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Sweden, one of the world's most sexually tolerant societies, is in the throes of a strange, emotionally charged debate about the last taboo: bestiality. The unmasking this week of an animal sex network by the Stockholm newspaper Expressen has again highlighted the issue. Members of parliament are urging a tightening of the laws (bestiality was decriminalised along with homosexuality in 1944) but the government is resisting the pressure... Sweden has had a pioneering approach towards sex, at least since the 1960s when critically acclaimed films such as I am Curious Yellow depicted the society's free-wheeling attitudes. The country was one of the first to shed the stigma of single motherhood and, while Swedes talk less about sexual matters nowadays than 30 years ago, they are still pushing back the boundaries... Legal limits are set mainly on the commercial exploitation of sex: thus, while prostitution is technically legal, customers are seen as offenders who exploit and abuse women. Cameras have been set up near the entrances of brothels and clients leaving the premises can be fined on the spot. But bestiality and the whole seedy sub-culture surrounding it is straining Swedish tolerance to bursting point. Religious Swedes say it violates a fundamental taboo: a passage from Leviticus 18 states: “And you shall not lie with any beast and defile yourself with it, neither shall any woman give herself a beast to lie with it: it is a perversion." In the Middle Ages, men were typically burned to death for having sex with animals. Most countries nowadays either outlaw the practice entirely (most states in the US) or prosecute penetrative sex with animals (Britain). Sweden, though, has not taken a religion-based stance. Rather, it seems to accept the idea that sex with animals can be in some way consensual. If it causes injury to the animal it can be prosecuted, although in practice only two out of the 115 cases registered have ever been investigated.[16]

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