Against Cow Rape

Skip this one if you're squeamish

Smut literature is popular with women according to Youtube pundit Mary Morgan. Apparently one of the most popular genres is fantasy-themed smut in which women copulate with monsters and other mythical creatures. One best-selling book is set at a minotaur “milking farm.” A young woman, down on her luck, is offered a job where she “milks” minotaurs to extract their semen which is then packaged and sold for its apparently magical properties. The young woman is delighted when one of the stern, burly minotaurs takes an interest in her. The book is apparently the #1 best-seller in Amazon’s Fantasy Erotica category. It is sold at Barnes and Noble.

Mary Morgan rightly denounces monster smut. She thinks that the “milking farm” book is intrinsically filthy, and also has the consequence of frying women’s brains, desensitizing them to actual sex lives with their husbands (yes many of them are married). And the mental consequences of consuming this stuff probably extend past their sex lives. What does it do to someone’s spirit when they fill their minds with this filth?

It is easy to denounce this absurd stuff, both because it is porn and because of the human-animal angle.

But the “milking farm” smut book is uncomfortably similar to some of the things that are done in real life on real farms. I am sorry to tell you that bull semen farms exist in real life. Workers who make $18/hr must hold a device onto a bull’s penis as it mounts a dummy cow. The semen is then collected, frozen and shipped out for artificial insemination.

Every day hundreds of farm workers artificially inseminate thousands of cows. The process involves the worker shoving their hands into the cow’s anus and vagina to deposit frozen bull semen there.

Most people roll their eyes when vegans complain about “cow rape.” I don’t think that cows have the same sense of sexual propriety that humans do. The artificial insemination of cows on dairy farms is not a great humanitarian crisis. In this article I’m not talking about the effects on the cows, I’m talking about the effects on the workers.

There are people who have full time jobs putting cows in a restraining device and shoving their hands into the struggling cow’s genitals. What does it do to someone’s spirit to spend hours per day shoving their hands into cow genitals? What does it do to someone when their full time job is to hold an object onto a bull’s penis? Does it disrupt their natural sense of sexual propriety in a way that might be similar to the way that the smutty minotaur-milking romance novel disrupts a person’s natural sense of sexual propriety?

The reason farmers started using artificial insemination 1940s was because it was cheap and efficient. It’s a way to save a few bucks. But if the way to save a few bucks requires you to do weird sex stuff with animals, maybe you should skip it.

I am of course not saying that operating a bull semen extraction machine on a farm is the same as performing a sex act on a minotaur. Obviously the latter is way more depraved. But on the other hand, one of them is in a fantasy book and the other is done in real life. If you agree that in fantasy books we shouldn’t celebrate human-animal sex acts, then maybe we shouldn’t, in real life, do things that are uncomfortably similar to human-animal sex acts.

Some acts, like necrophilia, pedophilia and coprophagia and inherently depraved, and many people would oppose necrophilia even if it were done for some useful purpose, such as shaving a few dollars off the per unit cost of a business operation. It’s hard to see how shoving one’s hands in an animal’s vagina and anus is not also depraved, albeit to a lesser degree.