Scientists Still Clueless

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/two-animals-species-sex-zoophilia-monkey-deer-japanese-macaque-female-sika-interspecies-sexual-a7519706.html

Just a quick post to let you know I'm still alive. Apparently the first ever "consensual" intercourse between species has been documented, and the researchers looking into it are still clueless about how or why this could possibly happen. Now they're getting down to it being a natural reaction to mate deprivation in combination with estrus.

It makes one wonder when they'll finally decide to just talk to us if they want to understand us, and find that we aren't all oversexed, lonely abusers. Or maybe it's time we started talking to them.

Sexuality and Psychology

Sexuality is rather prevalent in a lot of what we are and do.  If you look into personality disorders and thus their corresponding personality types, you'll see their specializing researchers listing their sexual tendencies as well.  People with borderline personality disorder/type tend to have very active, multi-partner, intense sex lives.  People with schizoid personality disorder/type tend to have the opposite, but have incredibly active fantasy lives, often right down to pertaining to specific fantastic interests, specifically the idea of returning to the womb. (Guntrip, Harry. Schizoid Phenomena, Object-Relations, and The Self. New York: International Universities Press, 1969.)

Of course, not all of us have these extreme personality types, but if we consider the research of some psychologists, these personality types seem to correspond to high or low values on scales used in personality inventories that we have today. (Mullins-Sweatt SN, Widiger TA. The five-factor model of personality disorder: A translation across science and practice. In: Krueger R, Tackett J, editors. Personality and psychopathology: Building bridges. New York: Guilford; 2006.)

Although perhaps the best place for this observation would be as the root of a study rather than a blog post, given these two observations together it would make sense to presume that sexuality is quite deeply linked to our personalities, and therefore everything we are and do.

It would also account for the conflicting but consistently present and simultaneously true views that personality is both quite static, by definition, and does not change from day to day (for instance, the fact that you are grouchy one day because your boss yelled at you is not changing your personality for that day, it's changing your mood), personality does seem capable of changing over time, as people's values on even our most up-to-date inventories do fluctuate.  Sexuality is the same: we see sexuality as crystallized by the time we're finished puberty, but I'm sure most adults can attest that they are not interested in the same things sexually they were ten years ago, and are interested in something new these days.

What this link between sexuality and personality means is that our sexualities are, simultaneously, both entirely natural and not under our control, but are also formed by our persistent environments, traumatic events, and other things that happen to us.  It also means sexuality is potentially even more complex than most people realize and should be given more consideration when measuring, using very broad terms, exactly who a person is.

Cambridge: Animals as Conscious as Humans

I'm about a month late to the show; summer is the season of the slowest transmission of academic information for reasons that are probably obvious, but:

"...the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates."

Link.

What else is there really to say but, "It's about damn time"?  This is less of a scientific breakthrough and more of a political one: the stuff brought up in this conference has been basic knowledge for quite a long time.  That's a good thing: it means that it's actually going to get around to public knowledge rather than get holed up in some journal somewhere that no layman will ever hear of let alone read - especially since Stephen Hawking attended the signing, and it was also featured on 60 Minutes.

So, it's a little early now, but what can we expect to get from this?  First of all, probably a slower rate of advancement in neuroscience and medicine in general.  This sounds like a bad thing, and it may be, but it will be as a result of more stringent regulations on animal testing.

Then again, it may also more strongly suggest that animal testing is more valid, meaning you will get the same level of advancement for fewer tests.  Wherever you go there are always people saying that you can't go off of just a few animal trials because animals aren't the same as humans.  This is obviously still true, but when it comes to psych and some areas of neurosci that don't explicitly involve the neocortex, we may start being able to get more for less.

Most importantly, we'll get public acknowledgment of the worth of animals as individuals.  It's unfortunate how many people you can come across today who don't believe animals really have thoughts and feelings; these tend to be people who either were never close at all to their pets or didn't have pets at all, in my experience, which is a growing percentage of the population with continued urbanization.

As I noted before, this conference is geared primarily as a social and philosophical change rather than a scientific one, so this, I think, is where we'll start to see the most change.  It will come slowly, and perhaps I'm jumping the gun just a little here, but I would hazard that the global and inevitably successful anti-anthrocentrist movement has already begun.  As it progresses, we'll see not only changes in the way people see animals, but the way we see the natural world at large: suddenly our non-human neighbors become far more important, and conservation becomes an issue.  Environmental decline could slow as a result.  Social things too, of course: with the acknowledgment of animal consciousness, animal intelligence is only a couple steps away, and with that the rights of zoophiles.

