COMING SOON

COMING SOON is a documentary out of the Czech Republic that professes to address zoophile issues in a modern society.  It follows a small organization called EFA (Equality For All) that acts as an animal and zoophile rights activist group.  What the film is advertised as is a “groundbreaking push for bestiality rights”.  What it actually is is a long and veiled string of pointing and laughing that does nothing of the sort.

It opens with a masked ceremony in which a woman is being married to a horse, right off the bat depicting zoophilia – not even bestiality, yet – as something inhuman and disturbing.  No faces are seen, and the picture itself fits right at the bottom of uncanny valley.  Then it goes on to introduce said woman, now quite old, as she pontificates on how God made animals superior to man, with “cuddly” souls unblemished by mankind’s faults.

This, we find, is one of the film’s sanest moments.  It goes on so that we meet a man who believes his (human) wife was reincarnated in the form of a pig (which he was about to slaughter, being a butcher); a radical vegan who equates meat-eating to the Holocaust; an Arab who claims to have a forty-seven-centimeter-long phallus; and a fellow who believes himself to be a satyr in the body of a man, and who has and wears the outfit 24/7 to prove it (complete with yet another oversized penis).  In short, every single person interviewed is at least a little messed, and at most… well, the sky’s the limit as far as batshit insanity goes.

To qualify the schizophrenic cast is a schizophrenic presentation: there is no real continuity in the film at all.  We bounce from one subject to the other without so much as a conversational string to bind the subjects, even within a single interview.  Even within a single sentence.  The interviewees attempt to explain their arguments in consistently the worst possible way, whether it be changing the subject to something completely unrelated (like a long montage of people on the street being asked whether rape or murder is worse, or a slideshow of images of animal abuse) – or else to some wacky spiritual or religious debate.

And boy, do those debates crop up often.  From the very beginning, where God is mentioned, people go on to talk about souls, then to talk about some skewed version of the story of Eden, and then go straight to some of the most idiotic New Age tripe I've ever heard, filled with inaccurate historical references (the ancient Greeks approved of bestiality, right?) to a several-minute-long take of an elf-eared “shaman” shambling around a fire and making screeching noises.  But that isn’t where it stops.

This film, as I said, was made in The Czech Republic.  That’s right, the same The Czech Republic that, as of the year of the film’s production, is the 5^th least religious country in the world.  Meanwhile, we have these neo-pagans, these conversations about God and the Bible and spirits, a porn star who used to live in a monastery, and all sorts of other things that, quite frankly, I don’t believe one would find nearly so often in the Czech Republic.  But of course, nothing says, “nutjob,” like radical religiosity, and more and more we realize that this is the film's true goal.

And to cap it all: on the odd occasion that people are actually talking about 'zoophilia' rather than spirituality, vegetarianism, radical politics, or the time they lost their job at the zoo for trying to abduct a zebra, they are in fact always only talking about bestiality: about the sexual aspect.  There is no romance, there is no emotionality, and there is no humility that, in my opinion, should accompany any conversation regarding sexual topics simply out of respect for not only the dominant culture but for your partner and your mutual relationship.  It’s just one oversexed, delusional, incoherent piece of nonsense after another.

So, are you convinced that this documentary is in fact a mockumentary?  That much of it was no doubt staged, that these things depicted do not in fact exist?  Well, now’s when we get to the unfortunate part: that is, there are serious aspects in the film, or at least one serious aspect.  Even if it was entirely faked, it’s nothing short of slander that it’s included in such a heaping pile of tripe.  I’ve actually cropped out this part for you, so you can watch what it is I’m talking about without having to muster through the rest of the charade.  I warn you, though, that if you are particularly sensitive to scenes of physical abuse (of a human woman) or to gore, you may want to skip watching this and simply take my word for it.  Nevertheless, I recommend you have a look at it if you are interested in this issue.

