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violent rape fantasies to join him for a romantic dinner at his place tomorrow night—just the two of you—seems prudent if you’re an attractive female. And assuming I had one, I’m afraid that even I’d be slightly reluctant to let the horse-loving bakery worker near my impressive stallion.
    This better-safe-than-sorry bias is morally rational (it’s designed to protect ourselves or those we care about from harm), but it’s not morally logical (it’s a form of prejudice against someone on the basis of his or her sexual nature, not a decision based on anything the person has actually done). When it comes to high-risk social decisions such as who’s going to babysit the children or whether or not to go out on a date with someone you barely know, negative stereotypes can have adaptive utility. But just because something is adaptive doesn’t mean it’s ethically defensible. (Assuming so would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy.) After all, it works the same way for any minority social category. Whether it’s the color of one’s skin, how much a person weighs, or the particular accent a person speaks with, negative stereotypes are shortcuts in our social reasoning that crop up mostly under time pressures and as the stakes rise. In the case of those with deviant sexual desires and our attempts to avoid harm, caution may be warranted, but we also shouldn’t follow our emotionally driven intuitions so blindly that we’re wholly unaware of our failure in moral logic. Overgeneralizing the frightening attributes of the most negative examples of a hidden social category (such as a religious denomination or a sexual orientation) to everyone in that category leads to disturbing effects in which we become overly paranoid about the unseen monsters in our midst. In sociological terms, we submit to “moral panic.” Since unsavory carnal desires can’t be easily detected, everyone is potentially now one of “those people.”
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    If a measure came up on the voting ballot today for the preemptive extermination of pedophiles, I’ve no doubt that it would pass by a landslide. Most people, I suspect, would reason that since pedophiles are intrinsically evil, eradicating them this way is in the best interest of society. There was once a similar approach to dealing with sexual deviancy in seventeenth-century New England. You’ve heard of the witch hunts in Salem, but I’m guessing you’re not as familiar with the pig-man hunts of New Haven. The most troubling sex fiends of those days weren’t pedophiles (the age of consent in the colonies was ten, if that tells you anything) but men secretly in league with the Devil to impregnate barnyard animals. The fear was that the resulting malevolent offspring (called “prodigies”—my, how the meaning of that word has changed over time) would silently infiltrate the fledgling America and muck it all up with evil for the God-fearing folk. The settlers had gotten this strange idea from the teachings of the violently prudish medieval scholar Thomas Aquinas, who coined the term “prodigy” to refer to any hybrid creature sprung from the loins of another species but borne of human seed. According to him, prodigies could also be conceived through sex with atheists (a.k.a. perverts), but it seems there were far fewer of those milling about the colonies than solicitous swine.
    It’s unclear if any of the early Americans I’m about to describe were what today’s sexologists would call “zoophiles,” individuals who are more attracted to nonhuman animals than to human ones. They may have merely used members of other species as surrogates for human partners in obtaining sexual gratification (as half of all “farm-bred” adolescent males have done, according to Alfred Kinsey in 1948), or they could have been falsely accused of such acts altogether. Yet some modern scientists believe that zoophilia is a genuine sexual orientation represented by as much as a full 1