The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations)

by Carol J Adams

  By speaking of the texts of meat we situate the production of meat’s meaning within a political-cultural context. None of us chooses the meanings that constitute the texts of meat, we adhere to them. Because of the personal meaning meat has for those who consume it, we generally fail to see the social meanings that have actually predetermined the personal meaning. Recognizing the texts of meat is the first step in identifying the sexual politics of meat.

  In defining the patriarchal texts of meat, part 1 relies on an expanded notion of what constitutes a text. These include: a recognizable message; an unchangeability of the text’s meaning so that through repetition the same meaning recurs; and a system of relations that reveal coherence.2 So with meat: it carries a recognizable message—meat is seen as an item of food, for most meat is an essential and nutritious item of food; its meaning recurs continuously at mealtimes, in advertisement, in conversations; and it is comprised of a system of relations having to do with food production, attitudes toward animals, and, by extension, acceptable violence toward them.

  The texts of meat which we assimilate into our lives include the expectation that people should eat animals and that meat is good for you. As a result the rendering of animals as consumable bodies is one of those presumptions that undergirds our attitudes. Rarely is this cultural text that determines the prevailing positive attitudes about consuming animals closely examined. The major reason for this is the patriarchal nature of our meat-advocating cultural discourse. Meat’s recognizable message includes association with the male role; its meaning recurs within a fixed gender system; the coherence it achieves as a meaningful item of food arises from patriarchal attitudes including the idea that the end justifies the means, that the objectification of other beings is a necessary part of life, and that violence can and should be masked. These are all a part of the sexual politics of meat.

  We will see in the following chapter that sex-role assignments determine the distribution of meat. When the meat supply is limited, men will receive it. Assuming meat to be food for men and consequently vegetables to be food for women carries significant political consequences. In essence, because meat eating is a measure of a virile culture and individual, our society equates vegetarianism with emasculation or femininity.

  Another aspect of the sexual politics of meat becomes visible as we examine the myth of Zeus’s consumption of Metis. He, patriarch of patriarchs, desires Metis, chases her, coaxes her to a couch with “honeyed words,” subdues her, rapes her, and then swallows her. But he claims that he receives her counsel from his belly, where she remains. In this myth, sexual violence and meat eating are collapsed, a point considered in chapter 2, “The Rape of Animals, the Butchering of Women.” It is also a myth about masculine consumption of female language. In discussing meat we must direct our attention to issues of patriarchal language about consumption; such a discussion is found in chapter 3.

  People do not often closely scrutinize their own meat eating. This is an example of the prerogative of those in the dominant order to determine what is worthy of conversation and critique. Resultingly, earnest vegetarians become trapped by this worldview, and while they think that all that is necessary to make converts to vegetarianism is to point out the numerous problems meat eating causes—ill health, death of animals, ecological spoilage—they do not perceive that in a meat-eating culture none of this really matters. This dilemma is explored in chapter 4, “The Word Made Flesh.”

  Part 2, “From the Belly of Zeus,” provides the beginnings of a feminist history of vegetarianism by focusing on the time period of 1790 to the present in Great Britain and the United States. It attempts to free Metis’s voice from the belly of Zeus by freeing vegetarian meaning from the sexual politics of meat and by freeing women’s voices from patriarchal interpretation. Rather than analyzing contemporary culture, the focus of this middle section is literary texts and their vegetarian influences. However, the literary-historical analysis found here makes use of the ideas introduced in part 1. It explores answers to the question “what characterizes texts that challenge the sexual politics of meat?” The idea of “bearing the vegetarian word” is examined in chapter 5 as one answer to this question. This idea facilitates the interpretation of the relationship between women’s texts and vegetarian history.

  In chapter 6, I explore the meaning of vegetarianism in Frankenstein, a feminist text that bears the vegetarian word. I am not attempting to compress Frankenstein into a didactic vegetarian tract. It is, of course, not that. But vegetarian nuances are of importance in the shaping of the story.

  Part 2 also examines representative texts by women writers since World War I that posit a connection between meat eating, male dominance and war. Like The Great War and Modern Memory after which the title of chapter 7 is patterned, I trace ideas that crystallized at the time of the Great War and follow their development during this century, including the idea of a Golden Age of feminism, vegetarianism, and pacifism.

  Women, of course, have not been the only ones to criticize meat eating. In fact, to read standard vegetarian texts one would conclude that few women have been involved in this task. Conversely, to read many feminist writings, one might think that there is nothing controversial about meat eating. And to read standard histories, vegetarianism is faddish and nothing more. But vegetarian theory is neither unfounded nor unfocused; like feminist theory it must be seen as “comprehensive and cumulative, with each stage retaining some of the values and limitations of its predecessors.”3 Among our vegetarian predecessors were numerous feminists.

