H U M a N I M A L I A 1:2
Margret Grebowicz
When Species Meat: Confronting Bestiality Pornography
In The Pornography of Meat, Carol Adams makes the argument that feminism in general,
and the critique of pornography in particular, ought to address the condition of
animals.1 She points out that animals have been historically excluded from feminist
inquiry because of the feminist rejection of denigrating comparisons between women
and animals. The feminist message has been “we are not animals!”, an investment in
rightful belonging to humanity right down to the bumper sticker that reads, “feminism
is the radical notion that women are people too.” I follow Adams in her demand to re-
inscribe the animal into feminist inquiry, but critiques like hers lack a robust
interrogation of the ontology of animal being in general. Contemporary discourses of
posthumanism explore “the animal” as a contingent, historical, and contested concept
in dynamic and co-constitutive relation to “the human,” and raise possibilities for new
ontologies of animality (see not only Haraway, but also Derrida, Latour, and
Agamben). In what follows, I argue that, in this posthumanist context, the feminist task
is to construct theoretical structures in which to begin to think not just animality in
general, but animal sexualities in particular, from the vantage point of a critical
rethinking of “the human.”
My particular subject of inquiry will be bestiality pornography, a discourse which thus
far has been dealt with only in the margins (if at all) of both animal studies and feminist
critiques of porn. Though the ethics of sexual relations between humans and animals
warrant serious research and discussion, I am less concerned with them in this
particular project, focusing instead on the interspecies imaginary that bestiality porn
produces. I firstly examine the role of this imaginary in the ongoing construction of two
related fields: that of femininity on one hand and of feminism on the other, and
secondly attempt to organize theoretical resources for thinking about—and living
alongside—animals as active co-agents in the production of meanings, rather than
passive screens for our anthropomorphic projections.
I. Gendering animals. Not surprisingly, Catherine MacKinnon’s recent contribution to
animal studies literature focuses in part on the use of animals in pornography (2007,
320-22). She describes the relation of the law to animals as gendered, which in her
analysis means that animals are feminized and women are figured in terms of “animal
nature.” Both groups are subordinated to the law of humans, the most powerful of
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which are biological men. This is most obvious, she writes, in the use of animals in
commercial pornography, where animals and women occupy the same subordinate
position. Both groups are victims of an unequal power relation, which is subsequently
eroticized. The actors are men, the objects acted upon are women and
animals. However, a quick survey of internet bestiality porn shows imagery and
narratives which do not align neatly with MacKinnon’s schema. In fact, there is quite a
variety of imagery available, making up an internally inconsistent kaleidoscope of
constructs and norms, and indicating that bestiality pornography tells us little about the
practice of bestiality. An analysis of the semiotics of gender particular to both cultural
practices yields important information about how we view women and how we view
animals.
In mythology and throughout the history of art and literature, images of women with
animals (and masculine beast-men) are much more frequent than images of men with
animals. But if we take commercial pornography to be a qualitatively unique,
historically and materially situated phenomenon of culture, rather than, say, just
another genre of literature, the proliferation of zoo porn cannot be read as just a natural
extension of the story of Leda and the Swan or the Rape of Europa. How do narratives
of interspecies desire change when mediated by this particular technology and logic of
democratization of information? The most widely available bestiality (also called “zoo”)
pornography depicts women having sex with male horses and dogs, two species which
have evolved in close proximity to humans, and which appear as figures of masculinity
throughout our culture. Indeed, horses and dogs almost always appear as the male
actors in the pornography itself, situated in narratives in which animals are substitutes
for men where men are missing (“horny farm girl needs horse cock,” “teen’s first time
with dog,” etc.). What is eroticized in this imagery is not the power difference between
the male viewer and the animal, which may be trained or forced into doing (almost)
anything, but something very different: the size and virility of the horse, the eagerness
of the dog, etc. Intense anthropomorphism fuels these narratives, rather than the
eroticization of the power of humans over animals on which MacKinnon focuses. There
is also extensive “gay” zoo porn involving animals, with men performing the same acts
as the women in the “straight” zoo porn—giving fellatio and receiving (in this case)
anal intercourse. In fact, the very designations “straight” and “gay” in this context
signify properly only if we assume that the horses and dogs substitute quite directly
and unproblematically for men. This type of imagery makes up the majority of
bestiality porn on the internet.
