Attraction vs Kink

Building on the last post, and inspired by a post I saw on the Zoophilia sub-reddit, I'd like to discuss the difference between what people like and what people want.

I have a close friend who is a self-defined masochist.  She loves humiliation, and has frequent fantasies about being cornered in an alleyway by multiple people and gang-raped.  This notion is of course very terrifying, and most people's immediate reaction is to ask why on earth she might think that would be a good thing to happen, but here is the answer: She doesn't.  She would never want that to happen to her in real life.  It's simply a fantasy that arouses her.

Many self-defined zoophiles actually fit into this paradigm.  Young and inexperienced boys, a lot of the time, quite used to masturbating to anything with visible naughty bits, they find themselves getting off to videos of animals having sex, or people having sex with animals, and imagine that this makes them zoophiles.  And sometimes it does, but sometimes they grow up, or they finally get the chance to be around the animal they thought they might like to be with, and it turns out they don't.  It's just a fantasy, more properly defined as faunoiphilia.

Others, as shown in the post that I'm thinking about, are more just voyeuristic.  These people are not zoophiles, but they may want to see their significant other (in my experience, usually a man wanting to see his girlfriend) having sex with an animal.  It's a factor of voyeurism as well as humiliation-focused sadism, given that the attractive aspect of it isn't seeing a beautiful girl with a beautiful animal, but rather a beautiful girl being taken by a base creature.  Unfortunately, it's often (not always, but often) a factor in abusive relationships, and these individuals are not zoophiles.

I think it's important to draw these distinctions and to be aware of them.  Usually the distinctions we draw are between those who love their animals and those who only use them for sexual gratification, but there are also those who claim to be zoophiles to begin with only to discover they are not — they didn't change, they simply never were, only thought they were because they couldn't distinguish between fantasy and desired reality — and there are those who enjoy watching animals having intercourse with people for reasons more connected to sexual sadism (and judging by the porn that exists out there, these people probably make up the large majority of its consumers). 

Zoophilia and Pedophilia

This is another topic I touched on in another post, a long time ago, but given the amount of discussion I've had on it recently I feel I ought to talk more about it.

Almost invariably, like some sort of sexual Godwin's Law, when debating with someone about the morality of zoosexuality my opponent will claim that zooerasty (or "be(a)stiality" as it is far more often termed, which as far as I'm concerned is like calling anal sex "assrape") is just the same as pederasty because animals, like children, have no concept of sex and are too uneducated to appropriately respond to it.

There are many arguments against this.  Most shouldn't be necessary: any ethologist, comparative psychologist, or animal breeder will know from study or observation that animals frequently proposition others for sex, have sex, react favourably towards sex, and eventually come back again for more sex.  Sex can even be used as a reward stimulus in Pavlovian conditioning.  Humans too.  And anyone with any knowledge of natural selection would surmise that if every animal on the planet apart from humans was not capable of showing sexual readiness, propositioning others for sex, and enjoying sex, then biodiversity would be very slim indeed.  And this enjoyment of sex is definitely not limited to same-species intercourse.

But let's assume correctly that these assertions are not enough for many people, who believe that the reason children should not have sex with adults, and therefore the reason animals should not have sex with humans, is because children do not have the mental capacity to understand it.  This is true, but what these individuals do not realize is that this truth does not extend to mature animals, and that this fact is readily observable.  The easiest way to find the onset of sexual interest is to examine sex hormone levels.  These hormones are necessary not just directly to the sex drive but also to the development of various somatic and neurological structures.  We can actually see a child's brain readying itself for sexual intercourse, and this does not take place until puberty.  The same goes for any mammal, and the chemicals (mainly estrogen and testosterone) and brain structures (especially the hypothalamus and other subcortical structures in the forebrain, such as the pituitary gland, nucleus accumbens, and caudate nucleus) involved are universal, with only slight changes to relevant structures and none suggesting any human exceptionalism.



There have been organizations of pedophiles who have suggested otherwise.  Perhaps most famous is the Party for Neighbourly Love, Freedom, and Diversity (Partij voor Naastenliefde, Vrijheid en Diversiteit) in the Netherlands, in existence from 2006-2010.  It advocated initially for a drastic reduction of age-of-consent and eventually its elimination, and it and other organizations have released pamphlets, for adults and children, with the suggestion that pre-pubescent youth can desire and even frequently proposition adults for sex.  Is this any different from what zoosexuals say about animals?

I would naturally argue that it is.  Active pedophiles tend to view entirely innocuous gestures as sexual proposition: an eight-year-old girl does a headstand and inadvertently shows her panties, or a six-year-old boy urinates at a campground, unaware or uncaring of his visibility.  Children themselves, of course, don't respond sexually when they see one another's undergarments, and even were adults to perform them, these gestures would never be recognized as sexual overtures.  The assumption would then have to be that not only are children capable of making such overtures, but have a far more complex social and sexual mind than do their post-pubescent counterparts that belies the fact that they may not get why peeing in public should be embarrassing.

