#MeToo and hunting

MSgt. (Ret.) Robert Beauregard
Bedford
To the editor,

Consider this — venery has two meanings: “hunting” and “pursuit of sexual gratification.”

Overall, hunting is not for “conservation,” “feeding one’s family,” and “love of nature” — which are used to justify something darker. Quoting male hunters in his scholarly paper titled “Violent Love: Hunting, Heterosexuality, and the Erotics of Men’s Predation,” Brian Lukes argues that hunters kill animals for sexual gratification. 

Science underscores the validity of Luke’s argument. University of California Santa Barbara researchers found that hunting raises oxytocin, increasing sexual arousal. Lukes writes: hunting by North American white men is structured and experienced as a sexual activity — hunters take sexual pleasure in the domination and destruction of other living beings, which he points out tracks sexual predators’ goals and means.

Well-known bow hunter Ted Nugent describes hunting as sexual satisfaction that follows this pattern: “anticipation, desire, pursuit, excitement, penetration, climax, satiation,” using a weapon as penile projection — an extension of the hunter’s body. Anthropologist Paul Shepard explains that ‘heterosexual intercourse and hunting are but two forms of the same phenomenon,’ which he calls “venereal aggression” — the root of “venereal” being “venery.” Carol Adams makes this hunting-sexual predation connection in her book “The Pornography of Meat.” Allison Lance — former Sea Shepherd animal-rights activist—makes the connection in “Sister Species.”

The fact that 93 percent of Americans don’t hunt aside, the bottom line is: hunting is eroticized power — serial killing for sexual pleasure. Murder for sexual satisfaction should not be condoned by anyone.

 

MSgt. (Ret.) Robert Beauregard 

Bedford