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How do I know? I looked. In fact, the account I offer here is a result of a deliberate
decision to look at/for porn sites in the way a casual consumer of internet porn would:
searching for free imagery, taking “tours” of paysites, registering as a user of file
sharing sites, and just clicking around, getting a general impression of what is available
and under what conditions. I kept a log of the search terms: animal sex, bestiality porn,
zoo porn, zoo sex, animal porn, and once I was more familiar with the terminology:
farm sex, free beast toons, animal sex galleries, bestiality porn share, monster hentai,
and so on. Rather than statistics about the production and consumption of this
subgenre, I was interested in the intersection of this particular technological mediation
with graphic narratives of inter-species desire on an experiential level. As post-
Foucauldian philosophers of subject formation, we should attend in particular to the
subjective and intersubjective effects of the circulation of this discourse. Who are the
consumers of this imagery? is a very different question than what is it like to be a consumer
of this imagery?, and a philosophical inquiry into the production of patriarchal and
naively humanist subjectivity conceives of the empirical in terms of the latter.
The more one clicks, the more nuanced a story emerges. There is another kind of
narrative widely available, one in which the women are so insatiable that “they’ll fuck
anything!” Sites like www.fuckthemall.com and others invite viewers to watch women
with “all” animals, as many different kinds as possible, penetrating themselves with
snakes, eels, and other fish. The story here seems to be a bit different: the women are
even more insatiable and out of control sexually, while the masculine element is not
quite as present here as in the bodies of the dogs and horses, often for the simple reason
that we are no longer watching penises, but entire animals being inserted into orifices,
animals like fish, onto whom it is more difficult to project anthropomorphic fantasies. In
this kind of material, the animality of the animals is emphasized. The insatiable women
will do anything to satisfy their needs, including fellating “filthy” dog penises, for
instance (see www.bestialityfacial.com). The recurrence of the word “filthy” is important
to note, because it serves to remind the viewer that this is precisely an animal penis, not
a human one, marking a departure from the narratives which rely on the power of
anthropomorphic projection. For instance, www.beasttoons.com shows a cartoon woman
dressed up in a maid’s outfit and with a gorilla looking up her skirt. She wonders to
herself, “A gorilla is so similar to a human. I wonder if he can get me pregnant?” A few
web pages later, the same site shows the same cartoon woman straddling a bucket
which houses a chicken, whose head is up her vagina.
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Finally, there are occasional, rare images of human penises in animal vaginas (usually
those of dogs or sheep, though there are also photos of penises inside chickens). On
www.zoohan.net there are multiple images of men having intercourse with animals, but
they are tagged with the words “extreme” and “shocking.” Following these photos to
further links, one can also find the occasional photograph of either an entire forearm
inside a cow’s vagina, or even just photographs of animal genitalia alone, but with a
very different appearance from today’s glossy porn. They tend to be single images,
rather than entire galleries or films, and the same image gets circulated among multiple
sites. The fact that many are yellowed indicates that they are scanned prints, not digital
photographs. They are shot in the dark with flash, usually very close up and never
showing a person’s face. In fact, all of the imagery of this sort that I encountered had the
appearance of home-grown, amateur porn, or possibly even images made in veterinary
contexts and not intended for pornographic use, but in any case, not commercial porn
produced under conditions of some degree of regulation and budget. In this
pornography, the animal is always on the receiving end of the sex, its vagina or anus
clearly substituting for that of a woman.
Thus, in contrast to MacKinnon’s claim that bestiality pornography invariably feminizes
animals just as it feminizes women, it appears that there are at least three different
classes of bestiality porn, in which the semiotics of gender function in different ways. To
speak in broad terms, in the first class, the animals become “men.” In the second, the
animals become “animals” and it is the species difference which is eroticized. I would
like to suggest that in this, the least anthropomorphic of the constructs, the animal is
almost genderless, or at least that the erotics of the narratives and images arise not from
gender difference, but from species difference. In the third, the animals are
“women.” Thus, we can see more than one distinct way of anthropomorphically
gendering animals, and, in the case of the animalizing of animals, we encounter a de-
gendering. How does this, a more nuanced reading of the gender semiotics of bestiality
porn, affect feminist critiques of porn, and how does it speak in particular to a critique
of this imagery as a site where the oppression of women and that of animals intersect?
