Just a month passed since I wrote my previous post about zoosadism, and the situation changed enough to warrant a new post. This text will detail some events that took place, as well as disprove new anti zoosad arguments.

If you are entirely new to this topic, here’s some summary for you: zoosadism is a paraphilia that means an attraction to pain experienced by nonhuman animals. It has been used as an identity by the anti contact zoosadist community since 2019. It is not synonymous with an act of abuse against an animal.

June 1-7 is celebrated as the zoo pride week. This year we came up with an idea to have a zoosadist positivity event during this week, where we made and spread posters with uplifting or educating messages. These posters featured an African wild dog, who’s the mascot animal of zoosadism, wearing the zoosadist flag and carrying the alef zoo flag.

Expectedly, these posters were met with aggressive pushback. But in addition to usual animal abuse accusations, something pretty new happened.

Instead of just accusing us of secretly abusing animals on the basis of our attraction, antis and zetas focused their efforts on getting us to stop identifying as zoosadists. Their new agenda included the following:

1. Zoosadism as a term does not refer to a paraphilia, it only ever means an action, and saying you’re a zoosadist equals saying you’re an active abuser because the suffix “-ist” only refers to doing actions;
2. Anti contact and nonoffending zoosadists were actually tricked and manipulated into using this term and need to be saved from it by new labels.

The idea of renaming zoosadism already visited someone several months ago, and that person came up with the term “bestiasadophilia”. This time the term was “zoosadophilia”¹, but in both cases the primary audience had nothing to do with zoophilia, sadism, or zoosadism – the word was tossed like a bone to a community these people don’t belong to.

A side note – the concept of sadophilia has already been proposed before as a term that means an attraction to sadists.

Several posts were made, including one invoking Grok (Twitter’s AI chat bot that is periodically tweaked to become more fascist):

A well meaning individual whose participation in para spaces was positive (unlike those pictured above) has posted the following text on this subject:

If you could never hurt an animal, i advice to not call yourself a “zoosadist”.
You can be a zoophile and a sadophile, without ever causing harm to an animal. You are valid.
Calling yourself (anti-c) zoosadist will at best confuse people, at worst get you in trouble.
I am not a zoosadophile myself. But I have reasons enough to believe that it is unwise to lable yourself as zoosadist. (A lable which has been used to lable people who HAVE hurt animals for sexual pleasure)
<…>
To me, it does as little sense as if a biastophile would try to reclaim the word rapist. And change the definition of rapist to mean: “attraction to non-consentual acts”.

I had a conversation with the author of the last post and ended up talking about the backstory of the zoosadist identity as compared to other paraphilias. It appears that some part of the misunderstanding is scarcity of zoosad-made resources, and people having to get their information primarily from places that state zoosadism is an act of “deriving pleasure”, meanwhile map-made resources that define pedophilia as an attraction, zoo-made resources that define zoophilia as an attraction, are already available.

One thing I’d like to say is that professional literature is sort of averse to the term “attraction”. The medical consensus on paraphilia for a long time was that it’s a disorder of abnormal sexual behavior. We only started seeing some progress recently.

Let’s compare the APA dictionary entries on zoophilia, zoosadism, and erotophonophilia as a control:

Zoophilia n. a paraphilia in which nonhuman animals are repeatedly preferred or exclusively used to achieve sexual excitement and gratification.
https://dictionary.apa.org/zoophilia

Zoosadism n. a paraphilia in which sexual arousal and satisfaction are obtained from torturing a nonhuman animal.
https://dictionary.apa.org/zoosadism

Erotophonophilia n. see lust murder. an extreme form of sexual sadism in which an individual experiences sexual arousal from the murder of a partner during the sexual act, often including elaborate staging of the act and mutilation of the victim’s body.
https://dictionary.apa.org/erotophonophilia
https://dictionary.apa.org/lust-murder

The words used to describe these three things are extremely similar.

While it’s possible nowadays to find more or less reputable sources describing zoophilia as more of a sexual orientation rather than “achieving sexual gratification”, this happened only due to organized push by zoo activists of early internet era, documented by a researcher of sexuality Hani Miletski.

No such change was made for zoosadism or erotophonophilia yet, which you can see for yourself by googling either of these two paraphilias. Any activism around most violence themed paraphilias became possible only after appearance of the anti contact paradigm and birth of the united para rights activism in 2010s.

Right now our opponents on Twitter aren’t singling out erotophonophilia the same way they do with zoosadism simply because it’s not the hot topic of the current discourse. It doesn’t mean zoosadism is uniquely different and doesn’t belong in the row of these terms. And the focus yet may shift onto other paraphilias, especially as our activism progresses. Antis will gradually begrudgingly accept zoophilia, necrophilia, and some others, but keep stumbling across paraphilias they view as especially unworthy, and periodically make some of them a focus of a big exclusionist campaign (late into this process, probably also trying to cover it up by claiming they actually care about para rights and think this specific paraphilia is dragging us back).

There is no inherent difference between zoosadism and other paraphilias, the only difference is how much effort has yet been put into taking each term away from the medicalizing and accusatory crowd. There is no reason to not reclaim zoosadism – no more than there would be to not reclaim pedophilia from people who use it to mean sexual abuse of children. The only purpose renaming this identity into something else would serve is keeping our community disconnected and lost. Which is, as I believe, what these renamings are actually for.

History of zoosadism as an identity label for anti contacts started with this word thrown at us with violence. Back then no anti bothered with trying to save us from it, nobody said “no, these people aren’t actual acting zoosadists, so don’t call them that”. Antis only showed initiative to rename zoosadism after we made ourselves known as anti contacts and said we will use this label with pride. This is something I find remarkable.

So this starts one more page in a 7 year long attempt to repress the sense of pride and community of those who are attracted to animals in pain and do not wish to act on it. I don’t know who may have been genuinely misled by antis into thinking zoosadism is a uniquely bad label, but I hope this post can help them.

1. The author of the term “zoosadophilia” intended it for personal use to avoid confusion with a documentary about animal abuse and doesn’t endorse it being used in erasure of the the anti contact zoosadist identity. ↩︎