post #20: reflections on erotica/fetish subgenres: hucow/human husbandry/???

      i want to write about genre trends in the human livestock subgenre of fanfic / smut etc. I'm not sure the exact nomenclature to introduce this with; i guess it is a fetish. other terms i've seen used to describe the genre i'm talking about include the following (I will also offer what the term is in japanese, if there is a corresponding counterpart) "livestock / 家畜" ; "human livestock" ; "livestock-ification / 家畜化" ; "human farm / 人間牧場" ; "humanoid cattle / 家畜" ; "body modification" ; non-sonsensual body modification" ; etc.** (i will expound further at end of essay). take from this that there isn't a unified name for the genre; if it even is a genre. for the purposes of this essay, i will be using the term "human husbandry" because i like the alliteration and i just came up with it (maybe it existed before, idk).

      Because this topic is niche, one effect of that is that there aren't super hard demarcations around what the genre even is. From what I understand, there seem to be two general modalities for works which could be called "human husbandry" fetish fiction. The first, the type that I will spend the majority of this post discussing, refers to works where humans literally transform into either a cow itself or, more often, some level of human-cow hybrid (hucow as is sometimes used to refer to this declension). Generally, these transformed people become part of an industrial operation -- often to the effect of milk production (usually breast milk, but sometimes, cock milk too) -- however, there are also fictions that focus on individual scale transformations. While the tranformation can be voluntary, it is often dubiously consensual or unconsensual.

      The second modality refers to works where humans or other humanoid species (often elves) retain their initial anatomy but, through coercion, hypnosis, or "mind break" (a fictional trope where someone experiences such an intense erotic pleasure that they become totally submissive and switch allegiances), become treated as livestock. The second modality generally emphasizes the gestational or reproductive labor of the people working as if they were livestock. Generally the second modality is about women (and generally a sizeable group or class of women) being subjugated (therefore the reproductive labor is about giving birth) -- that said, fiction that features men as if they were livestock exists too. I have more to say about this second modality -- specifically its colonial and fascist themes, but I intend to address that later on.

      While I've outlined some features of the first modality, there are still several important and consistent characteristics that I wish to establish. To begin with, the status quo for these narratives (from here on out, assume that I am speak about the general case -- i.e., not an always but also not a one-off; if I shift from talking about the general case, I will note that) is that there exists some institute -- whether that be a private company/factory, a clandestine limb of government, or an accepted social norm -- that transforms humans into cows/hucows and sets them up to extract resources from them. This institute may be regional (e.g., a farm that supplies milk to the community) or wide-reaching (e.g., a company that produces milk for the nation). In other words, the status quo is that, when the narrative begins, there is already a system for turning people into cows and capitalizing on their cow-ness chugging along in the background. From here, narrative action follows that stuff happens and eventually the main character and/or or their companion finds themself unknowlingly enmeshed into the system and well on the way of becoming a cow. This realization is met with shock and recoil but cannot be unconsented from once it begins. After an ellipsis of a couple of days to an undeclared number of years, the transformed ex-human comes to like their new place in society and draws meaning and contentedness from both their cowness and the utility they provide to the system they've been incorporated within. The narrative concludes with either a hint at a recursion or happily ever after-style fade out.

      I will now list some of the common set ups (one could call them contrivances) that facilitate this narrative. The most common (I think?) set up involves some combination of the main character and/or their companion(s) touring a milk production facility. Sometimes they know about the nature of the milk production (that it comes from human-cow hybrids) and sometimes they don't (e.g., they think regular cows are being milked). During the tour, a malfunction happens and a human gets trapped in an area (usually a sealed room of some kind) that facilitates the transformation process. This malfunction can be a hidden malicious intervention or genuine happenstance. The human realizes what's happening too late and can do nothing to stop it, cue possible horror (genuine? I'm not sure -- I'll get to this later). Once transformed or semi-transformed, machines or workers finish preparing the ex-human for production and corale them to their new living or working quarters. Generally, the ex-human isn't autonomous during this process (maybe they are guided by rails and machinated intervention or maybe they are semi/un-conscious). If a malicious intervention was the impetus, the agent(s) to blame will make themselves known at this point. Cue a montage of the ex-human assimilating to the production process (perhaps they gradually continue to transform). In the end, they come to love their new life and their new body. Another common setup is for the scientific undergirdings of the fictional world to be fundamentally different from out own. By this I mean some combination of, some subset of humans are naturally prone to transforming into semi-cows (e.g., during puberty) or, if human cow transformation is not genetic, then it is something like an occupational affect where it's accepted that people who enter the line of work of milk production will be turned into semi-cows (maybe this is a latent potential in all humans, maybe this is a technology). In the technological sense, I suppose all human husbandry stories of the first modality exist in a different scientific plane of existence from the world that I live in. This is likely obvious, but it's worth noting. For one, humans can't exactly turn into cows in our world. However, it's with this genre-wide divergence that I think it's important to emphasize that human husbandry(?) is a subgenre of *fiction.* I will now move to what that means.