MacKinnon’s critique of the pornographic feminization of animals seems more like an
engagement with bestiality rather than with bestiality porn. The cultural practices are
quite different. The most significant difference for the purposes of my analysis is that
the majority of zoo porn shows women having sex with animals, while real-life,
prosecuted cases of bestiality involve men almost exclusively. The legal literature as
well as bestiality (also called “zoophilia”) blogs indicate that the people having sex with
animals off-camera are in fact men. Our cartoon maid has a chicken’s head in her
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vagina, but, as the blogs indicate, when humans have sex with chickens it is a man
inserting his penis into the hen’s cloaca, an encounter which is usually fatal for the
hen. The kinds of rare images tagged as “extreme” are thus anything but—they show
the banal truth of the sex with animals that humans actually practice. In contrast, the
women having vaginal or oral sex with horse penises, at the forefront of every “zoo” or
“farm” paysite, make rare appearances in the legal literature (one recent exception, the
2008 case of Diane Whalen and Donald Siegfried, in which the Oklahoma couple was
charged with bestiality, was a matter of porn production: Whalen’s son discovered
numerous films which Siegfried had shot of the family dogs having sex with Whalen2 ).
This is significant, since gender does not officially signify in the legal prosecution of
bestiality cases, in the case of either the humans or the animals involved. Moral debates
about bestiality also obscure this fact, with blanket references to “humans” and
“animals”, as if neither were gendered, and as if gender-as-power-difference were not
at work in sex acts between humans and animals.
This is certainly not the only instance in which porn does not depict the realities of
sex. Lesbian porn for straight male viewers and incest porn are just two subgenres
about which it is common knowledge that the actors are in fact acting, faking pleasure
in the interests of a narrative, acting as “real” lesbians or members of the same family in
order to produce a fantasy, in contrast to amateur straight porn, whose appeal lies in
the fact (is it?) that non-actors are experiencing real pleasure. However, one must be
careful about the use of the word “real” in the context of the pornography
debates. MacKinnon has warned at length about the tendency to figure porn as fantasy,
when the sex taking place in order to produce the “fantastic” images is in fact very
real. Thus, my own distinction here between bestiality porn and “real” bestiality is quite
tenuous. It may be more helpful to distinguish between sex with animals for money and
sex with animals for personal pleasure, focusing on distinctions between intentions,
motives, pleasures, and privileges, rather than any ontological difference between more
or less “real” events.
However mediated and “fake” zoo porn may or not may be, zoo sites have a particular
way of linking onto websites about off-camera bestiality practices. They often
piggyback on “information” sites about zoophilia, defined as “love” relationships with
animals, usually to the exclusion of humans and including sex. Although zoophilia
websites actively disassociate themselves from porn sites and make strong distinctions
between bestiality practices and the production of bestiality porn, openly condemning
the use of animals in porn as “cruelty” and “exploitation,” the porn sites’ invariable
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insistence that what they show is real (“100% real animal sex!!!”) works to reinforce the
connection. Bestiality is presented as something which must be kept secret, like the use
of internet porn itself. Websites open in a sea of warnings and the experience is that of
entering ever deeper levels of something forbidden, when in fact there is nothing illegal
under US law about the viewing of most pornography, including bestiality porn and
virtual child porn (most of which remains decriminalized in the US since the Supreme
Court decision of 2002).
At the same time, however, because this imaginary is one of repression and the failure
of society to understand the viewer’s “needs,” it is also of community, file sharing, and
underground trafficking of information among users who form a network. It is
presented as an instance of the democratization of knowledge, with the internet making
access to knowledge easier, faster, and less expensive than ever.3 www.beastwiki.com, a
site devoted to reviews of all of the bestiality paysites available, looks exactly like
Wikipedia.com, except that the links are red and not blue. Sites like www.zooshare.com
are not only for file sharing, but for posting blogs, commenting on posts, reviewing and
rating the pornography, while users often describe themselves as keeping a secret,
hiding their true selves, and being deeply misunderstood. www. beastforum.com invites
users to “share you opinions, creations, and experiences with others,” and on
www.beasttoons.com, in the very same frame in which the aforementioned French maid
cartoon protagonist encounters the gorilla, she promises us an educational experience:
“with your membership you’ll also get full access to our extensive zoophilia database
that covers everything you want to know about animal sex.” Blogs often include
expressions of gratitude for the forum, a place where users can finally show their true
selves. While some blog posts discuss the considerable challenges of sharing one’s
desire for zoo porn with a sex partner, typically a new girlfriend who might be scared
off, others post about something very different, namely the difficulties of a life in which
animals themselves are the sex partners. Thus, the connection between bestiality porn
and bestiality is further reinforced by this imaginary of persecuted subculture, shared
understanding, and access to important-but-forbidden information.