  The basic vegetarian arguments we hear today were in place by the 1790s, except, of course, for the analysis of late twentieth-century developments in meat production. Vegetarian writings occur within a self-conscious protest tradition that contains recognizable recurring themes and images. Yet, they have not been seen either as comprehensive or cumulative, nor as a form of protest literature. But this failure of comprehension reflects the stasis of our cultural discourse on meat rather than the inadequacies of vegetarianism.

  This book is extensively documented to demonstrate precisely the comprehensive and cumulative nature that has gone unrecognized. I am not creating claims for vegetarianism in literature and history. The records are there, but the tendency to trivialize vegetarianism has meant that those records are ignored. In a sense, vegetarians are no more biased than meat eaters are about their choice of food; vegetarians, however, do not benefit as do meat eaters from having their biases actually approved of by the dominant culture.

  Because I see the oppression of women and the other animals as interdependent, I am dismayed by the failure of feminists to recognize the gender issues embedded in the eating of animals. Yet this failure is instructive as well. Where I identify feminism’s participation in the sexual politics of meat, I am simultaneously identifying the mental tanglehold upon all of us of the texts of meat. Feminist discourse, thus, ironically, reproduces patriarchal thought in this area; part 3, “Eat Rice Have Faith in Women,” challenges both by arguing that vegetarianism acts as a sign of autonomous female being and signals a rejection of male control and violence.

  Just as feminist theory needs to be informed by vegetarian insights, animal rights theory requires an incorporation of feminist principles.

  Meat is a symbol for what is not seen but is always there—patriarchal control of animals.

  Ultimately women, who often find themselves in muted dialogue with the dominant culture, become the source for insights into the oppression of animals. Major figures in the feminist canon—writers such as Aphra Behn, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Walker, Marge Piercy, Audre Lorde—have contributed works that challenge the sexual politics of meat.

  In establishing the association between vegetarianism and women I do not want to imply that vegetarianism is only for women. On the contrary, as we will see, many individual men who endorsed women’s rights adopted vegetarianism as well. To claim that women alone should stop eating animals reinforc
es the sexual politics of meat. I am more concerned with the fact that feminist theory logically contains a vegetarian critique that has gone unperceived, just as vegetarianism covertly challenges a patriarchal society. However, the sexism of some vegetarians, vegetarian groups, and vegetarian cultures demonstrates the necessity of adopting an overt feminist perspective.

  Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott, is a telling example of how vegetarianism without feminism is incomplete. It, too, reproduces patriarchal attitudes. Alcott moved his family to a communal farm, Fruitlands, with hopes of living off of the fruit of the earth and not enslaving any animals—either to eat or use for labor. He, however, was not inclined toward performing manual labor himself and had the habit of disappearing from Fruitlands to discuss his ideas in abstract rather than live them in the flesh. At harvest time, his wife and daughters were left to perform the heavy work; thus the only “beasts of burdens” at this Utopia were the women themselves. Honoring animals but not women is like separating theory from practice, the word from the flesh.

  We could claim that the hidden majority of this world has been primarily vegetarian. But this vegetarianism was not a result of a viewpoint seeking just human relationships with animals. Even so, it is a very important fact that the hidden majority of the world has been primarily vegetarian. If a diet of beans and grains has been the basis for sustenance for the majority of the world until recently, then meat is not essential.4 While knowledge of the variety of cultures that depended, by and large, on vegetarianism helps to dislodge our Western focus on meat, what is most threatening to our cultural discourse is self-determined vegetarianism in cultures where meat is plentiful.

  My concern in this book is with the self-conscious omission of meat because of ethical vegetarianism, that is, vegetarianism arising from an ethical decision that regards meat eating as an unjustifiable exploitation of the other animals. This motivation for vegetarianism is not the one popularized in our culture; instead attraction to the benefits to one’s health has brought about many new converts to vegetarianism. Their vegetarianism does not incorporate concern for animals; indeed, many see no problem with organic meat. I rejoice that an ethical decision resonates with improved personal health, that by becoming a vegetarian for ethical reasons one thereby reduces one’s risk of heart disease and cancer, among other diseases—a point examined in “The Distortion of the Vegetarian Body.” In the concluding chapter, I describe a pattern of adopting ethical vegetarianism that I define as the vegetarian quest. The vegetarian quest consists of: the revelation of the nothingness of meat, naming the relationships one sees with animals, and finally, rebuking a meat eating and patriarchal world.

