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S-2 Operations
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Violent love
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As they say, "knowledge is power!"
Violent love: hunting, heterosexuality, and the erotics of men's
predation.
It will require a courageous grasp of the politics and economics, as well
as the cultural propaganda, of heterosexuality to carry us beyond
individual cases or diversified group situations into the complex kind of
overview needed to undo the power men everywhere wield over women, power
which has become a model for every other form of exploitation and
illegitimate control."
- Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Signs
(summer 1980)
In his novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle tells a
story concerning a cruel nobleman named Hugo Baskerville. Hugo desired a
neighboring woman who consistently avoided him. One night he and his
companions kidnapped her and locked her in an upstairs room in Baskerville
Hall. She escaped by climbing down the ivy on the outside wall, and
some little time later Hugo left his guests to carry food and drink - with
other worse things, perchance - to his captive, and so found the cage
empty and the bird escaped. Then, as it would seem, he became as one that
hath a devil. . . . And while the revellers stood aghast at the fury of
the man, one more wicked or, it may be, more drunken than the rest, cried
out that they should put the hounds upon her. Whereat Hugo ran from the
house, crying to his grooms that they should saddle his mare and unkennel
the pack, and giving the hounds a kerchief of the maid's, he swung them to
the line, and so off full cry in the moonlight over the moor.(1)
The woman ultimately died of fear and fatigue, and Hugo himself had his
throat torn out by a mysterious large black beast, "the hound of the
Baskervilles."
In linking hunting with predatory sexuality, Doyle's imagination matches
reality. From the perspective of the man hunting with hounds, the chase is
hot, charged with phallic sexuality:
The sudden immersion in the countryside has numbed and annulled him. . . .
But here they come, here comes the pack, and instantly the whole horizon
is charged with a strange electricity; it begins to move, to stretch
elastically. Suddenly the orgiastic element shoots forth, the dionysiac,
which flows and boils in the depths of all hunting. . . . There is a
universal vibration. Things that before were inert and flaccid have
suddenly grown nerves, and they gesticulate, announce, foretell. There it
is, there's the pack!(2)
In this essay, I show how contemporary hunting by North American white men
is structured and experienced as a sexual activity. The erotic nature of
hunting animals allows sport hunting to participate in a relation of
reciprocal communication and support with the predatory heterosexuality
prominent in Western patriarchal society.
A PASSION FOR POWER
Hunters unfailingly describe their relation to their prey in terms of sex
and affection. For example, Robert Wegner discusses the "profound love" of
deer possessed by Archibald Rutledge, a man who killed 299 white-tailed
bucks in his lifetime.(3) In describing hunting, no term in the vocabulary
of love is neglected (emphasis added in each case):
For many people throughout history, the most seductive voice of Mother
Nature at special times of the year has been the invitation to join in the
quest to hunt and kill birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish. . . . For the
passionate hunter who is willing to fall in love with the creatures that
are hunted, the desire to give something back to nature bears equal
passion to the hunt. . . . Hunting, in the final analysis, is a great
teacher of love.(4)
[Jack] felt that bow hunting made him superior to those who killed by
looking through the sights of a powerful rifle. "What did they know," he
had said to his girlfriend Candice once, "what intimacy did they feel with
the animal?"(5)
The decision to cull was made by caring professionals [referring to the
decision by Florida wildlife officials to permit hunters to kill deer
stranded by flooding].(6)
Hunting, properly done, is not an outworn cruelty but rather a
manifestation of man's desire to reestablish or maintain a union with the
natural world. There are various paths to this marriage.(7)
There is no incongruity in describing the disposition to shoot wild
animals to death as loving, if one correctly understands the vocabulary
being used. "Love" here simply means the desire to possess those creatures
who interest or excite the hunter. Taking possession typically entails
killing the animal, eating the flesh, and mounting the head or the entire
body. The identification between "loving" and possessing by killing and
mounting is made in the following hunter's comments regarding two ducks he
shot and stuffed: "'I saw these mountain ducks and fell in love with
them,' says Paul, the tone of his voice matching the expression he wears
in the photo with the Dall sheep - one of most tender regard for something
precious. 'I just had to have a pair of them.'"(8) Aldo Leopold-hunter,
forest manager, and founding father of modern environmental ethics-
described the trophy as a "certificate" attesting to the hunter's success
in "the age-old feat of overcoming, outwitting, or
reducing-to-possession."(9) And Jose Ortega y Gasset, who wrote the
outstanding statement of twentieth-century sportsman's philosophy, defined
hunting by both humans and nonhumans as "what an animal does to take
possession, dead or alive, of some other being that belongs to a species
basically inferior to its own."(10)
"Romance" is probably the word most commonly used to refer to hunting, as
in the following representative list of titles and subtitles, all from
books about hunting: The Eternal Romance between Man and Nature, The
Romance of Hunting, Romantic Adventures in Field and Forest, Romance of
Sporting, even Flirtation Camp: Or, the Rifle, Rod, and Gun in California:
a Sporting Romance. Andree Collard remarks on the prevalence of romantic
images of the hunt, which she analyzes thus:
A romantic removes the "love object" from the reality of its being to the
secret places of his mind and establishes a relationship of
power/domination over it. There can be no reciprocity, no element of
mutuality between the romantic lover and the "love object." The quest
(chase) is all that matters as it provides a heightened sense of being
through the exercise of power.(11)
This power difference determines the "basically inferior" status of prey
species as claimed by Ortega y Gasset.
