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!
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