'Heavy petting': Princeton prof makes case for bestiality
The professor shared an article, titled 'Zoophilia Is Morally Permissible,' that argues that bestiality, pedophilia, and necrophilia 'have been left aside from the sexual liberation movement in the past fifty years.'
After sharing an article in defense of bestiality, a Princeton professor of bioethics has offered his own statement making a case for the practice.
Peter Singer has worked as the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University since 1999.
He is a founding co-editor of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, a journal that “offers a forum for careful, rigorous, unpolemical discussion of issues that are widely considered controversial, in the sense that certain views about them might be regarded by many people as morally, socially, or ideologically objectionable or offensive.”
It is from this journal that Singer shared an article titled “Zoophilia Is Morally Permissible.”
Another thought-provoking article is “Zoophilia Is Morally Permissible” by Fira Bensto (pseudonym), which is just out in the current issue of @JConIdeas.
This piece challenges one of society’s strongest taboos and argues for the moral permissibility of some forms of sexual… pic.twitter.com/32fIaJEJ1J— Peter Singer (@PeterSinger) November 9, 2023
“This piece challenges one of society’s strongest taboos and argues for the moral permissibility of some forms of sexual contact between humans and animals,” Singer posted on X on Nov. 8. “This article offers a controversial perspective that calls for a serious and open discussion on animal ethics and sex ethics.”
[RELATED: Prof bashes Greek life in email, claims fraternities promote bestiality]
The article refers to zoophilia, along with “necrophilia or pedophilia,” as “one of the few sexual orientations [...] that remain off-limits and have been left aside from the sexual liberation movement in the past fifty years.” It argued for “a large enough fraction of the general population and decision-makers” to “make an ideological U-turn on zoophilia and move away from seeing it as a sexual deviance.”
The article also specifically cites an earlier article by Singer himself, titled “Heavy petting,” which argues that “girls are more likely to be attracted to horses than boys” and suggests that men raping and beheading chickens is “no worse than what egg producers do to their hens all the time.”
Three days after first sharing the article, Singer made a statement arguing that bestiality is morally preferable to factory farming.
Q: You posted an article indicating that sexual intercourse with animals is morally permissible. You’ve also in the past published a book arguing for veganism.
That being the case, is it your official position that eating animals is not okay but having sex with them is?
A: I… https://t.co/6Mpg8zHEeL pic.twitter.com/nPngWg34kl— Peter Singer (@PeterSinger) November 11, 2023
“Imagine that you are an animal locked up all of your life in a factory farm stall too narrow for you to even turn around, let alone walk a single step, so that you have nothing to do all day except stand up and lie down on a floor consisting of bare metal slats,” Singer began.
“Then you are crammed into a truck and driven for many hours to a place where you will be slaughtered. This is what happens to millions of pigs in the US today, and the lives of billions of other factory-farmed animals are no better.”
He continues by asking the reader to “imagine that you are an animal living with a person who cares for you and loves you in all the ways that most people love their companion animals, but in addition, this person sometimes has sexual contact with you, making sure that the contact does not hurt you, and leaving you free to move away if you don’t like it.”
“You live out your natural lifespan like this, and when you get old and terminally ill and are in distress, the person who cares for you, full of sadness, takes you gently to a veterinarian who puts you to sleep,” he concludes. “Which animal would you rather be?”
Singer told Campus Reform that his post “was one of a routine series of posts I wrote to acquaint my followers with the variety of articles we publish in the Journal of Controversial Ideas,” adding, “The other posts got between 17K and 57K views.”
”This one is now at an astonishing 5.3M,” he continued, ”and against that figure, the number of abusive tweets is miniscule. Most of the people abusing me don’t even seem to be able to make the elementary distinction between the editor of a journal and the author of a paper, so that makes them easy to dismiss.”
”I’m particularly pleased that my second tweet, which briefly describes the miserable lives of animals in factory farms, has now been seen by 1.4M people. If even 10% of them are persuaded to stop supporting factory farming and cease to buy its products, that would be a fantastic result. And if some of them want to be better informed about what we do to animals and buy my latest book, Animal Liberation Now, that would be better still.”
