#Bestiality taboo free#

#Bestiality taboo free#

But Chatterbox canвЂ™t join Singer in concluding that the sexual revolution should give bestiality a free pass. (Click here to read a debunking of various bestiality urban legends.)Singer is clearly right that any sexual taboo based on the idea that sex exists solely for reproduction doesnвЂ™t make much practical sense, even for the boring heterosexual mainstream, in this age of contraception. In fact, subsequent surveys have found much lower percentages, leading one to suspect that Kinsey was demonstrating a bias having something to do with his training as a zoologist.

Alfred Kinsey, and that among men living in rural areas, it was more like 50 percent. Singer concedes that few of these art works likely depict events that actually occurred, but he adds that in the 1940s, 8 percent of males and 3.5 percent of females reported at least one interspecies tryst to Dr. There is a Greek vase from 520 BC showing a male figure having sex with a stag a seventeenth-century Indian miniature of a deer mounting a woman an eighteenth-century European engraving of an ecstatic nun coupling with a donkey, while other nuns look on, smiling a nineteenth-century Persian painting of a soldier, also with a donkey and, from the same period, a Japanese drawing of a woman enveloped by a giant octopus who appears to be. His book has a wide range of illustrations, going back to a Swedish rock drawing from the Bronze Age of a man a large quadruped of indeterminate species. Dekkers, a Dutch biologist and popular naturalist, has assembled a substantial body of evidence to show that humans have often thought of вЂњlove for animalsвЂќ in ways that go beyond a pat and a hug, or a proper concern for the welfare of members of other species. Though, as Chatterbox has written before, Gore toward the end of the campaign attempted a bold raid on the Platonist camp.) Had SingerвЂ™s Nerve essay surfaced before the November election, GoreвЂ™s Aristotelianism might have tempted the JournalвЂ™s high-spirited partisans to declare Gore the animal fanciersвЂ™ fellow traveler. (A chunk of Al GoreвЂ™s sophomoric eco-tome, Earth in the Balance, is dedicated toВ criticizing the Platonic worldview and embracing the Aristotelian one, a stance that Lynne Cheney attacked rather unfairly in her plodding anti-political-correctness jeremiad, Telling the Truth. The foundation for SingerвЂ™s argument is the Aristotelian view that man is part of nature, as opposed to the Platonic view that man exists apart from nature. (It was Singer who coined the term вЂњspeciesist.вЂќ) In the Nerve essay, which is actually a review of a new book about bestiality called Dearest Pet, Singer argues that the taboo against bestiality should be dispensed with. Singer is, of course, the notorious bioethicist whose Princeton appointment three years ago caused a mild ruckus because of his hard-line views about animal rights. The JournalвЂ™s ire was directed at an essay titled вЂњHeavy PettingвЂќ by Peter Singer on the highbrow porn Webzine Nerve.