Horse Sex
“What is it this father wants of me in showing me, letting me see this primal scene, even if only by taking me to a field to witness animal coitus?” Laplanch, Theory of Seduction and the Problem of the Other (1997)
“Come out in the field, Forest,” my dad called to me. “Okay dad!” It was June, everything was green, and I was 8 years old. “This is a sex education class;” my dad said. “This is what sex is.” The stallion screamed and tore at the earth with his hooves, his penis was two feet long and velvety black and curved like a scimitar. The mare backed up to him presenting her rear; her vagina, the size of two hands held in prayer, flashed open and closed, revealing a hot-pink interior and squirting a neon yellow fluid. The stallion rose up on hind legs and fell down on her back with his front legs splayed; in a thrust he was inside of her and, after a few more thrusts as she backed up on him, he dismounted in a milky spray and stood behind her, suddenly still, as if dumbstruck. In five minutes his penis had retracted back up into his groin and he was now as docile as any gelding. They began to eat grass together, flicking their tails at the flies.
While this demonstration as to the nature of mammalian sexuality may satisfy the alien biologist say, or the fascist—who wishes to keep sex in the family—it does little to satisfy the psychoanalyst. Is this really what sex is? No it is not. It is a mistake of my upbringing to have been told so. The mistake is to reduce human sexuality to reproduction and to instinct.
The horse has the privilege to have been automated by biology; during the summer months her cycle produces periods of desire for the stallion, outside of which she kicks him in the face; she never varies from this program. The stallion needs to chase the mare and kill his rivals. The drive of human libido precisely lacks this instinctual need for reproduction. What we lose in biological necessity we make up for in fantasy. While instinct yet originates in the body, it is bent upon reaching the psyche. To be explicit: the drive queers the instinct.