II. Meaningful consent in the case of animals. In the US most states have laws against
sex with animals, and of those, a majority deems the act a felony, not a
misdemeanor. Most states classify bestiality under their animal cruelty statutes.4 If
significant money is involved, the criminality extends to property damage, as in the
case in which an Illinois man confessed to having had intercourse with the mares in the
stables in which he was employed over the course of 20 years.5 MacKinnon (2007) asks
the important question why laws against sex with animals exist at all. Her answer takes
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us out of the problematic in which both the law and so much of animal studies are
explicitly located, that of suffering, and places us squarely in the problematic more
proper to feminist jurisprudence surrounding rape and bodily integrity, namely that of
consent.6 Since “people cannot be sure” that animals consent to the sex, the law exists to
protect the animals. More specifically, she writes, “we cannot know if their consent is
meaningful” (321). And yet, there are clearly cases when we know that the animals do
not give their consent to the sex: in the Illinois mare case, for instance, the man was
caught after 20 years of intercourse with the horses only because one of the mares died
in the act. He had bound her in such a way as to constrict her neck, presumably in
hopes of successfully immobilizing her, and the mare had fought the intercourse so
hard that she had strangled herself. Or, to take a less dramatic example, in much dog
porn the animal is lying down, being fellated or mounted by a woman, often with the
help of at least one other person, so that the whole scene is obviously highly mediated
and reads as forced. When animals fight back or show their indifference, it seems easy
to make the claim that they do not consent. MacKinnon writes, “Do animals dissent
from human hegemony? I think they often do. They vote with their feet by running
away. They bite back, scream in alarm, withhold affection, approach warily, and swim
off” (324). So when exactly is it that “we cannot be sure” about their consent? It is when
animals appear as willing participants in these acts that the question of consent becomes
complicated. We know that they say no, but it is much less thinkable that they might
say yes.
Indeed, in zoo porn, only those animals that are figured as intelligent enough to be
agents to some degree are the ones that may be believably presented as consenting to
the sex. This is most prevalent in the imagery which genders the animals male. A dog
mounts a kneeling woman from behind, or sniffs between her legs, or the horse
ejaculates in her mouth—this is where the issue of consent takes on considerable
ambiguity. The presentation of the animal as an agent in the sex becomes believable,
and the animals are continuously described as “lucky,” “hungry,” and
“horny.” Numerous sites advertise photo galleries accompanied by narratives of dogs
“raping” innocent girls or other “first timers.” In all of the sites classified as “animal
rape,” the animal, usually a dog, is present as the perpetrator, not the victim, of a
rape. This rape narrative sometimes depends on claims about the animal’s intelligence,
as in www.zooshock.com, which shows photos of a woman having intercourse with a
pig. The accompanying narrative states that she was raped by the pig in a shed, a claim
which is then supported by the following sentence, which explains that pigs are among
the most intelligent animals on the planet, comparable to dogs. The trajectory from
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intelligence to sexuality is clear: the more intelligent the animal, the more credible the
narrative in which the animal is a sexual agent.
However, when we compare this pornographic valuing of the intelligence and
complexity of “higher order animals” with the ways in which this densely gendered
inter-species imaginary manifest itself legally, we encounter some
contradictions. MacKinnon points out that “commercial pornography alone shows far
more sex with animals than is ever prosecuted for the acts required to make it”
(321). Indeed, though I will not offer a review of the legal literature concerning bestiality
cases, it is striking that the sheer amount of bestiality porn on the internet is
disproportionately large in comparison to the number of bestiality cases which make
the daily or weekly news. It is also significant that the cases which do make the news
rarely describe the kind of sex that makes up the majority of the porn. Women receiving
cunnilingus from dogs (and occasionally cats), women penetrated by dogs and horses,
and occasionally pigs and goats, women performing fellatio on dogs, horses, goats,
even camels—these acts are almost never prosecuted. Why might this be? I imagine that
MacKinnon would answer: because the law, with its First Amendment absolutism,
turns a blind eye to whatever is required to make pornography, which it is committed
to protecting. This is why legislators do not go after the people engaged in the various
acts of “sodomy” required to make porn. In other words, MacKinnon’s answer to the
question does not depend on the contents of the imagery at all, or on its semiotics of
gender, but on her reading of the Supreme Court’s investment in the First
Amendment. MacKinnon would argue that, just as the very real unwanted sex that
must take place for porn to exist at all is virtually unprosecutable, the sex with animals
remains invisible to the law. Her equation would be simple: we don’t prosecute
bestiality just like we don’t prosecute rape, because we hate animals just like we hate
women.
