Historical and cultural perspectives on zoophilia

This article covers the historical and cultural aspects of zoophilia (also known as bestiality), from prehistory onwards.

Contents

Overview

Prior to and outside the influence of the major Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), sex with animals (also known as zoophilia, or bestiality) was sometimes forbidden, and sometimes accepted. Occasionally it was incorporated into religious ritual. The Abrahamic religions by and large forbid it, and declared it a sin against their God,[1] and during the Middle Ages in Europe people and animals were often executed if found guilty. With the Age of Enlightenment, bestiality became subsumed into sodomy and a civil rather than religious offence.

Separately, Western cultures have at times reacted to other negatively-viewed sexual and lifestyle activities, with moral panic.[2]

Since the 1980s, many alternative sexualities have formed social networks, and zoosexuality (a more modern name for zoophilia) is no exception to this. Although society in general is hostile, several decades of research seem to form a consensus that bestiality is commonly misunderstood and mistaken for zoosadism. Most notably, utilitarian philosophers such as Peter Singer and Jacob M. Appel have argued that, under certain circumstances, such behavior should be legal.[3]

Although there may be indications of slow changes in cultural attitudes over recent decades, bestiality is still often considered a crime against nature and remains illegal in many countries, and for that reason it is not much evidenced other than online, in private, and in the context of prosecution.

Zoophilia through history

Ancient, Greek and Roman

Caveat - It is important to be aware that some of the descriptions in antiquity may have been written from a political agenda or bias, that is, with the intent of portraying a given target group intentionally negatively. Reader judgement is necessary when considering such source material.

See also: Leda and the Swan

Europe: Middle Ages

In the Church-oriented culture of the Middle Ages, zoosexual activity was met with execution, typically burning, and death to the animals involved either the same way or by hanging. Masters comments that:

"Theologians, bowing to Biblical prohibitions and basing their judgements on the conception of man as a spiritual being and of the animal as a merely carnal one, have regarded the same phenomenon as both a violation of Biblical edicts and a degradation of man, with the result that the act of bestiality has been castigated and anathematized [...]"

In 1468, Jean Beisse, accused of bestiality with a cow on one occasion and a goat on another, was first hanged, then burned. The animals involved were also burned. In 1539, Guillaume Garnier, charged with intercourse with a female dog (described as "sodomy"), was ordered strangled after he confessed under torture. The dog was burned, along with the trial records which were "too horrible and potentially dangerous to be permitted to exist" (Masters). In 1601, Claudine de Culam, a young girl of sixteen, was convicted of copulating with a dog. Both the girl and the dog were first hanged, then strangled, and finally burned. In 1735, Francois Borniche was charged with sexual intercourse with animals. It was greatly feared that "his infamous debauches may corrupt the young men." He was imprisoned. There is no record of his release.

On the other hand, other accounts are more possibly fictitious, such as Pietro Damiani's, who in his "De bono religiosi status et variorum animatium tropologia" (11th Century) tells of a Count Gulielmus whose pet ape became his wife's lover. One day the ape became "mad with jealousy" on seeing the count lying with his wife that it fatally attacked him. Damain claims he was told about this incident by Pope Alexander II and shown an offspring claimed to be that of the ape and woman. (Illustrated Book of Sexual Records)

Clergyman and chronicler Gerald of Wales claimed to have witnessed a man having intercourse with a horse as part of a pagan ritual in Ireland.[10][11]

Although thousands of female witches were accused of having sex with animals, usually said to be the Devil in animal form or their familiars, court records available in Europe and the United States, dating back to the 14th century and continuing into the 20th century, nearly always show males, rather than females, as the human parties in court cases. (Encyclopedia of human sexuality, Humboldt University)

Further information: Demons and animals and Animal trial

Asia

Other cultures

c.1700 - 1950

The Age of Enlightenment took much that had been under the field of religion, and brought it under the field of science. As with homosexuality a variety of mixed views resulted which persisted through until around 1950, when researchers such as Kinsey followed by Masters began researching zoophilia on its own terms.

The view of this era might broadly be described as objectified. Sciences such as anthropology and study of the psyche were in their infancy, and classical belief, categorization, and the subject-object viewpoint of study had not yet been upset by 20th century thinkers. Subjects were often studied by describing the objects of study in detail, and categorizing them into hierarchies and families. Such categories and viewpoints were often subjectively based upon writers' impressions, rather than being as objective as their authors imagined them to be (this issue impacted other fields of human study too). Zoosexuality was no longer for the most part punished by religious execution; rather, like homosexuality, it was broadly treated as a sickness or deficiency in a person, or analysed as a behavior of a social class of person. Some early researchers made the intellectual leap of considering it as a sexual variation rather than a deficiency, but these were a minority. Psychology had not yet emerged as a field in its own right, so psychological fields were subsumed within Medicine, and zoosexuality was documented by scientists as a medical phenomenon associated with more primitive or lower class people and races. Those who were neither were assumed to be examples of rare perversion or degeneracy. The clinical viewpoint by the early 20th century was oriented around early psychology's concept of non-sexual acts as symbolic or substitutional, after Freud. Both human and animal behavior (including sexuality) were seen psychologically through the twin light of behaviorism (John Watson's influential view that science should reject the use of introspection in favor of stimulus-response as an explanation, and that the understanding of the conscious mind was not a valid goal of experimental psychology)[12] and determinism (the view that there was no such thing as free-will in behavior).

