Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

between people and other animals) is found everywhere

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Woman Hating

on the planet, on every city street, in every rural town.

Bestiality is an erotic reality, one which clearly places

people in nature, not above it.

The relationship between people and other animals,

when nonpredatory, is always erotic since its substance

is nonverbal communication and touch. That eroticism

in its pure form is life-affirming and life-enriching was

sufficient reason to make bestiality a capital crime in

the Dark Ages, at least for the nonhuman animal; sufficient reason for the English in the Dark Ages to confuse sheep and Jews.

In contemporary society relationships between

people and other animals often reflect the sadomasochistic complexion o f human relationship. Animals in our culture are often badly abused, the objects of

violence and cruelty, the foil of repressed and therefore

very dangerous human sexuality. Some animals, like

horses and big dogs, become surrogate cocks, symbols

of ideal macho virility.

Needless to say, in androgynous community, human

and other-animal relationships would become more

explicitly erotic, and that eroticism would not degenerate into abuse. Animals would be part of the tribe and, with us, respected, loved, and free. They always

share our fate, whatever it is.

Incest

I was cold —later revolted a little, not

much — seemed perhaps a good idea to try

— know the Monster of the Beginning

Womb—Perhaps —that way. Would she

care? She needs a lover.

Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

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T h e parent-child relationship is primarily erotic

because all human relationships are primarily erotic.

T h e incest taboo is a particularized form o f repression,

one which functions as the bulwark o f all the other repressions. T h e incest taboo ensures that however free we become, we never become genuinely free. T h e incest

taboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with the

parents whom we love with our primary energy, forces

us to internalize those parents and constantly seek them,

or seek to negate them, in the minds, bodies, and hearts

o f other humans who are not our parents and never

will be.

T he incest taboo does the worst work o f the culture:

it teaches us the mechanisms o f repressing and internalizing erotic feeling—it forces us to develop those mechanisms in the first place; it forces us to particularize sexual feeling, so that it congeals into a need for a particular sexual “object” ; it demands that we