Review: Bestiality: An Historical, Medical, Legal and Literary Study

Bestiality: An Historical, Medical, Legal and Literary Study by Gaston Dubois-Desaulle

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Not sure what to expect, I read this book because I saw it in a list from a New England Sex Clinic. Intrigued, I went to see if my library owned a copy. Colour me shocked when I found it available for lending. I'm sure the librarians handling this were thinking, what is going on. At the same time I requested two other BDSM books and another bestiality book. Either I'm really trying to get me freak on or I'm doing research. They will never know.

This book is a translation and it was interesting. From a historical aspect, bestiality is mostly chronicled through laws and religion. Basically, we are inferring that humans committed acts of bestiality because there were laws against it. If we go by our 21st century litigious society, specifically in the States, we can assume that the laws were created because someone was caught doing it. Why else would a law be put into place? It's an interesting hypothesis which I can agree to, but that is only because of my own personal reference and experience with how laws are created in the States.

I've also learned that specific ethnicity were accused of both sodomy and bestiality as a way of their life. Voltaire (whom I've never really liked) passionately hated the Jewish and accused them of all sorts of unnatural laying with beasts. It's a bit odd but what it does, is shows how a person can be so bias.

The book also covered the inquisition and witches. Witches were specifically accused of laying with goats and other animals which were really the Devil incarnate. Interesting piece of common knowledge - Devil's semen is cold. That is how they knew the animal was possessed. I don't even know what to say about this tidbit.

What I found interesting from a legal perspective was that sodomy and bestiality were often times considered one and the same. They were used interchangeably. And apparently only homosexual men committed sodomy and under law, they were fully punished. It's quite the witch hunt.

From a medical perspective, it just went weird. The book analyzes three different medical conditions which would cause a person commit these "unnatural acts".

1. Peripheral neuroses
2. Spinal neuroses
3. Cerebral neuroses (p. 138)

These last are manifested by:

A. Paradoxia, or the sexual instinct appearing outside the limits of normal sexual life.
B. Anesthesia, or absence of sexual instinct
C. Hyperesthesia, or increasing of the sexual instinct
D. Paresthesia, or perversion of sexual instinct. This last division alone should hold us since it unites under its label:

1. Cruel and bloody love
2. Anthropophagy
3. Active and passive flagellation
4. Penchant for an inanimate object
5. Exhibitionism
6. Necrophilia
7. Contrary sexual instinct
8. and finally Bestiality.

All I know is that cases in the book reviewed people who had an overwhelming desire to fuck an animal. And they were cruel too. Rabbits, chickens, cats were killed during the rectal copulation. It's a travesty to abuse an animal in this manner. In the "dark ages" people who have committed this crime were tortured and burned with the animal the violated. How is this fair to the violated animal?

The really bizarre part of this book is in the literature section. I had no idea there were so many books in the late 1800s and early 1900s about women and apes. Or what we may now classify as gorillas. Apparently, there are numerous (fictional) accounts of negresses laying with the big apes in the jungle. They would go into deal how the apes with mate with the women and treat them better than human males. It's all a bit bizarre. The fact that they wrote as if it were truth rather than fiction is stranger. Then again, I started thinking about all the paranormal shifter books we have now. Perhaps, following Jungian philosophy, we have a collective unconsciousness which desires this illicit joining between man and beast. Why else are there so many shifter books and lately, some of the shifters are having sex in their shifted form. What is this allure? Is it to bring us all back down to an animalistic level? I'm not sure. I just know that this act is something which causes many people to squirm - whether in desire or disgust.

This book is a fascinating history lesson and a bit thought provoking. The material at times is a bit dry. Of course, this is a translation, so perhaps in original French, it's better.



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