Once again, an analysis of the semiotics of gender at work in the discourses yields a
different answer. The legal landscape is ostensibly void of gender distinctions when
dealing with bestiality, but this is not the case de facto. If MacKinnon is right that US
anti-bestiality law exists to protect animals from sex to which they do not consent, then
it follows that the law is harsher on sex acts with animals in which the anthropocentric
projection onto the animal is that of feminine vulnerability and passive
receptivity. When the projection is of masculinity, on the other hand, as in the case of
the acts required to make most animal pornography, acts which go unprosecuted, the
law appears much softer. The message seems to be that if the animals are doing things
that any red-blooded heterosexual man would enjoy doing, then we are no longer
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dealing with cruelty. To put it bluntly, the law is more able to recognize sex with
animals as cruelty when the animals are figured as women, rather than men, and is thus
more likely to prosecute “real” bestiality (in which men have intercourse with
predominantly female animals) than the acts required to make porn (in which women
have intercourse with predominantly male animals). For this reason, it could be argued,
the majority of the real sex in bestiality porn goes unprosecuted.
This is consistent with MacKinnon’s reading of the legal treatment of rape in general:
the easier it is to establish a lack of consent, the easier the rape conviction. And as
MacKinnon points out, we know when animals say no. The harder it is to prove that no
consent took place, the harder the rape conviction. It is here that MacKinnon’s claim
that the relation of the law to animals is gendered must be turned on its head. It is
gendered, but not in the sense that the animals are necessarily feminized. On the
contrary, in the making of the majority of bestiality internet porn, they are twice
masculinized: once in the pornographic imagery, where they substitute for men and are
(more or less believably) figured as taking pleasure in the activities, and again when the
laws against sex with animals are not enforced specifically in the context of the acts
required to make the pornography. The animals are made into men on two levels: once,
in the pornographic narratives and a second time, in the law’s blindness to the criminal
acts required to produce the narratives. The resulting equation is a bit different than
MacKinnon’s: when we do prosecute bestiality, it is when the animals are figured as
women and not when they are figured as men. Even as the law does not gender animals
(bestiality is defined as sex between humans and animals, regardless of gender), a very
predictable semiotics of gender is at work in its enforcement. Before the law, the
animals’ “desire” is naturalized, just as men’s sexual response is naturalized. In contrast
to the pornographic narrative, where desire is linked to intelligence and complexity,
and so results in the anthropomorphic projection of agency, the legal functions
according to a logic in which the willing animal, as virile masculinity, is exhaustively
programmed by nature and thus incapable of agency.
III. Denaturalizing animal sex. MacKinnon is perhaps best known for her analysis of
meaningful consent in the case of women. She claims that in conditions of social
inequality in which power differences are eroticized and women’s subjugation is
coextensive with their positive value as sex objects, there is no possibility of women’s
meaningful consent to sex (“Privacy vs. Equality: Beyond Roe vs. Wade” in MacKinnon
1987). This is often caricatured as her “all sex is rape” thesis. This does not mean that
women cannot consent to sex. Clearly, they do so all the time. But MacKinnon asks us
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to consider how “meaningful” this consent is, how seriously we ought to take it given
the cultural production of femininity as sexually available and servile. Though she has
famously been criticized for denying women any possibility of sexual agency, what
interests me more immediately is the paradox to which this argument leads, one which
is useful for thinking through consent and thus sexual agency in the case of animals.
Note that the law does not protect entities that cannot consent, like sex dolls, vibrators,
doorknobs, or watermelons, with which it is not illegal to engage in sexual activity. The
only kind of creature with whom sex might be prohibited is the kind of creature that is
capable of some degree of consent or dissent, an agent whose agency and consent
cannot be established conclusively because of external mitigating factors, but an agent
nonetheless. In other words, only a being that is capable of consent is capable of
denying its consent and thus being raped. Thus, there is something logically
problematic about the very idea of the being that always consents (as in MacKinnon’s
description of the construction the feminine in the legal imaginary, which, as she
demonstrates, makes it so difficult to prosecute rape in the case of adult, sexually active
women), as well as the being that never consents (the child, the animal, the mentally
disabled adult).
