Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Relatedly, another philosopher (Martha Nussbaum) has observed that 'We
need a group of humans to bound ourselves against, who will come to exem-
plify the . . . line between the truly human and the basely animal' (Nussbaum,
2001: 29). For all the talk of
animal
rights andwelfare in the debates leading up
to RCW16.52.205, the bill was really about
people
and their (mis)behaviour.
13
In the name of animal protection, Roach's law could not entertain the
possibility that bestiality might be considered a legitimate practice.
This move rested on an implicit bifurcation of sex acts into two classes
upon which 'facts' moral reasoning was constructed. On the one hand,
there was sex that we can regard as loving, cultured, sensual and ultimately
'human'. On the other hand, there was sex we can regard as instrumental,
carnal, lustful and ultimately 'animalistic'. The first kind of sex is located in
a wider set of human virtues that are taken to be irreducible to one's inner
urges. The second kind of sex is elemental and asocial - the virtues defin-
ing 'good sex' were, for Roach and her supporters, absent or suppressed by
instinct. In Pinyan's case, this may have seemed especially true to critics of
his behaviour; after all, he submitted to being penetrated by a creature seven
or eight times his own size, rather than penetrating the creature himself. He
thus apparently made himself into the
object
of a horse's desire, albeit a horse
that was manually stimulated to perform a sex act.
Study Task:
In
Chapter 1
and the previous section of this chapter, I referred
to 'ambivalent categories' that cross the putative ontological divides mapped
out in
Figure 1.5
. From the paragraph immediately above, can you see how
the ambivalent category 'human' was linked to nature's collateral concept
'sex' by Pam Roach and her supporters? Was 'sex' itself made into an ambiva-
lent category in this case?
Despite criticisms of his predilections, by all accounts Kenneth Pinyan
was an intelligent, educated, professionally successful man who loved ani-
mals. He was, it seems, a zoophile (or a 'zoo'). As part of his relationship
with animals, he pursued non-violent sex in which he, not the animal, was
sodomised. He evidently derived a certain pleasure from this, despite the
pain he endured (and the risks he took, which ultimately cost him his life).
If he had survived his mid-2005 night in Enumclaw Community Hospital,
would Pinyan have argued that his bestiality was a kind of 'good sex'? Would
he have argued the zoophile case and contended that love of animals -
emotional
and
physical - was part of who he was as a person? Would he,
in short, have contested the logic of Pam Roach's argument that sex with
animals crosses the line between respectability and deviance?
In an oblique way, all these questions were raised in a 2007 documen-
tary film about the Pinyan-Tait case entitled
Zoo
(directed by Robinson
Devor, see
Plate 5.1
). This film sought to represent the Enumclaw incident
