Foreword : the article does not in any way encourage or legitimize any practices here described. It is merely an attempt to understand and see what we can gather from a short trip down the land of the weird.
To read the article in french, head this way.Translated by N. Virieux.
Floridaland 1970. Zach is thinking of Ruby, the she-dolphin, as the sunset tints the blue waters of the Atlantic with a darker shade. Why is he musing so much about this animal? He only saw her that one time, the day he came to take a few photos to illustrate the water park’s album, nothing more! However, the looks exchanged with the magnificent mammal plunged him into deep stupor and the eyes he henceforth lays on the sea aren’t the same anymore. Now, he constantly imagines the tribes of dolphins that run through it, right now, slipping in the dark waters and probing the depths with their high-pitched radars, calling each other, screaming, “I’m here!” “Come see me!” “Stay close to me!”, hunting, feeding, leaving the depths to breathe and plunging back tirelessly to make love.
The more he thinks of it, the more Zach is overrun with a stifling melancholy. What’s happening to him? He feels… in love.
Zach exists. The hero’s real name of 2009’s novel Wet Goddess is Malcolm Brenner. And Ruby is actually called Dolly. Currently the subject of a documentary presented in Sundance: “Dolphin Lover”, Malcolm Brenner claims he had consensual sexual relations with Dolly, a dolphin in captivity in the water park of Floridaland for almost nine months, in 1970
Now aged of 65 years old, Malcolm advocates for the recognition of certain forms of zoophilia, insisting one interview after another that he never intended “to fall in love of a 200 kgs mammal”…Threatened by animal protection associations, Malcolm vigorously denies hurting Ruby. “It is the dolphin who first manifested his sexual desires for him”, he says. But how can he be so sure that this animal, gifted with reason for sure but not with human speech, loved and desired him?
I offer you to dive with Zach in the murky waters of his zoophilic relationship, through excerpts from the novel Wet Goddess, a very disturbing and trippy story with a backdrop of LSD, astral communication, and very wet sex scenes.
This is not for the faint-hearted.
“I wasn’t only a virgin due to lack of partners,” Zach insists. At that time, human sexuality barely attracted him and he dismissingly mentions the “unsatisfactory” experience he had with a young lady after a movie date where he got bored in front of “Eclipse’ by Antonioni: “I was just grateful that she had lifted the curse, I was already 19,” he remembers. As aFine Arts student, Zach is recruited to photograph the dolphins of Floridaland’s neighboring park — now closed.
All in all, the story of his zoophiles loves is much more romantic than the lapidary description of the loss of his virginity.
Ruby intrigues him immediately, and not only for her sea animal body. At their first meeting Zach is amazed by the intensity with which the dolphin looks at him. When discussing with the Floridaland’s trainer, in the company of Ruby, he notices with dismay that the female “held her breath during all the time of the discussion’ as if she was… amazed by him ? Zoophiliac reminiscences of the Flaubert’s “Their eyes met” in the french novel, Sentimental Education, the meeting of Zach and Ruby meets the standards of love at first sight: the glances exchanged, the sensation of discomfort, doubt about feelings… Especially since Zach don’t really know what is happening to him, what is that feeling he suddenly get — and how to interpret the look of such a creature, so different from the human being that is the dolphin.
For Zach is fascinated by the animal, to the point he can’t stop himself from thinking she gets it: “Ruby understands everything, I’m sure,” he tells himself. But Zach is cautious : he soon changes his mind about that, admitting to himself that, despite the strength of the dolphin’s gaze, nothing allows him to interpret what the animal feels in the light of his human feelings. He feels guilty of this anthropomorphism. Inner conflict which does not prevent Zach from feeling a definite attraction for Ruby, the she dolphin:
Then Ruby blew between the waves and rolled on her right side to stare upward. She brought her left eye to bear on me and maintained that position as she sliced through the waves.