It is sometimes suggested that prepubescent children masturbate or even engage in sexual conduct with one another, but this is a misrepresentation: while children may touch themselves, or touch one another in what is called "sex play" by developmental psychologists, these never result in orgasm, nor do they ever result in consistent sexual attention.  It is best regarded as exploratory, in the same fashion that a seven-year-old child who plays around with the terminal of a Linux box is not intending to learn to superdo his way into becoming a hacking sensation.  He's just curious about what's going on.

Animals are entirely different: the signals they give off, whether they be humping, displaying of genitalia, or other relevant actions, are unmistakably sexual in nature and could not conceivably be perceived to mean anything else.  As expected, animals respond sexually to one another when presented with these signals.  And unlike children, and like adult humans, they seem to benefit from consensual sexual intercourse physically and psychologically, whether their partner is of their own species or not.  It should be noted that there are many long-term physical and psychological consequences for victims of child sex abuse; indeed, the majority of individuals diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder are victims of child sex abuse.

Finally, there is the question of authority.  This, I think, is best answered with observation and common sense: while a child, even if he or she really does not want to do something, such as going to school, washing the dishes, or eating their broccoli, they will usually do so when told to by an adult, especially one with authority, such as a parent or a teacher.  This is because we as humans have a very developed social intelligence; we have language, we have culture as a result, and we have very complex social norms that often even supercede basic needs and conditioning: that child will eat his broccoli even if it makes him vomit later, because his mother told him to.

Anyone with an animal, on the other hand, even an animal traditionally regarded as very loyal, like a dog, will know that there are many things they will simply not do without a fight no matter how much they seem to dote on you otherwise.  Whether it be going to the vet, going outside when it's cold out, or swallowing a pill, their resistance is clear even if they eventually give in.  With animals such as cats or horses, this resistance is even more clear, and more likely to result in injury to your person.  While there may be a social hierarchy in the mind of your animal, then, the importance of that power you have over them is not nearly as important as their basic needs to not be ill, not be cold, or indeed, not be used or abused sexually.  Any animal, particularly a female, will make it incredibly clear that she is not in the mood for sexual intercourse, regardless of how much she loves you: as an adult, she knows what it is, and knows that now is not the time, and that knowledge is more important than any thought that you might take away her walk privileges.

Which brings up the notion that an animal will jump to these conclusions in the first place: we don't tend to punish our animals for resisting when we want them to go outside, or take a pill.  We just make them go outside, or take the pill.  This is of course different for children: "If you don't stop whining and eat your greens, you won't have TV for a week," isn't that uncommon of a statement.  Children are trained early on to do everything their parents, and other authority figures, want, for fear of punishment.  We are far more lenient on our animals, so why should an animal ever even imagine that should they not consent to sex with us that something bad will happen?  If anything, this is much more likely to happen with our (adult!) human partners, who have been educated socially to believe that sex is necessary for a stable relationship.  To imagine that animals have any such concept is, frankly, to afford them some very hefty intuition about how our modern human culture is organized.  This is not to say that we do not have some level of control over the lives of our animals, and therefore responsibility particularly to take care of them and to ensure they act appropriately in the public space, it is not to all the same extents as children with developing biology and views of the world.

That's the end of my argument.  This took a lot of time out of a day that maybe should have been focused on something that will be productive in my career or for my family, given the time of year (Happy Holidays, zetas & friends!) but given the discussion that has been happening recently, I really felt I needed to update the blog again.

I would just like to finish on one note: despite the abuse and lunacy propagated by the most visible of pedophiles, I believe the average pedophile is someone to be pitied.  The PNVD actually advocated for a ban of zooerasty in the Netherlands, interestingly enough, all the while proclaiming that they should be allowed to have sex with prepubescent children; however, the large majority of pedophiles are not only fully aware that pederasty is grievous abuse, but are indeed terrified and often traumatized by the idea that they may someday lose control and be perpetrators of such abuse.  They have nowhere to turn in our current social system, and even mental health professionals that are willing and capable of assisting pedophiles are few and far between.  So while it has nothing at all to do with zoosexuality, I would like to appeal to the readers of this blog to empathize more with those sad individuals who are cursed with a sexual attraction to prepubescent youth.  It is only through this empathy, and the resulting support, that these individuals can be helped, and thus child sex abuse prevented for the future.  Thank you.

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!

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.

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. ;)

Terminology

There's a lot of discussion in the zoo community and interested parties about what certain words mean.  Generally, it is said that because said community is disorganized and often less than stable, there is no agreement on what means what.

I'd like to change that.  We don't have a definitive lexicon, so I'll attempt to put one here.


