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 Anthrosexual Questionnaire

I came across again a piece titled, "The Language of Sex: The Heterosexual Questionnaire" by one M. Rochlin.  It made me giggle, so I thought I would adapt some of it for use here, as well as add a few of my own things.  1-18 are from the original questionnaire, which was obviously meant to highlight heterosexism, turning on their head a lot of questions that, at the time, were being asked of and about homosexuals.  Please note that, although it may seem like it sometimes on this blog, I'm not trying to pick on or appropriate the LGBT movement; I simply admire their ability to make an entire culture stop and think for a moment about their ideals pertaining to sexual morality.  I am also not trying to "convert" anyone to exclusive zoosexuality.  I do not even believe this is possible, nor, in our current cultural climate, is it particularly desirable.  I simply hope that you find this list entertaining and perhaps a little thought-provoking.

1. What do you think caused you to be attracted to men and/or women?
2. When and how did you decide you were only attracted to humans?
3. Is it possible that your anthrosexuality is just a phase you may grow out of?
4. Is it possible that your anthrosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of animals?
5. Is it possible that all you need is a good non-human lover?
6. If you've never slept with an animal, how do you know you won't prefer that?
7. Why do you insist on flaunting your sexual attraction to humans?  Can't you just be who you are and keep it quiet?
8. Why do anthrosexuals place so much emphasis on sex?
9. Why do anthrosexuals feel compelled to force others into their own lifestyle?
10. Nearly all child molestors are primarily anthrosexual.  Do you believe it's safe to expose children to anthrosexual people?
11. Men and women think very differently.  Can a hetero-anthrosexual relationship really work?
12. With all the societal support marriage receives, the divorce rate is spiraling.  Why are there so few stable relationships among anthrosexuals?
13. Disease transmission from animals to humans due to sexual activity is much lower than that between humans, due to the lack of cross-species STIs.  Is it really safe for someone to maintain an anthrosexual lifestyle and run the risk of disease and pregnancy?
14. How can you become a whole person if you limit yourself to compulsive, exclusive anthrosexuality?
15. Considering the menace of overpopulation, how could the human race survive if everyone were anthrosexual?
16. Could you trust an anthrosexual therapist to be objective?  Don't you feel he/she might be inclined to influence you in the direction of his/her own leanings?
17. Have you looked into methods, such as aversion therapy, that can be used to cure your anthrosexuality?
18. Do anthrosexuals hate animals?  Is that why they are anthrosexual?
19. How can you be certain that your human partner is consenting to sexual intercourse?
20. Humans fake enjoyment of sex with great frequency: 60% of women and 25% of men state that they have faked orgasm.  How likely do you feel it is that your human partner is not getting anything from your sexual relationship?
21. Are you attracted to humans because animals do not find you attractive?
22. If your partner does not explicitly say, "Yes, I want to have sex," it is rape.  Do you consider yourself a rapist?
23. Some people are, let's face it, pretty stupid.  Do you believe it would be wrong for you to have sex with an intellectually inferior individual?
24. With rape being this common in the human world -  one in four women are raped at least once in their lifetimes (Greenberg, Bruess, Haffner, 2000) - is it fair to say that humans do not have a real idea of sexual consent?
25. Do you think that, during a woman's "time of the month," she is capable of giving proper consent?
26. You can injure your human partner during sex: roughly one third of American adults being injured during intercourse every year (according to medical insurance companies).  Is having sex safe for both you and your partner?
27. Power differences are commonly large between human partners: many marriages include only one spouse who works to keep food on the table.  Is it wrong for such a couple to have sex with this power difference?
28. Humans are notoriously unconcerned about nature.  Don't you think it's better to become more intimate with the non-human world?
29. In South Carolina and Michigan, oral sex, even between heterosexual married couples, was illegal prior to 2003.  Do you feel that couples who practiced oral sex in these states prior to 2003 were perverts or criminals?
30. Anthrosexual intercourse is disgusting.  Why would you ever want to do it in the first place?

knotty.me

Over the last month, a new zoo community has sprung up that's quite different from the rest I've seen.  It is in its infancy, but I'm writing this post hoping that it continues on the distinguished road that has presented itself before it.  You can consider this a hearty recommendation.

A little while ago, I tore apart the zoo community, mostly that of Beastforum.  A little while before that, I also tore into EFA.  These communities, which have been prevalent at one point or another, have incurred my wrath for two separate reasons.  Beastforum is a junction of pornography and abusers.  EFA has done all the wrong things in trying to accomplish its mission to achieve zoo rights.  Both communities, along with the admittedly better ZoophilesForum and every other zoophilic community out there that I have seen, are also victims to the internet imbecile, who is shockingly common and makes that guy you heard rambling about grocery stores and government conspiracies on public transit seem calm and enlightened.