 

This scene is horrifically different from every ludicrous section of the film both before and after it, and it comes right smack in the middle.  The most obvious difference between it and the rest is the emotionality: other individuals interviewed report having harrowing experiences, but this woman is the only one that seems at all emotional about it - supported by the fact that she is the one of the only interviewees for which subtitles are used rather than voice dubbing.  She is also literally the only person who talked at length about her emotional relationship with the animal.  On a related note, she is furthermore very easily the only one to say next to nothing about her sexual relationship: I would not be surprised if I could show someone this clip and tell them that she and the bull never actually did anything sexual.  She’s the only one who spoke with any sort of hesitation or modesty.  She’s the only one who never once expressed some radical viewpoint about the world or the relationships between people and animals.  And she never appears in the film again.

She’s also the only one who talked about what’s really important - what this film said it was setting out to do in the first place: zoophilia in society today.  What happened to her is horrendous.  I don’t believe I’m even only speaking for myself when I say that, provided this young woman’s story is true, her ability to press on in life is nothing short of incredible.  If it’s not true, though – and here’s where I start to get mad – it actually is anyway, because this sort of thing happens in real life.  It doesn’t matter one lick if the entire scene was completely scripted, because the reality of it is not.  So why the hell are these filmmakers shoving this comparatively reasonable woman’s incredibly poignant story into the middle of what is inextricably otherwise a complete farce?

I don’t have an answer to this, and it truly is infuriating.  Imagine if you will if someone decided to make a film about the trials homosexuals in some places are still going through. (To any homosexuals reading this who may not be totally on my side here, I apologize for using your demographic as an example.)  Imagine if in the middle of this film was a man telling his story about how he escaped a mob of neo-Nazis descending upon the home in which he lived with his partner.  He says that he only escaped after bearing witness to the bastards stabbing his boyfriend to death and scattering his bloody limbs across the room in which he was in.  Now imagine if the other hour and a half of this film was full of gays and lesbians, all with IQs of less than eighty: talking about how much they love fucking, giving obscure references to Wicca and Gnosticism that somehow prove that homosexuality is superior to heterosexuality, dreaming of building a world in which homosexuality is totally approved of so that, by natural process, everyone would be gay, and whatever other nonsense one might conceive.  How would you feel about the filmmakers?  How would you feel about this man depicted who had been forced to watch as his significant other was brutally murdered?  Now, how do you think the rest of the world would feel about how this film depicts homosexuality?  How about, again, that one section?  I’ll give you the answer: it would be called the most offensive shit of the decade, it would be banned in many nations, and its producers would be sued into cardboard boxes in back alleys.  A sheer farce on homosexuality may be called offensive, and may get a few death threats; but that insertion of something that is truly serious as though it’s just another part of the parody would mean the literal end of careers.

Why isn’t that the case here?  Why, instead, is this mockumentary lauded as “funny and thought-provoking” by so many critics?  Simply, it’s because people hate zoophiles.  It doesn’t take much to put two and two together: this film has anything in mind but the intent of sparking a zoophilic rights movement.  It’s just one more nail in the coffin of such a rights movement, whether inadvertently or otherwise.  As though we needed more media talking about how disturbed, antisocial, diseased, and vapid zoophiles are, we now have an entire movie about it – and it’s the one that says it’s for equality.  This is all we’ve got; it’s the closest we have to anyone in the mainstream media advocating understanding and acceptance of romantic human-animal relations.  Right in the middle of it is perfect material that might, in any other context, win hearts; inserted for just another squirm and a giggle.

COMING SOON is a problem, and it’s made possible by a group that professes to want to remove these problems.  EFA, also, has never achieved anything of worth; it’s only given this travesty of a documentary its support.  So quite honestly, fuck them both.  Yes, I’m going to close with that.  And to you, reader, I have a bit of perhaps a bit tangential advice: not only in the realm of controversial subjects such as this, but on all topics, do be sure you consider the origins and the motives of the published media you consume.  Consider to whom you give your support.  You may find this isn’t the only instance in which people proclaim one thing, but do the exact opposite.

September 2012: EFA, also, has never achieved anything of worth; it’s only given this travesty of a documentary its support - after it was filmed.  That's right, EFA doesn't actually exist: the website was established following the film, and there is no such organization in the Czech Republic.  Those who call themselves EFA on the site's 1990s-style guestbook are gullible people who found the place after COMING SOON.  The documentary was in fact created using actors entirely for the sake of trying to make something that is both convincing and filled with ironic humour, based on my conversations with individuals who had followed its production as well as my own looking into the dates of EFA's site and organizations in the Czech Republic.  So there you have it.

