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| David Cameron - image via iStock |
By Evelyn Tsitas
After a week of the British media squealing
with delight at allegations that David Cameron put a private part of his
anatomy in a dead pig’s mouth back in his university days, the Prime Minister
has finally confirmed he is disputing
the claim made in a new biography.
That is hardly likely to put an end to
pig-gate. It is no wonder that the recent allegations set the British media
ablaze. The strongly enforced distinction between species means that the great
taboo of bestiality blurs this separation and factures the boundaries between
human and non-human animal.
The allegations are disclosed in Lord
Michael Ashcroft’s new unauthorised biography Call Me Dave. The
Daily Mail – which is serialising the book - called the initiation event
into the Piers Gaveston Oxford
dining society “obscene”, “sordid” “outrageous” and
“debauched”.
However, the fallout has gone beyond
simple embarrassment and humiliation for the PM and entered into the realm of
animal rights concerns.
According to NME
Morrisey, a highly regarded UK musician, has issued a joint
statement that he claims is also sent on behalf of animal rights group PETA.
It reads; "No, boys won't be
boys - not when it's sexual perversion and also involves a vulnerable victim of
slaughter, a feeling being who lost his or her life and then was used for a
prank… A prime minister is supposed to protect the most vulnerable."
It’s a very good point. While the Twittersphere
is ablaze with pig jokes and sexual innuendo, media commentators are more
concerned about speculating on the damage to Cameron’s reputation than examining
the cruelty to animals used in the debauched parties of the notorious Oxford dining society, the Piers
Gaveston, which ‘specialises in bizarre rituals and sexual excess’. And yes,
pigs’ heads.
Aidan Hartley, writing in The
Spectator recalled Oxford parties in the 1980s: “In those days, pigs’
heads from the Covered Market were a favourite as props for undergraduate high
jinks — and probably they still are. I don’t know why.”
Despite Darwinian notions of
evolution, much of our culture operates on the assumption that humans are
qualitatively different from other animals. Feminist theorist Donna Haraway
challenges this idea in her influential book When Species Meet (2008).
She is openly critical of other theorists Jacques Derrida and Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their attitude to animals. She challenges Derrida
to think beyond an animal’s capacity to suffer and asks us to be curious about
animals, to respond to the animal’s presence by asking the animal what is
wanted.
The human relationship with the
animal is political and contested. When pranksters dumped and then abandoned a terrified
piglet at 10 Downing Street as a joke, there was no thought about how this stunt was going to affect the
poor animal. “This is its first experience of the outside world and it has been
dragged all over Downing Street and then into Charing Cross police station,” said Clarie Elson, the livestock manager from the farm told Southwark News.
Humans have long had a great fascination
for sexual activity between creatures of different species. In his 2001 paper Heavy Petting philosopher Peter Singer argues
that instances of sex across the species barrier are so frequent "it
ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human
beings." No mention of the animal’s
dignity.
One of the problems with bestiality is the
issue of consent. Can an animal ever consent to an act of intercourse with a
human? There is the issue of power imbalance, for a start. Any encounter where one
party can be legally skinned, made into a handbag and also eaten is not on an
equal footing in the bedroom. The common word for the exploited person in these
situations is not ‘partner’ but ‘victim’. In the case of bestiality, the victim
is the animal, who does not and cannot provide consent.
If one partner is dead, does the need for
consent still apply? Regardless of legality, other taboos, such as necrophilia
step in. But the fact that the pig was dead when Cameron allegedly stuck ‘a
private part of his anatomy’ in the pig’s mouth doesn’t seem to be the issue.
The uproar about this allegation surrounds the taboo of bestiality, not
necrophilia. By demanding that
human beings do not engage with animals in sexual acts, the act of prohibition
defines the differences between the species.
The reaction on Twitter to the pig’s
head allegations reveals one overwhelming fact – people find the idea of sex
acts with a pig hilarious. According to The
Conversation, one reason why #piggate played so well on Twitter is that
making jokes about David Cameron and pigs allows us to turn the tables on the
privileged and powerful.
However, while this may be the case, the
humor is revealing in that it mostly speaks to our use of the pig as a product
of consumption, or one that is in someway ‘unclean’. The Tweets may joke that
we can no longer really trust where our bacon comes from, but none mention just
how smart pigs are. A paper published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Comparative
Psychology reveals that pigs have been
found to be mentally and socially similar to dogs and chimpanzees.
More than anything, what the “pig-gate”
scandal reveals is just how deeply entrenched our speciesism is, and how deeply
uncomfortable we are as a society when it comes to interrogating the real
issues arising from acts of bestiality and cruelty to animals.
Dr Evelyn Tsitas explored the role of human animal hybrid in science fiction in her PhD research, with particular emphasis on how animal rights and animal protection issues are reflected in the creative arts and popular culture. Her academic research in this area has been published widely in books, journals and popular media.