On the other hand, knotty.me is a new and small community so far entirely made up of insightful and romantic zoophiles, despite its name (which was chosen because it originally was going to be a porn site, but things changed and it was realized that there is a high demand for a site that is explicitly non-explicit).  I've barely even seen a typo there, let alone a statement that makes me want to throttle someone.  Porn is without exception outlawed; if it's something someone might conceivably masturbate to, you won't find it here.  Instead, you will find discussions on animals, support, news, and places to exchange experiences and advice regarding being an individual in one of the world's most despised minority groups.  Not to mention that the people there are genuinely friendly and supportive.  It's young yet, but in the month since its formation, and with nearly 100 registered users (and a high of 20 on at one time) there has yet to be anything even reminiscent of online drama.  And should there ever be, I feel the administrator is quite adept at managing not only the forum's software, data, and your privacy which is stringently kept, but also the community aspect of the forum.

So, if you're one of the many who have been groaning at the fact that everywhere you go on the internet that advertises itself as a 'zoophilic' community is full of idiots and genitals, and you would give anything for some pleasant, clean, and intelligent conversation with some friendly fellow zoos - or maybe you're reading this and just wondering if there are zoophiles out there besides me who are funny, clever, and incredibly handsome - you should definitely give knotty.me a look.  And maybe, if the forum continues to thrive, we'll eventually get that much-needed name-change.

http://forum.knotty.me

The Mish Posish

This post will contain some naughty pictures of animals.  It's nothing worse than you would see on a PG-rated production on the Discovery Channel, but if you're particularly sensitive on account of being on this blog, I totally understand.  If it makes you feel better, I find primates icky.

---

There's something I heard, again, a while ago that I kind of want to talk about now.  The first time I heard it, it was from a primatologist, and this statement is part of the reason I sometimes have difficulties with primatologists.  I have also seen it quoted online, though, in the years since bonobos became the animal of the day. (Now it's the honey badger.) The statement is, roughly, this: Bonobos are more sexually/interpersonally evolved than other animals on account of the fact that they have sex while facing each other.

Bonobos have only been identified as a species for a little over half a century or so, depending on who you ask.  They have only been intensely researched for a few decades.  Zoologists and comparative psychologists were of course astounded by the unique behaviour of the species: in contrast to their close chimpanzee relatives, they are quite nonviolent, females hold a lot of power, and they have lots and lots of crazy sex.  They have sex for many reasons: they have sex to calm everyone down, to build relations, or even to exchange favors.  They have sex with the opposite sex; they have sex with the same sex.  They have sex with their juveniles.  And, what was for some reason astonishing to researchers, they have sex in the missionary position.

The reason given was that because they are having intercourse face-on, it must add to the idea that sex in bonobos, like in humans and unlike in nearly every other animal, must play a very important social role and may even suggest a loving context.  After all, the face is the main outlet of emotion in primates, and we are a highly visual taxonomic order.  I say they are fascinated, "for some reason," though, because of this

this

and even this

Ignoring the fact that I probably have far too many pictures of lions at quick access, most ethologists would tell you that there isn't a whole lot going on between a male and female lion when they're doing their thing up to fifteen times a day.  Lions are also not terribly visual: they rely mostly on smell, like most mammals.  So what exactly is the deal here?

Well, as for why animals do it... we're not entirely sure.  Quite possibly, as it is with humans and weird positions, it's just a cool thing to do.  As for why some don't, though, or don't that often, it comes down to anatomy: if you've ever looked at a dog on his or her back, they're not quite as, erm, accessible as is a human on his or her back.  Any effort to make them more so would likely lead to at least some discomfort, particularly if you are a quadruped, with a quadrupedal spinal structure: you would need to have your entire body on top, pressing all the limbs that normally want to stick up back down, and things get way more complicated than is generally worth it.  In addition, a female is more prone on her back, and unable to escape.  A little more controversial, perhaps, but when you consider that rape seems much more common among apes, including humans, than quadrupeds, it may be that the missionary position developed to keep females safe and males "productive" among those species were rape is more frequent.

In any case, some primates in particular seem to have evolved towards the missionary position.  The spines of Old World apes are more erect.  Our limbs are very flexible.  Apart from humans, there is no animal that better exemplifies these crucial qualities than the bonobo.

On a side-note, and as an excuse for one more picture, have you ever wondered why human women have much larger breasts for their size than those of any other mammal?  It's not because of milk production: breast size has no impact on that.  It's not a conspiracy orchestrated by Playboy, either. (Or is it?) It's because they make a pretty great cushion in the missionary position, just as big butts do so in "doggy-style". (see Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, 1967) And bonobos look to be heading in that direction.