The sun was brilliant. Through the railing pressed against my hips, I could feel the riverboat’s twin diesels throbbing while the west wind whipped salt air in my face. Whenever I smell salt air, which I rarely do these days, these memories flood back to me. » « Ruby submerged. I sighted through the viewfinder and caught a photo of her as she reappeared in the brownish water. The look in her eye remains now as it was then: serene, clear, calm and penetrating. No matter which way I turn the photo, she is looking right at me, and no one else.
But wait a minute : how does the sexual appetite of a dolphin manifest itself? A (very) reasonnable question that Zach doesn’t really have time to ask himself: from his first visits to Floridaland he recounts that the dolphins, isolated in their pens, are literally in heat and especially the poor Ruby, who has no males to get her teeth into. One day, the dolphin finds a kind of plastic pipe in her pen and plays with it in a way that Zach finds strange. When he questions the owner, she explains in the simplest way:
“She was hoping it would go …zip! She was using it like a dildo. They’re very bright, you know.”
The fact that the dolphin is an animal with desire is quite obvious, but the fact he desires to have sex with a human, and moreover with Zach, is a completely different problem. It’s the critical issue of consent — moreover… animal consent. How to establish an inter-species dialogue to verify the reciprocity of desire, and that this desire is “documented”, meaning capable of grasping what this relationship exposes the animal to. There is also the risk of injury. The inadequacy of the sexual organs can indeed bruise the animal. Even with an animal as imposing as a dolphin, zoophilia can be very ill-treatment.
We have come to the most common criticism of Malcolm Brenner’s stories and pledge: the dolphin can’t clearly demonstrate his agreement and the inadequacy of the sexual organs can cause irreparable damages, even with a dolphin.
However, supporters of zoophilia have an argument against this : the controversial idea of “reversed bestiality”.
Some zoophiles, unable to demonstrate the “natural” or “willing” nature of their frolics with their animal partner, maintain that some mammals fell the same zoophilic instincts as them, or rather that they also feel a sexual attraction for species other than theirs. This amounts to saying that if it is the animal that has begun, it is he who is guilty of zoophilia and not the human. This is the typical case of the dog who rubs himself on someone’s calf or, frequently in the case of dolphins, “desire” manifested by males, in the sea, on swimmers — cases of which are found a plethora of written testimonies and videos on the Internet.
First things first : ending the myth of rapist dolphins
The word rapist is often used for dolphins, and there is a lot of narrative going in this direction in the media: a dolphin “raping” female dolphins, paedophile dolphin rapists, gay dolphins rapists, human swimmer rapists, or even this hoax claiming that dolphins abduct children to rape them in aquatic caves. It sends shivers down your spine, and it does not stop there. The idea is so widespread that the rapist dolphin has become…a meme.
But according to Justin Gregg, scientific journalist and author of “Are Dolphins Really Smart?” it is indeed a myth without any real concrete basis:
“The term rape cannot be used to describe this kind of behavior observed amongst dolphins. The central problem it poses is that the definition of rape is legal, and implies a lack of consent from the victim, which is impossible to define in dolphins. In zoology we speak of forced copulation. Forced copulation has been observed amongst ducks, lizards, monkeys, flies, locusts, orangutans, chimpanzees… but not dolphins!”
But the same argument that prevents dolphins from being included in the category of “rapists” has another implication: the difficulty/impossibility to establish consent for a dolphin that would be subjected to a human. On this point, Dr Mark Griffith notes an interesting testimony on the website Vivid Random Existence. The author, a presumed zoophile, gives a testimony that is daring, to say the least:
“There is nothing wrong with having sex with a dolphin, as long as he is willing! His consent, the animal affirms it not by words, but by the language of the body.[…] Moreover, when a dolphin wishes to have sexual relations with you, it manifests it by extremely clear signs. According to several sources that I found on the net, many people have witnessed the sexual arousal of certain dolphins in the sight of human beings … Humans have already made love with dolphins, and according to the two participants (humans and dolphins) were very satisfied with this delicious interaction … […] Of course, due to the taboo associated with zoophilia, the inverted zoophilia that dolphins feel is never discussed in the mainstream media.”
Are there hidden conspiracies against those “nature lovers”? Some people think so.
