Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (5 page)

This better-safe-than-sorry bias is morally rational (it’s designed to protect ourselves or those we care about from harm), but it’s not morally logical (it’s a form of prejudice against someone on the basis of his or her sexual nature, not a decision based on anything the person has actually done). When it comes to high-risk social decisions such as who’s going to babysit the children or whether or not to go out on a date with someone you barely know, negative stereotypes can have adaptive utility. But just because something is adaptive doesn’t mean it’s ethically defensible. (Assuming so would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy.) After all, it works the same way for
any
minority social category. Whether it’s the color of one’s skin, how much a person weighs, or the particular accent a person speaks with, negative stereotypes are shortcuts in our social reasoning that crop up mostly under time pressures and as the stakes rise. In the case of those with deviant sexual desires and our attempts to avoid harm, caution may be warranted, but we also shouldn’t follow our emotionally driven intuitions so blindly that we’re wholly unaware of our failure in moral logic. Overgeneralizing the frightening attributes of the most negative examples of a hidden social category (such as a religious denomination or a sexual orientation) to
everyone
in that category leads to disturbing effects in which we become overly paranoid about the unseen monsters in our midst. In sociological terms, we submit to “moral panic.” Since unsavory carnal desires can’t be easily detected, everyone is potentially now one of “those people.”

*   *   *

If a measure came up on the voting ballot today for the preemptive extermination of pedophiles, I’ve no doubt that it would pass by a landslide. Most people, I suspect, would reason that since pedophiles are intrinsically evil, eradicating them this way is in the best interest of society. There was once a similar approach to dealing with sexual deviancy in seventeenth-century New England. You’ve heard of the witch hunts in Salem, but I’m guessing you’re not as familiar with the pig-man hunts of New Haven. The most troubling sex fiends of those days weren’t pedophiles (the age of consent in the colonies was ten, if that tells you anything) but men secretly in league with the Devil to impregnate barnyard animals. The fear was that the resulting malevolent offspring (called “prodigies”—my, how the meaning of that word has changed over time) would silently infiltrate the fledgling America and muck it all up with evil for the God-fearing folk. The settlers had gotten this strange idea from the teachings of the violently prudish medieval scholar Thomas Aquinas, who coined the term “prodigy” to refer to any hybrid creature sprung from the loins of another species but borne of human seed. According to him, prodigies could also be conceived through sex with atheists (a.k.a. perverts), but it seems there were far fewer of those milling about the colonies than solicitous swine.

It’s unclear if any of the early Americans I’m about to describe were what today’s sexologists would call “zoophiles,” individuals who are more attracted to nonhuman animals than to human ones. They may have merely used members of other species as surrogates for human partners in obtaining sexual gratification (as half of all “farm-bred” adolescent males have done, according to Alfred Kinsey in 1948), or they could have been falsely accused of such acts altogether. Yet some modern scientists believe that zoophilia is a genuine sexual orientation represented by as much as a full 1 percent of the human population. Just as it’s impossible for nonzoophiles to become aroused by the steaming, mottled member of a Clydesdale or by a German shepherd rolling over for a tummy rub, “true zoophiles” can’t get (easily) turned on by human beings. One such man—a physician from suburbia, incidentally—could only consummate his marriage to a woman by closing his eyes and imagining his new bride as a horse. Strangely enough, the marriage didn’t last.

Centuries ago in the newfound colony of Plymouth, zoophilia was obviously not a known sexual orientation (again, the psychosexual construct of an “orientation” wouldn’t appear until the late nineteenth century). But the hysteria over Satan’s prodigal litters reached dramatic heights with the 1642 trial of a sixteen-year-old boy named Thomas Granger. This randy adolescent had been indicted for taking indecent liberties with what seems an entire stable full of animals, including “a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey.” I realize the turkey part is a bit distracting (and how one goes about having sex with a large clawed bird is better left unexamined), but even more remarkable is the legal diligence and sobriety with which this case was prosecuted.

