Some Thoughts on Beastiality and Relevance

So. BB's been talking about beastiality, with mixed responses, and I thought that I was going to weigh in with something insightful eventually, but I guess I don't have anything terribly insightful to say.

Of course, that has never stopped me in the past. And yes, I have something really mean to say. In fact, if you want to keep liking me, I suggest you stop reading this post right now.

I'll give you some space to think about it.





I don't care about animal rights.

There, I said it. Yes, I feel better getting that off my chest. Please don't misunderstand -- I think cruelty to animals is bad. But my care for animal rights falls, in the list of the top 100 of things I care about, somewhere around 99.

So it really bugs me when Biting Beaver makes an excellent, insightful post about beastiality being used primarily as a pornographic or sadistic weapon to hurt women and everyone spends time either talking about how such a practice is cruel to the ANIMAL or whether or not such-and-such radical feminist gave a shit about how animals were treated when the bigger issue, of course, is how human women are treated.

It also makes me sad to hear people dismiss my personal favorite of Andrea Dworkin's work, the great Woman Hating. Maybe I'm just biased, as it was the first work of hers that I read and I have a soft spot for "first works" of authors, but I really dug her arguments in favor of androgyny in the idea of the "ideal" androgynous society. I get much amusement at how such arguments and language has been co-opted by people who tend to call radical feminism "essentialist" and gender "performative" as though gender performativity was somehow related to anything other than very essentialist ideas about gender.

I mean, I do not buy whatsoever any reasoning that positions women "closer" to nature as men or any Paganistic-styled concepts about women being of the earth and the water and the sky. That said, I do not see human women as being separate from animals and I do not think we should ignore our responsibility to try not to fuck up the planet for the rest of the species out there as much as we already have. But, seriously, don't try telling me that women somehow have a keener sense of this responsibility, a "maternal instinct" if you will, about helping the Earth. Somehow, I think this is almost as presumptuous as a childfree woman telling a mother how to raise her child, or a man coming into a woman's group with brand-new ideas for the group's focus. I think Mother Earth really wants us to leave her the fuck alone, is what I think. But since we do have to clean up our messes, at least we can do so in a guilty and apologetic, "Sorry, dudette," way, instead of a santimonious, "I sing with Gaia!" kind of way.

But back to beastiality, and cruelty to animals in the larger sense. You know what? Honestly, isn't domestication sort of cruel? A whole ton of animals who aren't able to take care of themselves and have to rely on humans -- a WHOLE OTHER SPECIES -- to take care of them? I'm not talking about our efforts to bring up the panda population or some other species that we whoops, our bad, brought to near extinction. I'm talking about house pets. Nevermind what we're doing to farm animals for half a second -- what have we done to dogs and cats and horses*?

You see this problem of "animal cruelty"? And you see this problem of the response, "but they like it"? Fellow anti-pornsters, have we not heard this argument in other contexts?

I think my biggest beef (pun unintended) with animal cruelty issues is basically this: if this is your number one issue in life, then you are either really isolated or really lucky. It reminds me of yeshiva kids arguing about the specifics of whether or not this thing is truly kosher or not. However relevant that might be, it's probably not as relevant as at least 98 other topics for a Jew with his/her nose out of the Talmud.

Everything pretty much always comes back to the Jews for me. I should probably insert an "oy" here. Remind me to talk about why I think Godwin's so-called law is anti-Semitic.

*Yes, I realize that these animals are also sometimes "farm" animals. I mean to make a differentiation between animals used for labor and animals as pets. Sometimes "farm" animals are pets, and sometimes they're labor. You know what I mean. The point is, we do mention from time to time the idea as animal-as-labor as "cruel" but rarely do we mention this about pets. This makes me think that the idea of "cruelty" can be almost as subjective in respect to animals as it is to humans, in our minds.