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Dearest Pet:
On Bestiality by Midas Dekkers, translated by Paul Vincent,
Verso, c 2000.
Not so long
ago, any form of sexuality not leading to the conception of
children was seen as, at best, wanton lust, or worse, a
perversion. One by one, the taboos have fallen. The idea
that it could be wrong to use contraception in order to
separate sex from reproduction is now merely quaint. If some
religions still teach that masturbation is
"self-abuse," that just shows how out of touch
they have become. Sodomy? That's all part of the joy of sex,
recommended for couples seeking erotic variety. In many of
the world's great cities, gays and lesbians can be open
about their sexual preferences to an extent unimaginable a
century ago. You can even do it in the U.S. Armed Forces, as
long as you don't talk about it. Oral sex? Some objected to
President Clinton' choice of place and partner, and others
thought he should have been more honest about what he had
done, but no one dared suggest that he was unfit to be
President simply because he had taken part in a sexual
activity that was, in many jurisdictions, a crime.
But not every taboo has crumbled. Heard anyone chatting at
parties lately about how good it is having sex with their
dog? Probably not. Sex with animals is still definitely
taboo. If Midas Dekkers, author of Dearest Pet, has got it
right, this is not because of its rarity. Dekkers, a Dutch
biologist and popular naturalist, has assembled a
substantial body of evidence to show that humans have often
thought of "love for animals" in ways that go
beyond a pat and a hug, or a proper concern for the welfare
of members of other species. His book has a wide range of
illustrations, going back to a Swedish rock drawing from the
Bronze Age of a man fucking a large quadruped of
indeterminate species. There is a Greek vase from 520 BC
showing a male figure having sex with a stag; a
seventeenth-century Indian miniature of a deer mounting a
woman; an eighteenth-century European engraving of an
ecstatic nun coupling with a donkey, while other nuns look
on, smiling; a nineteenth-century Persian painting of a
soldier, also with a donkey; and, from the same period, a
Japanese drawing of a woman enveloped by a giant octopus who
appears to be sucking her cunt, as well as caressing her
body with its many limbs.
How much of this is fantasy, the King Kong-ish archetypes of
an earlier age? In the 1940s, Kinsey asked twenty thousand
Americans about their sexual behavior, and found that 8
percent of males and 3.5 percent of females stated that they
had, at some time, had a sexual encounter with an animal.
Among men living in rural areas, the figure shot up to 50
percent. Dekkers suggests that for young male farm hands,
animals provided an outlet for sexual desires that could not
be satisfied when girls were less willing to have sex before
marriage. Based on twentieth-century court records in
Austria where bestiality was regularly prosecuted, rural men
are most likely to have vaginal intercourse with cows and
calves, less frequently with mares, foals and goats and only
rarely with sheep or pigs. They may also take advantage of
the sucking reflex of calves to get them to do a blowjob.
Women having sex with bulls or rams, on the other hand,
seems to be more a matter of myth than reality. For
three-quarters of the women who told Kinsey that they had
had sexual contact with an animal, the animal involved was a
dog, and actual sexual intercourse was rare. More commonly
the woman limited themselves to touching and masturbating
the animal, or having their genitals licked by it.
Much depends, of course, on how the notion of a sexual
relationship is defined. Zoologist Desmond Morris has
carried out research confirming the commonplace observation
that girls are far more likely to be attracted to horses
than boys, and he has suggested that "sitting with legs
astride a rhythmically moving horse undoubtedly has a sexual
undertone." Dekkers agrees, adding that "the horse
is the ideal consolation for the great injustice done to
girls by nature, of awakening sexually years before the boys
in their class, who are still playing with their train sets
. . . "
The existence of sexual contact between humans and animals,
and the potency of the taboo against it, displays the
ambivalence of our relationship with animals. On the one
hand, especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition — less
so in the East — we have always seen ourselves as distinct
from animals, and imagined that a wide, unbridgeable gulf
separates us from them. Humans alone are made in the image
of God. Only human beings have an immortal soul. In Genesis,
God gives humans dominion over the animals. In the
Renaissance idea of the Great Chain of Being, humans are
halfway between the beasts and the angels. We are spiritual
beings as well as physical beings. For Kant, humans have an
inherent dignity that makes them ends in themselves, whereas
animals are mere means to our ends. Today the language of
human rights — rights that we attribute to all human
beings but deny to all nonhuman animals — maintains this
separation.
