“Namita Das has two grown up children, but she continues to suckle her pet monkey. Namita, a middle-aged woman who lives in India’s north-eastern Tripura state and is a government worker, describes Buru, the pet monkey, as her third child. ‘Yes, I breastfeed him. He is my son,’ says Namita, caressing the monkey. More than four years ago, her woodcutter husband found a dying baby monkey under a tree after a fierce storm. He brought the animal home in Chandrapur village on the outskirts of the Udaipur town in Tripura’s South District. ‘The monkey fell ill after the storm, in which it lost its parents. I decided to bring him up with my daughters,’ says Namita. Her daughters, Dipti and Tripiti, treat the monkey as a sibling… It is not uncommon for poor rural families in Tripura to keep pets. But Namita is upset when a photographer accompanying me calls the monkey a pet. ‘This is not a pet, this is my son. Please get that right,’ she insists. ‘I did not have a son. God finally gave me one,’ says Namita, as she continued to breastfeed the monkey. I ask her whether she has been breastfeeding Buru — who is around five years old — for too long. ‘I will continue to breastfeed him as long as he wants it. He will always remain a little one for me,’ she says.” — BBC (UK)

(Thanks to Warren for the link.)

Here is a picture of “monkey mom” breastfeeding her simian “son.” When you think about it, you can’t help but notice a double standard. The BBC would never depict bestiality but has no problem reproducing a picture of this woman in unnatural congress with her monkey. A few years ago there was a story about a woman who breastfed her puppy, and one newspaper posted a picture of her giving suck too. You think there are people out there who collect these pictures and jerk off to them? It seems quite likely.

Finding these pictures arousing would build a bridge between two parallel types of deviance. On the one hand, it is not uncommon for people to turn to animals to satisfy deep-seated sexual desires. On the other hand, it is not uncommon for people to turn to animals to satisfy parental urges — hence the stereotype of the “cat lady,” an older woman who busies herself with dozens of cats rather than children or grandchildren. The curious thing is that the use of animals as sexual surrogates is considered deviant, while the use of animals as emotional surrogates is not.

Then again, perhaps it is a matter of degree. Monkey Mom has clearly gone beyond the point to which most people take their emotional attachments to animals. She not only treats the monkey as a son, she gives it privileges that she doesn’t grant her flesh-and-blood daughters. This special treatment would be exceptional enough, but when she attaches the monkey to her body — when she deviates from what most people would consider her biological purpose, i.e. reproduction and the consequent nursing of (human) young — she reaches a strange new territory. It is not recognizably perverse, and that’s why the BBC will show pictures of it. And yet at the same time, is it not a novel form of perversion? A perversion not of the sexual but the parental instinct?

VideoBox

It's like the iTunes Music Store for Porn. Download unlimited high-quality video for only $9.95/month.