Pig in a poke: A brief look at porcinophilia

In my previous blogs I have examined various human-animal sexual relationships including zoophiles that have sexual relationships with horses, lizards, dolphins, birds and insects. Today’s blog examines something I am calling ‘porcinophilia’ (i.e., a sexual paraphilia where humans are sexually attracted to and aroused by pigs). Although there are a number of scientific papers that have made reference to humans having sexual relationships with pigs (both sows and boars), the behaviour has (surprisingly) never been given a name.

I don’t know about you, but before I researched the material for this blog, my only “evidence” that humans would want to have sex with a pig was an infamous scene in the 1972 film Deliverance starring Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, and Ned Beatty. In the film, the scene concerns Ned Beatty’s character (Bobby Trippe) being violently and anally raped by a two shotgun-wielding hillbillies and Bobby being forced to “squeal like a pig” as it was happening. However, this is nothing compared to the Belgian film Vase de Noces.

Vase de Noces is arguably one of the most disturbing and controversial movies ever made (known as Wedding Trough in the UK and often referred to as The Pig F**king Movie), and concerns the sexual relationship between a man and his pig. A number of film censors (including those in Australia) have labeled the film as an obscenity because of its animal killings (some real, some simulated) and depictions of coprophagia and urophilia (i.e., the eating of faeces and drinking of urine which I examined in previous blogs). The film revolves around an autistic man who becomes fixated on a female pig and ends up having a sexual relationship with it, and is psychologically devastated when the pig dies.

In my search for literature relating to porcinophilia, I came across a book chapter entitled ‘The Sex Lit You Probably Haven’t Read: Obscure and Expunged Material Dealing With Everyone’s Favorite Activity’ by Russ Kick. He made reference to the ‘feminist classic’ Our Bodies, Ourselves and described by Kick as “perhaps the most important women’s health book ever published”, and is currently in its eighth edition. Kick managed to track down some of the deleted fantasies from the original 1973 edition that presented sexual fantasies in the women’s own words. One of the extracts, mentioned sexual activity with pigs although in the context of being lower down the bestial hierarchy. The deleted quote read: “I fantasize about making love with horses, because they are very sensuous animals, more so than cows or pigs. They are also very male animals – horse society is very chauvinist”. 

A paper written by Margret Grebowicz concerning online bestiality pornography entitled “When Species Me(a)t” in a 2010 edition of the online journal Humanalia (the journal of human/animal interface studies). Grebowicz made a passing reference to bestiality involving pigs in a section on ‘animal rape’ based on what she had found on the internet. More specifically she claimed:

“Numerous sites advertise photo galleries accompanied by narratives of dogs ‘raping’ innocent girls or other ‘first timers’. In all of the sites classified as ‘animal rape’, the animal, usually a dog, is present as the perpetrator, not the victim, of a rape. This rape narrative sometimes depends on claims about the animal’s intelligence, as in http://www.zooshock.com, which shows photos of a woman having intercourse with a pig. The accompanying narrative states that she was raped by the pig in a shed, a claim which is then supported by the following sentence, which explains that pigs are among the most intelligent animals on the planet, comparable to dogs. The trajectory from intelligence to sexuality is clear: the more intelligent the animal, the more credible the narrative in which the animal is a sexual agent”.

But now for something a little bit more academic. Dr. Anil Aggrawal in his 2009 book Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices reported that the first ever legal reference concerning the punishment for bestiality was in the Hittite compendium of laws. These laws stated that bestial acts carried out by men (but not women) with pigs, sheep, cattle, and/or dogs were punishable with death. He also noted that court records available in Europe and the USA between the fourteenth century and the present day, nearly always show males (as opposed to females) as most likely to be charged with bestial offences, and that the most common animals that humans had engaged in sexual activity were in these court cases were horses, pigs and sheep.