There was little question in these righteous minds that the boy should be dispatched to the flames for his egregious violations of natural law, but there was confusion on the bench over which sheep, exactly, he’d been defiling, and therefore which of them should be killed and which of them spared. This was crucial to sort out, not only because livestock was a valuable commodity in the beleaguered settlement, but also because if they executed the
wrong
sheep, they risked the unthinkable happening: a monstrously bleating, hoofed prodigy might drop undetected onto Plymouth. So, naturally, a lineup of busily masticating victims was staged for Granger. With a trembling finger, the boy pointed out those five amber-eyed ruminants that had been targets of his secret woolly lust. Court records indicate that the animals were then “killed before his face, according to the law, Leviticus xx. 15; and then he himself was executed.”

Suspected “buggers” of the past—Old English slang for he who has sex with pigs, donkeys, dogs, and all and sundry critters—could expect a battle of wits with moral arbiters and overzealous prosecutors. In New Haven in 1642, not far from what would later be the Yale campus and just a few years after the Granger affair, a man named George Spencer, a servant notorious for having “a prophane, lying, scoffing and lewd speritt,” was executed for making love to his master’s pig. He swore that he didn’t do it, but unfortunately for Spencer the sow happened to give birth to a deformed fetus (“a prodigious monster”) that resembled George a bit too closely for most people’s comfort. The pig fetus had “butt one eye for use, the other hath (as it is called) a pearle in itt, is whitish and deformed.” This embryological mishap was George’s death sentence. His own ocular deformity bore an uncanny resemblance to that of the stillborn pig, and in the emotional climate of the town’s moral panic over grunting prodigies, this was the critical piece of evidence used to convict him.

Another town resident with the rather ironic name of Thomas Hogg also found himself at the center of an intense buggery investigation when a neighborhood sow bore a deformed fetus with “a faire & white skinne & head, as Thomas Hogg is.” (I feel compelled to pause for a moment to pity the women of old New Haven, too, since so many aborted pig fetuses were apparently reminiscent of the town’s eligible bachelors.) The allegations made against Thomas Hogg by the townsfolk were so serious that the governor and the deputy governor personally frog-marched him out to the barnyard toward the sow in question and ordered him to “scratt” (fondle) the animal before their eyes. This was done to gauge just how intimately familiar they might be. “Immedyatly there appeared a working of lust in the sow,” the court records recount, “insomuch that she powred out seede before them.” When Hogg reluctantly titillated the teats of a different sow, by contrast, she didn’t return his affections. At least, she didn’t release her bladder when he touched her teats, which is probably what that earlier pig had done. Given his accusers’ unimpressive knowledge of biology, she seems simply to have peed at the worst of times. So Hogg, like Granger and Spencer before him, was executed.

These zero-tolerance laws against bestiality had been imported from Christian Europe, the stomping ground of zealots like Aquinas. But an interesting development emerged on that side of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, highlighted by the case of a ragged French peasant named Jacques Ferron, who was tried for having sex with a female donkey. As described by Edward Payson Evans in his 1906 cult classic of legal scholarship,
The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals
, Ferron would clearly be killed, since he was “taken in the act of coition” with the animal. He’d soon be shoved along in shackles to the public square, where a smoldering stake was waiting to consume him in flames as he pleaded for mercy against a wall of scornful faces. What makes Ferron’s case different from the bestiality trials up to then is that the locals chose not to slay the jenny along with him. In fact, the donkey was so beloved by the community that she was instead given her own separate trial, with witnesses to testify that not once had they ever seen her exhibit even the slightest sign of promiscuity. Before the proceedings, a certificate was even drawn up affirming the donkey’s virtuous reputation. This impassioned plea was signed by the parish priest and was enough to persuade the court officials to acquit the animal on the grounds that she’d quite clearly been raped.

