She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull - “bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex,” she told me, “though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds” - she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years.
She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography.
