Read it in COUNTERPUNCH “America’s Best Political Newsletter”

by Dr. Susan Block

Brothers and Sisters, Lovers and Sinners, welcome to the butt end of 2018 (Happy Nude Rear) and the exhilarating thrill of “new relationship energy” with 2019. After a year that was awesome and awful, terrific and terrible—and Trumpible, once again, with much of the trickled-down terror Trumped up from the top, whether you loved or hated it, this year is in the rear. 

So, once more with feeling, hope tinged with champagne, Agwa and edibles: My New Year’s resolution is to “go bonobos”… in 2019!

Just in case you don’t know apeshit from edibles, bonobos are the “Make Love Not War” chimpanzees who swing through the trees as well as with each other. They are also, along with common chimps, humanity’s closest living cousins, over 98% genetically similar to us. So don’t you think we could learn a lot about ourselves (especially our primal, pre-civilized selves) from them?  I do, and one of the most interesting things I’ve learned about bonobos is that while all the other great apes, like common chimps and humans, are patriarchal and rather homicidal (especially humans), bonobos are matriarchal and have never been seen killing each other in the wild or captivity.

How do they do it, and can we do it too?  

Essentially, bonobos make “peace through pleasure.” Bonobo pleasures vary, from biting into a delicious fruit to sharing with friends and strangers, but there’s no denying that good sex, even dare I say, great sex is a primary part of the peace-through-pleasure miracle. Bonobo love is true agape, but it’s also all about eros (and like the song sings, dat’s amore!), including lots of good wholesome, mostly consensual, female-empowered, highly inclusive, wild sex, quiet sex, noisy sex, orgasmic sex, group sex, oral sex, one-on-one looking-into-each-other’s eyes tantric-style sex, conflict resolution sex, resource-sharing sex—plus tons of cuddling, caressing, “grooming” and hugs. Lots of hugs.

Right now, winding up such a crazy-making year and ready to plunge headlong into what looks like it will be a crazier one, it seems we could all use a hug.

This makes 2019 the great fifth Year of the Bonobo. It’s true, it’s just like my 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015 resolutions, but it’s also true that the time is ripe and more urgent. With so many powerful, fearful humans around the world generally behaving like mad chimpanzees, but lacking their relative good manners, I more deeply than ever believe that 2019 needs…

Less Chimp, More Bonobo!

Meanwhile the Mad Orangutan Still Reigns

With sincere apologies to real orangutans who—though they do sometimes kill each other and aren’t as female-empowered as bonobos—are far more “stabile geniuses” than the Orangeade Hobgoblin-in-Chief.

Unfortunately, in most respects, our most blatantly unbonobo Presi-dunce is as unbonobo this year as he was the last, in some ways maybe a little less (see Prison Reform and Troop Withdrawal below), but in most ways a lot more. Evermore obscenely narcissistic, racist, mendacious, sexist, plutocratic, authoritarian, petty, divisive, infantile, cowardly, vulgar, nepotistic and sadistic, delighting in stoking interracial violence, pleasing his Neo-Nazi fans, insulting hurricane and fire victims, separating migrant families as children die in government custody and borderline-spoiling Xmas Eve for a little girl… Trump’s most salient traits are the opposite of bonobos. Or is it?

Trump the Heel

His fake suntan might be orange, but Trump’s leadership style even more colorfully mimics another famous fake: professional wrestling. Trump the Heel even plays his mean, sadistic self in “Battle of the Billionaires” in the wrestling ring instead of a campaign rally. Trumpers love Trump like the fans love World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) heroes and heels, with tremendous, testosterone-pumping, erotic passion. This is especially true for the homophobic yet homo-eroticized fans. As the meme says, “WWE is just gay porn with no sex.”

How unbonobo is that? At least, the “no sex” part is unbonobo. Pro-wrestlers don’t kill each other (on purpose), so that’s pretty bonobo. Though bonobos never murder or “make war” (like common chimps), they’re the Dave Bautistas of the Jungle; they love to wrestle and play-fight—sometimes even for an audience. The big difference is that bonobo wrestling—whether serious or just for fun—usually evolves into some sort of sexual release for all involved.

As bonobos see it, what good is “winning” without coming… or at least getting a nice big hug, a snack and maybe a blowjob on a good day?