On the other hand there are many ways in which we cannot
help behaving just as animals do — or mammals, anyway —
and sex is one of the most obvious ones. We copulate, as
they do. They have penises and vaginas, as we do, and the
fact that the vagina of a calf can be sexually satisfying to
a man shows how similar these organs are. The taboo on sex
with animals may, as I have already suggested, have
originated as part of a broader rejection of
non-reproductive sex. But the vehemence with which this
prohibition continues to be held, its persistence while
other non-reproductive sexual acts have become acceptable,
suggests that there is another powerful force at work: our
desire to differentiate ourselves, erotically and in every
other way, from animals.
Almost a century ago, when Freud had just published his
groundbreaking Three Essays on Sexuality, the Viennese
writer Otto Soyka published a fiery little volume called
Beyond the Boundary of Morals. Never widely known, and now
entirely forgotten, it was a polemic directed against the
prohibition of "unnatural" sex like bestiality,
homosexuality, fetishism and other non-reproductive acts.
Soyka saw these prohibitions as futile and misguided
attempts to limit the inexhaustible variety of human sexual
desire. Only bestiality, he argued, should be illegal, and
even then, only in so far as it shows cruelty towards an
animal. Soyka's suggestion indicates one good reason why
some of the acts described in Dekkers book are clearly
wrong, and should remain crimes. Some men use hens as a
sexual object, inserting their penis into the cloaca, an
all-purpose channel for wastes and for the passage of the
egg. This is usually fatal to the hen, and in some cases she
will be deliberately decapitated just before ejaculation in
order to intensify the convulsions of its sphincter. This is
cruelty, clear and simple. (But is it worse for the hen than
living for a year or more crowded with four or five other
hens in barren wire cage so small that they can never
stretch their wings, and then being stuffed into crates to
be taken to the slaughterhouse, strung upside down on a
conveyor belt and killed? If not, then it is no worse than
what egg producers do to their hens all the time.)
But sex with animals does not always involve cruelty. Who
has not been at a social occasion disrupted by the household
dog gripping the legs of a visitor and vigorously rubbing
its penis against them? The host usually discourages such
activities, but in private not everyone objects to being
used by her or his dog in this way, and occasionally
mutually satisfying activities may develop. Soyka would
presumably have thought this within the range of human
sexual variety.
At a conference on great apes a few years ago, I spoke to a
woman who had visited Camp Leakey, a rehabilitation center
for captured orangutans in Borneo run by Birute Galdikas,
sometimes referred to as "the Jane Goodall of
orangutans" and the world's foremost authority on these
great apes. At Camp Leakey, the orangutans are gradually
acclimatised to the jungle, and as they get closer to
complete independence, they are able to come and go as they
please. While walking through the camp with Galdikas, my
informant was suddenly seized by a large male orangutan, his
intentions made obvious by his erect penis. Fighting off so
powerful an animal was not an option, but Galdikas called to
her companion not to be concerned, because the orangutan
would not harm her, and adding, as further reassurance, that
"they have a very small penis." As it happened,
the orangutan lost interest before penetration took place,
but the aspect of the story that struck me most forcefully
was that in the eyes of someone who has lived much of her
life with orangutans, to be seen by one of them as an object
of sexual interest is not a cause for shock or horror. The
potential violence of the orangutan's come-on may have been
disturbing, but the fact that it was an orangutan making the
advances was not. That may be because Galdikas understands
very well that we are animals, indeed more specifically, we
are great apes. This does not make sex across the species
barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-misused
words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an
offence to our status and dignity as human beings.
c2001 Peter Singer and Nerve.com, Inc.
（原文請見http://www.nerve.com/aboutus/Contributors/S.asp#SingerP）
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