So the next time you see a jenny standing in a field, remember: she might be someone’s last, best love story. And in the annals of romantic strange-tales, that is a legend worth writing. Author’s Note: This article examines literary, folkloric, and allegorical representations. It does not advocate for or depict real-world bestiality, which is illegal and harmful to animals. The “romantic storyline” discussed is a metaphorical and emotional construct, not a literal sexual one.
Anthropologist Dr. Miriam Soliz, in her 2016 study “Four Legs and a Husband: Surrogate Partnership in Rural Andalusia,” interviewed elderly Spanish muleteers. One 80-year-old man confessed: “I never married. My jenny, Rosa, she slept in my room in winter. I would wrap my arms around her neck. Was it romantic? I don’t know. But I never felt alone.” man sex in female donkey verified
More earnestly, the 2019 Romanian film Godzilla and the Donkey (a satire of EU austerity) opens with an old farmer kissing his jenny on the lips at dawn. The director, Corneliu Porumboiu, described the shot as “a political statement about the love that remains when all human love has been priced out of existence.” The farmer eventually drowns himself in a river, and the jenny stands on the bank for three days, refusing to eat. Critics called it “the most heartbreaking interspecies romance in modern cinema.” So the next time you see a jenny
This is the first literary template of the romantic-coded man/jenny relationship: not sexual, but conjugal . The jenny represents the perfect, non-judgmental partner. She never mocks his poverty, never leaves him for a richer man, and her stubbornness is merely a reflection of his own refusal to abandon her. In many ways, The Golden Ass argues that a man’s ability to love a female donkey (as a beast of burden and companion) is a test of his soul—a theme that would echo down through centuries. During the medieval period, bestiaries (illustrated volumes of animal lore) redefined the donkey through a Christian lens. The female donkey, in particular, became an emblem of the Anima Christi —the soul’s patient waiting for God. But in secular romance, especially among shepherds and peasants, the jenny took on a different role. It does not advocate for or depict real-world
Soliz notes that these men often used romantic language—"mi novia" (my girlfriend), "mi reina" (my queen)—for their donkeys. This is not bestiality (most reported no sexual contact) but rather emotional displacement . The jenny becomes a safe object for affection that a harsh, patriarchal world forbade them from giving to men or receiving from women in a vulnerable way. Contemporary writers face a challenge when crafting a romantic or quasi-romantic storyline between a man and a female donkey. The risk of revulsion is high. However, when done allegorically—as in magical realism, fable, or psychological drama—the trope can illuminate truths about human loneliness, the animal gaze, and the absurdity of romantic conventions.
These storylines work because they exploit a fundamental human anxiety: the fear that we are more lovable to animals than to our own kind. To understand the romantic storyline of man and female donkey, we must separate allegory from act. Across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Latin America, poor, isolated men have historically formed intense emotional bonds with their pack animals. The female donkey, being smaller, gentler, and less aggressive than a male jack, becomes a natural confidante.