An Interview With Malcolm Brenner
In 2011 I wrote a 3-part article called “Fierce Creatures: the Myth of Dolphin Sex on the Hawaiian Islands,” part 2 of which is still (oddly) the most-read piece on my Medium page and features Malcolm Brenner, author of a book called Wet Goddess that details his relationship with a dolphin named Dolly. Malcolm has since been the focus of a slew of interviews from Jezebel to Huffington Post and the focus of a 2015 documentary called Dolphin Lover.
Myself in 2011 took an irreverent tone: point and laugh at the oddball. Malcolm stumbled across the piece at some point and accused me of gaslighting him which, in looking at it now, I totally was. Type his name into Google and try to find anything about him not involving the words “dolphin” and “sex.” It robs Malcolm of his identity as 3-D human being.
That’s the kind of thing good people like us frown upon. Right?
I’m not taking a position, but will instead give Malcolm the microphone for a minute as he was kind enough to respond to my request for an interview.
The following transcript is in full and unedited.
1) Tell us briefly again about your experience with Dolly and the process of coming to accept the idea of being a zoophile, a label that you mentioned in your interview with Jezebel as pretty much killed any chance of you having a “normal” life.
I don’t remember when I first hear the word “zoophile” and connected with that. Throughout high school I was dating girls by night (occasionally) while jerking off a male poodle by day (frequently). I had real trouble stopping that habit, and it wasn’t the dog. The only things I actually wanted to have sex with were female dogs, but we bred miniature poodles, not standard.
Well by the time I went to college I was rather proud of having cured myself of that habit, which only I knew about. I could pretend that I wasn’t a zoophile, which made me feel a little more comfortable for a while. Then I met Dolly, who took my nose and rubbed it in my own zoophilia. Only a zoophile would respond to a female dolphin’s overtures like I did; that’s why in the novel I told the story about humping the dog without penetrating her, which is true. Only in an utter fairy-tale would a non-zoophile be seduced by a dolphin. That’s the Guillermo del Toro version of reality, not mine. The love interest can have scales and fins, as long as it is vaguely anthropomorphic, with arms, legs, torso and head. God forbid you should love something like a dolphin!
2) The big question concerning zoophilia is, of course, consent. Seeing as how a dolphin is 1,000+ lbs. of muscle that could easily destroy any human it seems like consent is implied just by the act of them allowing you to be in their presence. How do you personally define consent?
Correction, Florida bottlenose dolphin is 400-odd lbs. of muscle. You might find a large northern male bottlenose that runs that big, but not often. How do I define consent? It’s the willingness to allow things to proceed to their natural — or un-natural — conclusion. In the last analysis, if she lets you mount her, you have consent; if she doesn’t, you don’t. Playing hard-to-get is where you get to negotiate things, and you see things in nature like mares walking around with stallions trying to fuck them and the mare apparently trying to get away, only she doesn’t. She’s playing hard-to-get, and there’s a legitimate place for that in the litany of things that turn animals on.
There’s this idiotic idea by some lunkheads that a human can somehow rape a female dolphin in the water. Let me tell you, three Navy SEALS couldn’t accomplish that mission! The dolphin would simply rip off their masks, pull out their respirators and tear off their fins. Voila, helpless humans! I do wish people would think these things out before they let their knee-jerk reactions take over.
Well, I don’t know what their sex life is like, but these rapes are their fantasies, not mime.
3) The documentary Dolphin Lover is now 4 years old! How has it affected your life and have your feelings on it changed since 2015? Are there any parts of the story you feel people are still misunderstanding?
I think DL did a very good job of telling the most important elements of our relationship in a very narrow window. Frankly, I don’t know how they manage to squeeze a 15-minute film out of the budget they had, which was reportedly $4,000!
However, one part they had to leave on the cutting room floor was the extensive telepathic contacts I had with Dolly. The telepathy took three forms: one, the sort of stuff that seemed like dope fantasies; two, the experience I had during the “language lesson,” where I could actually anticipate what she expected out of me; and three, while making love with her, when I felt the deepest merging with any creature I’ve ever made love with.
And then, of course, there was that freaking dream while I was out in Washington State. Maybe I should actually say the telepathy manifested or expressed itself in four rather than three forms. That last one may have been clairvoyance, however.