Hunters' statements confirm Collard's analysis of romance. One sportsman
speaks of the "wild romanticism" of Africa and remarks that "as the animal
moves into your sights, you are most thoroughly alive."(12) And in his
book, In Defense of Hunting, James Swan describes as "romantic" the lives
of the old market hunters ("people who killed ducks, geese, passenger
pigeons, and anything else they could for money"). Swan explains the
source of the appeal of hunting:
Though fishing and hunting share the common quest for capturing a wild
creature, hunting for me has always had a more seductive call. . . . Once
a fish is hooked, excitement rises to be sure, but once the fish is landed
it can be returned to the water to live on. Also, relatively few fish that
get off the line before being landed are harmed or killed by being hooked.
There is more leniency in fishing. A hunter holds life and death in his
hands, with creatures for which we have a closer kinship.(13)
So power over life and death is central to the seductive, exciting romance
of hunting. But words like "seduction" and "romance" connote sex as well
as power. It is not that "romance" connotes only sex when applied to
heterosexual relations and connotes only power when applied to hunting.
Rather, hunting and predatory heterosexuality are instances of romance
because each is simultaneously sexual and an expression of power.
John Mitchell describes a dinner-table argument over hunting during which
a frustrated hunting advocate throws up his hands and says: "Telling you
about hunting is like trying to explain sex to a eunuch."(14) Hunters
frequently use sexual allusions to explain their killing. For example:
[H]unting includes killing, like sex includes orgasm. Killing is the
orgasm of hunting. But like in making love - talking and touching and, you
know, looking in the eyes, and just smelling - the long story is the real
lovemaking, and orgasm is the inevitable end of it. That is the killing of
hunting, but only one part of it.(15)
Similarly, James Swan compares the "hunter's high" to the "payoff of an
orgasm," and Paul Shepard describes killing as the "ecstatic consummation"
of the hunter's "love" for his prey.(16)
Men who defend hunting frequently compare it to sex. One of the most
common arguments used to justify hunting is that men who hunt today are
expressing a deeply ingrained instinct.(17) In the context of this
argument we find comparisons between hunting and sex such as the
following: "One of my basic hypotheses here is that man is instinctively a
hunter. He does not hunt for reasons of pleasure, although he has come to
associate pleasure with absolute necessity. One may draw an analogy
between the pleasures we have learned in the hunt and those we associate
with sex."(18) Similarly, according to James Swan, hunting remains a
"basic instinct, like sex, which is implanted in our minds and bodies." He
likens the possibility of foregoing the hunt to the possibility of
foregoing sexual intercourse: "We can get by without hunting, but is this
something we really want to do? We could also drop having sexual
intercourse in favor of in vitro fertilization."(19) Swan's rhetorical
question suggests that both possibilities are equally unnatural, absurd,
and undesirable.
The argument that sport hunting is instinctive is easily enough rebutted,
for example, by noting that those who do not hunt (a 93 percent majority
in the United States) show no evident signs of being repressed.(20) If
hunting is instinctive, why do children in hunting families sometimes
refuse to hunt,(21) and why do hunters themselves experience such pangs of
conscience that many of them eventually stop killing?(22) My main interest
here is not in the soundness of this argument but in the presumption it
makes about hunting and sex - namely, that both are so natural as to be
unalterable:
[Hunting] is absolutely beyond accepted, formal morality in the way, at
essence, that other fundamental human activity, sex, is: sex can bring us
pleasure or sadness, but the desire to join with another, whether or not
acted on, remains basic and unalterable: by itself it is neither good nor
evil; it only is.(23)
By naturalizing hunting, this argument attempts to move it out of the
realm of moral dispute altogether. The comparisons of hunting with sex in
this respect both draw from and reinforce the common view that sexual
behavior is innately determined. The naturalization of sex is a
reactionary position often promoted specifically to excuse men's sexual
violence against women and children, just as naturalizing hunting excuses
men's violence against animals.