Anthrosexuality
A sexual orientation towards humans.  The opposite of zoosexuality, although the two are not mutually exclusive.

Bestiality
The sexual use of animals.  Bestiality and bestials/bestialists, unlike zoophilia and zoophiles, give no regard to the emotions or desires of the animal, and there is no emotional attachment.  First used in the seventeenth century, it's now the usual term used in legal documents.

Faunoiphilia
Sexual arousal from watching animals mating.

Fence-hopping
Having sexual interactions with an animal that is not yours, without the permission of the animal's legal owner.

Horse-ripping
Rather explicit abuse of horses in an often sexualized context that has unfortunately become common enough that it has its own term.  Unfortunately one of the big reasons zooerasty is still illegal in many places.

Zooerasty
Zoosexuality in practice, ie the act of a human having sex with an animal. cf pederasty

Zoophilia
(1) A romantic attraction to animals.  An emotional attachment is necessary (-philia meaning love) and a sexual attraction is generally implied.  It does not, however, need to be present, nor does an individual need to have had a partner to be a zoophile. cf nyctophilia, etc.
(2) A paraphilia involving animals, used in a clinical context. cf necrophilia

Zoosadism
Bestiality, but above and beyond a simple lack of concern for the animal partner in being explicitly physically abusive.

Zoosexuality
A sexual orientation towards animals.  May cover either zoophilia or bestiality, but, like zoophilia, does not necessitate an existing relationship.  Sometimes used today to mean someone who prefers animals, as opposed to someone who will orient towards animals but prefers humans.

Genes, Animals Mating, and You

Some conversations I’ve been having recently have had me considering how sex is different across species… but also how it is the same.  This isn’t a new train of thought for me, but it is a new topic for this blog, and I imagine the handful of readers who have found this page without my linking them directly to it or finding it through some other zoophilic page have probably been waiting for me to talk about animal sex.

The conversation in particular I’m thinking of had to do with vorephilia, specifically why it exists in the first place, and I as a well-read academic and aficionado of kinks, paraphilias and orientations of all kinds immediately jumped up to posit the theory (not my own, but someone else’s) that vorephilia – a paraphilia related to biting and swallowing – is vestigial of the biting that many mammals engage in while mating to give themselves a certain dominant role.

But then I thought: why do they do it?  Anyone who watches enough Animal Planet knows that the species who are known for it – cats, canines, bears, etc. – don’t always do it, and the female (or male receiver) tends to be submissive enough anyway without all the biting.  Indeed, a lot of the time it’s not even real biting, but just sort of a threat that he could bite her if he felt like it.  It appears to have little to do with physical necessity and far more to do with the psychological, so we’re back to square one.

From there, I can take a different direction and philosophize a little about how mating activities have evolved – sex across the ages, if you will.  Sexual selection in larger, more modern mammals, such as the ones mentioned above, tends to be quite complex, with the female exerting a great deal of power over precisely with whom she will mate with, and the male more or less needing to put up with this because the female, while being a bit smaller, still has many sharp devices at her disposal that she can use to make sure that even if he impregnates her against her will, he may well die of infection or of the difficulties any injury may cause him.  The only large mammals in which rape can be called by any stretch common are primates, in which the females lack this natural weaponry, or, in the case of humans, any injury incurred by the male will not pose too much of a threat to his life.

This changes when we get to smaller, simpler creatures, such as most rodents, for many of whom mating success for the males depends on how quickly he can mount and disable the female.  Mating, then, tends to be quite violent, and often does result in injury – presumably, the number of young in a litter is considered to be genetically “worth it”.  In order to prevent herself from being injured, though, it is better for the female to be submissive, since, unlike the male, she cannot be mortally injured at the time of copulation and still have healthy young, thus passing on her genes.

We do not see these power-oriented sexual activities in non-mammals: in birds and reptiles, although the mating rituals can be extraordinarily complex, the action of mating itself is quite straight-forward.  In most fish, no real sexual interaction takes place at all; only in cephalopods do we see similar interactions to our rodent cousins, and in none do we see the symbolic gestures displayed by larger mammals.

It is from rodents that most other mammals have evolved from.  Is it possible, then, that this fixation on dominance in sex that manifests in such interests as vorephilia, sexual sadism and sexual masochism, and practices like bondage and necking, still remain in our genes from millions of years ago when we were merely rodents?  Were these paraphilias, which we now sometimes consider to be maladaptive and perverse, once part of an instinct necessary to pass on one’s genetic material?  This gives us an interesting perspective on these enigmatic paraphilias, which are sometimes, in the case of ones like vorephilia, to the point of being sheer fantasy.  Although this explanation obviously does not cover every paraphilia, if we consider how such interests and activities would have affected our non-human ancestors, we can get a better idea of precisely why they exist in the first place – and, in this, derive a greater tolerance for the associated individuals.