Lecter A.A. Wierstamann

This is a restored post from my WordPress. Originally posted on March 8, 2022. I still agree with everything I said here.

A couple of years ago I made a post where I outlined the problems I found within the Twitter zoo community. Now it is March the 8th, 2022, and nothing changed. The past few days were marked by discourse, surrounding zoosadism and Zeta principles.

Zeta – Zoophiles for Ethical Treatment of Animals – is a zoophile organization. It has a set of principles its members are supposed to follow:

1. Bestow upon animals the same kindness one would wish bestowed upon oneself.
2. Consider the well being of an animal companion as important as ones own.
3. Place the animal’s will and wellbeing ahead of one’s desires for sexual gratification.
4. Teach those who seek knowledge about zoophilia and bestiality without promoting it.
5. Discourage the practice of bestiality in the presence of fetish seekers.
6. Censure sexual exploitation of animals for the purpose of financial gain.
7. Censure those who practice and promote animal sexual abuse.

The mention of “fetish seekers” has always raised questions. Fetish is an umbrella term for objectophilia and partialism, an attraction to inanimate objects or non-sexual body parts. When Zeta activists say “fetish”, they mean objectifying and tokenizing attitudes to your sexual partner and putting your own sexual pleasure before theirs. I have offered long ago to rework this sentence into something like “in presence of people who don’t care about their potential sexual partners”, and I was met with lack of understanding and with opposition – zetas didn’t understand why I, as a fetishist, found putting the word “fetish” in context of sexual mistreatment offensive.

This is a small and relatively harmless discourse, but it exposed the deep rooted distaste the Twitter zoos have for people with attractions other than vanilla zoophilia. Enter the zoosadism discourse.

I don’t believe an honest sadist exists and following that line of reasoning, I don’t believe an “anti-harm” one exists, either. <…> If it is immediately gratifying for a sadist to consume content and enable the abuse of animals and the sadist calculates a low risk of being caught doing so – they’ll do it.

A Twitter zoo blogger Lyc (MountainShep17)

Paraphiles, I beseech you, what do you think becomes of creating networks for your kind, when the attraction is toward abuse itself? <…> If you were truly non-contact, non-offending, non-whatever, you’d keep that shit to yourself, network like any other zoo, and build a support network that doesn’t giggle about how hot it is to snuff puppies.

A Twitter zoo blogger Akela (zoodonym)

You can be ‘no contact’, but it’s the same as a no-contact MAP talking to kids online. How long, until the ‘urge’ becomes too great? One bit of trauma, a rough day, a disassociation (for those with DID). How long?

A Twitter zoo blogger Winter Green (big_bad_wuff)

Real life, non-fearmongering zoosadism is a sadistic attraction to animals, a zoo variant of BDSM. Nobody knows why exactly some people end up attracted to pain and violence, I personally as an anthropo-sadist and a zoosadist fantasize about having my own image reflected through the fear of my victim and about having them watch me and try to predict what I want to do. As a sadist, I have a clear preference (almost exclusively the age groups and species I find attractive otherwise), I have crushes, and I understand my inability to act on these fantasies because of the immorality of the act. One half of my attractions – the anthropo one – is almost unquestionably accepted by fellow anthropo-attracted people. There are occasional problems, e.g. kink-critical radfems or people who are anti sex and anti fantasy in general, but most understand that sadism is a kink like any other. I am also far from alone in these fantasies, and the amount of gore erotica you can find, say, in the Hannibal series fandom, can show you how much not alone I am.

But what about zoos? You can figure out what kind of a narrative dominates the Twitter zoo community from the quotes I listed above. There are zoosadists on Twitter, but many of them have re-closeted themselves, and the remaining ones are being actively pushed out of the definition of zoophilia. The new definition of zoophilia that the Twitter zoo community pushes is getting narrower and narrower.

If a zoosexual didn’t care about their partner’s feelings, autonomy or consent why would they be considered a zoo? If a fetishist did care about those things, why would they be considered a fetishist? Why not consider them zoo?

A Twitter zoo blogger Lyc (MountainShep17)

If someone asked me to define zoophilia, I would say it is a sexual and/or romantic attraction towards animals. The zoo Twitter defines zoophilia as love, care, respect, consent, and all virtues they can imagine in a relationship. This leads to a conclusion: a true zoo is incapable of being careless and abusive to animals, and people suspected of animal abuse are not zoos.