According to Mark Griffith, delphinophilia exists in a minority of zoophiles. The reality of this fantasy is confirmed by academic research, however: “in the same way as for herpetophiles (zoophilic amateurs of sex with lizards), the animal cannot give its consent while knowing exactly to whom and what it exposes himself, this sexual activity is morally reprehensible”.
However, on this topic, Dr. Griffith quotes Dr. Denise Herzing of the Wild Dolphin Project: “Glorifying sexual interactions between humans and another species is detrimental to the health and well-being of all animal species. This puts the dolphin’s health and social integration at risk.”
Therefore, the key question is: are dolphins themselves zoophiles, or “humanophile” to be precise? This is exactly what Malcolm Brenner, alias Zach, argues, often insisting on this point: “it is the dolphin who started it”. It is the dolphin who, on several occasions, has sought to develop a contact of both playful and sexual nature:
Ruby coasted to a stop in front of me, blew, submerged, and began to gently nuzzle my sneakers with her snout. She moved to my ankles, then rubbed my shins and calves, moving her rough snout gently up along the skin of my inner thigh, where I am extremely ticklish, but Ruby’s touch didn’t tickle.
Then, with great self-control and delicacy, she began to nuzzle my crotch. In spite of the cold water I found the sensation strangely erotic, but I had no idea if that was her intention.
I don’t remember feeling embarrassed. She wasn’t hurting me. The feeling that she was doing her damnedest to get me aroused was unavoidable, and she did a pretty fair job of it, too.
A point of view that he even defends in the comments of his former blog:
But let’s head into the details, shall we ?
A practical guide (sic) : How to make love with a female dolphin?
For a better understanding of what we are talking about, let’s ask the million-dollar question: how to make love with a female dolphin?
In his novel, Brenner gives us some details about the relationship between Zach and Dolly, but he remains discreet as to what had actually happened. However, in the documentary recently presented to Sundance , he gives away a bit more detail: according to him, Dolly was in a pool with a male, from whom she pulled aside to make sure she had some privacy with Brenner.
After 30 minutes of foreplay, various caresses as described above, Brenner penetrated the vaginal cavity of the animal that he describes as a complex series of valves. The act was not simple to realize: he had to position himself vertically while the dauphin remained horizontal. Anyway, according to the American magazine Vice, Brenner describes it as a delicate and erotic experience. In his story, they indeed both reached some sort of climax.
We have no information available on what allows Brenner to make this assertion, and it is impossible to question a dolphin to know if whether or not it got off (that I know of… at least!).
What can we know about that ? Well, well, I searched for more information and the matter, and internet always provides answers to any weird and perverted questions you might have : did you know you can quite easily find guides to make love to a dolphin on the internet ? Brenner is far from being alone: in 1991, an Englishman by the name of Alan Cooper was accused of masturbating a dolphin named Freddie, in public, in Northumbria. He was acquitted for lack of evidence of the sexual nature of the act, advocating that dolphins often using their penises in socialization activities with the group. “Hi, how are you?” — “Fine, thanks!”
However, as Dr. Mark Griffith reminds us, those websites explaining how to make love to a dolphin are relatively easy to find. They indicate how to find a dolphin, how to determine if the dolphin wants sex, how to motivate him if necessary and, of course, how to proceed with the following…
You may be interested to know that heterosexual relationships with penetration between a male dolphin and a human woman are strongly discouraged by the best guide that can be found on the net, on Sexwork’s website (well, you can skip that website and the quote below if you don’t want to know), and that it’s also the case of any anal intercourse:
“WARNING! In the considerations of safety, you should NEVER let a male dolphin attempt anal sex with you. The Bottle-nose dolphin member is around 12 inches, very muscular, and the thrusting and the force of ejaculation (A male can come as far as 14 feet) would cause serious internal injuries, resulting in peritonitis and possible death. Unless you are the masochistic type, you will have a hard time explaining your predicament to the doctors in the emergency ward….”
