There's nothing wrong with someone having sex with a dead pig

[jack]

Which things are not import about #piggate

I was completely unable to resist spending about 12 hours making puns about this. But I was probably wrong in that.

Which things are import about #piggate

The idea that the book was written by Ashcroft as an attack for not acceding to more of his influence over the conservative party. This seems likely, I hope it will quickly become apparent how certain it is, and who is to blame for the influence-peddling. But "not giving in to blackmail" is generally a good thing: even if I condemn Cameron for lots of other things, this isn't something I should criticise him for.

Which things are not important about #piggate

I think raising animals to be slaughtered is a bad thing AT ALL. But once the animal is ALREADY DEAD, I don't think it's harmed any more by being used for sexual purposes than for food purposes, it's just a matter of which penis goes in which mouth.

We should be critical of things that are harmful, not things we personally are disgusted by[1]. It can be hard to do that, our instincts often encourage us to be judgemental based on personal disgust, maybe for good reason. But we should avoid that. Lots of people object to being anything-other-than-straight mostly based on their "ugh" factor, even though they try to come up with good justifications for it. And for many other issues. And we don't accept that. But it's harder to accept things that we personally haven't emotionally accepted, or to say "I'll never personally like it, but I'll fight for other people's right to do it." And why shouldn't that extend to dead animals -- it shouldn't be a maybe, it should be a definite.

And that's not because I care about Cameron, it's because the accusation hurts other people who might be accused of it.

I don't know if that actually applies to many people! But shouldn't we practice being accepting whether we need to or not, so when we do need to, we're on the right side?

Except that, my argument sounds intellectually convincing, but I'm not sure I'm actually convinced by it. Surely there have to be SOME things we can mock people for? Or don't there? Am I right?

[1] Insert humorous exception here :)

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

I dunno, but I find the upper-class dude culture of 'put your penis in everything for LULZ' disturbing in the way that it:

- is often intended to create shame/disgust relating to percieved sexual performance, which ties up with weird masculinity things
- there are not many steps from 'we can put our dicks in any inanimate object we like' to 'we can put our dicks in any human we like' - including for explicitly shame-related purposes.

Secondly, animals are defined as creatures who cannot give informed consent but can be violated *while alive*. We identify and punish animal cruelty of a non-sexual nature, and are correspondingly disgusted by posthumous mistreatment of animals other than for food. Where the line is drawn relating to food varies: the whole point of cruelty-free farming is that some people at least believe it is reasonable to eat pigs but not to factory farm and slaughter them.

The other category of beings regarding which we have a concept of 'cruelty' and which we consider to be violatable but not able to give informed consent is (some: children, people past a certain level of mental impairment, people in comas, etc). Insofar as we discourage necrophilia with human corpses it seems reasonable to discourage it with the entire animal kingdom, on the basis that we (in most social groups) have a concept of animal cruelty and of cruelty to humans, but not of, say cruelty to plants.

[liv]

I agree with jack's OP but I also agree with this comment. I mean, in a lot of ways I would be less bothered if Cameron had put his penis in the dead pig because he actually got some kind of sexual gratification out of that kind of thing. But it's pretty clear that the allegation is that he did so as an initiation / hazing ritual and I agree with you that that whole culture of sexual disgust and masculinity policing is really really problematic.

About cruelty to animals, I agree that if it's morally wrong to inflict harm on living animals, it's also morally wrong to do disgusting things to their corpses. I don't think that anything that could be inflicted on the body of a dead animal is exactly equivalent to eating it. That is partly because of the analogy with humans who lack capacity for consent but still have moral rights, I think.

[highlyeccentric]

Put it bluntly, a man who will put his dick in a pig in order that his mates have some weird disgust/voyeurism experience is a man who would take a dare to hit on 'fat chicks' for similar ends.

[mathcathy]

I totally agree with this, it's more about what it says about his character than about what he did.

[jack]

'put your penis in everything for LULZ' disturbing in the way that it:

Right, I should have started from that point of view and I feel bad that I didn't. Thank you for pointing it out, and I am more aware what was bad about the incident.

Quite likely the ethos of those sort of events were terrible. So last night I should have said "it was wrong to pressure people into doing sex things they find disgusting and doing sex things seen as violating" which is true. And NOT made jokes implying "it was wrong for Cameron have sex with a dead pig" which is buying into the gross-out narrative.

[jack]

Insofar as we discourage necrophilia with human corpses it seems reasonable to discourage it with the entire animal kingdom, on the basis that we (in most social groups) have a concept of animal cruelty and of cruelty to humans, but not of, say cruelty to plants.

I sort of follow the logic, but I'm not sure. I tend to err on the side of more animal rights, but:

(a) Humans clearly care what happens to corpses. I think most animals don't (?)
(b) Defacing animal corpses, other than for food (and clothing) is sufficiently rare, if the food industry exists *anyway*, I'm not *more* angry that a few extra corpses are used for another purpose
(c) cruelty is bad even if it doesn't directly cause harm, because it often translates to being cruel against animals or helpless humans. But I'm not sure harming corpses is often like that: the pig incident sounded more like "treating the head as an object" which is pretty normal for meat, not deliberately degrading it.

I'm not sure the problem here is exacerbated by using animal corpses (more than it already was by eating them). But I'm not sure, I'm open to the idea I'm missing a big thing.

[redbird]

It's not just "for the LULZ": it's "to join a club of rich men who hope/expect to be running things and will be able to blackmail each other." That not only perpetuates various sorts of privilege (which rich white men who go to Oxford already have a fair amount of), it makes it harder for those men to break ranks.