Sexual Assault

The other day my dad, a guy named Bill, and I sat in on an Animal Law class at Cal. A lawyer from Peta was the guest lecturer, and she showed us footage of mistreatment at a pig farm. One of the things in the video was a worker telling another guy how he deals with stubborn sows. If she doesn’t move when he wants her to move, he takes the prod and shoves it up her anus. She always moves then. The lawyer called this a reference to “sexual assault”. But why call it sexual? What makes the forceful penetration of one orifice a sexual assault, and the forceful penetration of another orifice a non-sexual assault? Would it still be a sexual assault if a guy shoves a stick in a sow’s mouth? After all, oral can be just as sexual as anal. Should we include any other orifices besides the vagina, anus, and mouth? I can’t help remembering the sadistic curiosity that plagued me when I was a kid, when I took twigs and probed the insides of cats’ ears.

Really, any use of any body part can be sexual, if it’s done with a sexual drive. But shoving a stick up a pig’s backside to get it to move is not an act fueled by sexual drive. Maybe it’s fueled by a vicious hunger to dominate that is connected with other visceral drives, but this drive itself isn’t a sexual drive. A man can, acting under a sick urge to see others in pain, kidnap a girl, tie her to a post, and whip her. Maybe he likes the sight of blood, so he makes her wear a white dress, or strips her down to her panties, or to her skin. But his use of her body wouldn’t be a sexual use (and, assuming he lacks her consent, ab-use) unless it sexually stimulates or gratifies him. Merely using an organ that some would occasionally use for sex does not constitute a sexual act. And the forceful penetration of an orifice that some would penetrate for sexual pleasure, is not everywhere and in all cases a sexual assault.

Anyway, why should we care whether an act is sexual or not? What makes sexual assault wrong is not that it’s sexual, but that it’s assault. We don’t have to be calling abuses “sexual” for them to seem as abusive as they actually are. Whether a man gets a boner when he shoves a stick up somebody else’s anus isn’t exactly relevant. What matters is whether he has their consent. And it is this factor that we’ve been paying too little attention to. Western culture has for too long obsessed over whether an act is sexual, and has called both consensual and non-consensual acts “abuse” on the mere grounds that they have something to do with sex. And in this obsession western culture has let pass a whole host of humiliations and abuses that aren’t motivated by sexual desire. So it’s okay for a man to drag his daughter to those well-intentioned sadists in white jackets who we call “pediatricians”, who’ll make her take off all her clothes, touch her all over, and even pierce her with iron rods, and it’s okay to confine her for hours on end in those dayprisons we call “schools”, but it’s not okay at all when she lifts her skirt to a friend.