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 —
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 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 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.
