Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Bestiality

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

When sex between two humans can be many things, how do we define bestiality - that is, sex between a human and a non-human? Especially when the farming industry relies on certain sex acts on animals - or ‘animal husbandry’ to use the correct term - to function. These are an uncomfortable but important question, and we’re joined by academic Joanne Bourke, author of Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love, to discuss these topics and more. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Charlotte Long. If you're enjoying Betwixt the Sheets please vote for us at the British Podcast Awards here: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/voting. It would mean the world to us!Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Please betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here, as I always am, with your fair do's warning. The fair do's warning is the warning that we have to give at the top of each show. Just in case you weren't aware of what this podcast is about, just in case you'd seen the words betwixt the sheets and thought, this is a podcast on interior design and soft furnishings.

Well, then, ha! are in for a surprise because this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults in an adulty way about a range of adulty things and you should be an adult too. We are actually getting a bit spicy today. Is spicy the word I want? I don't know because we're talking about beastiality. Yep, yep, we're going there. It's a subject. It has a history and we are tackling it today. So please, you might want to put young people and pets in the other room so they don't have to listen to this. And if you're still with me, after all of that, then let's get into it. The year is 1750 and we are sat in a courtroom watching a trial take

place between a man and his donkey. Yeah, betwixters, this really happened. It's not a joke. The man is accused of beastiality. To quote the Bible, if a man lies with a beast, he shall surely be put to death, and ye shall slay the beast. Seems harsh. On this day, however, the public rally behind the donkey, and the beast shall not be slain. Arrah! The public rushed to the donkey's defence, signing a petition stating that before it was owned by the man in question, this was a good-natured and virtuous donkey. The judge considers the evidence, and the donkey is acquitted. The man, however, is found guilty of beastiality, and he is sentenced to death. What do you look for in a man?

Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect coppence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and putting the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society. With me, Kate Lister.

While many laws and attitudes towards sex and sexuality have progressed since the 18th century, the ones around beastiality have not, and with very good reason. We don't demand that donkeys stand trial anymore, I'll say that, we've come that far. But for a pet-loving nation, there's a strange hypocrisy at the heart of how we think about animals, with violence and often sexual violence towards animals being so normalized through agricultural practices, animal husbandry? How does the law differentiate between an industrialised process and a deranged lonely person's perversions? What does our relationship with animals tell us about our definitions of love, sex and consent? You feeling uncomfortable already? Yeah, I did warn you. Well, today we are

joined by Joanna Bork, author of Loving Animals on Beastiality, Zophilia, and Post-Human Love, and we are going to tackle all of these deeply uncomfortable questions and more. But before we get to that, I have a little favour to ask you, possibly for the last time. But amazingly, betwixt us, we have made it to the top 10 for the listeners choice awards at the British Podcast Awards. The top 10, and that's all thanks to you. So thank you so much if you voted for us. The voting officially closes on the 5th of September. So if you haven't already, please follow the link in the show notes. Give us a vote. And we might even win it this time. All right, betwixters, I am ready to do this if you are. Hello and welcome back to betwixta sheets. It's only Joanna Book. How are you doing?

I'm doing really well. I'm on the Greek island of Poros right now, so I'm getting lots of work done as well as lots of swimming. Oh, that sounds lush. Is it super gorgeous and hot and you're just eating lovely food and olives and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, it's a little bit too hot. It's about 38 degrees today. Holy moly, okay. That's quite spicy, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.

But what a situation, what a location for you to be talking to me about beastility this morning? It's a really interesting subject. Because everyone says it's like this huge taboo, and yet it's everywhere when you start looking at the topic, you know, in art and theatre and cinema, in books, you know. So it is a really fascinating topic for a so-called taboo that everyone talks about and thinks about and watches and hears about and stuff. So I really enjoyed and learned a lot writing the book. When I knew that I was talking to, obviously I was reading it around this and reading your research.

And it was that bit that got me was the point that you made about it is this huge taboo. And I'm sure everyone listening is going, Jesus, yes, that's. that is a taboo, quite rightly. But then you're right, when you point it out, oh my God, it's uncomfortably everywhere. And that's, we just not notice that? Did we do what? I mean, I think it is.

And I'm often wondering just why it is that people say it's a taboo, and yet we consume it all the time. We consume images of it all the time. And I do think it's got something to do with our human curiosity about the other, about, you know, this sentient creatures who are so close to us and yet so different from us, sentient creatures who we love, we, you know, we play with. I mean, half of households have a so-called pet, have a companion species, and yet they're so different to us, and yet we love them so much.