All this from one conference?  No.  But it's a start.  I like to be optimistic, because in my experience if you publicly assume that something is going to happen, people around you believe so as well and change their behaviour accordingly, so as far as I'm concerned this is just a big step towards all of these big transformations of society and academia.  Spread the word; save the world.

I don't know when my next post will be, but the moral of the story is that if you have some news or something otherwise fascinating for me to write about, I will drop everything to do so.  Good work, "lovingpegasister".

Female Zoos and Sample Bias

Nearly every article, academic or not, that I find on "zoophilia" or "bestiality" (because they're the same thing, right?) is quick to point out that sex with animals seems to be an almost entirely male phenomenon.

I know for a fact that a number of people reading this article will be raising their eyebrows, shaking their heads, and/or scowling, at least mentally.  The reason for this is often that they themselves are women.

So what's the deal?  Are these ladies outliers, little statistical blips in otherwise solid data?  Or is there something more?

In my personal experience - which cannot be used in research - female zoos are actually just as common as male zoos.  The trick to discovering this is to go on communities that are not specifically for zoophiles.  In being briefly open about my sexuality on a large online community, I received a lot of messages from people, many of which said, "Me too!" Roughly half of these individuals out of several dozen were female.  This in itself is bizarre, because in that community, only about a third of all users - zoosexual or not - were female.  This isn't the most scientific of ways of gathering data, but if we were to take it seriously, it would indicate that the majority of zoosexual individuals are female.

Let's look at another pseudo-statistic: On knotty.me, a non-pornographic forum I advertised a few weeks ago, at least two (possibly more) of the ten most active members are female.  So, fewer ladies, but still more than people tend to think exist.  We're getting closer to the source of the difference.

The simple fact is that not only do men tend to be on online communities more often than women, as evidenced by any "What is your gender?" poll you can find on an online forum, and not counting things like Facebook which are more gender-neutral, but they also tend to be far more often on online communities geared towards sexuality.  Men are more commonly visual sexual beings: we are more than twice as likely as women to view pornography on a regular basis, and so are probably more than twice as likely to find online communities and resources related to sexual activity.  These two facts are almost certainly responsible for a strong skew towards men in any study on paraphilias that use the internet as a source of participants, which is almost all of them.  It's very difficult to put an ad out on the street for pedophiles to call you or walk into your office, or approach random individuals in a shopping mall with clipboard in hand and the question, "Have you ever given your dog a blow job?" You get the idea.

And from that idea we get the other source of participants in studies on paraphilias, and the other bias: prisons.  One of the most commonly cited studies concerning zooerasty is a case study on a sex offender who also happened to rape animals.  People had no problem taking this to mean that it may be common for zooerasty to predict [other forms of] criminality.  The bias here is obvious, but prisons continue to be used as easy ways to get sample populations for studies on deviant behaviours of all kinds, and for one reason or another, prisons are primarily inhabited by men.  Just like with criminal pedophiles, despite the fact that women may make up a significant portion of sex offenders with a history of zooerasty, they are typically ignored by the academic community.

Once again, it always comes down to thinking about what you read.  Wonder about how the author got his or her information.  Look for similar conclusions reached in separate studies.  That goes for what you see here, too: I don't do professional research in this area because I'm aware that I have a very strong bias.

And for those lady animal lovers here: don't worry, you're not alone.  We have actually known this for a long time: in one study, out of 190 sexual fantasies of different women, 23 involved explicitly zooerotic activity. (Friday, 1973) Stay true to yourself.

For those who want more proof, there is actually a fellow zoo in the blogosphere who is female.  She's linked to ZP, so I'll link back to her here.  She does a bunch of stuff there and is quite a bit more personal and sexual than I am here, but if you're looking for other perspectives (or are into that sort of thing :P ) give Lexxi Stray a look.


Oh, and because these landmarks are important to me if to no one else: we just hit 5 000, er, hits.  It's to the point where I'm not even sure where they're coming from now, which is kind of too bad because I find that fascinating.  Oh well.  A big thanks once again to the readers, and especially the sharers!

The Furry Spectrum

This post is on a question that I get asked a lot.  Not via this blog, but other places, even places that don't know I am a zoo.  The question is: "are you a furry?" So yes, this post will be going a bit into what "furry" has come to mean, how it might or might not relate to zoophilia, and what this relation means in the grand scheme of things.