James Whisker compares hunting to sex in order to explain and defend
hunting but rejects the literal identification of hunting as a sexual
activity. Against theories that analyze hunting as an expression of
phallic sexuality, Whisker argues that there exist many other phallic
symbols besides guns and that, although men do admit to feeling "manly" as
a result of hunting, they also derive this feeling from other sports. But
the existence of institutions expressive of manliness or phallic sexuality
other than hunting says nothing about the nature of hunting itself.
Whisker also points out that there are female as well as male hunters.(24)
A relatively small number of hunters (less than 7 percent in the United
States) are female. Whisker evidently presumes that these women cannot be
experiencing their hunting as a form of sexualized domination. But if we
reject deterministic/dualistic theories of sexuality, it remains an open
question whether some women develop a predatory sexuality (in hunting or
elsewhere). To be sure, women's writing on hunting remains relatively free
of the frenzied, highly sexualized accounts men frequently give of their
hunting.(25) But even if sportswomen do tend to experience hunting
differently than do sportsmen, this by itself would not invalidate any
given analysis of the nature of men's hunting. If some women hunt in
nonsexualized ways, this certainly suggests the possibility that some men
might also hunt in nonsexualized ways. This abstract possibility
notwithstanding, sportsmen's self-descriptions, sampled below, indicate
that among them sexual experiences of hunting are very common.(26)
The reasons behind Whisker's reluctance to identify men's hunting as
sexual are noteworthy. Whisker states that within sexual interpretations
of hunting, the "hunter has been reduced to the position of being a
sexually immature, unfulfilled and frustrated and probably mentally ill
creature who is in need of therapeutic help."(27) According to Whisker, to
see hunting as a sexual activity implies that hunters are fundamentally
"unfulfilled and frustrated," that is, they do not gain sexual
satisfaction elsewhere. Because Whisker rejects the notion that hunters
are sexually dysfunctional, he also rejects the interpretation of hunting
as sexual.
Like Whisker, antihunters also at times equate sexualized hunting with
sexual dysfunction or deviance. But antihunters are more likely to accept
sexual interpretations of hunting and use the equation to stigmatize
hunters (hunters are sexually frustrated or impotent; hunting compensates
for small penises, and so forth). Neither Whisker's analysis nor
antihunting rhetoric of this sort recognizes the possibility that
eroticized animal hunting may be a sexual expression of normal men in
hunting communities. As I argue in the following section, sexual
descriptions of hunting are not merely metaphoric; for many North American
sportsmen hunting is a sexual experience. By interpreting the sexuality of
hunting as sexual deviance, anti-hunters gain a quick way to demonize a
morally repugnant activity, but only by ignoring the fact that hunting is
not perpetrated by a few isolated, abnormal men but rather is organized
and carried out by entire communities of men. Within hunting communities
it is the abnormal man who does not enjoy hunting. Hunting men are not
frustrated and sexually impotent, they typically enjoy sexual relations
with other people, and they enjoy the erotics of stalking and shooting
wild animals. Within certain patriarchal social structures the disposition
to take sexual pleasure in the domination and destruction of other living
beings is a normal part of men's fulfillment.
A comparison with theories of rape may be useful here. Rape is often
imaged as the deviant behavior of a sexually frustrated man overwhelmed by
a chance encounter with a provocative woman. To sustain this image certain
facts must be ignored: that most rapes are premeditated, that rapists
usually know those they attack, that rapes are often carried out by men in
groups, that rapists are typically not degenerates or sexual deviants,
that more than one-half of college age men surveyed said they would force
sex on a woman if they were sure they could get away with it, and so
forth.(28) The last two facts suggest that rape is hardly a deviant
activity, yet to acknowledge this conclusion, just as to acknowledge the
normalcy of men's erotic enjoyment of hunting, suggests the threatening
possibility that there is something seriously wrong with normal manhood in
this culture.
