I've never made love to an animal. I want to clear that up right away, because I don't want anyone to finish reading this essay and feel ripped off because I didn't include any stories about my own sexual exploits with creatures. If I had any good bestiality stories of my own, you can bet your ass I'd tell them. I believe that the literary marketplace of 2006 is ripe for memoirs of bestiality. In 2005, the number-one story on the Seattle Times website, by far, was about a man who died from a perforated colon after having sex with a horse in Enumclaw, Washington. In fact, that story was probably the most widely read piece of journalism in the paper's 109-year history. If the man had lived to tell his tale, he'd have a bestseller on his hands. In recent years, readers have enjoyed memoirs by a writer who has sex with her dad, a writer who has sex with hundreds of complete strangers, and a writer who has sex in front of cameras. A passionate tale of bestiality would be a similar hit, and
I'd like to read it.
However, living practitioners of bestiality have so far been reluctant to let their stories be known. No doubt they fear public perception. So, to encourage them along, I thought I'd take a moment to explain that, while I don't practice bestiality myself, I do think it is perfectly ethical and certainly not cause for shame.
Getting people to come forward with their stories will not be easy. I only know one person who admits to having had sexual contact with an animal. It's a friend of mine, whose family raised sheep in northern California. When their ewes would die from birthing injuries, it was my friend's job to bottle-feed the orphans. The lambs sucked on anything that smelled like milk, so one day, when my friend was a teenager, he dipped his pecker into a jar of lamb formula. Voila! This friend of mine would shit himself if I revealed his identity. However, he wouldn't mind at all if I revealed him as the only guy I know who's had sex with three of his stepsisters in a tent, which he is. You see, on the sexual deviancy hierarchy, it's widely held that bestiality is worse than humping your relatives. So that's the mindframe I'm up against.
My buddy told me that story about the lamb years ago, back before I was sympathetic to bestiality. When he told me, I felt as though I should feel morally outraged by his confession. I actually tried to feel morally outraged. But I couldn't. Until then, bestiality had been nothing more to me than an abstract stereotype. You might hear someone say, "Kentuckians fuck pigs," or "folks from Wyoming fuck sheep," but you don't often hear someone say, "I got a blowjob from an orphaned lamb." With a real practitioner of bestiality in my presence, I just wondered if sheep fellatio felt good. But I wasn't comfortable asking; such a question might have implied my tacit approval.
My buddy's story stayed with me. I wrestled with it. I thought about it every time I looked out a car window and saw a flock of sheep in a field. I wasn't haunted by my friend's transgression as much as I was perplexed by my own indifference to it. Because I was thinking about it so much, I started telling his story at parties. The story was met by others with the very moral outrage I'd been unable to muster. The story — even telling the story —
My curiosity about my buddy's act of bestiality might have tortured me forever if I hadn't eventually found myself in a trailer with fifty-one female sheep. |
seemed to be the epitome of sexual taboo. But this taboo was different from other taboos, because it wasn't grounded in logic: If you have sex with your mom, you might have deformed kids. If you have sex with a child, you're certain to leave an emotional scar. But the wall that separates man from animals seems utterly unnecessary.
My curiosity about my buddy's act of bestiality might have tortured me forever if I hadn't eventually found myself in a trailer with fifty-one female sheep. I was transporting the ewes as a favor to a friend, my first experience handling livestock. To transport sheep, you've got to pack the animals into
the trailer tightly, so they don't get jostled; but you can't pack them so tightly that they suffocate. It's a hard call, so I had climbed into the trailer to make sure everybody had the proper amount of elbow room.
The backs of the ewes came up to my hips. The animals were smeared in mud and manure. Each of them had a couple ID tags punched into their ears. Their backs were branded with neon-orange spray paint. As I stood there, they looked over their shoulders at me. The paint and the earrings made them look like punk rockers. Their tails were cropped short, so their sex organs were perfectly visible before me, row upon row, like a display of oblong pink fruit in a supermarket.