And I think it's that sort of curiosity that kind of sparks this interest in, you know, cross-species love, cross-species effect. Wow. So when you say bestiality or bestiality, depending on where you are, what do you mean by that? Because if I hear that word, I think someone's having sex with an animal. Like somebody is giving a cow a hand job or doing something to a hamster that they shouldn't be. Do you just mean like affection, like we love animals, that we anthropomorphise animals? One of the chief reasons I wrote this book is precisely to, question what we mean by sex and what we mean by love. Because you're absolutely right. When we think about bestiality and, you know, there's other words for it, like Zunphilia, but when we think of that,

we do tend to think of a very fellowcentric, a very anthropocentric idea about love and sex. And, you know, I think we ought to be questioning that because sex is not simply about those kinds of activities, sex between humans is much wider than that. And I think it's very interesting to think about, you know, when we say sex between different species, in this case between human animals and non-human animals, you know, what are we talking about? If we are talking about penetrative sexual activity, then it's very, very different to if we're talking about stroking as we would with a human partner as a form of sexual intercourse, as a sort of form of sexual. sexual intimacy, I should say. So, you know, what are we talking about? And I mean, speaking as a woman here,

I think it's really important to move away from a very fallocentric notion of sexuality, which, you know, is very conservative and very narrow in its definition to something that is much more embracing of difference. Everybody listening to this now. Everybody reading your book. I'll just be sat there going, what holy what are there now been that they'll now be looking at their pets these lovely things and just thinking oh my god what is it that we're doing together you must have encountered a lot of uncomfortableness when you're writing this book and doing this this research is that part of what made you want to take it on is to i should probably preface this by saying that we're not actually advocating it we're not we're not going to start like a zoo affiliate pride or anything like that to try and

reclaim a minority don't have sex animals it's really bad But what you're saying is you're trying to break down the intimacy of the relationship that we have with animals all around us, all the time. Yeah. I mean, Kate, in my entire career really is based on looking at different kinds of violence. And I've actually wrote an earlier book on human-animal interactions, which is all about violence, a book called what it means to be human. But, you know, all my work actually is about some kind of violence. and most our interactions with non-human animals is violent. And certainly sexual interactions with animals is almost exclusively violent.

I mean, humans claim to love animals, but we destroy them. We wear their fur. We eat them. Well, some of us eat them. We do incredibly horrible things to animals without their consent. And most of my book actually looks at those horrible things in the history of those terrible things that we do to animals, including companion species, including our so-called pets. But we don't have to do those things, and we can. And I think I want to encourage us all to think

about ways of changing that, of actually engaging with particularly companion species, but also, you know, non-human animals more generally, in ways that respect their needs, their desires, their preferences. And that is what I think is a really interesting and a very challenging thing for us to do, because Western society in particular is really based on the exploitation of animals. You know, it's at the heart of Western society and indeed many other societies as well. But thinking about how we can change that, how we can think in different ways about these animals who we do. love. I mean, I do think that most people sincerely love their pets. They do try and treat them

with respect and feed them, make sure they have enough water, talk to them, you know, but other ways that we can think about the needs of our companion species and other animals more broadly. It's such a fascinating topic because I think it's one that we, and I include myself in this quite firmly, is that we're very, very good at ignoring it. We're very good at pretending that it doesn't happen about creating distance. Like the fact that you can go to a petrol station in the middle of the night and get a pepper army is on one hand, great, get pepper army. But we never think of the fact that something's had to pay the price for that, that something has had to die in order for you to have that. Or we very, very rarely do. And we have this real state of cognitive dissidents around it,

is that if I look around my little office right now, without meaning to, and I think I love animals, but I'm surrounded by animal cruelty. I am, but like my shoes, I've got, leather in them. I'm sure that some of the products I'm using have been tested on animals, and I'm sure it could go on and on and on. If I actually saw those animals in front of me, and it was like, right, Kate, you can have this lipstick, but I'm going to have to bash this rabbit over the head repeatedly in order for that to happen. I would go, no, no, please, please don't do that. What is that, do you think, that human beings on a mass scale can do that? Is that we don't actually engage with the suffering that we do cause animals. And we do,

unfortunately, we do, we do that. Yeah. Our entire world, around us, as you just said, is based on this. You know, the idea that we can somehow change this overnight is frankly ludicrous. But we can start thinking about it, and particularly we can start thinking about it in the context of those animals immediately around us who we do generally care for. And that's, I think, a really important first step. And also acknowledging and recognizing that our companion species, the dogs in our household, our cats and so on and so on,

you know, have senses, have needs, have preferences, have desires, and paying attention to those things, those aspects of our companion species is the first thing. And second thing is acknowledging our own positionality. You know, we are human. We can't just step out of that. by definition, we're anthropocentric. But we can think beyond that. And that's something that certainly, you know,