The other consequence of the standard image of rape is that it puts the
burden on women to control their behavior to avoid "provoking" men into
rape. When the man rapes, it becomes "her fault." This is not only a
presumption of the legal system, it is also a common feature of men's
phenomenology of rape. As the interviews in the book Men on Rape
demonstrate, rapists often report feeling that they were attacked by their
victims and that the rape was a way of regaining lost control or seeking
justifiable revenge.(29) I would not deny that some of these men actually
feel that they were the disempowered victims, but I would distinguish
those feelings from the reality that rape remains a premeditated,
unprovoked act of aggression. In a similar way, hunting men often report
that they are only responding to some violent depredation initiated by the
animal (mountain lions attacking joggers, wolves killing livestock, deer
eating crops, and so forth). Hunters make these claims even in situations
where the overall context reveals that they themselves initiated the
attack. For instance, the 1989 film In the Blood tells the stow of some of
the male descendants of Theodore Roosevelt mounting a hunting expedition
to Africa. Once there, the group splits into two parties: one hunts for
trophy-size Cape Buffalo, the other decides to bait and kill a large, wily
old crocodile known by the locals. A native who makes money guiding white
hunters tells the sportsmen that this crocodile has taken some of their
livestock. Rumors are floated that this crocodile may even have killed
some children. As the sportsmen carry out their ultimately unsuccessful
attempt to kill the crocodile, they construct an image of themselves as
benevolent protectors responding justifiably to the crocodile's aggression
against the local people. Lost in this image is the reality that these
white men came to Africa specifically to kill some indigenous animal or
other and that once there they fixed on the crocodile not simply because
he was claimed to be a threat to the locals, but also because he promised
to be a challenging adversary, and because crocodiles are protected from
sportsmen in most other parts of the world (thus greatly increasing their
trophy value and the market value of the pelt).
THE EROTICS OF HUNTING
North American white men do not hunt out of necessity; they typically do
not hunt to protect people or animals, nor to keep themselves or their
families from going hungry. Rather, they pursue hunting for its own sake,
as a sport. This point is obscured by the fact that many hunters consume
the flesh of their kills with their families, thus giving the appearance
that hunting is a subsistence tactic. A close reading of the hunting
literature, however, reveals that hunters eat the flesh of their kills as
an ex post facto attempt at morally legitimating an activity they pursue
for its own sake.(30) The hunter often portrays himself as providing for
his family through a successful kill and "harvest." This posture seeks to
ritually reestablish a stereotypical masculine provider role less
available now than it may once have been. In reality hunting today is
typically not a source of provision but actually drains family resources.
Deer hunters, for example, spend on average twenty dollars per pound of
venison acquired, once all the costs of equipment, licenses,
transportation, unsuccessful hunts, and so forth, are calculated.(31)
This hunting is doubly sexual - as a source of erotic enjoyment as well as
an expression of masculine gender identity. In her ecofeminist critique of
hunters' discourse, Marti Kheel cites a number of sportsmen and hunting
advocates who understand hunting as an expression of aggressive male
sexual energy.(32) The following sampling of North American hunters'
literature indicates the validity of a sexual interpretation of hunting.
The pattern is that of a buildup and release of tension organized around
the pursuit, phallic penetration, and erotic touching of a creature whom
the hunter finds seductively appealing.
Hunting is experienced as and expected to be a very sensual activity for
the hunter.(33) The physical exertion; exposure to the elements; immersion
in environments rich in sights, sounds, and smells; and the stalking
induced intensification of sensory capacity all contribute. But the warm
internal feelings mentioned by hunters go beyond the sensory focus and
stimulation entailed by stalking in the wild and suggest an additional,
purely sexual aspect of the hunting sensuality.
Indeed, the hunting experience follows rhythms typical of men's sexuality
in this society. For rockstar Ted Nugent, bow-hunting follows this pattern
- anticipation, desire, pursuit, excitement, penetration, climax, and
satiation.
Last season's hunts are still vivid in the mind, but it does little to
satisfy the craving.(34). . .
It's the preparation, the thought process that goes into anticipating the
hunt that's the most exciting part.(35). . .
Their grace and beauty . . . was the essence of the thrill of the hunt. My
binoculars revealed their delicate features; . . .
a certain light, cream-colored sheep was calling me; . . .
Him, I wanted; . . .
I had worked myself up to a nervous wreck waiting to shoot; . . .
the heated excitement of the shot; . . .
the shaft was in and out . . . complete penetration; . . .
I was hot . . . . I was on fire;(36). . .
Oh yeah, a lot of blood here, I'm getting excited now . . . there's no
telling what I might do . . . I'm excited . . . I am high.(37). . .
the kill is climactic; . . .
I felt good all over; . . .
it satiated a built-up frustration; . . .
a serious still hunt/stalking maneuver . . . can gratifyingly drain a guy.
I like that.(38). . .
