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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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In this context, there would pretty clearly be a human involved, so the term seems appropriate.

That's just my point though, calling it rape suggests a volition, a willful act against the consensual, as opposed to simply instinct. A human can rape, because rape is a human act, defined within human terms. A dog (or whatever we're talking about) cannot be defined within those terms, even if the human is unwilling. Presumably a dog would only have sex with a human if coerced or duped. I guess. I don't particularly want to know. Even if it did make it with a human, it would not be rape as such, though it would be a violation, and certainly unseemly and profane, if we can use those terms.

This reminds me of a time around 20 years ago sitting in a local dive, a college bar devoid of college students, with a friend of mine, he was flipping through a magazine, one of many the owner had left at the bar, some biker/art/alternative magazine. On one page was a blonde Japanese woman showing a good deal of leg, walking what appeared to be a Pyrenees or Samoyed. I was an idiot and had been drinking and made a stupid joke: "Turn the page and she'll be fucking that dog."

He turned the page. I hadn't got it quite right, as the dog was humping her. Not her leg, if you understand my meaning. I never looked at that bar's magazines after that. Anyway they closed their big swinging door about a decade later.

You can disagree about the word rape here, it's fine, it's not something I care that deeply about, just my sense. I used to be annoyed at the reddit crowd when someone would remark on dolphins' mental capacity and the tendency to be protective of humans in open water, then to many thousands of upvotes someone would counter testily "Yeah but fuck dolphins, they're rapists." This seems the same kind of naïve misconstruing of animal behavior as the people who keep chimpanzees as pets and call them "part of the family".