Another important point that the zoophile who wrote this guide carefully reminds us is that, if the preliminaries are important to the dolphin, post-coitus caresses are just as much:
“One thing to note. Whether you masturbate or mate with a dolphin, male or female, always spend time with them afterwards. Cuddle them, rub them, talk to them and most importantly, and show them you love them. This is essential, as it helps to strengthen the bond between you. Like a way of saying that this wasn’t just a one-night fling. The dolphins appreciate it, and they will want your company more the next time you visit them.”
To finish this “practical” point of our little expedition, let’s return to the Zach / Brenner case, whom we left so happy to have been “chosen” by an animal as magnificent as Ruby, the dolphin. At that point, he says he feels absolutely no shame. Far less than when, at the age of 12, he felt a strong sexual arousal at the sight of a dog on a cinema screen.
Here’s how he describes his relationship with Ruby:
The sky was cloudy, the light cool and gray. A northerly breeze was kicking up little waves. When we stopped in the middle of the pen, we seemed to be the only living things for miles.
That’s when I realized I could have sex with her. Right there, in the middle of the pen. We were totally exposed, but by the same time I was dead certain nobody was watching us.
Keeping one arm around Ruby, I reached down and unsnapped the wet suit’s beaver tail, pulled down the convenience zipper. I had a tenuous erection.
Part of me trembled with a strange excitement; part of me seemed to be in a dream, remote, detached, dazed. I could not believe what I was about to do. Ruby held absolutely still.
Holding my penis, I slid it between her labia, hoping to find my way into her vagina by luck.
Gently, Ruby began to swim.
I pushed harder, but something blocked me, as if there was no real entrance, just a shallow trench.
Ruby took a deep breath. She was hard to hold, and her movements threatened to dislodge me. Suddenly I felt terribly exposed, vulnerable. Was that old skipper still up in the riverboat’s wheelhouse? Could he see what we were doing? Would he bust me?
If you (really) want to have more testimonials, I invite you to visit the Beast Forum (.com). Careful, it is quite explicit. I will stop there, for my part.
The dolphin’s soul: John Lily, swimming pool & jackhammer
Zach has always been fascinated by dolphins — but not only as a sexual fascination. Since his childhood, this sympathetic and playful animal that he discovered in 1964 on the family’s television screen with the series Flipper, occupied a place of choice in his imagination.
In the 70s, the dolphin symbolized the possibility for man to renew the dialogue with the natural world. Moreover, this mammal embodied the idea of animal freedom chained in water parks, and destined to free itself from the alienating industry of capitalist entertainment (Free Willy !). The dolphin is a New Age symbol of young liberals in love with Gaia, Zach, a young student of the 70s who keenly consumes the fashionable hallucinogenic drugs of his time, feels a strong fascination for the dolphins that is not only sexual. On the contrary, he recounts being marked by a cover of Life magazine where a scientist in a flowered shirt listens to dolphins with huge plastic ears: that guy is John C. Lilly, mythical eccentric researcher of the ’70s, specialized in neuroscience.
John C. Lilly was conducting NASA-funded experiments to communicate with dolphins via an Apple II, LSD and zoophilia, all for the purpose of, among other things, preparing for a possible extraterrestrial contact.
This extraordinary researcher was at first famous for inventing the isolation tank, a sarcophagus filled with water to guarantee the most complete sensory deprivation on the subject. The extreme experiments he has performed in his tanks have been the subject of many conjectures and fantasies, which will particularly inspire Ken Russel’s film: Altered States.
In an interview for People magazine in 1976, Lilly describes his exploration method in an isolation tank:
“The idea is to separate you completely from society in favor of the solitude and confinement of a scientifically controlled tank [ …] in a water sufficiently loaded with salt to allow the ideal flotation of your hands, feet and head, freed from all vision, sounds, people and the universe. (In that way), you can finally discover the universe inside you”
Imagine for a moment to remain like this, in total silence and darkness, completely immersed in water … the man returning to his state of fish, then of spirit, feeling the limits of his being abolished between the water of the tank and the water of its own body. The experience presents itself just as much as a means of studying the brain for scientists left outside the tank and as an empirical means of exploring the mind for the isolated researcher inside.
