Peter Singer reminds us that not so long ago any form of sexual expression that did not result in the conception of a child was perceived to be, at best, wanton lust, or at worst, a perversion. Over time we’re seeing that, one by one, taboos are falling, and bigots and stigmatisers progressively becoming defeated. Thankfully, most people aren’t offended by the idea of more creative, alternative expressions to the traditional, “let’s make a baby and nothing more” method between two people, or by solitary practices and indulgences, which in some faiths are still acknowledged as a form of ‘self-abuse’. Things like contraception, homosexuality and pornography had all at one point in time provoked widespread moral panic and are now widely accepted with applause and enthusiasm.
The idea of bestiality in common contemporary thinking is however very different. Regularly condemned in the same arena as paedophilia, the practice of bestiality is considered outrageously immoral. Despite this, reported occurrences of humans coupling with animals are apparently not so rare. In the 1940s, Kinsey, in his famous endeavour into the private lives of ordinary (and not so ordinary) people, surveyed twenty thousand Americans and found that 8% of males and 3.5% of females reported that they had, at some time, had a sexual encounter with an animal. Among men living in rural areas the figure reached 50%.
While there have been no solid indication that at any point in history, bestiality had once been accepted and embraced, fragments from the past certainly reveal humanity’s perpetual fascination with the concept of sexual intimacy between man and beast, depicting such transgressive acts in art, sculpture and mythology. An illustration dating back from the Bronze Age was uncovered depicting a man having sex with a large, quadruped beast of indeterminate species, a vase from ancient Greece shows a man having sex with a stag, an Indian miniature from the seventeenth century portrays a deer mounting a woman and from nineteenth century Japan, one that I find most amusing, a traditional style drawing depicts a woman tangled in the tentacles of a pleasuring, giant octopus. Today, while the subject still remains deeply taboo, there is no shortage of pornographic websites dedicated to offering people footage and images of women and men engaging in erotic activities with various farm animals, readily available for an evidently substantial demographic.
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| Carved on the exterior of a temple in Khajuraho |
If we were to take Singer’s rationalist stance, it would seem that the only problem with such practices is animal abuse, but this highlights the apparent inconsistencies in social attitudes concerning animal welfare. Take meat consumption for example: is slaughtering an animal to satisfy our taste and hunger more justifiable than having sex with an animal to satisfy our sexual hunger? This is a typical argument made by proponents of legalised zoophilia, who also point out the difference that certain animals, such as dogs, may visibility consent to such activities. But while we’ve all been in that embarrassing situation of kicking away our lustful canines from frantically rubbing up against the legs of our houseguests, the idea that such affections could ever be reciprocated remains very hard for most of us to stomach.
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| German lifestyle magazine pushing the boundaries |