Thus, in 1927, when British sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote Studies in the psychology of sex, science was still in the stage of describing and categorizing unusual sexual activities, largely according to researchers' preconceived notions or behaviorist observations, under a thin guise of objectivity:

Havelock-Ellis referenced Kraft-Ebbing's work Psychopathia Sexualis (1894) which recognized zoophilic voyeurism (watching animals mate), as "fall[ing] within the range of normal variation". He identified touch and emotional closeness producing "sexual excitement or gratification" as "a sexual fetishism" termed "erotic zoophilia". Kraft-Ebbing then divides zoosexual activity into "two divisions: one in which the individual is fairly normal, but belongs to a low grade of culture, the other in which he may belong to a more refined social class, but is affected by a deep degree of degeneration," (Kraft-Ebbing named these "bestiality" and "zooerasty" respectively, stating they were different in kind from erotic zoophilia). Havelock-Ellis' view was that:

"Bestiality and zooerastia merely present in a more marked and profoundly perverted form a further degree of the same phenomenon which we meet with in erotic zoophilia; the difference is that they occur either in more insensitive or in more markedly degenerate persons [...] In seeking to comprehend this perversion it is necessary to divest ourselves of the attitude toward animals which is the inevitable outcome of refined civilization and urban life. Most sexual perversions, if not in large measure the actual outcome of civilized life, easily adjust themselves to it. Bestiality [with one exception] is, on the other hand, the sexual perversion of dull, insensitive and unfastidious persons. It flourishes among primitive peoples and among peasants. It is the vice of the clodhopper, unattractive to women..."

Modern era

See also

Sources

Main sources include:

References and external links

  1. ^ Leviticus 18:23 and 20:15-16.
  2. ^ For example, the Rev. Jerry Falwell speaking on "The Early Show" (CBS, 2004) was one of many American community and political leaders who justified a stance that gay marriage was unthinkable, by arguing that if gay marriage became approved, it could lead to legally sanctioned incest or bestiality. Boston Globe
  3. ^ Arguments for Legalised Bestiality
  4. ^ Located at "Coren del Valento" in Val Camonica. Raymond Christinger contributed, at the 1st Valcamonica Symposium, that this scene might display a socially reprehensible sexual intercourse remaining the privilege of the chief of the tribe. Link to web page and photograph, archaeometry.org
  5. ^ Cited to "Dr. Jacobus X.", said to be a nom-de-plume for a French author: Abuses Aberrations and Crimes of the Genital Sense, 1901.
  6. ^ a b Peake's commentary on the Bible, Revised Edition (1962), ad Exodus 22:19
  7. ^ The petroglyphs of Sagaholm, The petroglyphs of Sagaholm.
  8. ^ Aggrawal, Anil. (April 2009). "References to the paraphilias and sexual crimes in the Bible". J Forensic Leg Med 16 (3): 109–14. doi:10.1016/j.jflm.2008.07.006. PMID 19239958. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B8CY1-4TRHCD9-1&_user=5081486&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000047720&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=5081486&md5=ccfb8545a50236e6819a0666ba569db2. 
  9. ^ [1]
  10. ^ Last Night's Television: Always let a sleeping pagan lie
  11. ^ Banks-Smith, Nancy (July 20, 2004). "Please, please tell me now". The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/jul/20/television.artsfeatures. Retrieved May 4, 2010. 
  12. ^ "In choosing behavior as the basic datum, behaviorists changed the ultimate research goal of experimental psychology from the scientific understanding of conscious experience to the scientific understanding of behavior. Behaviorists argued that explanations that include mental causes are unscientific, and argued that all behaviors — including complex actions that generally are attributed to mental causes — may be viewed as automatic (mechanistic) responses to environmental events (stimuli). By 1920, the behaviorist argument had succeeded in transforming experimental psychology into the scientific study of the environmental causes of behavior." Scottsdale Community College course description (abridged)
  13. ^ Liliequist 1990, 1991, 1995; Träskman 1990; Österberg 1996, cited at historia.su.se (PDF)

Histories of zoophilia by non-zoophiles

Histories of zoophilia by zoophiles

Note: these pages are to a degree amateurs research, written to varying standards by parties with a vested interest. However they may also contain numerous factual references and other suggestions of academic interest omitted by or unfamiliar to authors less familiar with the subject.

Culture and sociology

Art