Is it now OK to have sex with animals? -

The Week

I have a very 2014 question for you: How would you respond if you found out that a man living down the street regularly has sexual intercourse with a horse?

Would you be morally disgusted? Consider him and his behavior an abomination? Turn him in to the police? (This would be an option in the roughly three-quarters of states that — for now — treat bestiality as a felony or misdemeanor.)

Or would you perhaps suppress your gag reflex and try hard to be tolerant, liberal, affirming, supportive? Maybe you'd even utter the slogan that deserves to be emblazoned over our age as its all-purpose motto and mantra: Who am I to judge?

Thanks to New York magazine, which recently ran a completely nonjudgmental 6,200-word interview with a "zoophile" who regularly enjoys sex with a mare — unironic headline: "What it's like to date a horse" — these questions have been much on my mind.

They should be on yours, tBecause this is a very big deal, in cultural and moral terms.

No, not the fact of bestiality, which (like incest) has always been with us, but the fact of an acclaimed, mainstream publication treating it as a matter of complete moral indifference. (Aside, of course, from the requisite concern about animal abuse — a nonhuman analog to the pervasive emphasis on consent as the only relevant moral criterion for judging sexual behavior. The interview dispenses with this worry by informing us that the zoophile regularly brings his equine lover to orgasm orally — and that she often initiates acts of intimacy, showing that she appears to enjoy their sexual interactions.)

Much more here http://theweek.com/article/index/272578/is-it-now-ok-to-have-sex-with-animals