First of all, to answer that question is always tough for me; my response is generally along the lines of, "Kinda." I like furry art, certainly.  I'll confess I like furry porn.  I like animal fiction, and I've seen The Lion King many dozens of times.  Nala is a total hottie.  If this is all there is to furridom - a proclivity, a paraphilia, whatever - then most certainly I am, and I don't know a lot of zoos who aren't furries in this sense, particularly if we're counting "ferals" (that is, non-anthropomorphic anthropomorphic characters [?]).

On the other hand, I have little to nothing to do with the furry community, don't fursuit or anything like that, don't fancy myself anything other than a simple human, and quite honestly, a lot of self-professed furries would or do hate my guts.  To them, furry is more than just a weird interest in anthro and animal fiction, and I wouldn't count, particularly since people like me make them look bad.  And I can sympathize with this.

I'm not going to claim to be able to draw a line between these two parts of the furry fandom.  Whether I'm a furry or not will continue to be up to judges other than myself.  What I am going to do is draw a line between furry as a paraphilia and zoophilia.  Right after I erect these sandbags around my dwelling.

Alright, so, here's the thing: ever since Kinsey (1948) we have had the idea that sexuality, at least homosexuality, heterosexuality, and bisexuality, are not exclusive categories but are instead along a spectrum.  Later on, this became a series of two axes, which is now widely accepted:



For those who are unfamiliar, what this means is that everyone in the world fits somewhere on this graph: if they are further towards the top-right of the graph, they are more homosexual, and more highly sexual (towards hypersexuality) than the norm (on Y) and bisexuality (on X); if they are towards the bottom-left, they are more heterosexual and asexual (demisexual).  It should be noted that placement on this graph should be considered more diamond-like than square-like, as it is impossible to be 100% asexual and hetero/homosexual, and it is impossible to be 100% sexual (hypersexual) without being bisexual.

Now, it has been suggested, albeit sheepishly, that there may be more to this graph.  A hell of a lot more, to put it bluntly: there may be dozens more axes that can be placed here.  Unfortunately, there just isn't that much interest in research in this area, and no one cares to fund it, so you won't find it in your textbooks anytime soon.  These spectra range in all sorts of paraphilias: sadism-masochism, chronophilias (pedophilia to gerontophilia), anthrophilia-zoophilia, necrophilia-vitophilia(?), and whatever else.

You may think, after considering how generally well Kinsey has been accepted, especially given the time since the bulk of his research was conducted, that this would be a no-brainer.  There are, however, problems with these becoming widely accepted.  The first problem is that, as I mentioned, very little research has been done to support or fail to support such a paradigm shift, and there is no drive to conduct any.  Even pedophilia, which once might have got some interest from legal establishments, is actually quite well-controlled these days, and convicted pedos have some of the lowest recidivism rates of sex offenders.  The second problem is that the current versions of both the DSM and the ICD, which are the two manuals used most commonly by psychologists in making proper diagnoses, really like their categories, and all sexual disorders listed are categorical: that is, you can't be kind of a masochist, according to the APA and WHO.  Thirdly, society doesn't like these people; most of us don't like the idea that we all fit onto a pedophilic spectrum, a necrophilic spectrum, and whatever else.  It's not very scientific, but popular opinion has a much greater effect on the social sciences than we like to admit.

Now that I've finished that little rant, what exactly did it have to do with furries?  As the title implies, it is my personal belief that the furry fandom is on that theoretical anthrophilia-zoophilia spectrum, based on the fact that zoophilia is much more prevalent among furries (Evans, 2008), that I have met few if any zoos out of the many who are not at least mildly interested in some aspects of the furry fandom, and that if you brave it and actually look at furry communities and art, you can literally see that sliding scale.  This is not to say that all furries are secretly zoo.  In fact, it means quite the opposite: although a fair number of furries self-identify as zoos, if we consider that sexuality is incredibly difficult if not impossible to change, based on the fact that there is no 'cure' for homosexuality, pedophilia, etc., you can actually be quite sure that if someone is into furry porn but doesn't have any such interest in real animals, that they are not going to somehow progress into zoosexuality: they already have their place on the spectrum, and they are going to stay there, given that sexuality tends to crystallize by one's mid-twenties.  In short, if we accept that there is such a spectrum, we no longer feel the need to pigeon-hole people into one thing or another, or to make assumptions about someone fitting into some imaginary category simply because they're close.

If we extrapolate here to other sexualities, such as pedophilia, this can have some interesting implications, even affecting national legislation.  Lolicon - that is, children or childlike individuals portrayed sexually in drawings or animations - has come under a lot of fire in the last few years, with people being arrested for creating, distributing, or possessing it.  The idea is that people who view lolicon may eventually "graduate" to child sex abuse, either because they must already be pedophiles if they are viewing lolicon, or because the lolicon itself may make them become pedophilic.  If we consider that lolicon may be to pedophilia as furry may be to zoophilia, some research (already backed by the fact that there are a great many people who enjoy lolicon but are not pedophiles, evidenced by the success of certain television shows that would not exist if they only appealed to the ~3% of the population who are pedophilic) would end the equation of loli fans and pedophiles, and thus the fear and criminalization.