I'm increasingly doing in my own life, in my own relationships, not only because it says something about our relationships with our so-called pets in our household, but also it tells us something and it helps us think about our relationships with other human beings and about your paying attention to, to their needs and desires as well. So it is about sentient life more broadly

and how we can know the other and is the other always inscrutable, it's always unknowable, or can we pay more attention? And that's, I think, what the book tries to suggest that we should be doing more often than we do. One of the things I thought was really fascinating about your research, and I know it's fascinating

because it made me feel deeply uncomfortable. I was like, oh, no, was that you sort of made that. point that beastiality as in having sex with animals for pleasure and however phallocentric that might be. That's the taboo. That's the one that we all go, nope, no, no, thank you. Don't do that. But then you point out that actually we do have sanctioned acts of beastility all around us and we're okay with that. Like how do you think dairy milk is produced, which is always exploiting the animal's fertility system or if you want animals to reproduce, you have to gather their semen, which is

performing a sex act on an animal. And that made me go. Oh, no. When I read that? Yeah. You know, animal husbandry, farming, is based on acts of sexual intercourse and sexual manipulation of the sexual organs of animals. You mentioned dairy cows. You know, we could say the same things about pigs. We could say the same things about a lot of our farming.

And this is one of the things that I think really, I shouldn't say it made me laugh, but it did. because in the 1990s, all these huge debates in parliaments all around the world about criminalizing bestiality, criminalizing sex with animals. And, I mean, I need to give a little bit of background here because basically, you know, the criminalization of sex with animals happens in the 16th century. Then there's lots of changes to the law. But it's basically fundamentally decriminalized inadvertently in the 1990s with legislation about homosexuality, human male homosexuality in particular, because the legislation

that criminalizes bestiality is the same legislation that criminalizes consensual intercourse between human males. So they used to call it buggery with the buggery act. Then they used to call it sodomy. So these acts against sodomy are about human male sexual intercourse and human animal sexual So with the decriminalization of homosexuality, they inadvertently decriminalize bestiality. So in the 1990s, suddenly, for various reasons which I discuss, they discover that bestiality is in fact not a crime. So they try to recriminalize it. So you get all of these big debates in Parliament, particularly in the States where they try

to criminalize bestiality. And the problem is, and this is where I started, you know, sort of smiling, because they suddenly realize that how do you word and act that criminalizes sex with animals but doesn't criminalize ordinary animal husbandry farming practices. So there's all these massive contortions that these legislators are forced to go through to try to criminalize one thing, but not criminalize ordinary farming. So they really tie themselves up the knots trying to do this. So they basically, it had to come back to the idea of pleasure. So, you know, if you get pleasure from doing it, then it's a crime. But of course, if it's simply capitalist production, then it's absolutely fine. So it was one of

these kind of funny moments when, you know, I'm sitting in archives and I'm thinking, what? The mental gymnastics that we're capable of as a species to go, well, that's wrong, but this thing that I'm doing, that's okay, actually. You touched on it there. Let's talk about the history, because obviously having sex with animals for pleasure has a very, very long history, and it's interwoven in many creation myths as well. But talk to me about how it first became illegal. What was that the bug react? How on earth did sex between two men even end up on the same statute books

as humans and animals having sex? Yeah. I mean, it's partly due to the movement of law from ecclesiastical jurisdictions to state, to governmental jurisdictions. And this is why it's criminalized because it's non-reproductive sex. So it's criminalized the same way as homosexuality is because it is sexual intercourse that does not lead into reproduction of the species. And it's fundamentally, and here I'm talking about Western societies,

it's fundamentally based on biblical prohibitions about lying with the beasts of the field. and this is taken up by state legislators in this period of all of history. And the penalty for it is, of course, death. And that remains the case, as it is with male homosexuality. And that remains the case until the 19th century, where you get a change, where it becomes no longer a felony, but it becomes an act against cruelty to animals, vile practices in public, offensive practices in public,

and offences against property. So, you know, you are carrying out an act against the property of a, for example, a farmer or property of the owner of the doll and such like. But what's really interesting in that early period is that the animal itself is considered partly libel, partly responsible. No, it's not, Joanna. That's bonkers. And this comes in two ways. Firstly, you're not allowed to eat the animal afterwards or drink the animal. animal's milk. And there are two reasons for this. One reason is the milk or the meat is polluted.