And one southern hunter explains: "Deer huntin' is like the fever. It
builds up all year long and then has to be released. It's like buildin' up
for 'a piece.' Once ya laid one, you move onto the next one that may be
harder."(39)
This is a phallocentric sexuality. The weapon becomes an extension of the
hunter's body and thereby the means by which he penetrates animal bodies:
"the traditional archer carries his bow lightly and casually, almost as if
it's an extension of his body." Decisions of which instrument of
penetration to use are made by reference to maximizing the erotic
sensation experienced by the hunter, as in this argument for traditional
handmade wooden bows and arrows over high-tech factory-produced equipment:
"Is there any romance in a steel cable or a magnesium pulley? Does an
aluminum arrow generate any feeling of warmth for the archer?"(40)
The various dysfunctions of phallic heterosexuality all have their
counterparts in hunting. In a passage that could easily be paraphrased
into a sex manual, Nugent lists the varieties of "target panic," a malady
afflicting hunters who become too excited to shoot properly: "The target
panic demon comes in many disguises. Flinching, freezing above, below or
to one side, failing to come to full draw, releasing the arrow
prematurely, not being able to release at all! All kinds of mind-boggling
dementia."(41) "Target panic," also known as "buck fever," is common
enough among hunters to have generated its own extensive literature.
Targetted animals become objects of erotic desire for the hunter. One
night in the middle of a weekend goose hunt, James Swan dreamt "I saw a
Canada goose come to me, and then it was lying beside me."(42) Another
hunter explicitly identifies his feelings toward hunted animals with
sexual desire: "You see the animal and it becomes a love object. There is
tremendous sexuality in this . . . sexuality in the sense of wanting
something deeply, in the sense of eros. All quests, all desires, are
ultimately the same, don't you think?"(43) And elk hunter Ted Kerasote
ends his book by describing this dream:
I . . . see elk before me, around me, moving everywhere, big dark shapes
in the trees, along with their calves of the year. I raise the rifle,
wanting to fire, but also wanting to wait. . . . I walk among them. They
aren't afraid, and behind me one of the cows rubs her flank against me.
She doesn't smell like elk - dry and musky. She smells washed and clean.
When I turn around she drops her coat and becomes a naked woman, pressing
herself to me and pushing me down. Her skin is the creamy color of wapiti
rump, her breasts are small. . . . As she bends her head to my chest and
tries to take off my shirt, I lift her chin. Her eyes are wet and shining,
and I can't tell if she is about to laugh or to cry. I put my hand behind
her head pulling her face toward me for a kiss, when I see the elk hide
under my nose in the dawn.(44)
Hunters are very aware of the physical beauty of wild animals, a beauty
they describe in detail and with longing:
No one can know how I have loved the woods, the stream, the trails of the
wild, the ways of the things of slender limbs, of fine nose, of great
eager ears, of mild wary eyes, and of vague and half-revealed forms and
colors. I have been their friend and mortal enemy. I have so loved them
that I longed to kill them.(45)
Through killing the hunter gains ultimate control over the animal. In
particular, he may now do something to wild animals that they generally do
not permit while alive - he may touch them. Thus Thomas McIntyre exults
over a successful kill: "We may look at those antlers now for as long as
we wish and whenever we please. We can, if we dare, even put our hands on
them."(46) Hunters take great pleasure in stroking the fur, antlers, and
horns of the large mammals they kill. The erotic nature of this touching
is evident from the sensual way that it is done, from the quiet, admiring
comments about the animal's beauty that frequently accompany the stroking
and from the words hunters use to describe this aspect of hunting:
the hand touches the gleaming points (or the horn tips), caresses the
antler beams (or the burr), and plays with the soft hair on the head.
Hunting is a passion better men than I have tried to describe. . . . Were
someone to call it an intercourse with nature, I should shake my head at
the choice of words, but I shall know what that person gets out of
hunting.(47)
In this context Plato's characterization of hunting as "nothing more than
pursuing the game and laying hands on it" is perfectly apt.(48)
In many types of hunting the sexuality of the hunted animals themselves is
thoroughly integrated into the pursuit. Hunters make use of the calls and
scents of mating animals to track or lure them, to get close enough to
kill. For instance, deer hunters attempt to bring bucks close to their
stands by spreading the scent of a doe in estrus; Jerry Daniels, in
Hunting the Whitetail, recommends that "you heat your doe scent to 103
degrees to imitate the smell of a 'hot doe.'"(49) Deer hunters are keenly
aware of the sexually charged state of the bucks they pursue - they rely
on this to make the bucks more reckless than usual and thus easier to
kill. Deer hunters also tend to identify with these bucks; for example,
one hunter joked that "all bucks everywhere better watch their nuts
today," as he cupped his left hand over his own.(50) The hunters'
attribution of aroused states (the "hot rut") to prey animals with whom
they identify adds to the overall sexual experience of the sport for the
hunter - and not just for deer hunters. Archibald Rutledge suggested that:
"To call a turkey one will perhaps do best if he will put himself in the
place of the bird and will call in such a manner that, if he were in the
place of the bird, he would come." Rutledge had such success with one
particular turkey call that he "had her christened Miss Seduction."(51)
HUNTING AND HETEROSEXUALITY
In noting the sexuality of hunting we may start understanding what might
otherwise be a puzzling phenomenon, namely, the perception of hunting as a
dating situation by hunters such as James Swan:
I do not remember ever taking a date out hunting in high school, but on a
number of occasions we did organize group outings where several couples
went out at night spearing carp. . . . One could . . . make a Freudian
argument about the symbolism of the spear being thrust into spawning carp.