This French donkey-rape case may sound somewhat absurd to us today. But it was a small moment in history in which people stopped and questioned the punishment demanded by the Bible and instead chose their own more rational course of action, showing how even a society steeped in religion can move away from the irrelevant question of
naturalness
and onto the more meaningful and moral one of
harmfulness
in its consideration of sexual deviance. Personally, I don’t think Ferron got a fair shake, since harm to the animal hadn’t really been established. Most of us (me included) don’t especially enjoy the thought of a man screwing a donkey, let alone such an apparently virtuous one, but anyone who has ever seen the erect penis of an adult jackass, approximately the size of a small moped, would have to acknowledge that it’s unlikely Ferron’s member caused physical injury to the donkey. And unless she stopped eating, was ostracized by the group, or felt ashamed by the judgmental glares of the other donkeys, psychological damage was also unlikely. Still, since God clearly prescribes death to any creature, willing or unwilling, tainted by human semen, the sparing of this she-ass meant her
perceived
harm (by rape) was important enough to these people to ignore God’s unreasonable and cruel orders to kill her. They thought for themselves in this sexual ethical dilemma, in other words. And that’s real moral progress. (True, they still chose to burn the human being alive. But—baby steps.)

Since we now know that many people of European descent possess Neanderthal DNA, it’s tempting to speculate about how many of those stoking the fires of yore were flesh-and-blood prodigies themselves. My Heinz 57 genome has never been sequenced, but there’s a good chance I’m a hybrid in this sense, too. (
See
, my adolescent caveman crush was perfectly “natural.”) But in any event, once some basic biological knowledge put an end to the paranoia over Aquinas’s evil prodigies not long after the Ferron affair, Christians abandoned the practice of immolating those accused of interspecies sex.

It’s foolish, however, to assume that religious morality isn’t still woven into modern bestiality laws (even the term “bestiality” is religious, first appearing in the King James Version of the Bible in 1611 to falsely cleave apart human beings from all other animals). We’re a peculiar species, but humans are animals too, of course. Bestiality is expressly illegal in most countries today, and in those places where it’s not an officially codified crime, people who have sex with animals are still occasionally prosecuted under animal cruelty laws. As a
platonic
animal lover, I’m in favor of protective laws. The sad reality is that there are indeed hideous sexual deeds done to animals by a few demented people. Yet there are also cases of human-animal sex that don’t involve any obvious harm to the animal and may even involve mutual pleasure. Which is worse, for instance, a stud manager forcibly collecting the semen of a prized racehorse by “electro-ejaculating” the animal for commercial gain (which involves inserting an electrified rod into the animal’s rectum and delivering a high-voltage shock to its prostate) or a zoophile gently masturbating his companion horse with the sole intent of bringing it satisfaction? That the first is perfectly legal and the second illegal shows that bestiality laws are more concerned with a person’s sexually deviant desires than they are with the animal’s actual harm. When the question of harm is an afterthought in any sex law, we need to rethink both its fairness and how it’s handled by the courts. There
is
the problem of an animal’s inability to give verbal consent. But note that many zoophiles prefer to be the passive
recipients
of the animal’s actions upon—or more often inside—them. That’s still completely illegal, even in cases of volitional thrusting (think humping dog to human leg), which seems to imply the animal is more or less on the same page with the zoophile. Funny enough, that equally thorny problem of how to gain an animal’s verbal consent before it’s killed for one’s personal dining pleasure doesn’t inspire nearly the same degree of outrage. Not that either is great, but if I were a bovine, I’d rather get “humanely” penetrated by the penile equivalent of a stiff strand of hay than be “humanely” slaughtered by seventeen-inch steel blades. (I think I might have to draw a firm line with all this at juvenile goats, though. They’re just kids, for God’s sake.)

*   *   *

Most modern sex crime laws are based on the better-safe-than-sorry principle. And that’s quite sensible. We especially want to protect the most vulnerable members of our society—children, animals, the elderly, the disabled—so we err on the side of extreme caution, even if this means occasionally getting it wrong about the actual harm that they face. After all, what’s the life of one well-meaning, gentle sex deviant when it comes to protecting those we care about? Lumping that unfortunate sap in with the nastier variety is a chance you’re probably willing to take. Once you accept that we’re all sex deviants in our own ways, however, the life of that expendable pervert is more than just collateral damage. That unfortunate sap could, in fact, be
you
someday, or the very child you’re trying to protect. Given the serious consequences of our “true natures” being known, is it any wonder that your first thought (and I’m paraphrasing here) was “Speak for yourself” when I initially called you a pervert?