Something to think about.


By the way, over the last week, this blog hit 1,000 views.  Let's celebrate by getting 1,000 more, hm?  Whether you think this blog is insightful or disgusting, entertaining or insulting, don't be afraid to share it; no one will think less of you if you do. ;)

Ancient Lifestyles and Animals

Let's talk a little more about history: this time, the more ancient sort, before we had the concept that one could 'own' an animal any more than one 'owns' a child.

We'll start with what we can see with our eyes: in every corner of the world, one can easily find ancient graves in which there are animals buried with humans.  Often times, they were killed or sacrificed so that they could follow their masters into the afterlife.  Incidentally, this is also not uncommon with spouses, particularly wives, although suicide was more common here.  In Ancient Egypt, of course, we have millions of mummified cats, ibises, dogs, birds, and whatever else you might think of either given as a sacrifice to a relevant deity (because if your deity is represented by an animal, it logically follows that you should kill it) or, again, buried along with a human to accompany them in the next world.  Even in less structured regions, though, from Europe to the Americas to Japan, people are buried with their cats and their dogs.

Animals also crept frequently into the beliefs and the resulting art of these people: whether we're looking at tipi paintings in Montana or carvings on Norwegian jewelry, more often than not an animal will feature, frequently as the central aspect.  Old gods are often associated with animals: Horus and the falcon, Inari and foxes, Athena and her owl, Tezcatlipoca and his jaguar counterpart, Thor and his goats.  People became associated with animals, too: although when many of us, especially in the west, think of spirit animals, we think of Native American cultures, identical concepts existed all across the world essentially until the introduction of monotheism: the old Norse concept of fylgja mirrors precisely the idea of a spirit animal, which follows a person throughout their lives, representing them as part of their soul, and protecting them while they dream, and families in Japan are still sometimes represented by a zoomorphic deity.

Why was this?  What was so important about animals that has been lost today?  What has attracted us to animals so much?  First of all, from the earliest times, we have relied on them.  Today, when we say someone relies on animals, we think of beasts of burden, or food sources; however, until we started living close together in more urban settings, we instead lived closely with our animals.  Central heating didn't exist, so in colder climates people would sleep alongside their dogs to keep them warm.  Pesticides weren't exactly widespread, and since humans had not yet dethroned rodents as the number one carrier of human disease, cats were very often seen as protecting agents, hunting down those things that would not only deprive them of food but may well be the death of them through contagion.

Secondly, the divide between the human and non-human environments was not so distinct as it is today.  People both feared and respected the dwellers of the wild, and that often came to admiration, as we see so often in the association between deities and animals that had not at that time been domesticated.  Even as tarantulas bit us, snakes terrified us, wolves hunted us and foxes broke into the hen-house, and we were literally pitted against them, we recognized their power and wished for it ourselves, to be associated with these animals as our gods were.  This changed eventually as our prime nemeses in life came not from the climate and other species but from our fellow human beings.

The question we're left with is what precisely this means for us.  As noted in a previous post, it means that we're no longer as in-tune with our animal friends; that we have relegated them to a lower point than we once did and assumed them to be inferior to us, often to the point of having no consciousness of their own.  It also means, though, that we have lost touch with some of our own nature: many mental disorders, including schizophrenia and certain personality disorders, have roughly equivalent prevalence rates across the globe, mood disorders and anxiety disorders are most common in urban areas, where there is very little contact between species and very high contact within ours.  There is also a great deal of research on the negative correlation between depression rates and whether or not someone has a pet. (Hint: dogs are the best, but cats are great too, especially if you're female.) Animals have also proved very valuable in people with disorders like autism, (from Animals In Translation) and have other health benefits.

I already talked a fair bit about this before, so I won't yammer on, but it's something to think about: should we be looking backwards in time for our social and moral salvation?  In regaining a more mutual relationship with animals and animal nature, will we have a better sense not only of the world around us, but of who we are, and become more stable as individuals and a society?  In some ways, is the old better than the new?  I've obviously already made up my mind, but I invite the reader to do some research on his own, looking past the image of a boy and his puppy and thinking about what exactly the partnership depicted in that image means for each of its constituents.

Sex with Animals Causes Cancer?

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