. . . Later, in college, . . . many women students hunted. It was not the
kind of date in which most other students on campus participated, but we
had a lot of fun.(52)
A Pennsylvania woman describes one such hunting date: "I dated a man who
looked forward to that first [day of deer season] with an ardor I wished
he would have reserved for me. . . . Before hunting season opened, my
boyfriend and I walked the woods of Central Pennsylvania, listening and
looking for game. . . . We stopped a lot to kiss."(53)
Sportsmen see their hunting as connected to their sexual relations with
women. As reflected in the title The Man Whom Women Loved (from a book
about big game hunter Bror Blixen), hunters commonly believe that success
in hunting animals will gain them affection and sexual attention from
women. James Whisker projects this hopeful belief on to prehistory,
stating: "Man . . . would receive sexual favors from the waiting female as
a reward for being a good hunter and provider" and speculating that
perhaps "the community gave successful hunters sexual rewards, e.g., by
offering the most attractive female or a virgin, or the most accomplished
lover, to the hunter."(54)
Thomas McIntyre believes that for both male deer and male humans the
possession of large antlers lures females:
[T]rophy antlers may have served for the male hunter the very same
function they served for the male deer. A female was far more liable to be
allured by and to "select" a male who had manifested his ability to
provide food, protection, and social rank. . . . Do we also keep the racks
of the animals we hunt for similar, unspoken reasons? Probably. Our
initial reaction upon entering a trophy room, a present-day cave, filled
with antlers reaching to the ceiling is to be just the teensiest bit
impressed and intimidated.
Note the specific process by which successful trophy hunters gain sexual
access to women, according to Mcintyre: by impressing and intimidating
others. Mcintyre does not merely tacitly condone the rapism implied by his
remarks; he gives explicit approval to men's sexual aggression (excused
through the usual biological determinism): "Is this, then, a bad thing? I
don't think so . . . we are all to some extent still motivated by
down-home primitive emotions and lusts that all the bullying in the world
for us to act 'socially responsibly' is not going to purge from the
wicked, wicked human."(55)
Hunters speak admiringly of the imagined sexual
lives of the large, antlered males they seek to kill; Ted Kerasote
describes rams as "hierarchical and sexually freewheeling: souls who begin
their combat early, establishing dominance through their horn size; who
won't bond to a single female or even collect a harem." By applying human
social categories to the lives of game animals (Kerasote's "harem"),
hunters bolster their expectation that somehow in killing male animals who
are sexually active they will also gain sexual access to females - the
presumed dominant sexual status of the targetted animal transfers to the
man through the act of taking possession. The general belief is that the
antlered male's sexual prowess correlates with his antler size, as in
McIntyre's remarks above and Kerasote's statement that the bull elk with
large antlers "is the mate a cow wants."(56) By transference the antlers a
trophy hunter has "collected" measure the extent of his virile
masculinity; in the hunting world antler size matches the function of
penis size in Western patriarchal culture more generally. Antlers are thus
the phallic centerpiece of the trophy hunter's attention: "The big boy up
front was a huge specimen with maybe 30-inch horns, a truly outsized
trophy. His buddy was a respectable 26 1/2 inch."(57)
The designation of the antlered male as a prized trophy insures that
hunters are often aware of the biological sex of targetted animals. In
fact, hunters extend the bare maleness of their targets into intense
attributions of manly status and power, referring to their targets as the
"fallen monarch," "ancient patriarch," "king of the mountain," and so
on.(58) Large antlers on an animal represent to the hunter the animal's
success in surviving years of threats, including harsh conditions,
challenges by males of the same species, and the predatory efforts of
previous hunters. The hunter's sense of being, developed from his exercise
of domination, is felt more fully when the victim is himself imbued with
power. The victim must be seen as powerful for the hunter to feel manly
and alive in his conquest; thus, hunters construct elaborate rules of fair
chase to keep the power difference between hunter and hunted from
appearing absolute.(59) The application of manly titles to their antlered
prey is part of this process of constructing a victim imaged as powerful.