In order to escape this paradox and develop a more nuanced account of sexual agency
across the board, we must pool feminist and posthumanist theoretical resources. This, I
propose, points to the future of feminist animal studies: the possibility of thinking the
agency (erotic, ethical, semiotic) of animals in sexual practices, in an effort to counteract
the received claim that they are exhaustively programmed by “nature.” Feminism has
barely begun to denaturalize or queer animal sexualities. For instance, Carol Adams
persuasively argues that the sexual objectification and consumption of animals and of
women follow the same models. She proposes that feminism should approach the
animalizing of women and the feminization of animals in patriarchal culture as a
unique opportunity, namely the chance to study the oppression of animals as a
particular symptom of androcentric social organization. However, Adams’s work on
the visual culture aspect of meat consumption is devoted to exposing the logic and
structure of a pattern of oppression and exploitation, a position which depends on one
important assumption: that humans are the only actors in this practice. The structure of
her argument follows an identifiable Second Wave feminist formula in which power
and privilege are pretty unambiguously distinguishable from subjugation. In that sense,
it offers rather limited resources for a post- or neo-Foucauldian feminist analysis of
power, desire, and norms, of the production of truths and practices, and the
complexities of the care of the self.7
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What happens if, in contrast, we begin from the assumption that animals are actors, too,
insofar as they are the kinds of beings that can not only deny consent, but give it? The
position appears dangerous at first, as if one were on the side of the contemporary
zoophilia communities I describe here, which also rely heavily on a particular rhetoric
of animal consent and even “pleasure.” How might we begin to distinguish between the
sexual agency we anthropomorphically project onto animals (in the production of porn,
for instance) and their real sexual agency, the very thing which renders them rapeable
(at least in human legal terms) in the first place? How to think critically about the law
which purports to protect animals without in the course of our critique leaving them
wide open to exploitation? And furthermore, what kind of account of agency is
available in a post-Enlightenment world in which we have abandoned human
exceptionalism, in which we take evolutionary biology seriously, but also in which we
no longer conflate “nature” with “programming”? What is the relationship between
consent, agency, and responsibility in this posthumanist landscape? And finally, does
this starting point commit us to the progressive potential of bestiality?
Haraway’s latest book, When Species Meet, offers an ontology of the political subject
which includes non-human animals, or to put it differently, demonstrates that the
inclusion of non-human animals in the body politic will call for the radical
transformation of that body. She, too, reminds us of the reasons animals were actively
excluded from much early feminist inquiry, in this case Marxist feminism :8 “They
tended to be all too happy with categories of society, culture, and humanity and all too
suspicious of nature, biology, and co-constitutive human relationships with other
critters.” Feminism never questioned the reserving of the categories of desire and
sexuality for human beings (73-4). But surely, it cannot be by accident that the
comparisons between animals and women are made in pornographic contexts in
particular. Neither is it accidental that animals are gendered in pornography. The
patriarchal logic which depends on an assumption of woman’s animal nature makes
this assumption specifically in the context of sexuality, insofar as we imagine that sex is
where humans are at their most animal. And we do imagine this: in his controversial
piece “Heavy Petting,” Peter Singer actually defends bestiality on the grounds that
“there are many ways in which we cannot help behaving just as animals do — or
mammals, anyway — and sex is one of the most obvious ones. We copulate, as they do.
They have penises and vaginas, as we do, and the fact that the vagina of a calf can be
sexually satisfying to a man shows how similar these organs are” (2001). According to
Singer’s logic, the zoophile’s desire for the animal is always already proof of our
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animality. Zoophilia itself becomes a symbol of the breakdown of human
exceptionalism and perhaps even proof of evolution.
But clearly, this collapsing of desire into “nature” is not where feminism will wish to
end up. If the received wisdom is that woman=sex and sex=animality, and if feminism
today must reinscribe the animal it has exiled from its literature, then it must put at the
forefront of this reinscription the complex naturecultural problematic of animal sexualit(ies) in
particular. Just as feminism has interrogated, historicized, and unhinged the connections
between femininity and sexuality in an effort to denaturalize exploitative sexual
practices, it must do so in the case of animality. The idea of denaturalizing animal
sexuality is obviously problematic, at the very least because it complicates our
relationship to the discourse which offers the most detailed information about non-
reproductive sex among animals, namely animal behavior studies. Feminist theory will
need to do much more than cite studies by empirical scientists which describe, for
instance, same-sex sexual behaviors among some primates, manatees, certain whale
species, and those famous big horn sheep that recently made the news.9 It will have to
also examine the political and ontological commitments which underpin projects
seeking to naturalize non-reproductive sex among animals.
