User talk:JAQ/Zoophilia

Changes in my revision

Since I'm making a bunch of changes, wholesale and unilaterally, and without interactive debate over them, I want to explain them here first. One of the few things I agree with Ciz about is that this article had developed a general tone and preponderance of material aimed at justifying zoophilia. I'm not criticizing anyone for wanting that idea to get across, but if you feel strongly about a subject, and you like the way the article about it reads... the article probably isn't neutral enough. The same applies to me, but this topic isn't one I really have that much emotional investment in; it interests me mostly because I think articles along the "fringe" like this are important to Wikipedia's reputation of neutrality. So I hope this comes close to a NPOV, though I'm sure it's imperfect.

Overall

I made edits to just about everything, mostly for the sake of clarity, grammar, etc. and also to help establish a consistent "voice" to the text.

Terminology & Categorization

The article had inconsistent usage of terms, especially interchanging zoophilia and zoosexuality. For example, it talked about laws against "zoophilia", which is inaccurate because there are no laws against the paraphilia of being attracted to an animal; the laws are against sexual activity. Zoosexuality especially might refer in one place to a sexual orientation, and in another to a sex act. To avoid confusion, I standardized on zoophilia and bestiality, which are each the most widely recognized term for their respective phenomena. To avoid overuse of the terms, I used phrases such as attraction to animals or sex with animals as substitutes. I moved the Terminology and Categorization sections up in order to help establish terms before trying to talk about them.

The use of "partner" in reference to animals has been questioned because it assumes mutuality in the relationship. But no better alternative (at least one that doesn't assume the opposite) has come up, so I skated around it with other phrasings as best as I could.

Legal status

I removed a few anecdotal cases that while both factual and arguably interesting, didn't have much bearing on the larger basic question of legality. I reorganized the data into a bullet list by jurisdiction, which should facilitate adding more data points, and discourage putting in too much about any one country.

Mythology/Lit

This section was (to me) disappointingly brief, so I've added more examples from my own research.

Porn

I moved this section after Mythology because A) I didn't think it should be quite so prominent, and B) it flows better chronologically there.

Research

I'm sorry, but way too much space was devoted to quotes from research papers. I think the extensive list of books etc. - which I've left as it was - is adequate for anyone interested in more in-depth reading on the subject. And frankly, the whole Research section was clearly arguing for the general conclusion that zoophiles are just as well-adjusted as anyone else... and probably even moreso. Maybe that's correct, but it was still advocacy. It'd make a persuasive article (if it were on another site, I'd supporting including it in the "pro-zoo links" section) but I don't think it belongs in a Wikipedia article, where NPOV is required. Maybe with more critical studies, it could work as a separate "Research into Zoophilia" article, but that'd still be a stretch, IMHO. In any case there was too much to fit here, and the 32KB guideline agreed with me. In removing most of this material, I probably threw out some baby with the bathwater (so to speak); I certainly wouldn't object to selective re-introduction of some the material back into the article, in places where references to researched information are needed.

Extent of occurance

I accepted FT2's rephrasing of the percentages and did some other work on presentation. The section about proportion of zoophiles engaging in bestiality consisted mostly of truisms and repetition of points made elsewhere about the difficulties of defininition, so I removed it. Lacking any hard data on that question (of which I'm aware), the introductory distinction betwen the philia and the activity should suffice in making that point.

Criticisms

This section set up some strawmen against zoophilia, and also gave more space and depth to rebuttal of criticisms than the criticisms themselves. I've left it fairly sketchy, I admit, but I have a feeling this section will get plenty of attention going forward, so I don't feel too bad about that.