Of course, bonobos aren’t capitalists like the bully kings of the WWE who see little value in love, hugs and bonobo community pleasures, especially compared to the billions of dollars of blood money they can make by fanning the flames of false controversy and brutal violence in their pleasure-starved audiences.

One of the most annoying things about pro-wrestling for most regular sports fans is how obviously phony all of the so-called matches are. Talk about “fake news.” Yet this is the key to Trump’s natural political style. Deliberate or dotard, Trump lies so much even the Trump Lie Trackers can’t keep track.

Not that Trump’s base cares. If anything, they relish their Heel-in-Chief’s lies as much as his winks, sucker-punches, tantrums, villainous vulgarities and bellowing declarations of “winning!” in the face of clear loss.

But what do Trump’s lies mean to those who still, perhaps nostalgically and even quaintly, value what we call “truth” or “facts”? How do we deal with the ultimate heel?

As a sex therapist, I can tell you that Trump’s lies, like a spouse’s lies, are giving many of us a special type of PTSD: Post-Trump Sex Disorder. It’s different than “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” You’re more depressed than deranged.

All year long, all of Trump’s transparent but relentless lying is depressing, disturbing and downright dangerous Oh, for the days when we had more eloquent presidents who could lie and cover up their administration’s dastardly deeds so convincingly we didn’t even know they were lying! In many cases, we probably still don’t know they were lying.

Which is worse: a lie that neatly, politely and seamlessly buries a difficult but important truth—sometimes forever—or a lie so blatant that you know right away it’s a lie?

Bonobos or bananas, if someone’s lying to me, I’d rather know it than not. With Trump, the king of cons so bad they’re good, whenever he opens that shithole below his tangerine nose and above his many chins, you can be pretty sure it’s a lie. And that’s the truth.

Maybe the silver lining to all this blatant presidential mendacity is that we KNOW this über-crude dude is lying most of the time. The challenge is that now it’s up to us to get off our internet-addicted asses and do something about it.

Peace through Trump in 2019?

Of course, the Liar-in-Chief could be lying again. Of just waffling. But maybe, just maybe, he’ll do this. After all, the lying, Tricky Dick Nixon opened up diplomatic relations with Communist China, so why can’t the lying Trumpus stop (or at least, curtail) the American perma-wars?

Janus, the two-faced Roman god that lends his name to the month of January reminds us that there are at least two sides to every story, god, human being, and even to heroes and heels.

If Trump makes peace, or at least makes good on his tweets to pull American troops out of Syria and Afghanistan where we have been wearily waging America’s longest wars, devastating populaces, destroying the environment and mostly losing anyway, this is Good New for going bonobos in 2019!

Nevertheless, many of the co-called “adults in the room”—in both parties—opposite Trump’s rather ham-fisted but still very bonobo peacemaking urges (what’s more bonobo than making peace?). They seem to want to keep American perma-wars going. Could it be that the titanic Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) in some way supports their own careers, and what’s an obscenely bloated MIC budget for if not for waging never-ending, always-spending wars?

Here’s where those of us who valiantly attempt to “resist” Trump on most other things ought to take a step back from our rigid “resistance,” and try to think clearly about bombing villages, storming homes, killing people, maiming others, crippling infrastructure, fostering starvation, deprivation, human destruction and ecological devastation that all wars, including our wars, inevitably bring to our brothers and sisters in foreign lands.

Take Syria: Whose side were we on anyway? Seems like we’ve been fighting ISIS, arming Al Qaeda and trying to oust Assad… all at the same time. What a mess. As for Afghanistan, I’m no fan of the Taliban in that beautiful land, but it seems they’ve only strengthened under American occupation. I even find myself agreeing with a Fox News commentator when he says Trump should get the U.S. military out of Iraq too. Trump’s blundering blowhard costumed Christmas-themed visit to American troops at ad Asad airforce base was so “arrogant (and) a violation of national sovereignty, according to the Iraqi parliament, that Baghdad leaders demanded that U.S. troops leave the country anyway, so now might be a good time to get on a bus, Gus.