Despite Twitter zoos’ claims that they see zoophilia as a sexuality like any other, their view of this sexuality is pretty much unprecedented. Heterosexuality, pansexuality, hell, even minor attraction, are not defined through how much you care for and respect your partner. Consequently, nobody says hetero men who beat and neglect their wives are no true hetero. The rest of the world (or, at least, that part of it that has a habit to think about sexualities) agrees that being attracted to someone and understanding/respecting their needs are two different things, and the latter is a skill that you need to bring up in yourself consciously. And vice versa, not being attracted to someone does not mean you can’t treat them with compassion and care.

I don’t seriously think Zeta activists believe being a zoo automatically makes you incapable of abusing animals. Rather, they gained a habit of waving “love and care for animals” in the faces of anti zoo people, and any aspect of zoophilia that is not about gentle consensual relationships is undermining their favorite tactic. This is why zoosadists are getting lumped together with active abusers, zetas want them removed from the general picture as soon as possible. Some zeta bloggers are also preoccupied with talking about an imaginary majority of exclusive zoosadists, to avoid addressing the fact that most zoosadists have diverse attractions towards animals, including romantic. They benefit from painting this discourse as loving romantic zoos versus loveless abusive sadists, because admitting that zoosadism is just kinky zoophilia would make their propaganda more complicated. Attacking fetishists in Zeta principles is a means to virtue-signal: “we’re not actually fetishizing animals, we’re loving and caring”.

The need to have something to oppose the stigma and prejudice from the society is rather understandable. The choice of weapon, linking zoophilia to having consensual relationships, enhanced compassion, and supporting animals, calls for something better, for the following reasons:

1. This rhetoric directly leads to exclusion of kinky zoos, aromantic zoos, zoos that just do not get along with animals. Discourse-driven zetas might consider these people a possible (or even desirable) collateral damage, but this is still bad. You can’t exclude people from a sexual identity just because you keep changing the definition.
2. Zoophilia ends up defined in a way no other sexuality is, and this further breaches the gap between the zoo community and paraphiliac and queer identities. Attempts to close this gap by zoo ideologues tend to be horribly invasive towards other identities, e.g. a recent claim by a zoo blogger Hypnotist Sappho that “zoosexuality is LGBT because we experience romantic attraction” is fueling aphobic bigotry within the LGBT community.
3. Equating attraction to action, used against zoosadists, also hits vanilla zoos that are attracted to animals who can’t be in a sexual relationship with a human. I used a mouse as an example, and my opponent did not have a definite answer. For me a sexual attraction to a dog and a sexual attraction to a mouse are the same, equally morally neutral, but if you’re used to measuring the worth of someone’s feelings through how safe acting would be, you’re going to face issues.
4. People start seeing being in the zoo community as synonymous with being accepted and wanted in contemporary zoo groups, as opposed to just simply being a zoophile. Because of that there is virtually no strategy to address animal abuse perpetuated by some zoos. Fake-claiming their identity and hoping the new generation of zoos will do better is a failing method, you need to address animal abuse as something a zoophile might actually do, the same way LGBT is addressing spouse abuse in LGBT families (spoiler alert: lesbian and bi women are more likely to be assaulted by their partner than straight women, and this is an issue we’re actively talking about, and one of its causes is radfem propaganda about how women are inherently better at understanding each other and more loving).

I do not have a working solution for these problems. My main sphere of activism is the map community, largely due to how unwelcome the zoo community makes me feel. Instinctively I want to allow Twitter zoos to cocoon in and marinate in their increasingly more out of touch politics, but I do not want more people to get caught up in it. I’m already hearing stories from zoos whose first introduction to zoophilia was Zeta, and who feel traumatized by this encounter. The only thing I can say is that Twitter zoos desperately need to have ties with other paraphiliac communities, look at more examples of anti contact maps, and understand that zoosadists and other extreme kinksters can be, and often are, anti contact. They should also definitely drop questioning someone’s identity as a means to deal with an abuser. Not only it won’t stop the abuse itself – and won’t even make you look better in the eyes of a bystander – it also mischaracterizes the zoo community as a closed club where membership is defined by a vote. Maybe a paraphiliac community can work like this when its active member numbers are in triple digits, but if you actually want mainstream recognition for your identity, you need to understand that occasionally dealing with bad people is a reality, and you need a protocol for such cases that isn’t “you’re not actually one of us, because our identity is good, and you are bad”.

Besides that, I feel genuine sympathy for zoos who are joining the zoo community on Twitter right now. Some of them will be zoosadists. Some will have other paraphilias, or just very complicated attractions. They need to know people like them are out there, just put off by what the Twitter zoo community is now.