On the animal – Amia Srinivasan in LRB:

“For some people there is an answer, and it is sex with animals. It isn’t something openly talked about, apart from – like so many other things we repress elsewhere – in art, folklore and myth, where sex with animals has always featured in a big way. The oldest surviving evidence of bestiality comes from a Palaeolithic cave painting in Italy, which shows a man penetrating an animal; similar images are common in the art of the Iron and Bronze Ages. Indigenous peoples in South-East Asia, Australasia and North America have traced their origins to sex between women and dogs. Ancient myths are full of human-animal hybrids: satyrs, centaurs, minotaurs, mermaids; swan-Zeus, jackal-headed Anubis, shapeshifting fox-women.
Closer to the present, in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), an Armenian shepherd confesses to being in love with his sheep, Daisy: ‘It was the greatest lay I ever had!’ In Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2000), the same premise plays out as family tragedy. The disclosure of the father’s goat-love – ‘a love of an ... (dogmatic) un-i-mag-in-able kind’ – prompts both marital crisis and a frantic burst of incestuous lust on the son’s part. We can only imagine how Sylvia, whose murdered body is dragged onstage in the play’s final scene, felt about this.
Animal-human transgression is the fantastical norm in the dreamworld of myth, and operates still as a powerful symbol of the desire to reach beyond the confines of the possible or the acceptable. And yet, it’s one thing to read about animal-human sex in Yeats – ‘How can those terrified vague fingers push/The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?’ – and another to think about, say, your neighbour getting down with Fluffy. Could he be? So what if he is? And what does Fluffy make of it? (As Wendy Doniger wrote in the LRB in 1994, ‘What does the animal think about it?’ is ‘the most interesting question in the area of bestiality’.)”

(…)

“First things first: is your neighbour getting down with Fluffy? It’s hard to know how many people out there are having sex with animals, although it’s surely a lot more than chaste animal lovers might like to think. (The stigma attached to bestiality is so strong that even its practitioners internalise it; more than 40 per cent of people who enjoy sex with animals are reluctant to meet others like them, on the grounds that they are ‘weird’.) Nearly all studies of bestiality focus on people in psychiatric hospitals or prisons, where the rates of bestiality appear to be considerably higher than they are among the general population, or the members of online communities dedicated to the destigmatisation of bestiality.
There are some exceptions. In his study of American men’s sexual practices in 1948, Alfred Kinsey found that 8 per cent of men claimed to have had a sexual encounter with an animal, and 17 per cent of those who lived in farming communities reported experiencing orgasm as a result of animal contact, a number that rose to 65 per cent in some rural settings. In his study of American women in 1953, Kinsey found that just under 4 per cent had engaged in sexual activity with an animal since adolescence; almost all these cases involved dogs or cats. In 1974, the sexologist Marilyn Story conducted a survey of students at the University of Northern Iowa, in which one in ten said they had had sexual contact with an animal; when she repeated the study in 1980, the number had dropped to just 3 per cent, presumably because Reagan wouldn’t have approved. Some contemporary sex therapists claim that their urban patients are increasingly turning to their pets for sexual gratification, unable or unwilling to find it with humans.”

(…)

“‘Formicophilia’ is the condition of being sexually aroused by having small insects crawl on one’s body, ‘anolingis’ by licking lizards. Zoophilic voyeurs are aroused by watching animals, as in the case of one ‘Mr Z’ Bourke refers to, who had a habit of masturbating in front of large dogs and peeping on them in neighbours’ homes. (Asked how he imagined the dogs felt about this, Mr Z said they ‘probably enjoyed it’.) ‘Necrozoophilia’ is the sexual attraction to dead animals. ‘Avisodomists’ penetrate the cloacas of birds, breaking their necks right before ejaculation.”

(…)

“Today, many zoophiles embrace the label, but insist that it describes a sexual orientation, like homosexuality or bisexuality, rather than a psychosexual pathology. Sometimes, zoophiles compare themselves to trans people, as in the case of one ‘zoo’ who describes himself as ‘a Rottweiler, but I have the body of a human’. Zoos do not embrace the comparison with paedophiles, another group whose members like to fashion themselves as a persecuted sexual minority. (However, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, a notorious paedophilia advocacy group, has proclaimed its solidarity with zoophiles.) Zoos generally claim to love and care for the animals they have sex with, and that they are loved, cared for and desired in turn. (Again, many paedophiles make the same claim about children.) Mark Matthews is one of the leaders of the zoo movement. In 1994 he published The Horseman: Obsessions of a Zoophile, a memoir about his romantic and sexual encounters with horses. Bourke quotes Matthews’s description of his first sexual encounter with his pony, Cherry: They made slow love, using their whole bodies in foreplay, rubbing against each other, caressing with hands, lips, noses, teeth, using all that each had to use; then, when his testicles and penis ached with arousal, he entered her and they rocked on their feet in blissful harmony ... ‘I love you, little girl. I’m in love with you. You’re so sweet, so funny, so – oh, Cherry, my darling!’ He hugged her neck, hung her head over his shoulder, rubbing his cheek against her sleek coat.
Bourke charitably observes that ‘despite the lack of literary flair’ and the ‘soft porn mannerism’, the ‘emotions Matthews was struggling to convey were real enough’. When Cherry died Matthews was grief-stricken. Eventually, he fell in love with another mare: ‘I feel a warmth and companionship that I can trust. No games, no power plays, just honest affection.’”