      Fiction means metaphor. Fact is flesh, is skin and bone and cellulite and rotting teeth and wage theft and animal creulty and domestic violence and trauma and pain and misery. Fiction may mention facts, but it diverges from repeating them entirely. (Note here that even what I offer as fact is, in fact, a fiction; language, the interface for communicating written information points to things that do not exist; i can lick my teeth and feel something, but that thing is only called teeth in the terms of the fiction I use to approach it; fiction means metaphor; metaphor means tools for making sense of the world). I believe the human husbandry subgenre of fiction may speak metaphorically to a number of things. Before I get to what those are, I need to contextualize what fiction as metaphor means in the case of (18+) fan fiction. While the function of smut and erotica are not singular, I think it's safe to say that, generally, fetish-oriented erotic content is intend to provide a reader (of the text; so this applies even to non-written instances) with sexual pleasure, perhaps in the form of relief. I consider myself fairly asexual, so I can't speak to what this means entirely. That said, I believe the intent, purpose, or function of an object must relate in some way to the meaning of it's component parts. The teeth of a sawblade have meaning with respect to the function of a saw; thus, a sawblade tooth means to cut. Using what I hope was an illustrative example, I extend that if the function of smut and erotica is at least in part to produce sexual pleasure, then their component parts have a meaning which is that they move the reader along their way to the acheivement of sexual pleasure. Furthermore, within the context of an erotic narrative, I believe the ordered-ness of the parts will be a relavent aspect to consider. Sexual pleasure happens when events happen in a certain order; the climax needs time to come, in other words. While erotic fiction has purposes outside of providing sexual pleasure, I don't think I know enough to sus out what else those might be (likely it varies and likely it could go on and on). In short: human husbandry is a genre of erotic fiction; fiction uses metaphor to say something about fact (which can include feelings, since those are facts); erotic fiction is oriented around achieving sexual pleasure; narrative (erotic fiction, but also generally) uses the order of events to create meaning; ontology (i.e., an arugment which suggests certain things have a reason to be -- aka, a purpose) uses the function of a thing to create meaning; the meaning of the whole relates in some way to the meaning of its parts; and the whole in this case is the erotic fiction narrative genre of human husbandry fetish erotica.

      To say the human husbandry sub-genre is one of fiction is to say that neither the author nor the reader actually transform into cows when reading or writing the text. While readers may not always know what they are getting into when they start reading a text, readers familiar with the sub-genre likely would be. At this point, authors writing human husbandry fiction are familiar with the sub-genre's trappings. Because authors and knowing readers are familiar with the genre, they know, generally, what will happen (this is the concept of genre). A knowing reader, therefore, would not be surprised at the fact that a human transforms into a human-cow (they may, though, be shocked with the manner it happens, idk) -- this is essentially the premise the genre revolves around (and the one which it is named after). While the initially human character may not be aware that they are about to become a human-cow, the author knows. I note this because it's important. The vast majority of human husbandry works are from the perspective of the person who transforms into a human-cow. While there may be aspects of this which are voyueristic -- something like schadenfreud -- I think this reading is limited in what it can say. Ultimately, human husbandry works are meditations on the process of it all. Part of what might be getting misread as voyeuristic is the fact of fiction: that the characters are neither the author nor reader. The character's perspective and experiences cannot be precisely emulated; they can only be accessed through the what-if of fiction. To get out with it, I believe the erotic nature of the text means that the what-if of the human husbandry subgenre is, "what-if I got turned into a cow?" And since "got turned into a cow" doesn't exist in the world I live in, that means it is metaphorical for something(s). My hot take would be that human husbandry is a fantasy that runs parallel to furry and therian identities (i.e., being not a human, but an animal). According to my hot take, the fantasy is that the reader is no longer human. The nonconsensal element of transformation is therefore a haha, jk (unless... 😳).

      Stepping away from my hot take, other interpretations can be that human husbandry is about the estrangement from the body, in general, such as with a loss of autonomy. Although the genre appears to be about someone losing something (their autonomy and humanity), perhaps it's sexual nature is also about giving the author/reader something (their fantasy; their metaphors of transformation). What if the ways systems take advantage of me or in which power strips me of my autonomy-- what if these were generative? What if powerlessness didn't make me feel worthless and angry, but was in service of something else -- what if I could escape ... find pleasure?