One important task is to thematize and explore the difference between the
anthropocentric projection of consent (as in the pornographic narratives, for instance),
and the real agency of non-human animals, the agency which renders them active
partners in interspecies sex and thus in the production of the posthuman sexual
imaginary. What, if any, epistemological resources do we have for making this
distinction? In Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, sexuality is precisely the site of
the human-animal difference and the site where both humans and animals are de-
naturalized. Rather than challenging the modern anthropomorphic opposition between
human and animal by pointing out how very animal we are in our sexualities, as Singer
does above, Derrida performs a contrasting gesture. He exposes the human as a highly
mediated philosophical construct by exploring the degree to which animality poses the
ultimate limit to the human. The animal is “more other than any other,” and it is so
precisely “on the threshold of sexual difference. More precisely, of sexual differences”
(36). Animals thus become not just another “other” for feminism to include in its ever-
expanding list of oppressed identities, but quite possibly the question mark itself, the
philosophical problem of sexuality par excellence. Engaging philosophically with
animality means engaging with the idea of sexual differences in the plural, a bottomless
heterogeneity of sexual possibilities. This undermines the modern fantasy that humans
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are on one side of the divide and a homogeneous group called “animals” is on the
other. Derrida writes,
Philosophers have always judged and all philosophers have judged that
limit to be single and indivisible, considering that on the one side of that
limit there is an immense group, a single and fundamentally
homogeneous set that one has the right… to mark as opposite, namely the
set of the Animal in general…. It applies to the whole animal kingdom
with the exception of the human (40-1).
Animality, understood as the site of limitless sexual differences, overturns this received
order and allows a feminist engagement with animals that does not fall prey to fantasies
of a Nature from which Politics is absent.
Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto, an account of the complexity of dog-human
interdependence and co-evolution which argues for the necessity of a posthuman or
animal political ontology, ends with a rather racy sex scene. She makes the case that
dogs are not “natural,” using the example of complex, unique sexual play between two
dogs, one of which is spayed:
None of their sexual play has anything to do with remotely functioning
heterosexual mating behavior—no efforts of Willem to mount, no
presenting of an attractive female backside, not much genital sniffing, no
whining and pacing, none of that reproductive stuff. No, here we have
pure polymorphous perversity that is so dear to the hearts of all of us who
came of age in the 1960s reading Norman O. Brown. The 110 pound
Willem lies down with a bright look in his eye. Cayenne, weighing in at 35
pounds, looks positively crazed as she straddles her genital area on top of
his head, her nose pointed towards his tail, presses down and wags her
backside vigorously. I mean hard and fast. He tries for all he’s worth to
get his tongue on her genitals, which inevitably dislodges her from the top
of his head. It looks a bit like the rodeo, with her riding a bronco and
staying on as long as possible. They have slightly different goals in this
game, but both are committed to the activity. Sure looks like eros to
me. Definitely not agape (99).
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Haraway’s political philosophy depends on the claim that humans and dogs (and many
other animals) are semiotic agents10 in the production of naturecultures. The central role
played by non-reproductive sex play is crucial to her position, which seeks to
undermine the notion that animals are programmed by nature while humans are not
(and insofar as they are, they are animals). Haraway denaturalizes animal sex at the
same moment that she endows the dogs with not just desire, but sexual agency: “they
invented this game” (100). Note the importance of the claim that this is eros and not
agape, perversity and not necessity—in short, a certain sense of indeterminacy,
possibility, rather than bondage to a stable and knowable script of practices and
significations.
Invention—in the form of non-reproductive sexual practice—appears here as an
alternative to a view of nature as programming, as ordered, predictable and thus
controllable. It plays the same role in Haraway’s text as the limitless plurality of
sexualities does in Derrida’s. In the work of these theorists the animal understood as a
sexual agent becomes the figure of radical possibility and openness. If bestiality is
defensible, it is so not on the grounds that as animals we are all programmed by nature
(and so both the bitch in heat and the man who enjoys penetrating her can’t help
themselves), but that posthuman sexuality means precisely the possibility of agency,
resistant practices, queer bodies, and culturally unintelligible pleasures, and that within
this landscape no practice may be prohibited preemptively. As philosophers know,
however, agency does not erase power structures or protect the agent from
exploitation. We also know that with agency comes responsibility, which means that no
practice among agents is immune to ethical examination. It is precisely when we take
animals to be agents that interspecies sex becomes irreducible to questions of pleasure
for the parties involved (pace the zoophile’s insistence on the pleasure of the animal
partner). Thus, while a denaturalizing of animal sexualities makes it impossible to
prohibit bestiality preemptively, it remains possible (and perhaps becomes even more
urgent) to make post-emptive prohibitions, upon ethical examination of cultural
constructs, beliefs, and practices in the presence of existing power structures.