If a man believed, as I'd been claiming to, that it's morally permissible to fuck sheep, and if he had the inclination, he couldn't have been in a better position. But truth be known, I felt not even the slightest stirring of arousal. In fact, I berated myself for even thinking about sex in the presence of these spray-painted, shit-covered sheep. Which almost worried me.
You see, I have this nagging fear that I'll grow old and realize that I was sexually repressed as a young man. To prevent this from happening, I ask myself deeply personal sexual questions, and force myself to answer them honestly. This is not an easy method of self-discovery, to be sure. In order to pull it off, you have to swear that no matter what your answers are, you won't get mad at yourself (or congratulate yourself). For instance, whenever I meet a gay man, I ask myself if I'm attracted to him. When my answer is no, I'm not allowed to be thankful. I'm not allowed to think, "Good. My mom would be pissed if I was gay," because that sort of judgmental thinking is what makes a fella sexually repressed in the first place. So surrounded by all these sheep, I began to worry that I was repressed. Why didn't I want a blowjob from a sheep? Why? I thought of my friend in California with the jar of sheep formula, and I worried that he was more liberated than I. By the time I finished driving the sheep to a new pasture, I had vowed to learn the logic behind the bestiality taboo; it was time to come to peace with my buddy's transgression, and with my own lack of interest in following his lead.
The Puritan leaders of early American history had a tremendous fear of zoophilia, as bestiality was known back then. (Until the nineteenth century, an accusation of "bestiality" just meant that someone was behaving like an animal.) Puritans didn't even like to describe the act of human-animal sex. Instead, they called it "a sin too fearful to be named." The usual punishment, throughout much of the Western world, was death by hanging or by burning or by beating the person on the head. The corpses of the accused man and animal were sometimes buried together. Even in notoriously tolerant Sweden, there was a 143-year period during which 700 people were executed for bestiality.
Bestiality isn't as much of an issue today; the practice seems to be decreasing in popularity. Back in 1948, the researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey reported that 8% of American males, and 40-50% of American farm boys, had experimented sexually with animals. These numbers have dropped considerably
It's the judgment of the act, not the act itself, that seems to be the real problem. |
since then, because, the logic goes, most people no longer have farm animals in their yard. There's no federal statute against bestiality, but in a majority of states you're not allowed to — as some laws put it — engage in oral/genital contact with animals, or insert a penis or digit (except in the case of animal health care) into an animal's vagina, anus, or cloaca.
To me, it all sounds pretty arbitrary. Should it really be illegal for a woman to allow a dog to lap her clitoris (a favorite internet trick, executed by covering the genitals with a tasty substance)? If she can legally masturbate with her own hand, a dildo, even a dildo shaped like a dog's tongue (or the popular Jack Rabbit dildo), and if there's no law against letting a dog lick her palm, or, for Christ's sake, her face, or against feeding the dog treats, then why shouldn't she be allowed to combine all the licking and masturbating and dog-feeding into one succinct act?
Thankfully, our hypothetical woman doesn't need to worry about being hanged and buried in a hole with Fido. Nowadays we treat bestiality as a psychological disorder. This is also puzzling. A person is usually diagnosed with a psychological disorder when his ability to function in society becomes impaired. For example, if a person likes to be really clean, that's fine. But if he likes to be so clean that he washes his hands all day, non-stop, he's diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Well, unless the woman who finds sexual pleasure in her dog's tongue is skipping work or neglecting to eat in order to give her dog more time in her crotch, she's still absolutely a functioning member of society. In fact, her participation in society is only compromised when other members of society chastise her for practicing bestiality. It's the judgment of the act, not the act itself, that seems to be the real problem.
Bestiality is also pretty practical. It's certainly more practical than loving a dog in a deep, non-sexual way, which many people do. Many people think that their dog is their best friend, but all they do is feed it and let it lie around their house. In my mind, that's not a friendship; that's called being taken advantage of. Someone who feeds his dog peanut butter from his own penis is at least getting something in return. The bestiality practitioner is also more practical than the person who uses other humans solely for sexual gratification. Finally, unlike humans who sleep with other humans, the guy who sleeps with his dog doesn't have to worry about being abandoned by his lover, unless he forgets to close the gate.