Besides, American Perma-War is a bankrupt business—morally and financially—something our consummate Heel-in-Chief knows all about. Sometimes the best thing you can do with such a huge loss is just get out (though it’s nice to pay your contractors, which Trump is famous for not doing, though who cares about paying Halliburton and Boeing). The American imperial empire has been losing war after bloody, unbonobo war since World War II, and that win we pretty much owe to our old friends, the Russians.

I loathe the big Cheez Whiz Clownmeister as much as anyone in the “Resistance,” but I support his effort—any effort—to end the sickeningly unbonobo march of American wars.

I even cherish the fantasy that my old New Year’s resolution to #GoBonobos in 2018, and all the spanking, gagging and hilarious Russian pee parties that my show guests and I have given our various (consensually submissive) Trump surrogates and Trumpus Voodoo Doll actually accomplished something.

Hey, I believe in evolution, but I also believe in magic.

Who cares if “Cadet Bone Spurs” wants to pull out American troops because of his bromance with Putin, Erdogan or his own grossly narcissistic self in the mirror? It’s still the right, bonobo sapien thing to do.

About those bone spurs: Word has it that a Dr. Larry Braunstein gave young Donald the famed Vietnam War draft-dodging diagnosis as a “favor” in exchange for more “access” to landlord Daddy Fred Trump, who rented office space in Queens to the cordially deceitful podiatrist, proving for the gazillionth time that being a sleaze and a liar runs in the Trump Crime Family.

Nevertheless, I don’t hate draft dodgers anywhere near as much as warmongers. Even if it was just to save his own thin skin (which wasn’t orange then), Fred and Dr. Larry did a good bonobo deed not sending Donnie to go napalm innocent Vietnamese people for the MIC, unlike so many of his less fortunate peers.

#GoBonobos for good riddance to the last of “My Generals,” former Secretary of Defense, retired four-star Marine Corps General James “Mad Dog” Matthis, the war criminal of Fallujah. The Dems moaning about this “loss” is embarrassing; it’s like they’re showing their war-love panties for all to see and note: they’ll fellate the murderous MIC as much as any rabid right-winger. Mad Dog wasn’t any more of an “adult in the room” than General John “Empty Barrel” Kelly. Let all these warmongers take their toys, guns and ammo and go home. Let’s spend some of that obese military budget on single payer health care, social services—including sex work subsidies (we all need it)!—for the poor and heading off ecological devastation… but please, not the Wall, or slats or whatever. How about a nice cage for all of us rats in the Trumpocalyptic maze?

Hopefully, this new, more bonobo Trump that I’m fantasizing about won’t fill up his bare Cabinet with more military men whose lives have always revolved around war, killing, environmental devastation and not a lot of good consensual sex, General Petraeus notwithstanding.

But bringing the troops back home is only part of ending the perma-wars in a “bonobo way,” and it’s not the most important part. As Medea Benjamin and many others say, we also have to stop the bombing. And it’s all a big sham if it’s now onto Iran. Moreover, if these “troops” are simply replaced by Eric Prince’s villainous, almost unaccountable Blackwater mercenaries, what good is withdrawal? And let’s not forget Yemen; a few of those damn war-loving Democraps blocked the Senate’s very bonobo resolution to stop funding that ongoing war crime.

Still, I hold out hope—though I’m not holding my breath—that all this peace talk is not just another Trumped-up puff of propaganda for the pro-wrestling stans.  

Year’s end Lindsay Graham gossip is that Peacemaker Trump is getting cold feet on pulling out.  Sigh. What a Heel.

2018 was the Year of Stormy Daniels

Meanwhile, going back a year to those first chilly days of the two-faced month of Janus 2018, when within the fetid swamp of Trump lies, fake news, falsely whipped-up hatreds, bigotries, obfuscations and alternative facts, there grew a beautiful blossom of truth and sex-positivity, and her name is Stormy Daniels.

The truth that Stormy told is not *just* that she spanked and had mediocre sex with a philandering future President who paid her off to lie about it during his campaign… though that particular truth, in combination with the Karen McDougal/National Enquirer payoffs, could prove just as juicy as Russian dressing in 2019.

Stormy also told the unsung truth that porn stars are people too. Sex workers are people, and some of them are very smart, honest, bonoboesque people… at least relative to most politicians, entertainers and businesspeople. Interestingly, porn is even more popular than pro-wrestling (on a private viewing basis, of course). And though there are certain aspects which can be faked, in general, it’s pretty fucking real.

