s called The Bonobo Gene.

Think back to where you were on January 9, 2007.

Doesn’t sound that long ago, does it?

Apple supremo Steve Jobs was about to front the Macworld conference in San Francisco, California to unveil the latest technological device from his rapidly expanding company.

Jobs’s performances at these massive nerd fests had become legendary in their own right. With a combination of ego, chutzpah, genuine techno whizzkiddery, and mixed with even more ego, Apple’s “new product” announcements were a heady mix that nearly always generated massive publicity for the new devices themselves, as well as reinforcing the “cult of Steve”.

Anyone would think the two Steves – Jobs and Wozniak – had created everything Apple purely on their own. It was a brilliant piece of marketing. Suddenly it was cool to be a pencilhead or geek. It helped that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak had apparently swapped his neck for a Medusa-like mass of curls. He looked like the sort of bloke if you asked him to dig a hole, would redesign a shovel rather than lift one.

These nerds really were changing the world.

All the lights and music, sturm und drang, rock star charisma of their media launches just made Jobs and his Apple products cooler and cooler.

Back in 1984 it was the Macintosh home computer. In 1998 it was the iMac.

In 2001, the iPod music player and storage system. “A thousand songs in your pocket!”

Rumours in the tech world abound that in 2007, Steve Jobs is about to reveal his plans to enter (and thus, dominate) the booming mobile phone market.

A notoriously prickly boss at the best of times, Jobs is more nervous than usual on the day. He is anxious that the big screen hardware behind him on stage is working perfectly. And at the rehearsal, it wasn’t.

After all, there’s no point being the world’s greatest technological dork if your “overhead projector” doesn’t click on when it’s supposed to. Before they open the doors to the general public, Jobs is fiddling with the remote like a grandfather trying to reconnect his Foxtel cable. (“Tell me again, what does HDMI stand for?”)

Somewhere backstage, a sweating Apple employee is nervously wondering what careers might be going right now at, say, Microsoft.

Ding! All of a sudden it’s working, and Jobs relaxes. Clad in his usual baggy dad jeans, sneakers and black turtleneck, Jobs walks on stage with the swagger of a true rock star.

“This is a day I have been looking forward to for two-and-a-half years. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.

And Apple is very fortunate that it has been able to introduce a few of these into the world.

Today we’re introducing three revolutionary products. The first is a wide screen iPod with touch controls.

The second is a revolutionary mobile phone.”

When he says the words “mobile phone”, the crowd erupts like they’re watching the Beatles at Shea Stadium.

“And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device. These are not three separate devices. This is one device.

And we are calling it iPhone.”

The crowd reaction couldn’t have been wilder had the long-deceased John Lennon himself walked out and sung “Day Tripper”.

After the hooting and the hollering faded down, Steve Jobs then went on to demonstrate all the features of the new iPhone, including things called “apps”, (which you would get from an “app store”), plus emailing and texting from the device, and its built-in iTunes store and music storage system.

When he demonstrates how the user can use their fingers to interact with the built-in screen, thus making the objects on the screen appear larger, the crowd howls like they’re at a Hillsong revival show.

And while there is no “laying of the hands”, it would be fair to say Jobs has the audience right in the middle of his palm. There’s only one thing he hasn’t pointed out….

You can also use the built-in, 2-megapixel camera to take a picture of your DICK!

And send it to anyone in your address book!!

Steve Jobs was never reluctant to take personal credit for the brilliant inventions of his vast Apple team, and it might be pushing it to credit him with inventing the Dick Pic.

After all, both Samsung and Sharp had had cameras in their phones years before Apple, but like just about everything else in their vast technological armory, Apple made it easy to use.

And use it we did.

And we’re still using it. In fact, just about everyone is using it.

Every day, tens, if not hundreds of million digital photographs are emailed across the ether. Websites, chat rooms, apps; there is even (and this comes as no surprise) an online counterculture completely devoted to genital photography.

The future is Now. And in most cases, it’s a megapixel, colour- corrected, white balanced, fully edited, non pixelated, clearly filtered photo of someone’s dong.