The other reason is that it's a form of cannibalism because the animal, by engaging in sexual intercourse with the human, has become partly human. The second thing is that when these cases get to trial, the animal is often accompanying the human. So the animal is brought before the court and is judged to be the innocent or guilty and is then executed. So there's a very famous case actually of a woman, which is very unusual, where her dog is brought into the court room. And the dog, when sees his own up, wags its tail and comes up to the woman. And that is judged to be, okay, that dog is guilty. And so the dog is then executed in front of the woman who is then executed immediately afterwards.

There's another famous case where a man has sexual intercourse with a donkey. He's brought into court and the community signed a petition on behalf of the donkey, saying that the donkey up into this stage has led a virtuous life. And the donkey is actually set free, but the man is executed. So sorry. So it's a very different conception of what we mean by bestiality and what is actually happening here in this early period of history. I'll be back with Joanna after this short break.

Hi, I'm Eleanor Yonaga. I'm thrilled to be joining Matt Lewis to co-present Gone Medieval from History Hit. Twice a week, every week, we set out to answer the big questions that have vexed people for centuries. Like, what did the Romans ever do for us? Roads, buildings, walls, churches, houses, manuscripts. Why did Edward I mourn his Queen Eleanor so much? He was very good at making a show for people to see that was going to influence how they would understand him or his campaigns or anything like that. Did Viking hero Ragnar Lothbrook really exist?

Maybe yes, maybe no. The sons who were attributed to him were definitely real people. So join me, Eleanor Yonaga. And me, Matt Lewis, Forgone Medieval from History Hit. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't know what to say to that, Joanna. Apart from I would have signed that petition, I would have signed that to get the donkey off the hook.

I would have signed that this is not a slutty donkey. petition. Help me get inside that mindset of how is the animal to blame? Like, they really put the animal, I can understand the human, like you've been caught and that we understand that there's agency in that. But what on earth were they thinking that the donkey or the dog or whatever it is could be in any way part of this? Like, was it the idea that the dog was tempting the human? What on earth were they thinking? Yes, the animal is often seen as licentuous, as you say, Kempting. Remember that the human is also seen as having, by engaged in this act, to have become animalistic, to have become literally bestial. So the human is also, has been degraded to the level

of the non-human animal. So these things are all working in tandem. And of course, the animal is regarded as polluted in some way by this encounter and therefore cannot be left within the community. I mean, even people who witnessed someone committing an act of bestiality were believed that their soul was at risk, simply by having, for example, caught the two at it, that their soul was at risk by even just witnessing it, inadvertently witnessing it. So these things are all tied up with each other. And this all changes from the 19th century where it becomes much more about cruelty to animals and improper behavior in a public place. which is, again, a very different idea of bestiality. And in different jurisdictions, you know, you can either get life for that, or you can just get a few weeks, a few months.

So there's huge variation in the punishment of this kind of activity. There's really interesting research done in the 1950s. I'm thinking here of Kingsies' work in 1948 and 1953, which showed that one in every 12, male in America admitted to at some stage having engaged in sexual intercourse with a non-human animal. So that's one in 12 in the late 1940s, early 1950s. And similar research has been done in more recent periods that actually suggests quite high levels, particularly in rural areas, high levels of engagement at some stage, usually in adolescence with non-human animals.

And interestingly, the higher the education, the higher the propensity to engage in these sorts of activities. So again, it's unusual, but it's not as rare as I think most of us, and certainly myself when I started this work, had assumed. That must have been quite shocking for you to find those kind of stats. I'm shocked just listening to it of how common this seems to have been. These cases that you reference where the animal is brought to court, are they quite common?