Interestingly, hunted animals do not lose their status as objects of the
hunter's erotic desire when the hunter is self-conscious about the
maleness of his prey. For example, Larry Fischer calls one hunter's
thirty-five-year career of shooting "trophy" deer his "love affair with
large, mature bucks."(60) The erotic stroking of the corpse is part of a
successful hunt regardless of the animal's sex. Indeed, the antlers
themselves are a particular focus of this sensuality. Nor is the
phallicism of hunting lessened when the prey is seen as male - it takes on
homoerotic connotations as in this dialogue exchanged between hunters
stalking giraffes: "Give it to him!" "Right in the ass?"(61)
The erotic pursuit of overtly male animals becomes significant when we
consider that heterosexuality is explicitly intended in the comparisons
between men's hunting and sex. For example, Ted Kerasote, after
inadvertently flushing three sage grouse, wonders why his reflexive
response was to imagine shooting them: "[D]oes my tracing these grouse
across the Wyoming sky, nothing in my hands except my bicycle gloves, lie
buried in my hypothalamus like my sexual preference for women? If this
part of my brain were a few microns smaller would I prefer men? Would I
feel no pleasure at my imaginary tangents intercepting feathered motion in
the sky?"(62) Significantly, Kerasote contemplates a theory that assumes
if a certain part of his brain were slightly smaller he would
simultaneously lose his pleasure in hunting and his sexual preference for
women. This position moves beyond a mere comparison of hunting and
heterosexuality as two structurally similar instincts; the desire to kill
animals and a sexual orientation toward women are here seen as coming
together in a single package.
For those who defend hunting as an instinctive behavior, the desire to
hunt evolved to facilitate food procurement, while the supposed
heterosexual instinct evolved to facilitate human reproduction.(63) Thus
in principle the two "instincts" remain distinct and separable. Yet, the
position articulated by Kerasote - that hunting and male heterosexuality
are but variant expressions of a single innate quality-remains a common
assumption. The bumper sticker "I HUNT WHITE TAIL YEAR ROUND," described
by Matt Cartmill as "decorated with drawings of a deer's scut and a
woman's buttocks to make sure nobody misses the pun," illustrates just one
instance of this viewpoint.(64) And for anthropologist Paul Shepard,
heterosexual intercourse and hunting are but two forms of the same
phenomenon, which he calls "venereal aggression." According to Shepard,
the woman draws on to herself, the hunting man's hostility toward animals
subtly transforming it in the process into sexual relations between
people.(65)
Hunting men relate their pursuit of male animals to their sexual relations
with female humans, because both eroticize power difference. Thus we can
understand the behavior of Rex Perysian who, after shooting a boar to
death with three arrows, "stood astride the boar and . . . lifted its head
by the ears for the camera. 'I'll grab it like I grab my women,' he told
his pals. Then Perysian dropped the animal's head and bellowed into the
woods, boasting that the kill had sexually aroused him."(66) The
biological sex and species of his targets are less essential to Perysian's
masculine sexual identity than is the establishment of domination, so the
fact that his victim is a nonhuman male does not preempt his comparison
with his sexual relations with women. Nor does his mounting of a male
animal undermine his identity as a heterosexual male, because he is in the
position of dominance. Ultimately a man's sexual identity as lady "killer"
and big game hunter fuse, as in the following lyric from Ted Nugent:
I am a predator That's one thing for sure I am a predator You better lock
your door(67)
Men are often portrayed as innately predatory, with women and nonhuman
animals as their natural prey. Sharing a common status as the designated
targets of men's sexualized violence, women and game animals can merge in
men's minds, as in Ted Kerasote's dream of shooting/kissing elk/women, and
in Paul Shepard's remarkable statement that the "association of menstrual
blood and the idea of a bleeding wound is inescapable."(68) Although
hunters often consciously image their animal targets as virile males, the
very same animals may be seen as female outside the immediate context of
the pursuit itself. For instance, the character "Bambi" is a buck in the
Disney movie and in Felix Salten's novel. He is represented in the movie
as "Prince of the Forest" and this is exactly how sportsmen tend to think
of the bucks they hunt. Yet the name "Bambi" has come to be given
exclusively to girls, indicating that the male deer is ultimately
feminized by our broader, nonhunting culture.(69) This becomes explicable
in terms of the radical feminist observation that the eroticizing of power
difference occurs originally and typically in the subordination of
women.(70) Notwithstanding his overt maleness, as a designated target for
sportsmen, the character "Bambi" assimilates the prototypical target of
men's sexual violence, the woman. Thus in discussing the 1989 gang rape
and beating of a woman in Central Park, columnist Joanne Jacobs wrote:
"The most critical element of this attack was that they were male. She was
female. They were predators. She was Bambi."(72) Gender marks relative
positions of power as much as it signifies biological sex. In this sense
the feminization of the buck can be compared with the practice of
referring to sexually subordinated men in U.S. prisons as "gal-boys," as
"she" or "her."(72) Regardless of their biological sex or species,
subordination feminizes people and animals.