Over this Trumpocalyptic year, as well as many before this, Americans everywhere have become generally more accepting of sex work, even when it’s been revealed that the President of the United States not only paid cash for sex (or tried to), but had his lawyer pay more cash to the sex worker to keep quiet about it. Americans certainly love Stormy, her quick wit, her shameless courage, her determination and yes, her unapologetic sex appeal. In this “PR” sense, 2018 has been good year for the “inner bonobo” in all of us.

#GoBonobos to repeal SESTA/FOSTA in 2019.

Unfortunately, two different stories of sex work streaked across 2018.  As Stormy’s and Karen McDougal’s scandals raged on, this year’s unfortunate bi-partisan passage of SESTA/FOSTA, signed into effect by America’s most famous John, Donald “David Dennison” tRUMP, seems to have taken us a giant step backwards into a new sexual dark age.

Sure, the titles of these neo-Puritanical bills, the Senate’s “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act” (SESTA), called “Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act” (FOSTA) in the House, may sound very worthy (who doesn’t want to stop unsavory pimps from forcing underage girls and boys into prostitution?), but neither SESTA nor FOSTA do a damn thing to stop real sex trafficking. Instead, they do a whole lot to endanger the lives of adult consensual sex workers and their clients, as well as drastically curtailing the freedom of speech of all internet users. We need to restrain real “trafficking” crimes, and that will be easier when we decriminalize, destigmatize, government-subsidize and yes, even honor adult consensual sex work as the “sacred” bonoboesque vocation that it is. Under Trump, there’s a horrifying War on Sex on many fronts, as David Rosen delineates, from stripping sex education programs to tossing trans rights in the trash, and these “laws” against honest sex work are at the forefront of the battle.

Stop the War on Whores!

Stormy Daniels, Mistress Tara Indiana of Dominatrixes Against Donald Trump and many others are on the front lines of the current “Resistance” as well as the ongoing battle for sex workers’ rights and respect, and for that I salute them—body, mind and soul—and say, “Thank you for your service.”

Legal Hemp & Prison Reform

Sex workers are under attack from both sides, but at least now we can grow hemp like our Founding Fathers and Mothers did. 2018 saw hemp legalized everywhere in the US, stemming from an amendment to the 2018 Farm Bill that removes industrial hemp from regulation under the Controlled Substances Act, making it a legal agricultural commodity for the first time in almost a century. Ironically, hemp, a real-life miracle plant, got pushed over the legalization finish line by the usually odious Mitch McConnell and other conservative tobacco state Republicans searching for a more viable crop to replace tobacco. 

Of course, after failing to push work requirements into the Farm Bill that would have denied food stamps to over 700,000 poor people, Trump is now sidestepping Congress and doing the dirty deed through the USDA. This is essentially a “mass starvation plan.”  But hey… let them eat hemp! Seriously, why do these greedy creeps have to ruin our high with a slice of wake-up-and-smell-the-cruelty?

On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be a downside to the promising bipartisan Prison Reform Act of 2018. It’s just federal, but serves as an example to state prisons and local jails, and yes, our mean nasty mostly unbonobo President signed this very bonobo reformation of America’s Prison-Industrial Complex (PIC), encouraged by the maybe-not-so-vacuous Kim Kardashian West, and the usually loathsome Jared Kushner. When your loved ones are incarcerated, as Kushner’s dad was, you get a glimpse of the festering evil of the PIC, which is just as unbonobo as the MIC. Of course, it’s a lot easier if you’re rich, but still extremely oppressive. The shock can turn a gutless “cuck” (with apologies to real consensual cuckolds, who can be very cool) for murderous dictators into a courageous bonobo sapien… albeit only on select issues.

MILFs in the House!

#GoBonobos for the 2019 U.S. House of Representatives filling up with all these strong MILFs, single women, people of color and different religions, plus a few interesting white guys like Sean Casten who actually puts climate change at the top of his platform, thanks to the Blue Wave.

MILFs rule Bonoboville and, aside from cuckold parties, most parties are better balanced with a few more women. Of course, just being a woman doesn’t necessarily make you bonoboesque, not at all.  Sue Gordon, Gina Haspel, not to mention Ann Coulter, come to mind.

