If, like me, you read the title, thought “Isn’t that obvious?”, but didn’t read the link, this is a response to a tweet asking if bestiality was always taboo and raising arguments for why it wouldn’t be from someone whom I’ve never heard of, yet also has a blue checkmark. In her defense though, it’s not that she’s defending bestiality so much as arguing, “Well, here’s a person from medieval times would think”. The issue is more that she seems to think that people from history were incredibly stupid, amoral, and would fuck anything if it didn’t give them a disease, which is dumb.
Yeah, a thing that often occurs to me when we talk about medieval life is that even the most cosmopolitan person back then was less connected than a backwoods off-grid militia hermit today.
So it’s like, yeah, you could nominally get your head cut off and kicked up your butt by a mule for masturbating (or whatever), but in practice, you weren’t going to get caught. It’s not like they had CSI. And if you were accused of moral crimes, like Anne Boleyn or alleged witches, it was probably because someone made up the charge to enforce their power over you.
And the flip side of people being largely in the dark about each others’ private actions is that specific crimes were probably partly symbolic. “She consorted with the devil” is kind of just a code for “she talked back to a man”, and “he fucks horses” is probably code for someone being autistic, or a hillbilly, or whatever else bothered people at the time.
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But perception and reality don’t always agree. I would wager that it is far more common for laws to be passed against perceived problems that don’t really exist than for them to be passed against real problems that hardly anybody is aware of. Remember the hand-wringing by certain members of the US Congress a decade or so ago about human-animal hybrids? Admittedly, no laws ever came of that…
That said, Idaho passed a law against cannibalism in 1990, making in punishable by 14 years in prison. Yes, 1990. And apparently Idaho is the only state where cannibalism is illegal. What the hell was going on in Idaho in the '80s?!
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The arguments that say animals cannot consent - apply equally to the idea we shouldn’t be killing them and eating them as food. That might have been what they were saying at the time, but I don’t think thats what they meant.
Blurring the line between humans as God’s annointed, and animals as property to be owned, now that argument still holds water today. But its still not helping the animals any.
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First execution in colonial america was a young man who has sex with a turkey. Not medieval, but similar religiosity, I guess?
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My wife and I just finished doing the “candy apple” and we are still in the garden. Weird.
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It’s like I always say:
If it be livestock, thou art morally in hock!
If it be demonic, humanoid, or fey
My friend, methinketh ye art ok!
So long as there lies a homunculus in that theatre,
If ever there dwelleth a ghost in the machine,
Regret not, as there be no need to come clean!
Whenever there is consent, I implore,
Repent not, nor prostrate before the men of purple
Ye won’t be paying tithes to the lords of the 2nd circle.
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They were figs iirc according to most scholars. Apples require a period of cold not present in Africa… and they clothed themselves in fig leaves
Dr. Janega (who I admire) is completely right about the Church’s theological stance on bestiality and on sex in general. But, while she is very clear in much of her work that people in Medieval Europe violated the Church’s teachings about sex frequently, she’s sticking to the Church’s position to claim that people back then viewed bestiality the same way the Church did (and she does). I don’t see how she can hold both those views at the same time - if the general public violated Church law so consistently for other kinds of sex, why would they adhere to Church law just about bestiality?
Most people were rural in Medieval Europe, and bestiality is always present in rural communities, even when the dominant religion preaches vigorously against it. That’s so in rural communities in the U.S.A. today, and in rural communities around the world. So yes, there have always been people who are repulsed by the thought, and people who think it’s ok and fun. It is, and has been, often tolerated, even where it’s officially prohibited. Even in medieval times.
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I think the woman getting slammed on Twitter is great, because it fills me with hope knowing there are actually women out there who aren’t insane conservative shill shock jocks, yet who still manage to stick their feet in their mouths as badly as I sometimes do. People on Twitter need to chill out and join a debate team or something, and learn that some people just like to “unpack” shit, and that’s not automatically a form of endorsement, apologetics, or concern trolling. It’s almost like Twitter is filled with a bunch of people living in a first world country who must not have real problems or be particularly busy.
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Would you include people practicing folk traditions as practicing witchcraft? I have to think such things were pretty widespread especially for “healthcare,” prior to contemporary medicine. Not sure the church saw these analogously. Genuinely curious, I don’t have much background on such things.
Yeah, I know what you mean. The waiters turn a blind eye and it makes it really hard to enjoy the jousting and the turkey legs. That’s why I don’t go to Medieval Times anymore.
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Who needs past-tense Europe? Bestiality is legal in many US states today, point of fact:
Notably, five of these states (and D.C.) had “blue laws” prohibiting sodomy that were found unconstitutional in 1973, and the bestiality laws were part-and-parcel of the same legislation. They were stricken when the antisodomy laws were removed and never restored.
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I question how many animals really grok the cause and effect here.
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There is a medieval reference to a ritual in which an Irish king would get up in front of his subjects and fuck a horse as part of a coronation ceremony, but the source is a Christian chronicler describing a pagan tribe, so it’s a little bit suspect.
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Why in heaven’s name did this topic come up?
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Of course it is also true that unless you were the lord(and often not even then) , you probably didn’t sleep in a room by yourself or with just your spouse. Depending on the exact period and place, you might have been lucky to sleep in a room with only your family,
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Ok, Janega is pretty damned funny and makes a lot of good points about modern people clutching pearls while simultaneously ignoring the brutality of modernized processes.
I still love me some cheese, though. Sorry, factory moos.
This is actually part of a talk I gave on Indo-European language and culture. You’re leaving out some good stuff, like that black horse gets killed, chopped up into a stew, in which the newly coronated king sits as he serves up to the assembled guests. The Asvamedha (“horse-drunk” in Sanskrit, because ‘mead’) has the inverse setup, whereby the priestess fucks the white stallion, then kills and eats it. Some posit this is the religious split between the so-called “kemtom/satam” divide in the development of I-E. But I go on.
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For the record, I have many gay animals on top of my head.
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