(…)

“Peter Singer, the philosophical lodestar of the animal liberation movement, came out for bestiality in 2001, in a review of Midas Dekkers’s Dearest Pet: The taboo on sex with animals may 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.
For Singer, the taboo against having sex with animals, like the practice of killing and eating them, is a sign of human ‘speciesism’: our tendency to think of animals as our inferiors, less deserving of moral consideration. While some acts of bestiality ‘are clearly wrong, and should remain crimes’ – Singer gives avisodomy as an example – ‘sex with animals does not have to be cruel.’ Who, he asks, has not been at a party 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.
Here, as elsewhere in his moral philosophy, Singer identifies pleasure with well-being: the dog enjoys having his penis rubbed by the human, and perhaps the human enjoys it too – in which case they are both better off for it. The word ‘consent’ doesn’t appear in the review, perhaps because Singer tacitly identifies it with physical pleasure: if an animal enjoys sex, it must have chosen to do it. The right-wing shock jock Rush Limbaugh reasoned similarly when he insisted that Strut, the horse in the Enumclaw case, had consented, since he had an erection and mounted the men. ‘If the horse didn’t consent,’ he said, ‘then none of this would have happened.’ The conflation of pleasure and consent is commonplace in rape apologism. It’s at work whenever an orgasm or an erection is taken as proof that someone consented, even when they insist that they didn’t – or, as with young children, when they are incapable of meaningful consent. In a New York Times op-ed, Singer and Jeff McMahan defended Anna Stubblefield, a former Rutgers philosophy professor who had been convicted on two counts of aggravated sexual assault against a 29-year-old man with severe cerebral palsy under her care. They argued that either the man (known to the court as ‘D.J.’) had the cognitive capacity to consent, in which case it was ‘difficult to believe that he was forced to have sex against his will’, since he’d had an erection and didn’t struggle; or he did not have the capacity to give or withhold consent, in which case it was ‘less clear what the nature of the wrong might be’, as ‘it seems reasonable to assume that the experience was pleasurable to him.’ Either way, D.J.’s erection exonerated Stubblefield, or at least mitigated the wrongness of her actions. She was not ‘a sexual predator but ...an honest and honourable woman in love’.
Bourke is not unsympathetic to Singer’s claim that the taboo against bestiality expresses a commitment to human exceptionalism. She quotes Derrida’s line that men ‘have given themselves the word [‘animal’] in order to control a large number of living beings within a single concept’. But she is rightly sceptical of Singer’s equation of pleasure, consent and well-being. She discusses the work of Gieri Bolliger and Antoine Goetschel, who point out – in a paper of 2005 titled ‘Sexual Relations with Animals (Zoophilia): An Unrecognised Problem in Animal Welfare Legislation’ – that while ‘zoophilic relationships can be mutual,’ in general animals have to be trained into having sex with humans. Even self-identified zoophiles often ‘groom’ animals: bribing them with food, constructing specialised barns, halter breaking, acclimatising them to human penetration with dildos, injecting them with hormones. Such conditioning, Bolliger and Goetschel write, not only infringes ‘the free sexual development of an animal’, but runs the risk of creating a ‘strong dependency’ of the animal on the human.” (…)
“Perhaps one day there will be members of the animal species Homo sapiens who are able to have sex with other animal species in a way that has nothing to do with the will to dominate, fetishise or transgress. If so, I think, those people would be of our species, but not of our kind.
One thing I am undecided about is whether it was right to get Goose spayed. I have little doubt that, like most creatures, she has within her the instinct for reproduction. But I also know that Goose, like any human, is more than a bundle of instincts, that she has a sense of the good life that extends beyond the mere satisfaction of urges. When she is finally let out after a spell of confinement – for example, after finishing her first season, when she had to be kept on the lead in case any ‘entire’ male dog ‘got to’ her – she doesn’t simply romp or run: she dances. What Goose loves most of all, I sense, is the feeling of freedom. Spaying her means, I hope, that her body will remain hers, that she will not have to repurpose it, weigh it down, for anyone else. After all, Goose is no more a creature of nature than I am.”

Read the article here.

It’s good to know about perversions like ‘anolingis’, it’s refreshing to realize that there are people who have the body of a human, but they are in reality a Rottweiler. Whether this gives them the permission to have sex with any other Rottweiler is a different question.

Bestiality, first decriminalized and then criminalized again, has a long way to go, I assume, before it has the same status as let’s say homosexuality.
Many people tend to adore children and certain animals and just the sheer idea that some people would have sex with animals or children is beyond them. It makes them sick. I’m not at all convinced that this repulsion is a virtue, but many people regard it as a virtue.

It all comes down, as this article underlines, on consent. When and how can an animal consent? And at what age is the child a consenting adult?

The other question, see Peter Singer, whether eating animals is morally more acceptable than having sex with an animal remains unsolved. If I were a cow, I probably would be rather penetrated by a human being once in a while than being slaughtered.

Sex without any transgression appears to me a rather tragic endeavor. Of course, the transgression can remain a fantasy, a role play, a thought, but the whole idea that we can take the transgression out of sex is just an attempt at sanitizing the acts of the flesh.

Well, we will be whipped into saints. We cannot help ourselves, with or without god.