Still, our resurrected House crone, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, did pretty well playing the “Face” at the WWE-style, staged Border Wall meeting with Trump the Heel, Pence the Mummy and Schumer chuckling away like he had front seats at a very exclusive and claustrophobic comedy club. The Pelosi shades were a superb touch and sucker-punching Trump by calling the wall “a manhood thing” for him was taking a page out of the WWE handbook, with bonoboesque class.  

Nevertheless, we mustn’t forget that Mama Pelosi let George W. Chickenhawk Bush get away with mass murder, and her saying she’s going to “strive for bipartisanship” is not encouraging—unless it’s the kind that passed Prison Reform.

Abolish the Electoral College!

A lot of good bonobo sapiens really want Pelosi and the fresh new Dems to impeach Trump asap, including me. But let’s not let a flashy Agent-Orange-colored clownfish distract us from the shark that’s about to eat us all. Maybe they can handle more than one important issue at once?

Impeachment or crumbling dictatorship, Trump himself cannot last, but we don’t want to find ourselves with the “next Trump,” if possible. So….

#GoBonobos to abolish the Electoral College.

Otherwise, we will relive the nightmare of November 9, 2016, the “electoral dysfunction” that may or may not have had to do with Russians and illegal payoffs, but simply and constitutionally allowed Trump to take the presidency without even winning the popular vote. We should have done away with it when the late kingmaker Antonin Scalia gave the U.S. presidency like a crown on a pillow to Bush, Jr., even though he’d lost the popular election. Dems shouldn’t have rolled over and let that happen for their own sake, for the people’s sakes, for bonobos’ sakes! Al Gore won the popular vote, and so did Hillary Clinton. I’m not saying either Democrat was a great candidate, but the Republican counterparts were worse. More to the point, they lost the popular democratic vote of the American people, yet they won the presidency of the United States. That’s not fair, and that’s certainly not bonobo. Bonobos demand fairness.

Quick, while the Blue Wave is (somewhat) high, and while the WWE lovers and haters are obsessed with Trump the Heel’s every slobber, do something “adult” and abolish the antiquated, plantation-and-corporation-supporting, people-thwarting, unfair and unbonobo Electoral College.

Maybe Pleasure is the Key to Peace

My darling fellow Lefties: Decrying pleasure just makes you sound like a pain.

Many otherwise brilliant leftist intellectuals and well-meaning liberals exude an almost Puritanical, anhedonic self-seriousness that makes it very easy for red-blooded Trumpers to resent, mock, troll and disregard. That alone is a good reason we should #GoBonobos for sharing the pleasures of life in 2019.

But it’s not the only one. Bonobos show us how important a certain “baseline” of “ecosexual” pleasure is to keeping the peace.

Counterpunch writer Nick Pemberton is right-on-the-money when he says, “any critique of capitalism that does not take into account humanity’s relationship with the earth not only fails to consider the earth, it fails to consider capitalism in an honest way.” But why does he then have to decry “pleasure,” saying “The basic story of our species is this: we have chosen individual pleasure in the short term, and it will eventually doom us in the long term.”

Haven’t the Puritans, Calvinists, capitalists and corporatists decried pleasure enough—usually in favor of insatiable greed, hope-againist-hope and excruciating envy (none of which give us real pleasure)?  Haven’t we put our healthy, ecosexual, consensual, bonoboesque pleasures at the bottom of our list of values, out of pleasure-denying avarice for more, out of pleasure-decrying ambition to achieve and amass, out of a desire that’s not really a pleasure, but more of a compulsion to “own” our “own” things?

Mr. Pemberton does float the intriguing notion that “we should all become gorillas.” Gorillas are pretty cool, but being an ethical hedonist, I’ve got a boner for bonobos who show us the way to female empowerment and peace through pleasure for all.

Capitalism poisons pleasure, like additives spoil fresh orange juice. The nature of the capitalist “system,” sprouting like genetically modified corn from the first agricultural revolution, is to always leaves you wanting more. This translates to feeling the insatiable need to buy something, or maybe steal it, or even possibly rape or kill to get it. It’s enervating and unsustainable, and if we’re to keep this human race of ours racing along, we must wean ourselves of our more technological, ecocidal, mis-labelled “pleasures,” so that we can get in touch with the “real,” priceless, primal pleasure that can inspire, motivate and sustain us through revolutions to come in 2019.