      With that said, it's important --I think-- to note that not all of the fantasies available in the human husbandry subgenre can be framed as pleasantly. The existence of a second modality of works going under the label "human husbandry" is important and exerts a real influence on the first modality that I've spent so long talking about. What if people who were enslaved found that pleasurable? What if it was acceptable to treat people as non people? (note that I use "people" here, not "human"). What if it was efficacious to enslave people and steal their labor? What if people, on mass, found that pleasurable? What if trafficking someone made them happier and more fulfilled? What if science could dominate people or what if there were genetic hierarchies? Et cetera, et cetera. I don't remember all the reservations I've come up with over the years. My interest in the genre developed over the time (as a coping mechanism, perhaps), and since stumbling upon the genre, there have definitely been a fair few works (some visual and some written) which have made be quite uncomfortable. For whatever reason (though I think I've perhaps alluded to plausible ones earlier in this paragraph), some number of overtly fascist authors write works (not exclusively) in the genre. Granted, I should do a better job vetting the things I read, but still. Part of it is also that it's just not a very big subgenre, and so you can end up in the wrong neck of the woods if you're not careful (metaphorically speaking). At the same time, I don't think that these facts are enough to declare the genre itself a "bad object." I think that type of categorization is problematic at its core (and, in fact, would be another, hello :) fascism, moment). It is an imperfect genre, yes, but the fact that it has persisted for I think at least two to three decades, indicates that there's a persisting interest in the ideas it lets authors and readers explore.

      If anything, I wish works would push the genre further. The biggest complaint I have is that texts get cold feet FAR too quickly. That is, the status quo and the transformation and the climax and the da da da after that is all fine and good, but things usually just end there. What I'm always searching for is a text that stays with things -- a text willing to deal with the facts of its fiction. What does it mean to become a hucow? What does that flesh feel like? What does flesh mean? What does that life look like in the quotidian? (i.e., not just the sparknotes you say post-transformation and then one or two days of events after that). This is especially the case for human husbandry works of the second modality. There will be a lot of work set up doing "world building," where they just explain, 'oh this is how this happens :) ; all the elves are prisoners of the orcs now (clear racial connotations that I won't get into now) and they happily give birth to the next generations of orc soldiers :) ; the end :)". At best, there will be a final sting, where someone (often the former male partner of the captured female) storms into the dungeon or lair or wherever that she now resides and tries to save her, but she goes, 'naw, i'm liking it better here, u have a small dick and can go shove it :p' (clear settler-colonial connotations; see: settler imaginations of Indians kidnapping white women and turning them savage; see: the movie "The Searchers"). While this is somewhat an attempt to follow through on the wafflings of the settler imagination (in the BLACKED (NTR) i'm not owned, i'm not owned (lying) kind of way); the texts get bored and end (that pesky narrative coming in again). Maybe the fact that I don't find sexual pleasure in, well, the sex stuff happening informs what I get out of them, and that's on me, I get that(definitely it does; the "maybe" is rhetorical). But at the same time, I personally would like to see a text that does whatever variety of human husbandry stuff but then looks at itself and says, 'hmm... this is what i am... what am i?' and dealt with the complex realities of the metaphors it set up. I think the ideas are evocative and can go so much further, but as of right now, neither the fantasy pastiche nor the corporation without (real, 21st c.) capitalism are not doing it for me; intellectually. I don't read porn for the plot, but I also don't read it for the porn. So who am I to say? I don't really know. But also. I want to be turned into a cow 🐮🐄 ,,

(and even I don't want to live with the realities of that; but i think i want to; but i want to; )

...

a fiction of a fantasy

      I have more to say about nsfw content (art trends in eroge, doujin, and hentai [manga mostly, though maybe anime too? i don't watch cuz they're boring, but i will look into this] ; digital erotic art's strained relation to context and place-ness ; and probably reflections on other subgenres i've thought about before)

      I didn't list the names any human husbandry texts in this post for two reasons: 1) i not ready to expose myself that much ; 2) i forgor most of the names . . . that said. if you are curious, you can contact me and i can get you the names for some works from different mediums

      ** associated categories (aka tags, because that's the dominant taxonomy for nsfw texts; something to be considered more at some point in the future) include "Milk server / ミルクサーバー" (i found this one while doing research for this essay; hadn't heard of it before; but it's very funny that it's a thing; and also i've read fics where this is the entire premise, so, yeah, that makes sense) ; "Breast milk / 母乳" ; "milking (semen) / 搾精" ; and, "milking (breasts) / 搾乳 or 注乳 (not sure what the difference is; i think the latter might be used more?)." One funny thing i found while researching is that pixiv lists the japanese tag, "社畜", as "human livestock" in english, when i'm pretty sure it just means corporate slave or something like that (that's what all the research + jisho suggest, anyways). There are some more tags found at the extreme ends (i.e., which apply to less an less works that these other tags do; but also sometimes more extreme content), but i'm not sure where to categorize them, so i will leave them out for the time being.