Or in these cases, they're remembered because they're so unusual? They are unusual. These court cases are very unusual. I mean, in Britain, over a century, I think we're talking about in the dozens. We're not talking about more than that. There's evidence is much more common in earlier periods and particularly in Europe, much more common. But, no, these are not frequent cases. But of course, many more people in the 16th to the 18th century,

many more people are executed for bestiality than are executed for homosexuality. There's excellent evidence to show that. Wow. It's very difficult to know where to take the conversation when you just keep dropping these really shocking bombs on me. Where are we up to today? Is it illegal to have sex with animals today? Is there a difference between bestiality, as you're discussing it here,

which is more like a sort of parasycial relationship between humans' animals, and people that actually identify is, is it zoophyll, zoophiles, zoophilia? Yeah, zephania. It is illegal inversion to have sexual intercourse with animals. Sexual intercourse, though, remember, is defined in a particular way, the penetration of mouth, anus, vagina, by any of the parties, etc. But it is illegal to do so. And, you know, most of the cases are prosecuted under cruelty to animals, legislation, which is good. But, you know, there are communities, all zoophiles, zoos, as they call themselves. You know,

there are communities of people who profess the love, sexual love of animals and professed it as a kind of sexual identity. What was happening in the 19th century to sort of change attitudes around this? Because you looked at how that first of all, Bestiality even got onto their books and it's this idea of not reproducing. But then something's happening in the 19th century that these attitudes start to be questioned and changed. Is it just changing attitudes to human sexuality in general, or what was happening at the time to drive this reassessment of this act? It's driven by a lot of different things, including urbanisation pets, people actually having pets as opposed to animals that are there for farming purposes

and more pragmatic purposes. It's also due to the rise of progressive movements, such as movements against cruelty to animals, which is a really important one, which the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was, established decades before the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, you know, that animals had took on this really special status within Victorian society as creatures that needed to be protected from human beings. And it's linked also to questions about movements, I should say, about vegetarianism and those sorts of issues.

It's also due to big debates about human exceptionalism. So Darwinism is really important in this story. you start saying, well, actually, you know, we have an evolutionary connection with non-human animals that gives them a different kind of status. So there's all this, a lot of philosophers started speculating about this idea of human exceptionalism. Most famously, of course, the philosopher Kant, who, you know, makes a big argument about that sex with animals is in affront to the dignity of man, as he putted. And we need to, you know, ensure that humans retain their position at the top of that pyramid of life. Those are the sort of the main

reasons, I think, for this new interest in bestiality in that particular period of history. We do have a very long history of seeing ourselves at the top of a quote-unquote food chain, or even that there being a food chain. But that was something that started to be questioned the 19th century as well. This idea that humans have been put here by God to be a master of everything on the planet. That was challenging. and being reassessed as we are actually just another animal. And that steeps into lots of Victorian novels and dramas and this kind of fear of almost like a devolution that we could maybe un-evolve back into animals again.

Absolutely. And it's tied in with some of the most invidious racist ideologies of the Victorian period. Oh. You know, about, well, you know, it's the white male at the top of that pyramid. And, you know, there's all these different groups beneath that white male at the top. And, of course, you know, desperately trying to ensure that that white male remains at that top of that pyramid. And, you know, racist thought is really important in this as well as, you know, being challenged, of course, by women, by white women about their position within that hierarchy. White women, are women generally closer to animals?

where does white women fit in that, middle-class women, working-class women? So there's all this real struggle for authority, for power, for dominance that we are seeing. And non-human animals get tied into that. And certainly the early feminist movement in early Victorian Britain were very concerned about the way that women were linked to pets and to animals and desperately trying to ensure that they change that and that they. keep animals down, if you like. It's so true, isn't it?

Do you know what I've just been struck by when you're saying there? Is that the 19th century saw this move towards animal protection and move away from animal cruelty. And that was a few hundred years ago now. And in that time, I'm not sure how much further on we have come with it because in many ways our systems today with industrial farming and industrial processing is it's far crueler now. Like, for example, I might be completely off here, but just tell me if you're like,

but I really like watching old cookery shows on YouTube, like from the 60s and 70s, and I was struck by one the other day that they were really excited that they had a chicken for Christmas dinner. And now, today, that would be like a chicken. That's not very special. You can just go, and I suddenly realized that's because you can just go down the street to a fried chicken shop. Meat is everywhere. It's plentiful. It's all around us.