I don’t expect to convince any of the dolphin-lover-haters out there with this additional info, they’ll just think I’m crazy, but Michael Greenwood (a civilian scientist with the US Navy), Ric O’Barry, Frank Robson (trainer at Marineland, Napiers, NZ) and most recently David Capello (“The Perfect Pair” trilogy) have all come forward and talked about their use to telepathy to train dolphins. I am the only one to reverse the process and use it to explore the dolphins’ world, however.
So how the fuck can this happen? How can we both get on the same wavelength, get into each other’s minds, exchange information? I don’t know but I suspect a concept from quantum physics called “entanglement” has something to do with it. Look it up. Defies distance. I leave it up to the physicists to explain it, but it does suggest that attempts to communicate by establishing a computer-generated language are barking up the wrong tree (apt metaphor?)! We should first communicate with them telepathically, then work with them to build a common communications space. Of course, the trick is to get marine mammalogists to go along with it. It’s actually easier to train the dolphins telepathically than it is to convince PSICOP that’s what you’re doing.
4) Oscar Wilde once said that “Truth is rarely pure and never simple.” What advice might you offer to simplify peoples’ understanding of zoophilia? Also, how does it feel to be thrust into the position of being a high-profile/unofficial spokesperson for zoophilia?
Look, my zoophilia doesn’t mean anything, it’s been a challenge in my life, that’s all. I never wanted this book to be about my zoophilia, but people have tried to make out like it is. I just thought that if I wrote it anonymously it wouldn’t get any publicity and if I published it under a pen name everybody would make a big game out of trying to guess who it was. So I just went ahead and published it and owned it, it made for a good press release.
What really means something is the dolphins. They suffer profound tragedy at our hands every day. I had one die, and that one was like every dolphin in the world dying. I want to put an end to that. I want us to acknowledge them for what they are, ancient beings that are our equal in the waters. I want them recognized as non-human persons.
Occasionally it is very uncomfortable to be in this position, like the night of the day Bubba the Love Sponge interviewed me and my web site got 12 million hits and crashed and I had to change my cell number. I was so uncomfortable I borrowed a shotgun from a friend and slept with it by my bed for a couple of nights. That made me feel more secure, believe me!
Aside from that I really don’t feel like the poster child for zoophilia, even if that’s what I am. I still smoke dope, dress like crap and do what I want. To simplify peoples’ understanding of zoophilia? Quit thinking of animals as victims and start thinking of them as independent creatures who make their own choices. It’s emblematic of our interactions with other species that it’s apparently OK to do anything with them — eat them, breed them, artificially inseminate them, milk them for their semen, whatever — except have sex with them. It’s just slightly hypocritical, and it’s all based on the idea that “animals can’t give consent.” Bullshit, they have been giving consent for millions of years, it’s called courtship, and Dolly was courting me. In the interest of interspecies communications, she ought to have the right to do that, don’t you think? :)
5) I remember reading the America’s Best Science and Nature Writing last year and it seemed like every other article in there was about how our oceans are just totally fucked. I know you’ve said in the past that dolphins aren’t necessarily Zen creatures who hold the secrets of the universe and clearly neither are we. Is there anything you’d like to add about our relationship with the ocean and its inhabitants or how we might begin the move towards a more harmonious coexistence?
The greatest danger to life on this planet isn’t the Yellowstone caldera or an errant asteroid, it’s us. This is “the Anthropocene” — the age when human beings have already manage to wipe out 1/3 of the life on this earth, when we have become the single greatest force in evolution.
There are just some people who are never going to believe that, or even in evolution, and we have to find some way to leave them behind to wallow in the past and go on without them, because we cannot let them hold us back.
If we acknowledge dolphins as non-human persons then we give them certain rights, including legal standing. Need I say more? The day pollution will stop is the day it becomes more expensive to pollute than to clean up. Until that day comes, expect things to get worse.
Sorry to be pessimistic, but I don’t believe in human exceptionalism or that Jesus, the aliens or the 7th Cavalry will come riding over that hill to protect us from the ruinous effects of our own stupidity. Like the people who voted for Trump. Did he throw some magic fairy dust in their eyes that made them see all the bad things about him as good things? I don’t think so, they just voted stupidly, against their own interests. As long as people are willing to do that, I don’t think you can count on the majority of them to really support interspecies communications — not if it will lead to more dolphin-fucking.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
May the road rise to meet your feet, as the Irish say. — Malcolm
Thanks, Malcolm.
Read my original Hawaii coverage about much more than Malcolm here:
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