Even academics, who you'd think could rise above emotion and religious morality, can't come up with a satisfying indictment of bestiality. After reading a few academic papers, I was disappointed by the flaccidity of the logic. The most compelling argument I found against bestiality was a long, drawn-out theory that the real problem with bestiality has nothing to do with religion or sexual taboo; the real problem is that bestiality is mean to animals. The writer reasoned that, since an animal can't communicate consent, bestiality is like rape. After visiting the websites the writer referred to in his article, I was convinced that he had no idea what he was talking about. You can bet your ass that the dogs on those sites are enjoying themselves much more than they would be playing
Humans do all sorts of things to animals, things way worse than sex, that are considered perfectly just. |
fetch. One in particular, a German shepherd, was riding a blond woman (doggy-style, of course), his front legs wrapped around the woman's waist like a furry tourniquet; he was wearing the closest thing to a smile I've ever seen on a dog. But the writer of the academic paper completely ignored the dog's joy, and went on to tell the story of a man in L.A. who raped his ex-girlfriend's chicken as an act of revenge. The chicken died, so the writer concluded that bestiality is bad.
Well, okay. But it seems more accurate to say that violently raping your ex-girlfriend's chicken as an act of revenge is bad. Which it is, because violently raping anything as an act of revenge is bad. If they were forced to choose, though, most people would agree that raping a chicken isn't nearly as horrible as raping a human. The fact is, the overwhelming majority of the world does not, in either action or thought, treat humans and animals as equal beings. Humans
do all sorts of things to animals, things way worse than sex, that are considered perfectly just. You can lock an animal in a zoo for its entire life and people will pay to look at it. You can tie dogs to a sled and make them drag it around, and the press will call you an athlete. You can ride a horse all day in the hot sun, kicking spurs into its ribs, and filmmakers will romanticize your lifestyle on the silver screen. You can kill a cow and eat it. You can keep a fish in a bowling-ball-sized aquarium, denying it any chance of ever seeing another fish throughout its entire life, and that's just fine. So who's to draw the line at sex? If I was a sheep, slated to be someone's lamb chop, I'd damn sure hope a farmer would take a liking to my booty, rather than slit my throat and chop me into pieces of meat.
Once I had determined that there is no solid argument against bestiality, and that I still had no desire to have sex with a sheep, my worry about being repressed deepened. Maybe I'd lost my libido or my sexual curiosity or my lack of inhibitions, or, God forbid, all three. As I mulled it over, I got to thinking about some things that had happened to me over the years. I remembered this one night in a bar when a girl that I'd never met before said, "If you come home with me, I'll suck you all night. And I swallow." I didn't take her up on the offer. Another time, I was sleeping on my couch because my roommate had a visitor and I'd given her my bedroom. In the middle of the night, I woke up because the visitor was gently shaking my shoulder, asking me to come upstairs to my room. I told her that I was fine where I was, but thanks. When I made those decisions, I wasn't acting on some noble idea of right and wrong; I was just making choices based on what sounded good at the time. The girl in the bar was a very big girl, big as a cow. The girl shaking my shoulder on the couch was the opposite — small, bony, angular, like a gerbil. But when I draw these comparisons to animals, I'm not implying that sleeping with a cow-girl or a gerbil-girl would have been immoral, or even akin to bestiality. I simply didn't want to sleep with anyone I wasn't attracted to. It's taken me years to stop feeling plagued by my friend's sexual experience with the lamb, but I'm finally over it. My lack of interest in sleeping with an animal is no different from the lack of interest I feel when I hear a guy talking about getting head from his unattractive wife; I may not want to try it myself, but I do love hearing the story.
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Related articles on Nerve:
Heavy Petting by Peter Singer | Bestiality by Rachel Sherman
©2006 Steven Rinella and Nerve.com |