That seems to be quite a recent development in human history. The affluence of meat, it doesn't seem to be as precious. as it used to be. Yeah, we don't think, or most of us don't think about putting a piece of animal flesh in our mouths and chewing it. I mean, when you start thinking about it, it does become a little bit gross, to put it mildly, but most of us don't, because as you say, it's, it is all around us, and we are taught from most many of us, not all of us. I mean, there's a sizable community, of course, of people who don't do this, who choose not. to. But actually, it's not as large a community as one, well, as one might have thought. I mean,

veganism, vegetarianism actually is still very much a minority within our society, a small minority, I should say, within our society. But we want to, somehow, we want to make distinctions. I mean, we wouldn't eat our dog, even though, you know, and happy carnivore in Brighton, wouldn't eat her dog, but she might, she will eat perhaps a chicken or a piece of beef, you know, cow, she will drink milk. So, you know, we kind of make these distinctions in our everyday life, which makes us feel like, you know, we are acting in good ways. That is true that we draw these strange lines around it, don't we, around what is acceptable,

what is not acceptable? Do you think, I mean, put it aside that it's, don't. have sex animals for pleasure. But do you think it would ever be possible to live a life for all from animal cruelty? Or do you think it's so entwined into our culture that you couldn't really do it, that something's always being hurt along the way? I think it is possible to create a world without violence. Certainly, you know, all of my work is an attempt to think about ways of doing that. I work a lot on sexual violence. People make similar arguments there that it's always with us, it's always going to be with us, etc. No, I think that we can create nonviolent worlds.

But we do have to think in very imaginative, very different ways if we are going to do that. And it's not going to be easy because capitalism is fundamentally founded on the abuse of non-human animals as well as the abuse of humans, you know, human animals. And to get rid of one, The whole thing has to come toppling down, if you like. You can't just extract the non-human animal from cultures of cruelty. There are also cultures of cruelty about humans and human animals that are fundamental to our society. But I don't think that the embedded nature of it should stop us or should discourage us from kind of thinking about that and trying to imagine what that world would look like. in the future to come.

When you were writing this book, were you were different, I mean, you must have been a different person by the time you finished it, but how were your attitudes around human relationships with animals changed?

Did you approach it with an already very set view that was reinforced or did this research change your outlook completely? Which is absolutely changed totally in the course of writing this book. You know, as I said earlier,

the book came out of an earlier book I wrote about human-animal interactions, which was a much broader book about the ways humans and animals interact and what is the human and what is the animal, was the really central question there. But when I turned to look at the sexual aspect of it, there were so many things that I didn't know and I didn't expect. I think the embedded nature of our sexual abuse of animals

was something really shocked me because I hadn't thought about it. And I don't think many people, do think about it, but also thinking about questions of consent, questions of, well, what do we mean by sex? What do we mean by love? Is the other always impossible to understand? You know, how do we try to live good and ethically responsible lives? These are all, I think, big questions that really interested me and surprised me in my journey in writing this book. Did it turn you into a vegan? Or were you a vegan before or are you a vegan now?

I'm a vegetarian. I'm a vegetarian, too. I am a vegetarian. I mean, I was before, but I don't, you know, I don't actually, I'm not a pet owner, but I'm very interested in seeing people's relationships with their companion species. And, you know, I think all of us, particularly over the pandemic, sort of started to notice and started to, I think, maybe even appreciate more the companionship that we get from our, you know, from our dogs, our cats,

and our other, other pets. I've been a vegetarian for years and just this conversation might be the one to shift me into maybe veganism is the way to go. It was just the fact, like, when you pointed out that actually we do sexually exploit animals all the time and that we have this weird attitude to it. Well, that's okay, but that's not okay. You might have done it. You might have just tipped me over over the edge. Oh, well, mission accomplished. You have been incredible to talk to today. If anyone wants to do more about you and your research, where can they find you? My books are in any shop. I'm on Twitter,

reconsidering that one. I think it's really interesting to hear different people's views on such difficult. I mean, these are difficult topics. And I think the conversations that we can have, I think, can always be helpful. You have been mind-blowing today. Honestly, I could talk to you forever. But thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk to me today. This has been amazing. King, this is always lovely talking to you. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much to Joanna for joining me. If you appreciated what you heard, please don't forget to like with you subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. We have got episodes on Polari, the Hidden Gay Language, and senior sex, all coming your way.

And if you want us to explore a subject, or if you just fancied saying hello, you can also email us, and you can get us at betwixt at historyhit.com. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.