In contrast to the view that would have us believe that animality=sexuality=nature=
woman, posthuman animality explodes the universalizing category of Nature as
homogeneous and predictable. It is this figure of the animal with which feminist
critique should engage today precisely because it unmistakably announces that we
don’t know what we thought we knew about any of the players in the above equation--
about sex, women, and least of all about “nature.” The task, then, may be more
accurately described not as re-inscription of the animal in feminism, but as the
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inscription of a wholly new imaginary of animality, the condition for the possibility of
new imaginaries of gender.
Notes
I’d like to thank Cara O’Connor for her insightful commentary on this piece and for
Anne O’Byrne for organizing the “Feminists and Other Animals” symposium at SUNY
Stony Brook, February 2009.
1. See also the account of zoos as an instance of pornography in Acampora (2005).
2.
<http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20080708_11_A
vete78514&allcom=1>
3. For more on this subject, see my article “Democracy and Pornography: On Speech,
Right, Privacies, and Pleasures in Conflict,” forthcoming in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist
Philosophy 26:1.
4. <http://www.animallaw.info/articles/ovuszoophilia.htm>
5. < http://lists.envirolink.org/pipermail/ar-news/Week-of-Mon-20030804/004730.html>
6. My point is not that consent is a more important category, or that consent and agency
are the most significant concerns to raise in the problematic of animal sexuality. My
point is more modest: that sexual agency is an important problem to raise about
animals from a feminist perspective.
7. Take the ubiquitous “Rabbit Vibrator” (made famous by the television show “Sex and
the City”), which has a soft little vibrating animal attachment, working to stimulate the
clitoris while the penis-shaped shaft does the work of penetration. The animals depicted
are almost exclusively rabbits (hence the name) and dolphins, with occasional
appearances by mice and seahorses. These products are marketed (apparently with
great success) exclusively to women, arguably to sexually self-aware, adventurous,
perhaps even queer or “fluid” women. The animals in play are sexy (rabbits and
dolphins) or diminutive (mice and seahorses), and note the absence of any figures of
masculine virility, like dogs or horses. What exactly is happening here? This is one
example of a cultural phenomenon which Adams’s particular way of reading the
Margret Grebowicz- – When Species Meat
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intersection of women and animals in pop culture does not help us to analyze robustly
(though, to be fair, her own analysis is concerned exclusively with the welfare of
material animals, not semiotic puzzles like this one).
8. A self-described Marxist feminist, MacKinnon nevertheless offers an important
resource for this conversation by opening the space for the question of meaningful
consent of animals. How might an analysis of commercial bestiality pornography
benefit from Haraway’s writing about labor, inequality, relations of use, and freedom in
the context of the work animals do in experimental labs (2007, 73-77)?
9. <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1582336,00.html>
10. In future projects, I hope to work out exactly what is meant by “agency” in a
Harawayan schema. This remains a difficult and ambiguous term in her work.
Works Cited
Acampora, Ralph. “Zoos and Eyes: Contesting Captivity and Seeking Successor
Practices.” Society & Animals, 13:1 (2005): 70-88.
Adams, Carolyn. The Pornography of Meat. London: Continuum, 2003.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 2004.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Willis. New York:
Fordham UP, 2008.
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant
Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
―――. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: UP, 2007.
Latour, Bruno. The Politics of Nature. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
2004.
MacKinnon, Catherine. Feminism Unmodified. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.
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Volume 1, Number 2 (Winter 2010)
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―――. “Of Mice and Men: A Fragment on Animal Rights.” The Feminist Care Tradition
and Animal Ethics. Ed. Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams. New York: Columbia
UP, 2007. 316-332.
Singer, Peter. “Heavy Petting.” Nerve, 2001. <http://www.nerve.com/opinions/singer/
heavypetting/.>
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