Although both groups are designated as targets for men's violence, the
status of women and wild animals is not identical. Within traditional
patriarchal marriage, women's situation can be seen as closer to that of
domesticated animals than to that of game animals.(73) Significantly, the
term "husband" simultaneously means a woman's spouse and a man who manages
livestock for reproduction. The farmer completely controls the sexual and
reproductive lives of cows and pigs to further his interests. Thus, the
common use of terms such as "cow" and "sow" to refer to women shows either
women's similar domesticated status or a cultural expectation that such
subjugation would be appropriate. Similarly, the application to women of
the term "bitch" is significant given that, as Joan Dunayer has explained,
breeders have always treated the bitch or female dog "as a means to a
useful, profitable, or prestigious litter."(74) The specific use of the
word "bitch" to insult assertive women shows the hostility felt toward
those members of domesticated groups who do not quietly assume their
designated subordinate position.(75)
The names of domesticated animals, almost invariably terms of derision,
express the contempt felt by the conqueror for the conquered. In contrast,
the names of game animals rarely become terms of derision. Hunters
zealously pursue those wild animals they have made into emblems of
strength and independence. Deemed worthy of being killed, game animals
instantiate just the characteristics the hunter hopes to possess by
transference through the process of killing and eating. Thus, it would be
contrary to the purpose of the hunt to see game animals as totally
despicable creatures.
So we can understand why parents might choose to name their daughter
"Bambi": although the name connotes a creature periodically subjected to
men's predatory efforts (who is to that extent in a subordinate position
and thus feminine), it also connotes a creature who lives in the wild,
that is, generally outside of men's control, and who thereby commands a
certain degree of grudging respect. The word "fox" is another term
transferred from a hunted animal to women. Like "Bambi," the word "fox" is
not nearly as derisive as the names of domesticated animals, but does
connote one targetted for aggressive pursuit and ultimate violence. In the
United States men apply "foxy" to women they find sexually desirable and
somewhat wily and evasive. Indeed, the "fox" becomes sexually desirable
because she is independent and evasive, thus exciting to run down and
conquer? Women considered sexually undesirable, on the other hand, are
called "dogs," a usage which picks up the already tamed status of those
animals-because dogs come when you call them, there is no exciting
challenge in shooting them nor any increased masculine status. While
challenging and exhilarating, the sport of fox hunting remains extremely
violent and orgiastically bloody, culminating in the fox being torn to
bits, the body parts distributed to various participants, and the blood
smeared on novice's faces. The sexual use of the term "foxy" implies an
erotic of predation and bloodshed.
CONSTRUCTING THE EROTICS OF MEN'S PREDATION
Hunting and predatory heterosexuality are both structured as institutions
of men's sexualized dominance. Their structural similarity allows each to
be used to describe the other-hunting to describe heterosexuality, as in
this nineteenth-century romantic poem:
O let my love sing like a thrush In the greenwood's blossoming crown And
leap away like a fleeing roe So that I can hunt it down(77)
And heterosexuality to describe hunting: "[T]he 'dedicated' waterfowler
will shoot other game 'of course,' but we do so much in the same spirit of
the lyrics, that when we're not near the girl we love, we love the girl
we're near."(78) Ultimately it becomes difficult to tell whether hunting
describes sex or sex describes hunting, as in the following lyric by Jon
Bon Jovi:
First you're gonna fall Then you're gonna bleed For the glow of it all
That's the stow of love(79)
The many examples of such cross-talk between hunting and heterosexuality
reflect the fact that both institutions eroticize power difference. But
this discourse does not merely reflect some independently existing social
reality, it is performative, each speech act one part of the process of
developing and maintaining the erotics of men's predation.
The overt violence of hunting coupled with its erotic stimulation make its
imagery a useful resource for promulgating a predational sexuality between
women and men. For example, Robert Franklin Gish describes the media
portrayal of one of Cosmopolitan magazine's "bachelors of the month":
There he stood, attorney as hunter, in |