The tasty pleasure of a ripe banana, the sexual pleasure of a kiss or an orgasm, the mental orgasm of a good laugh, the roller-coaster delight of new love, the timeless bliss of old love, the healing pleasure of a hug, music (humans aren’t the only virtuosos; bonobos, nightingales and many other nonhuman animals make music), the mental pleasure of doing a good deed, the emotional pleasure of hedonic kindness, the priceless pleasure of sharing pleasure… Sharing isn’t just caring; it’s pleasurable—and it’s the only thing we’ve got that just might be stronger than our disastrous compulsion to kill each other and everyone else on Earth, as the bonobos know.

At first, when I read a recent 2018 study showing that bonobos share food, sex and many other resources with great pleasure, but not “tools” or “toys” (given to them by humans), I was perplexed. Then I remembered that bonobos, unlike common chimps (and humans), don’t use tools, let alone toys, in the wild. Other studies show that bonobos have as much mental ability for using tools as chimps; they just don’t choose to use them, unless motivated, usually by humans. Probably this is because living for hundreds of thousands of years in the real-life paradise (until human encroachment, of course) that is the Congolese rainforest, bonobos have had no need for tools and toys. And maybe, on some level, bonobos “know” the mostly negative consequences of putting more value on our tools and toys than the sustainable pleasures we can truly share without anyone being the “loser.”  

#GoBonobos for Pleasure in 2019.

Despite the increasingly Puritanical rhetoric of politicians on the left and right, “ordinary people” around the world are opening up to the pleasures of erotic female empowerment in politics and the bedroom, including consensual sex work, at least when they have the freedom to do so. Many millennials are putting off marriage as well as channeling sexual pleasure more into adult recreation than procreating those adorable, expensive, little anti-aphrodisiacs we call children. More and more are opening up to polyamory, ethical BDSM, sapiosexual pleasures, pansexuality, the transgender experience, erotic community, conscientiously explored fetishes, and thank goddess that Ohio’s awful abortion ban veto override plan failed as we wound up a nail-biting year.

Not that it’s all been good press for sex in 2018. On the dark side are the serial sexual harassers, though many do seem to be falling away from their patriarchal power positions thanks to the mostly bonoboesque #MeToo movement. In terms of politics, both sides of the aisle seem to be about equally accused, the big difference being that the liberals tend to shamefacedly resign or get fired. The right-wingers—Lying Crying Kavanaugh and the Pussygrabber-in-Chief himself come to mind—just keep pushing on, amply enabled by the many female empowerment-fearing men and women who support them.  

Camped near the self-defensive sexual harassers are the coercive cuckolds, like the heavily indebted Paul “The Oligarch Fellator” Manafort, who give consensual cuckolding a bad name. Next to them are the sad-sack sex-phobic misogynists of the alt-right, the deadly ammosexuals and the toxic, sublimely frustrated incels who spew misogyny and occasionally bullets. It would be nice to drop them all on a deserted island somewhere in outer space, but the harsh fact is that these poor misbegotten human vipers are part of our small world, and they need and deserve pleasure as much as any of us cool kids (another good reason to decriminalize and honor sex work). My wish is that in 2019, the otherwise marvelous #MeToo movement will open up to the essential primal truth that just as female empowerment is vital to the Bonobo Way, so is male well-being.

Amen and AWOMEN.

MILFs rule Bonoboville, but bonobo guys are happy. If they weren’t, they could tear the lassies apart because they are bigger, stronger and have fangs. Yet male-female sexual harassment and rape are rare, while murder is nonexistent among bonobos. Why are bonobo males so chill with this Femocracy Now Planet of the Apes? Multiple reasons, but one basic one appears to be that bonobo lads get laid—a lot—by aggressive older females and adventurous younger ones, as well as by each other. And then there’s all those hugs…

It may be a longshot, but with passionate celebrity advocates for both bonobos and the #MeToo movement like Ashley Judd reaching out to mainstream audiences, I’m excited for 2019 to be a great new Year of the Bonobo.

