Is your girlfriend a tiger in the sack? Your best friend a sexy beast? Or does your roommate's frequent fornication makes you wish you could get him fixed? Party animals and pussycats are hardly the invention of the 21st century sexual freedoms. In fact, accounts of animalistic sex date back to ancient Greece, though our main source for them is a naughty narrative known as Ovid's Metamorphoses, dating from 8 A.D.

Let's begin with a girl we all should know: Helen of Troy. “The face that launched a thousand ships/and burnt the topless towers of Ilium.” Seeing as how men paid in blood for her nocturnal adventures, this little slut makes Lindsay Lohan look like a saint. Then again, given her parentage, maybe we have to forgive her a little. Her mom did get raped by Big Bird, a.k.a. almighty Zeus.

For reasons known only to Greek and Roman poets, their chief deity did most of his girls while gadding about as a barnyard animal. Arguably, Zeus owed this idiosyncrasy to Greek poets stoned on natural gas or possibly the lead poisoning in Rome that we blame for Nero's incestuous relations with his mother. As it is, no artist before Coleridge really wanted to admit to being high as a kite, so they improvised a jealous wife, Hera, to give Zeus cause for his animal adultery.

So, the burning question: How to have sex with a swan? Yeats' Leda and the Swan gives us only the loosest notion. First, apparently interspecies/divine relations are strictly non-con since Zeus gives the girl “a sudden blow” and carries her off. The bird abducted my baby? Yeah, that'd hold up in court.

Then she gets “her thighs caressed/by the dark webs” of his feet as “he holds her helpless, breast upon his breast.” Then things get vague. “A shudder in the loins engenders there” Helen. Sure. It'll take some mental and physical gymnastics though to get us to (shudder) fowl on femme action. So let's get started, shall we?

Most English lit classes will tell us that “the feathered glory” between Leda's “loosening thighs” is the swan fishing his bill up her bearded clam. Can't see this happening for two reasons, the primary being the happy tendency of my subconscious to block the idea of avian cunnilingus. Second, have you ever been bit by a goose? Those things hurt! No, Zeus almost certainly used a standard pecker for his promiscuity, and here's why.

Swans are some of the few birds with penises. Check out budgies, chickens or crows, and except for a few minor details, you can't tell the genders apart. Both have a cloaca, which is basically a urethra- penis or vagina-rectum combo. Sex consists of ‘cloacal kissing,' sticking two mostly flat holes against each other briefly to exchange fluids. Heck, with that sort of plumbing, it's no wonder that even experienced chicken sexers, who eye up avian arses day after day, make mistakes. But evolution decreed that swans and a few other waterbirds got to keep their bits, while the cock ironically cannot live up to its name.

This leads to the slightly more pleasant interpretation of Michelangelo's painting, Leda and the Swan. While we may still be slightly dubious as to how a bird managed to defile a girl against her will, this bird being Zeus, he might have had some divinely invisible duct tape. Or Leda just had a really good excuse to give her local SPCA on what she was doing with that swan.

Another notable conquest of Zeus, this time in bovine guise, was Pasiphaë; though this time it was more of a revenge fuck and less of a fun time. Minos, then king of Crete, asked the sea god Poseidon for a sign that his reign would be blessed. Poseidon sent Minos a bull out of the sea. Minos promised to sacrifice the bull to the gods, and swapped it last minute for another one, thus pissing off the gods. They cursed his wife, Pasiphaë, with zoophilia.

Apparently zoophilia requires more props and ingenuity than a BDSM dungeon, because Pasiphaë hired Daedalus — future engineer of the Minotaur's labyrinth — to build her a bronze heifer with the appropriate orifices to enable her to mate with the bull. All I can say is that she should have used a condom. The offspring of that union was the Minotaur, who apparently had really bad Mommy issues, since he ate seven girls every spring.

So maybe leave animal indulgences to the imagination, or get really good at dress-up. Either way, Ovid's Metamorphoses will serve as a great reference guide for your perverse pleasures. Check out books, not birds!