When I first arrived in Sydney, I felt pretty detached from things. I was travelling alone, wasn’t used to the hostel lifestyle and was older and flabbier than most of the people I met there. Typically English, I also had an inherent distrust of ‘Johnny foreigner’ and struggled to adapt to my environment.
After a few nights, I tagged along on a hostel excursion to a nightclub and everything suddenly seemed to click into place. There were Britons, Australians, Germans, Canadians, Japanese - every nation you could think of in that club and their behaviour was very familiar. Drinking, dancing, pulling, predatory males and flirting females all revolving around each other and playing out the same scenes that I’d seen a thousand times before. I realised then that whatever nationality, we’re all essentially the same.
Nightclubs are great places to observe the basic instincts that drive human beings. Booze erodes the veneer of respectability and burrows down into the most basic part of our brain. The primal need to reproduce takes over and nightclubs serve as mating grounds. Sure, the mating rituals may be different, but they’re mating rituals just the same. Instead of growing colourful and elaborate plumage, we might wear a snazzy shirt. Instead of a sophisticated and technical mating dance, we’ll wiggle and strut to Beyonce. Instead of calling out into the darkness with a beautiful song we’ll smarm up to someone at the bar and hit them with our best chat-up line.
I remember being in a Leeds nighclub a few years ago - it must have been about the time The Blue Planet was on television because the dancefloor reminded me of something. There was a scene in the programme that showed thousands of sardines being hounded by a group of sharks. The sardines had been pushed up to the surface to prevent their escape and had then packed themselves into a tight mass for protection. This was called a baitball and the predators swam into it at speed and picked off the weaker fish or the ones that were too slow. The Leeds baitball was a hen-party dressed in tight pink T-shirts and mini-skirts. They were all dancing close together for protection as groups of men prowled their perimeter, pushing them further and further into the middle of the dancefloor so they couldn’t run to the bar. Occasionally a man would bolt into the jiggling mass of women, looking for a bite, picking off the gullible or the ones that were too drunk.
Another primal instinct is violence. When booze has cut through our human airs and graces, the less advanced elements of society tend to fight a lot. That’s pure hunter gatherer, caveman behaviour – the need to protect or display your strength or show power – even the music in nighclubs is almost tribal in its rhythmic pounding.
I saw similar behaviour in two red-deer stags during rutting season. Each of them was surrounded by their own group of hinds and they faced off in a feeding area split in two by a fence. On the left side of the fence was Harry, the mouthy one. He was the younger of the two and kept his harem of hinds close by, preventing them from wandering freely. Being the main aggressor, he was bellowing all the time, putting on a show of strength, trying to prove his worth. Cameron, on the right, was three years older and much more dignified. Being more secure, he didn’t feel the need to watch over his hinds so strictly and they wandered around freely looking a lot less scared than Harry’s. Cameron didn’t bluster quite so much although occasionally he had to react to Harry’s goading and put the young pretender in his place. The two would eyeball each other, walking side by side, backwards and forwards along the fence. Then one would turn away casually before spinning round with his head lowered to launch himself at the opponent.
These sorts of fights happen in nightclubs all the time. I half expected one of the hinds to grab their stag by the antler and shout tearfully: ‘Leave it Cameron, it’s not worth it!’
However developed and important we think we are, you just need to add a catalyst of lager or vodka and you’ll see that, despite national boundaries, we’re all the same species. Not only that, we’re all animals too. We have the same urges and the same drives – the same behaviour much of the time. The only real difference is that our brains are bigger and we’ve built up a more complex and sophisticated system with which to display our base instincts. We’re not quite as special or important as we often think ourselves to be.