So, is there something special about the missionary position?  Quite honestly, not one bit.  It's a side-effect of the anatomy that evolution has given us, and bonobos just happen to be on a similar pathway.  Sorry, bonobo fans.

Zoo Rights

I look around that freaky part of the internet that is filled with zoosexuals and I see a whole lot of two things: firstly, the idiots/rapists/holy-shit-crazy people that I've already torn into quite enough for one month; secondly, people who have quietly accepted who they are but are saddened by the social stigma and fear they know they must live with until they die.  I recently had a chat with one such individual, and though this week I was going to do a quick silly post, that will be put on the back-burner so that I can whisper into the ears of all the rest of you dejected zoos.  I'm going to tell you why we are the next sex rights revolution.

This isn't because of crap like COMING SOON or predictions by Bill O'Reilly, although we should certainly be inspired by the success of the LGBT and other sex rights movements.  It's because, quite simply, we are right.

And people are starting to know that we're right: today, we in the western world are encouraged to question absolutely everything.  It started with creationism, branched off into religion as a whole, later into ethnocentrism and sexism, and finally into sex: we've questioned whether it really is wrong for a woman to be lustful and kinky, or for a man to love another man, and we are so used to questioning such things by now that we are beginning to be able to question whether it really is wrong for a human to fall in love with an animal, and to express that love physically.  If you don't believe me, check my last blog post, in which Peter Singer, who is among other things a supporter of zoo rights, was given a very prestigious award by the nation of Australia.

And it only takes a quick trip around the smarter places of the internet, and a good head on your shoulders yourself so that you can support a brief argument (or links to this blog ;) ) to find that when people are made to think about these things, the forward-thinking of them, which are a surprising amount, are quick to reach the conclusion that zoophilic intercourse is no more wrong than anything they might consider doing themselves.  The days in which we could fall back to religious arguments and knee-jerk reactions and have it work in science and politics are quickly leaving us here in the first world.

We have a leg-up, too, on the LGBT movement as it first started: it wasn't until 1974, after a lot of pressure from rights groups, that homosexuality was no longer regarded by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder.  With the release of the DSM IV in 1994, though, zoophilia (as it is called there) and other paraphilias (barring some exceptions) are only regarded as mental disorders if they cause significant distress or inhibition of daily functioning to the individual.  As such, few zoos, despite their fear of social stigma, fit this disorder, and zoophilia is a rare diagnosis.  The most that could be done is to have the name changed to fit the nomenclature we have established, and to have it include an addition to make it similar to the diagnosis of Sadism, in that it may also be considered pathological if it includes harm to another.  At the moment, zoophilia is only listed in Paraphilias Not Otherwise Specified.  The Word Health Association's ICD-10 has a similar thing going on, so the insanity argument is already null and void.

So what needs to be done for this push for acceptance?  It will of course be difficult and take a long time: although zooerasty is legal in many places, it is not widely accepted anywhere.  It therefore is not legislation that we need to be pushing for, but for a change in people's  collective mindset.  It involves getting allies: people who sympathize with and understand us, even if they are not zoophilic themselves.  If you're zoo, it involves coming out, where it is safe; at the moment, the only people who often come out are the ones you don't want to be associated with: these people who don't have the brains to fear society.  We need to mediate that fear, though, even if it's only on the internet, and get out and talk to people about our orientation.  Not getting up in people's faces, but should the topic come up, or should the opportunity to arise, we must become educators.  We must be well-armed with information and we must not back down from a debate.  You have the resources.

I also feel that women who typically orient towards male animals are crucial here.  The big argument against us is that animals cannot possibly consent to human intercourse.  We of course have all sorts of data and observation that is contrary, but unfortunately, with few if any scientific studies on this and no terribly good way to show people, it remains the largest argument against us.  The sad fact is that most people are unable to read animal body language, and will invent scenarios in which what they expect to happen is happening.  You can't exactly show them pornography (and if you can, please don't), but what about your own life?  Most people have great difficulty with the idea of a female raping a male, and even more if the male is an animal, due to anatomical reasons.  It's important, though, when your arguments involve explicit content, that you know how to sound professional, and know when to stop creeping out your opponent.  Keep it short and to the point.

Here is what I think: Telling the world that, contrary to popular belief, zoos exist outside of the realms of animated comedies, they love their animals, and that the time has come for them to get the facts and seriously think about them - this will be the heart of any movement towards acceptance.  If you're zoo, so long as you're safe and smart, you need not be afraid any longer.  Your coming freedom from the hatred of society rests on you, and it rests on us working as one entity.  Here's to a liberated future.