If you put ‘bestiality porn’ into Google, you do not get Websites where such matters are discussed. You get hundreds and hundreds of sites containing the actual stuff. I confess I did not go to them to see exactly what they offered. It was enough to see the phrase ‘includes cruel fucking’ to know that what they offered would make me ill. (I made the same confession when I wrote a book about the feelings of farm animals: I could not bring myself to visit a slaughterhouse – but others have done it for me.)
However, Abigail Bray alerted me to a new trend, ‘pet love’ as some call it, a lucrative porn genre. One company, run by Doctor X and an animal sex prostitute ‘Stray’, sells 200–400 DVDs through their Website every day. New subscribers join daily; the majority are aged between 18 and 45. The owners have moved from the UK to a European country where they say “you can freely buy animal porn in shops and from news-stands… Pet love videos are routinely in the top three bestselling DVDs at sex shops” where expos screen “doggy sex shows on giant TVs” and the government is “very helpful with the business side of things.” University educated, Doctor X decided to market porn videos of women with dogs as a cool, sexually self-empowering practice for transgressive liberated women. His business partner, Stray, also frames ‘sex’ with dogs with post-feminist sexual self-empowerment rhetoric: “Getting fucked by dogs allows me to take charge of my own sexuality. I don’t have to rely on a man.” Stray says that it was reading pornographic bestiality fantasies by the libertarian writer, Nancy Friday, that encouraged her to explore bestiality. The online ‘pet love’ community normalizes her abuse of dogs.
Suddenly information was available, chat rooms, forums… Pet love sites would frequently get closed down, but I learned to recognise insider lingo – plus, as a single woman into pet love, I was a popular community member and fellow enthusiasts would ensure I was kept in the loop! Posts on an internet group drew my attention to one of Doctor X’s websites, which had been running for three years, and I thought it really spoke to women. It was classy and upmarket, not degrading… Money isn’t my main motivation, but I earn a good amount of cash too, and no-one takes a bigger cut than me from the productions I star in. Every aspect of what I do is liberating and empowering (emphasis added).
Stray also argues that Peter Singer’s argument validated her bestiality prostitution especially as the president of the animal group PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, endorsed his ‘ethics,’ although Newkirk later retracted the endorsement.[58]
Pornography, in all its many variations, is the attempt to take away the personhood or subjective identity of whatever is depicted. So it is not surprising that it is primarily used against women. Perhaps the first us/them in history consists of men feeling different and superior to women. Nor is it surprising that it would then pass over to animals: possibly the second us/them in history consists of men and women feeling different and superior to animals. Common cause should be the default position of feminists and animal rights activists; we are all fighting for the same thing: dignity and the abrogation of cruelty. Pornography is violence against women, children, animals, and all those who are falsely believed to have no claim to a soul. We are all, as the philosopher, Tom Regan, reminds us, the subject of a life.
Bibliography
Animal Rights (2005) ‘PETA and bestiality Round 2’, http://www.animalrights.net/2005/peta-and-bestiality-round-2/.
Arts Law (2003) ‘Animal Rights and Artistic Freedom’, http://www.artslaw.com.au/articles/entry/animal-rights-and-artistic-freedom/.
Singer, Peter (2001) ‘Heavy Petting’ (Nerve, 2001) and http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/2001----.htm.
Tankard Reist, Melinda (2011) ‘Porn masquerading as an anti-animal cruelty video’, http://melindatankardreist.com/2011/02/porn-masquerading-as-an-anti-animal-cruelty-video/.
Robi Sonderegger
(Australia)
Neurotica: Modern Day Sexual Repression
At the height of the 1960s American counterculture revolution, folklorist and social critic Gershon Legman coined the slogan ‘Make love not war’. Notwithstanding the popular use of the term by activists in opposition to the Vietnam War, the slogan originated from Legman’s deeply held views that sexual repression and censorship of erotic publications were the cause of escalating violence and sadism in American culture (in Landesman, 1999). Despite Legman’s best intentions, however, the sexual revolution delivered more than he bargained for. As sexual and interpersonal norms were challenged in pursuit of ‘sexual freedom’, new types of repression emerged in the form of the capitalist commercialisation of sex. The ‘sexual freedom’ that people aspired to in the 1960s was exploited by big business in the 70s and 80s with the production of pornography en masse (Jong et al., 2003). Any notion of ‘Make love not war’ quickly became ‘Make money not love’.
Renowned political theorist and philosopher on the sexual revolution, Herbert Marcuse, argued that the notion of ‘sexual freedom’ was almost oxymoronic. Despite being an advocate for sexual expression in art and literature in its true form, he challenged the Freudian-style thinking of the day that suggested the commercialisation of sexual liberty would only result in social enslavement. Indeed, contrary to the myth that pornography could somehow enhance intimacy, free the libido, or grant a liberating outlet for sexual expression, sexualised media has ultimately became a source of addiction and bondage (US Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, 1986). In his classic One-Dimensional Man (1964/1994) Marcuse describes this as a process of Repressive Desublimation: when the best sellers of oppression defile authentic sexuality by replacing relational intimacy with a commodity to be consumed. The sexual revolution was supposed to throw off outdated constrictions. However, in an endeavour to cheapen and profane what so many consider sacred, ‘sexual freedom’ has been hijacked by industrialised, mass-produced, stereotyped pornography which only represses authentic sexual expression and intimacy. Marcuse contends that hope and truth preserved in the sublimations of higher culture are both betrayed and destroyed (1994/1994, p. 60).
Paradoxically, with the relaxation of laws relating to the commercial availability of sexually explicit material and the increasing demand to satisfy newly cultivated sexual appetites, greater liberality has been taken in the production of hardcore and violent content. In a recent investigation of pornographic subject matter (Bridges et al., 2010), almost 90% of scenes in the most popular adult films incorporated verbal aggression (48%: name calling/insults; threatening physical harm; and/or using coercive language) and physical aggression (88.2%: pushing/shoving; biting; pinching; pulling hair; spanking; open-hand slapping; gagging; choking; threatening with weapon; kicking; closed-fist punching; bondage/confining; using weapons; torturing, mutilating and attempting murder). Such aggression (averaging 11.52 acts per scene) was mostly perpetrated against women, by both men (72.7% of offences) and women (27.0% of offences).
While not everyone who views pornography goes on to develop sexual behaviour problems, for many pornography seems to both create and exacerbate pathology. Similar to other mental health professionals, I’ve observed a disturbing trend among pornography consumers towards both compulsive behaviours and the development of abnormal interests, over which clients report having little control. According to Dr William Struthers, Associate Professor in Biopsychology, pornography creates significant confusion for the human brain. As pornography consumption increases, autonomy (freedom over what a person thinks and pursues) decreases, leaving one’s sexual drive screaming for an outlet. “Sexually acting out in response to pornography creates sexual associations that are stored as hormonal and neurological habits. These associations are seared into the fabric of the brain” (2009, p. 59).
58
4 See http://www.animalrights.net/2005/peta-and-bestiality-round-2/ and for a feminist critique of PETA see http://melindatankardreist.com/2011/02/porn-masquerading-as-an-anti-animal-cruelty-video/.