Jesse Bering’s recent Slate article “Porky Pig” is a shocking, hilarious, and ultimately brave look at the stranger-than-fiction world of zoophilia. This line says it all: “For most people, it’s an icky conversation to have—I do wish my dog would stop staring at me as I’m typing this—but queasiness doesn’t negate reason.”

I’m not going to add my voice to that conversation. (If you're up for it, check out the article’s comments section.) Instead, I looked to my bookshelf for perspective, and within a few minutes I had a little stack covering zoophilia and a few other -philias that, for the purposes of this post, I have had to name.

Bestiality isn’t that hard to come by in literature; at least, not in the idylls of Faulkner (from As I Lay Dying: “Darl had a little spy-glass he got in France at the war. In it it had a woman and a pig with two backs and no face.”) and McCarthy (from Blood Meridian: “Not three weeks before this he was run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat.”) Here are some more instances of hot human-on-nonhuman action, from the mainstream to the fringe, from the relatively familiar to…well, read on.

Mealophilia: “So. Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my family’s own dinner.” To this act of what we may also call “feastiality,” the narrator of Portnoy’s Complaint adds lactophilia (a milk bottle) and two counts of snackophilia (a cored apple, a candy bar wrapper).

Nightshadophilia: “We wrestled, eggplant breaking up between our navels. I got her shorts off, she got my jeans down. I dumped a whole plate of eggplant on her belly … When we finished, we gathered up all the eggplant on the floor and fried it in flour and crushed garlic.” From Dorothy Allison’s story “A Lesbian Appetite.” I would give anything to see this scene re-enacted on Kitchen Nightmares.

Floraphilia: “The soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles … To lie down and roll in the sticky cool young hyacinths, to lie on one’s belly and cover one’s back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, soft and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one’s thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs…” If this passage fromWomen in Love has you at all confused about what’s going on, the next paragraph, which begins with the Portnoy-esque line, “As he dried himself a little with his handkerchief,” should help.

Whatthefuckophilia: “When Alan actually entered Bull his face was buried between the prop forward’s well-upholstered shoulder-blades. Bull’s leg was bent back at the knee and tucked comfortably up, and under Alan’s crotch.” Because, you see, in Will Self’s Cock and Bull, “Alan was now having an affair with a man who had a cunt in the back of his leg.”

Keep in mind that I compiled this without the help of Google. (Fine, I looked up dendrophilia for a second.) The vast, terrifying unknowability of the human sex drive is bursting out of our bookshelves.

See for yourself. Or, if you're pressed for time, you'll find more strains of sexual deviance than you could ever name (let alone try) in this book.

Image: www.icanhasinternets.com