#GoBonobos  to Save the Bonobos   

According to a study by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) cited by Ken Orphan in Counterpunch, “the earth has lost over half of its wildlife in just 40 years… Each of us is a witness to this Great Dying, the sixth mass extinction, the last one being 65 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs.”

All nonhuman life deserves to be saved from imminent extinction, from the grizzlies to the gnats. Well, maybe not the microbes living in my respiratory system thanks to my “sensitive” sinuses and lungs essentially choking on climate change here in America’s most polluted city. Besides all the pleasure we need and deserve, we have a lot of long hard work to do, and a Green New Deal or Select Committee on the Climate Crisis just scratches the surface, but at least it’s an eco-positive start to 2019.

Yet, our Yellow Vested brothers and sisters in France show us that the heavy costs of “going green” must not and cannot be borne just by the poor and working people who are already suffering the most from climate change. The obscenely rich must somehow, in a bonobo way, be made to pay their “fair” share. They who cause the most damage have been “blessed” with prosperity, so hell, they can afford to experience the pleasure of sharing their wealth for the hedonic good of all.

There is so much to #GoBonobos for and against on the ecological front, and so little time (if any) to do any of it and also have time for healing orgasms and “self-care.” Yet we all have our special causes, and mine is saving the bonobos, these amazing creatures who are so close to us and can teach us so much, yet who are highly endangered due to the devastating effects of human war, deforestation, mining and, especially, simple sinful poaching. Therefore, I resolve to make 2019 the fifth “Year of the Bonobo,” continuing to do what I can to help save them from imminent extinction.

Once again, I’m trying not to gush, but bonobos are my crush! Not only are they adorable (okay… lots of animals are adorable, including humans), they show us that peace, hedonic kindness, good consensual sex, female empowerment and male well-being aren’t just libtard pipedreams, but are integral to our primal nature and key to our sustainable future. These bonoboësque qualities may even link us to our primitive, pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer, “fierce egalitarian” past to which Sex at Dawn author Dr. Christopher Ryan refers, a part of our primate heritage with which the bonobos never lost touch. Can we open up to that part of ourselves that integrates “ecosexually” with nature?  Can we release our inner bonobo… before it’s too late? 

I don’t know, but I do know that in order to do that, we should keep the real bonobos alive. That’s my resolution anyway, and the resolution, as well as the revolution—and the resistance—start with me.  And you. Since you’ve read this far in another one of my extravagant, free-wheeling, pro-bonobo, turn-of-the-year encomiums, I hope you’ll join me in helping save the bonobos through donations to:

1) Lola ya Bonobo (Bonobo Paradise), a bonobo “refugee” sanctuary outside Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Operated by the amazing longtime heroine of the bonobos, Claudine André,  “orphans” of the devastating “bushmeat” trade are rescued, cared for at Lola, and eventually released back into the wild.

2) The Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI), founded by my old friend, Sally Coxe. The BCI is developing a Bonobo Peace Forest, which will provide food, medical care, school supplies and jobs to villagers who live in the bonobos’ area to protect their precious and vulnerable wild populations from the unscrupulous or tragically ignorant poachers who would murder them.

3) The Bonobo Project, spearheaded by Ashley Stone, is helping to spread the word about bonobos, their inspirational culture and their precarious plight. Mark your 2019 Calendar for World Bonobo Day on February 14^th. After all, Valentine’s Day is for lovers, and bonobos are the masters and mistresses of love… all kinds of love.

As we head into our last revolution around the sun for this crazy-making decade, as we witness, grieve and attempt to ameliorate the Great Dying that is upon us, in the midst of the Mad Orangutan Trumpocalypse, let us try to put our best bonobo foot (for the foot fetishists!) forward, with pleasure, and…

#GoBonobos in 2019!

Read it in COUNTERPUNCH “America’s Best Political Newsletter”

© January 1, 2019. Susan Block, Ph.D., a.k.a. “Dr. Suzy,” is a world renowned LA sex therapist, author of The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace through Pleasure and horny housewife, occasionally seen on HBO and other channels. Watch The Dr. Susan Block Show live every Saturday night from Bonoboville. For information, call 310-568-0066. Email your comments to her at drsuzyb@blockbooks.com and you will get a reply.