Sex with Animals Causes Cancer?

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"Am I a Zoophile?"

I get this question more often than one might think.  In this last week, I’ve had a couple people ask me this, and my answer comes down to, basically: what does the word “zoophile” even mean in the first place?

Obviously it means a love of animals, but what is the dividing line here?  If I have a dog, and I love him very much, consider him my best friend, and would rather spend time with him than anyone else, human or otherwise, am I a zoophile?  On the other hand, if someone sneaks into farms in the dead of night to bone random horses, is he a zoophile?  It’s a fact that most people don’t know the definition of a zoophile beyond that it’s someone who likes animals “a lot” – usually “too much”.

I don’t think this is a result of the usual stigma against zoophilia, though; rather, it may be the result of the death of a distinguished emotional relationship.  A zoophile is, quite simply and at the very least, someone who has or desires a romantic relationship with an animal.  Once again, though, we’re left with the question of what this means: we don’t know what romance is these days, beyond things like candlelit dinners and wedding proposals.  We don’t tend to do either of these things with the animals we love, so we must provide a more personal and less situational – and less anthropocentric – definition of romance.

Romance is love beyond that in friendship.  It involves a strong fixation that wants stimulation by all three basic senses, but primarily the haptic.  One wants to not just be close to someone, in terms of the mental and social – like how you and your friend share all secrets you have between each other, and thus you are “close” – but also physically close.  This is in preference to being physically close to any other individual.  It’s also an extreme form of friendship in which one will do anything within their power for the sake of another.  Importantly: this friendship and this desire for closeness are reciprocated.  Feelings of romance do come and go, as they’re feelings that take an awful lot out of us, but two people who often have romantic feelings for each other are said to be a romantic couple.

Given this definition, many people do not believe that it is possible for a human and a non-human animal to be in a romantic relationship.  However, it does happen quite frequently; it simply goes unacknowledged.  We often hear about dogs sacrificing greatly for their human owners.  We know of cats that are with their owners all the time, and are so tuned into their emotions that they seem able to sense them from the other side of the building.  The reality is that it is not the animal aspect that is usually the barrier to a romantic relationship: it’s the human that is unwilling or unable to reciprocate.  Our senses are just no match for theirs, and in a lot of ways because of this, we have troubles understanding them.

Some people do, however, manage this.  And those who are at the same time willing to be literally in a relationship with an animal are what we call zoophiles.  But that’s not all that terrifying, people say: it’s perhaps a little odd to love your cat that much, but nothing outrageous.  When we think of zoophilia, we think less of someone who is mutually cuddling his or her furry companion, and seems happiest only when with them, and more of the guy who’s boning his neighbor's sheep in the dead of night.  This perception is false.

Zoophilia usually does involve sexual interaction with animals.  This is because, as humans, we believe that romance naturally leads to sex.  Animals, as creatures without culture and thus without reverence of sex, think of things the other way around, but that’s for another time.  The point I will make here is that there are people who have sex with animals without that romantic relationship, and who have no inclination to forge such a relationship.  These people are not zoophiles: they are what we tend to call bestialists (although bestiality technically means any intercourse between a human and an animal, regardless of the circumstances, a better term is zooerasty).  The zoophilic community will often show their disdain for such individuals.

One does not need to be a zooerast to be a zoophile, or to be a zoophile to be a zooerast, in the same way that one doesn’t need to be homosexual to have intercourse with members of the same sex, and one does not need to have said intercourse to be homosexual.  However, most people who are or do one thing tend to also fit into the other group.  Is this true about zoophilia and bestiality, though?  I would say that it is.  The people we tend to hear about in the news and other media that have abusive intercourse with animals are not zoophiles, but these people are not representative of the zooerast population: they are the people that have difficulty containing themselves, and are often disordered in one way or another in that fulfilling their sexual urges becomes top priority for them.  They have little interest in the romantic.  Those that do – and are thus zoophilic – tend to be more difficult to spot and less likely to sneak into their neighbor’s barn.  Although this is not an area where reliable statistics are easy to come across, from personal experience I would suggest that the zoophilic population is much higher than that of bestialists and “fence-hoppers”: one study shows that fifteen percent of males have had some sort of intentional sexual contact with an animal at some point in their lives.  As much as three percent have continued to do so.  This is a much higher figure than we would think, given that each time another sheep-shagger is arrested, every news blog in the world has something about it.  It’s on this discrepancy between the bestialists who are detained, and the more covert zoophiles, that I base my claim that the latter group is larger than the former.