But, you might say, what is the connection between isolation tanks and dialogue with dolphins?
Good question ! Well, it is the dream of finding, at the bottom of the mind of living beings, a common language. A language from which we could draw words in what is most universal in the mind. Its deepest core. This primary language echoes the linguistic research particularly in vogue in the 70’s, when many scholars braved the prohibition of linguistic Societies to seek the first language of humanity, pre-Babelian.
But John C. Lily looked further than searching for the first human language. He wanted to find a language even before the division of the living into species. The ultimate language that could allow the dialogue with beings as foreign as the dolphins and, why not, with an extraterrestrial species? A language to rule them all.
Avid reader of John C. Lilly, Zach tries very quickly to talk with Ruby the dolphin. He tries to reproduce the conversations between Margaret Howe Lovatt, one of Lilly’s team scientists, and Peter the Dauphin:
What had taken Margaret How and Peter Dolphin weeks of daily practice, Ruby and I had accomplished in ten minutes with a rubber ball!
“Say ‘Roo-bee!’”
“##, RR%%-@@EEE!”
I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to hear it again and again.
“Say ‘Roo-bee!’”
“###, &&*****! %%%%%#### RRRRrrr^^^^###!” Ruby’s humanoid mimicry broke down abruptly and completely. She began to babble, splash and ‘ya-ya’ — shake her head up and down playfully with her jaws open.
“Hey! What’s the matter? Say ‘Roo-bee!’”
“###&&&&&aaaRRRR, @@@@@dddd! Eeeee…” She swam back a few feet, lifted her head up and made a distinctive sound I could render phonetically as “kEEEorrrOOOP!”
Without knowing why, I had the sudden, inexplicable urge to imitate her. She seemed to expect it of me.
“KEEEorrrOOOP!”
In Lilly’s experience, Peter the Dolphin and Magaret Howe were hanging on a bed above the pool to allow them to converse.
As she says in the BBC documentary, The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins, the work began immediately and Margaret tried to teach Peter to greet her: “Hello Margaret.” Apparently Peter was struggling to pronounce the letter M, but another problem arose. Peter was visibly excited by Margaret’s proximity and, apparently, sexual arousal wasn’t conducive to French lessons, especially when Peter, instead of listening to Margaret, rubbed himself compulsively against her leg. Margaret explained that she decided, in the name of science, to masturbate Peter so that he remains focused — a gesture that she presents as innocuous, “sexual for the dolphin” but “not for her”.
However, she admits in the documentary that she lived a “close encounter” with Peter the dauphin whom she speaks as one of the great loves of her life and which she is reluctant to call “dolphin”.
Years later, Lilly made the first computer-synthesized language tests to communicate with dolphins by adapting human language to much higher frequencies.
Better, he created the design for a floating laboratory in which human and dolphins could jointly conceive a common language. Ant Farm, a group of architects and avant-garde artists, have taken up this design to contribute to a movement that some describe as Zoopolitics.
After carefree days came darker times. As the experience progresses between Margaret and Peter, an impatient Lilly decides to give LSD to the dolphins. Peter didn’t get any, Margaret opposed to it, but the other two dolphins receive several injections. To Lilly’s great disappointment it didn’t produce anything, despite the use of a jack hammer to draw a reaction from the stupefied dolphins in their pool.
Exhausted, Lilly hangs on and concludes all the same that the dolphins had “super good trips”. Conclusion, this is how we advance science in the seventies: with LSD, Zoophilia and jack hammers.
In Wet Goddess, Zach is a great admirer of John C. Lilly’s Mind of a Dolphin, and the latter is was strongly criticized by park trainers who merely viewed him as a dolphin killer. For them, the LSD would have troubled their respiratory reflex and drowned them. As for Peter, he was separated from Margaret and placed in a tiny basin. According to some, he was never again the same and died ten months after being deprived of Margaret. Would the dauphin have let himself die, his heart broken? Has contact with Margaret disrupted certain natural behaviors of the animal?