In the scientific literature there are a couple of case studies relating to human-porcine sexual relationships. In 1976, Dr. P. H. Blondel reported in a French medical journal that a 46-year old French farmer had to undergo surgery for peritonitis after anal sex with a boar (i.e., a male pig). Later in 2002, Dr. G.K. Kirov and his colleagues reported in Injury (the International Journal of the Care of the Injured) that a 62-year old Bulgarian farmer was treated for a torn rectum after sex with a male pig. The authors noted that: “A transmural tear occurred when pressure exceeded the rectal wall compliance at a fixed point of contact”. The farmer had presented at hospital suffering from abdominal pain. Following medical tests, it was discovered that the cause of the pain was a small (half a centimetre) ragged tear of the rectal wall. Initially, the farmer was understandably reluctant to tell the medical staff how the injury had been obtained, but eventually he revealed that one of his male pigs had anally penetrated him. Science writer Darren Naish (in an article covering this case on his Tetrapod Zoology blog) described the anatomy of a pig’s penis, and from this description it is easy to see how being anally penetrated by a pig would cause a rectal tear:

“The pig penis is somewhat different from the sort of anatomy that we’re more familiar with. For one thing, the organ is twisted, with the right corpus cavernosum more strongly developed than the left. The retractor muscle is also attached asymmetrically…Believe it or don’t, by contracting its retractor muscles, a boar makes its penis move in a semi-rotary fashion, and by causing this movement a mating boar can achieve ejaculation even when not thrusting the pelvis in the normal fashion. A glans is absent, and instead the tip of the organ is twisted with a curved and pointed end”.

I also read in Frances Twinn’s book The Miscellany of Sex that the pig’s corkscrew-shaped penis can provide orgasms that last for 30 minutes. Finally, a 2000 study of 32 male zoophiles by Dr. Andrea Beetz (and also reported in a number of her later publications including the 2002 book Love, Violence, and Sexuality in Relationships between Humans and Animals) reported that 14% of her participants were most attracted to pigs. However, compared to other form of animal sexual attraction, pigs were the least sexually attractive animals when compared to dogs (87%), horses (81%), cows (32%), goats (28%), sheep (27%) and cats (15%).

Both court reports and scientific medical papers prove the existence of humans having sexual relationships with pigs, and Dr. Beetz’ research with self-confessed zoophiles also shows that among the zoophile community, pigs are among a number of household pets and farm animals that humans have had sexual relationships with. We know nothing about the prevalence or etiology of such behaviour, but the incidence is likely to be very low.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Aggrawal A. (2009). Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Aggrawal, A. (2011). A new classification of zoophilia. Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, 18, 73-78.

Beetz, A.M. (2000, June). Human sexual contact with animals: New insights from current research. Paper presented at the 5th Congress of the European Federation of Sexology, Berlin.

Beetz, Andrea (2002). Love, Violence, and Sexuality in Relationships between Humans and Animals. Germany: Shaker Verlag.

Beetz, A. M. (2004). Bestiality/zoophilia: A scarcely investigated phenomenon between crime, paraphilia, and love. Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice, 4, 1-36.

Bering, J. (2012). Porky pig. Slate, January 6. Located at: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/01/when_bestiality_gets_blamed_on_the_animals.html

Blondel, P. H. 1976. Perforations digestives d’etiologie insolite: deux cas. Nouv Presse Med 5, 915.

Grebowicz, M. (2010). When species Me(a)t: Confronting bestiality pornography. Humanalia, 1(2). Located at: http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue02/grebowicz.html 

Kick, R. (2005). The sex lit you probably haven’t read: Obscure and expunged material dealing with everyone’s favorite activity. In R. Kick (Ed.), Everything You Know About Sex is Wrong (pp.260-267).  New York: The Disinformation Company.

Kirov, G. K., Losanoff, J. E. & Kjossev, K. T. (2002). Zoophilia: A rare cause of traumatic injury to the rectum. Injury, 33, 367-368.

Naish, D. (2008). Traumatic anal intercourse with a pig. Tetrapod Zoology, February 22. Located at: http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2008/02/22/he-loved-pigs-too-much/

Twinn, F. (2007). The Miscellany of Sex: Tantalizing Travels Through Love, Lust and Libido. London: Arcturus.