Quote of the day, the bestiality edition

[kat_lair]

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“Interspecies sexual assault is the product of a masculinity that sees women, animals and nature as objects that can be controlled, manipulated and exploited. Listen only to some of the sexist language that prepare the way for bodily sexual assault […] When a man describes women as ‘cows’, ‘bitches’, ‘(dumb) bunnies’, ‘birds’, ‘chicks’, ‘foxes’, ‘fresh meat’, and their genitalia as ‘beavers’ or ‘pussies’, he uses derogatory language to distance himself emotionally from, and to elevate himself above, his prey by relegating them to a male-constructed category of ‘less than human’ or, more importantly, ‘less than me’." (Beirne, 1997: 327)

Full Ref:
Beirne, P. (1997). Rethinking bestiality: towards a concept of interspecies sexual assault. Theoretical Criminology 1, 317–340.

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Comments

[moth2fic.livejournal.com]

The consent issue is, to me, paramount. Even for those who argue that some animals give a kind of non-verbal consent, the same 'rules' apply to animals as to children i.e. their consent is not valid. Nor can anyone, even an adult human, legally consent to gbh, so the fact that the animals can suffer badly adds weight to that. To add other arguments to the 'debate' is, to me, just an attempt to cloud the issue, in much the same way proponents of paedophilia do.

There's a passage in Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi where the author quotes an argument by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei about who is allowed to eat chickens that have been used for sex..... Basically, he restricts consumption to those at some kind of remove from the sex act.....

[kat-lair.livejournal.com]

Nod yeah, it's the consent issue that people will hopefully arrive at. What was interesting about some of the articles was the point they made about how the taboo about bestiality isn't about protecting animals but about defining the limits of humanity, our distinctiveness and elevated position, reflecting the Judeo-Christian anthropecentric worldview... Which yes, condemned the involved animals to death alongside the human. Both often got hung and burned...