The fact that Ruby, Zach’s Dolphin, will die too after only a few months after her last contact with him — after being placed in another enclosure, in another park, gives even more credit to this idea…
From trans-Gender to trans-Species: Zoophilia, an out-of-body experience?
What can the study of dolphins teach us? John C. Lily wanted to use the dolphins to design a language in case of encounter with an alien intelligence. But did he think, for a moment, that the dolphins could themselves be a form of extraterrestrial life much more evolved than the human one? Behind the subject of zoophilia — and the question of animal consent — perhaps lays concealed the fantasy of coming into contact with a species more evolved than ours.
(Yeah, I just went from dolphin to aliens. Are you really surprised ?)
From the first encounter, Zach, a hippie utopian and a lover of artificial paradises, sees in Ruby a superior being to the human being, and the first feeling he shares with his reader is not sexual arousal — but the honor of being “chosen” by the dolphin. Faced with the silence of the animal and its own guilt, which grows as the forbidden desire arises, Wet Goddess’s narrative takes on an unexpected turn.
Zach hears a voice in his head. Persistent. After several days, he finally approached her:
There was only one idea I could come up with, and it seemed preposterous, even to me.
- Are you… are you… Ruby, the dolphin?
The entity flared with affection, showered me with warmth.
- Hey! You got it right! You can think!
There was a note of bemused exasperation there too, as if, after hours spent laboriously training a lovable but stupid pet to do some simple trick, it had finally succeeded.
Oh great, I thought to myself, as unobtrusively as possible, now I’ve got a dolphin swimming around in my head! And then to her:
- So you’re Ruby?
- That’s right! Again that burst of happiness at being recognized.
- All right, prove it!
- Don’t you believe me?
That gave me pause.
- No, actually, I don’t.
- Why not?
- This is all just a little bit too fortuitous, if you know what I mean! You’re Ruby, the dolphin? And you just happen to be telepathic? How convenient! It fits too well!
- You have a lot of trouble with the obvious. The dolphins are naturally telepathic, says Ruby, and for good reason: their brain is bigger and in many ways much more complex than the human brain. Why wouldn’t it have senses that we don’t know?
Ruby then convinces Zach that his intuition about an oceanic consciousness that would unite all marine mammals is, indeed, perfectly true. Meanwhile Zach is farily enthusiastic about the fact that it is very similar to his experiences on LSD:
Floating in a world of echoes, thinking only of breathing, having nothing, sharing everything, always having a part of the brain awake, the dolphins seem to have been conceived for spirituality.” He concludes that the power to establish an oceanic consciousness, a kind of marine nirvana New Age, is the gift of dolphins, through the grace of natural selection … or something else.
The zoophilia of the Wet Goddess novel propels other fantasies: the dream of an inter-species union, where the being frees itself from its limits and its appearance to plunge into an ocean where it is only one mind. The dolphin then becomes a metaphor of the soul freed from the body. Water is often referred to as “lubricant” — not just for its sexual scope, but rather for the immaterial nature of the dolphin’s body. Elusive. And while Zach and Ruby are in full embrace, the water prevents them from really grasping each other: “To try to make love with her was like a permanent confirmation of Newton’s Third Law of Gravity: any action on my part provoked an equal reaction in the other direction on her part.”
In the end, the delphinophilic sex scene looks like a whirling dervish show.
From zoophilia to the astral out-of-body experience, Ruby finally offers Zach to accompany her into the ocean. The young man finishes his joint, closes his eyes and suddenly becomes a dolphin swimming in the ocean in company of Ruby. What if, in seeking to communicate beyond species to find a common language, there was nothing else to find but an infinite farandole of orgy-loving animals under the sea?
We were swimming at the fringes of an enormous gathering of dolphins.
At the time I couldn’t count, and I couldn’t guess distance, but thinking back there might have been a thousand or more, occupying a square mile of ocean, swimming slowly counterclockwise in a huge, vertiginous funnel, surfacing to breathe and diving in dizzying confusion. The water trembled with strange calls, whistles, and cries, and it was thick with the taste of bodily fluids.
For almost all the dolphins around us were engaged in some form of sexual play.
