My Mind Just Spins At This Weirdness

I saw this posting over at Reflections, Reflections, which claimed that William Saletan's review of the documentary Zoo (about people with intimate relationships with animals):

William Saletan reaches the absurd level of trying to equate bestiality to heterosexuality (which he constructs as all bad), and states that it is the opposite of homosexuality (which he constructs as all good). Yes, you read that right.

My first reaction was, "Okay, the young lady in question must have reacted very negatively to some subtle point that Saletan was trying to make, and misread him."

Nope. You can read Saletan's review of Zoo here, if you have the stomach for it. I'm afraid that Reflections, Reflections got Saletan's review right.

UPDATE: The more I think about this, the more irritated I get, not just because of its offensive comparison of heterosexuality to bestiality, but the misogny that Saletan's review includes.

One of the traditional stereotypes of homosexual men is that they hate women. While I've met a few misogynous gay men over the years, most gay men I have worked with seemed to have no problem with women. On the other hand, I've seen the claim made that the reason why there were two separate gay Democratic clubs in San Francisco--a gay man's club and a lesbian club--was that for many years there was too much tension (and not sexual tension) between gay men and lesbians to work together.

But Saletan makes it very clear that not only does he see bestiality as heterosexuality--because of "difference" but that the horses in question are like women--strictly for sex, because they really aren't up to an equal relationship:

But Zoo isn't about equality. It's about inequality. It gets inside the heads of the horse fetishists, exploring their peculiar mentality. At the core of that mentality is a craving for otherness. Zoophilia isn't homo. It's hetero. Very hetero.

The men in the movie think their trysts are meaningful. "It's the love of animals—that's what zoophilia is," says one, a ranch hand who goes by his Internet alias, H. "It's just like if you love your wife." Another, who calls himself the Happy Horseman, ventures, "You're connecting with another intelligent being."

But the more the men talk, the more this pretense unravels. "I don't need a high level of emotional interaction," says a zoophile who goes by the name Coyote. The Happy Horseman agrees. A horse "has no idea what Tolstoy is, or Keats," he explains. "You can't discuss the difference between Monet and Picasso. That just doesn't exist for their world. It's a simpler, very plain world. And for those few moments, you kind of can get disconnected."

In other words, horses are bimbos. The ranch where the men gathered for equine sex, nestled under a mountain in the Pacific Northwest, was a place to get away from failed marriages and friendships. For some, the Happy Horseman recalls, going there meant, "I don't have to really deal with relationships."

If there is anything that better typifies Saletan's misogny than this, I don't what it is. Rather than try to justify what these sick guys are doing as "just another expression of human sexuality," he specifically compares it to heterosexuality--and women, in a heterosexual relationship, are dumb animals, unable to ever be on an equal plane with men. I don't know what Saletan's sexual orientation is, but I think I can make a guess.