What about the other way around?  Are there many people who are in romantic relationships with their animals, but not sexual relationships?  This may also be a higher number than we realize, but these people do not often call themselves zoophilic, due to the word’s sexual connotations.  Indeed, they may not even think themselves particularly abnormal; I know many of these people.  There are those, though, that call themselves asexual zoophiles: people who truly love their animals, but have no interest in becoming sexually active with them.  It is a complex topic, and one that really can’t be resolved at the moment.

But really, it’s just a word: zoophile.  It’s a complicated word that attempts to describe a person, like “Christian”, “democrat”, or “bisexual”; and this means that its definition is deceptively difficult to pin down.  Originally, the word literally did just mean “someone who loves animals” – it was in fact used by animal welfare activists before their mortal enemy, the kitty-diddler, stole it from them.  Its definition changes with how people use it, so if you’re asking yourself right now, “Am I a zoophile?” think about this: would you call yourself a zoophile?  Does it benefit you to do so?  Does acquiring this new label help you understand yourself better?  If not, then don’t even worry about it.  You are you, and, as any real zoophile knows, words are overrated: they can’t express love so easily.  And isn’t love what really matters?

Woman Poses Nude in Horse Carcass

While doing a bit of work, I discovered an article today regarding a young woman, a photographer, and an ex-horse.

A twenty-one year old Oregon woman was photographed nude nestled in the corpse of a horse.  The horse had died in a relatively normal way for a horse in that it was euthanized.  The woman was the same person that did the euthanizing.

She apparently did this bit of posing so that she could “feel at one with the horse”.  It’s not for pornographic purposes.  It’s presumably not for the family photo album either.  She just felt that the most natural thing to do with a dead horse is to bury oneself in its entrails.

I don’t know if she loved the horse.  The article I read makes some jibes at the idea of her being a furry (which any self-respecting furry would no doubt find ridiculous if not offensive), but she doesn’t say anything herself explicitly regarding her relationship with the horse.  At any rate, she went on to do what must have felt like the other natural thing to do with a creature one wants to “feel at one with” and ate it.

Now, I’m not into horses, though I have no problem with those who are.  What I do have a problem with is people taking advantage of animals – particularly, those people who are what’re called zoosadists.  Horse-rippers.  People who get pleasure out of the destruction of animals.  For me, this article sets off a few alarms regarding this.  Maybe I’m just being a little paranoid, but if I were in charge of the world, this woman would be submitted for psychiatric evaluation to ensure that, young as she is, in a few years she might not decide to create some more corpses with which to “feel at one”.

And even if she wouldn’t, this kind of story doesn’t do anyone any favours.  People see this crazy broad dressing up in a fresh equine ribcage and spewing eerily romantic things about it, and they immediately jump to the conclusion that she’s “one of those furries or bestialists or what have you”.  Because this is what furries and bestialists do, of course.  And we can’t fault them for thinking that, because that’s all they ever see: insane buggers and buggettes doing insane things.

So hell, lady.  If you actually do love horses that much, try and be a little more ‘normal’ about it.  If you don’t want to be normal about it, at least don’t take freaking pictures and get yourself in news articles and blog sites over it.  And if you absolutely must crawl into your lover that you just killed and have your friend snap shots of your implied necrozoophilia, then at least be prepared to explain your feelings in some way that will at least make some sense to someone.  Even in the zoo community, “I loved him so I killed him and then posed naked in his open chest before eating him for my dinner,” translates to, “I’m a psychotic bitch dancing on the line between legality and illegality to see just how many people I can make vomit.”

Represent.  Born to be zoo and all that jazz.  But if that’s the case, at least try and do a good job of the representing.  We have enough crazies in the media as it is, thanks.