Zoophilia Ancient and Modern

Leda, raped in her sleep by the Zeus-swan

Please be assured that I am not an advocate of zoophilia, which I find disgusting. I am surprised that in many countries it is not illegal (it is a felony in only 17 USA states).  My point is that our thinking about zoophilia is muddled.  

The free newspapers on the London Underground are obsessed with it. This week’s story featured a Nigerian named Malam Kamisu Baranda, arrested for having sex with his goat. He argues in his own defence that he asked her for her permission first. A heartbreaking tale two weeks ago featured a British vagrant caught on camcorder apparently copulating with his dog inside the sleeping bag they shared. She was taken into care and he has been banned from dog ownership for three years.

Ancient art captures the brutality

The issue raised in both articles is NOT whether zoophilia is unhealthy or degrading to humans, or a moral threat to society, but the animal’s welfare and ability to make a decision. Can an animal consent to sex with a human? I would like to know how Baranda put the question to his goat, and how she replied. I would like to ask the vagrant’s dog whether she wanted to be separated from him (probably not?)

My problem is that people legally do all kinds of (arguably much worse) things to animals without seeking their consent—coerced hard labour and lactation, artificial insemination, castration, experiments in laboratories; undermining their dignity with stupid costumes and circus tricks, riding, caging, electrocuting and eating them. 

'Love Will Find a Way'

Sex between humans and animals was explored more intelligently in Greek narratives. When gods raped women in the form of fauna, as Zeus raped Leda in the form of a swan, his animalization is an implicit acknowledgement that forcibly penetrating another human is an act of subhuman violence. 

'You look so like your father'

Greek poetry and art is remarkably sympathetic to Pasiphae. In her cold husband’s long absences she fell in love with her handsome bull. One Greek vase shows her tenderly burping the resulting baby Minotaur, a fulfilled mother at last. Pasiphae’s emotional bond reminds me of my (long deceased) childhood piano teacher, a lonely childless widow who treated her Old English Sheepdog like a husband, embracing him on her sofa, including him in all conversations, asking him whether he preferred Mozart to Brahms, getting jealous if he paid other human women attention, and sharing her bed (although I do doubt her body) with him.

Lucian's Ass Consents

Best of all are the closing scenes in an ancient Greek version of the traditional story of the man turned into an ass, the Ass attributed to Lucian. These contrast two scenes in which the Ass-hero accepts and declines sex with a woman. In the first, he tells us that he enthusiastically made love to a lovely rich lady who plied him with delicious food in her luxurious boudoir. In the second, he is exploitatively required to penetrate a female convict publicly outdoors, as an amphitheatre spectacle, and manages to escape in the nick of time. Perhaps the moral is that when speculating about animals’ attitudes to sex with humans, we shouldn't make blanket generalisations.

I am going to email Metro newspaper to offer a series ‘Greek zoophiliac myth of the week’ so commuters can satisfy their voyeuristic hunger for such stories while perhaps thinking harder about what they might signify. I will let you know how the editors respond to the offer in due course.