  This book would not be the book it is if I had not become a vegetarian, participating in my own vegetarian quest. Holding a minority opinion in a dominant culture is very illuminating. Patterns in the responses of meat eaters to vegetarianism became quite instructive as I sought to define the intellectual resistance to discussing the eating of animals. Approaching a cultural consensus from the underside demonstrated how securely entrenched the attitudes about meat are. But this book would not be the book it is if I had not been involved in the domestic violence, antiwhite racism and antipoverty movements during those same years. To learn of and speak from the reality of women’s lives deepened my understanding that we need to discuss the texts of meat and not one monolithic text. Meat eating is a construct, a force, an economic reality, and also a very real personal issue.

  Yet being involved in the daily struggles against the oppressive forces I encountered made me minimize the importance of the task I set for myself in writing on this subject. How could I spend my time writing when so many people were illiterate? How could I discuss food choices when so many people needed any food whatsoever? How could I discuss violence against animals when women victimized by male violence needed shelter? In silencing myself I adhered to that foundational text of meat, the relative unimportance of vegetarianism. By my own silencing, I endorsed the dominant discourse that I was seeking to deconstruct.

  It is past time for us to consider the sexual politics of meat for they are not separate from other pressing issues of our time.

  FOREWORD BY NELLIE MCKAY: FEMINISTS DON’T HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR

  * * *

  So these two guys are crossing the desert, and after a couple of days—they’re tired and hungry—Fred says to Harry “You know, I really wish I had a woman” and Harry says “Don’t worry, there’s a camel train passing by tonight, we’ll take care of it”—so later on they’re asleep and awakened by the tinkling of bells off in the distance—“Wake up Fred!” yells Harry, pulling on his pants and running toward the sound—“They’re coming!” Fred stretches and yawns then asks “What’s the hurry?” Harry looks back and says “You don’t want to get an ugly camel, do you?”

  Not only has Susan Boyle been kissed, she’s a professional prostitute.

  What did the five hundred pound canary say? Here, kitty kitty.

  How many animal rights activists does it take to screw in a light-bulb? Shut up and get a life.

  * * *

  I came of age in the animal rights movement of the 1980s and 90s, when meat replacements and soy milk became common health store fare and 4,000 people marched down Fifth Avenue to protest the fur industry. I was four years old when my mother and I finally found our own apartment in Manhattan on 114th Street. From our window we could see the beauty and ugliness of poverty—poor old women daily feeding the alley cats and pigeons, young men at night siccing pitbulls on the cats. By fourth grade I was handing out pamphlets on subjects covering everything from cosmetics testing on animals to the production of foie gras. I showed pictures from PETA News to school friends, and formed an elementary school animal rights group (one our teacher opposed—at the end of the year she kept our $6.25 in dues money).

  These early attempts at outreach were seen as an attack on the pleasure and tradition of meat eating. The more empowered people are—in this case, by being part of a near unanimous country of meat eaters—the more emboldened they feel to silence a perceived attacker. Even in leftist New York, animal rights is the last progressive frontier—back then, everybody wore Dukakis buttons and campaigned against apartheid, but a vegetarian future was still a joke.

  In 1982 my pregnant mother had seen The Animals Film in England, but hadn’t yet made the connection between the horrors onscreen and a flesh diet. In New York she bought a copy of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation from the Salvation Army and put off reading it because she had a feeling it would require inconvenient changes in her life. Singer’s book was a revelation—just after finishing it she went to meet my father at a coffee shop, and while trying to communicate her epiphany, realized that almost everything on the menu contained the products of suffering. His first reaction was that without meat, some poor people could be left with nothing to eat. Her first misgivings were around tuna—though it was cheap, delicious, and supposedly nutritious, cans were beginning to be marked “dolphin safe” and she couldn’t help thinking about the tuna themselves.

  On my fourth birthday she took me to our first march and rally protesting New York University’s primate labs. I had an immediate visceral reaction to the photographs of caged animals with bolts through their skulls, images of institutionalized torture and cruelty. This echoed in my response to factory farms & fur farms; I came to distrust the word “farm” as much as the glossy corporate brochures sent out in response to protest letters. Soon after my parents gave up meat I stopped guiltily eating school lunch burgers and joined them.

  What I grasped as a four-year-old has stuck with me ever since. Animal exploitation conditions us to accept brutality as a normal, rational, everyday occurrence. It happens in every area of society, bridging and dividing people of different sexes and colors and classes. With this book and others, my mother introduced me to feminism, and made the link between oppressions. The “harmlessness” of sexism supports a culture of commodified living bein
gs, beings not good enough as they are but dressed/displayed/dismembered to suit the whims of the ruling class.

  In the years since I’ve often looked through The Sexual Politics Of Meat and been struck by how relevant it still is and how it addresses a malaise so ingrained as to be invisible. I handed my mother’s copy to the editor-in-chief at Random House, who was doing a story on me for The New York Times Magazine. His response was to flip through it bemusedly, quote a sentence without proper context in his article (neglecting to mention the name of the book), meanwhile making much more of trivial items in my apartment.

  Two years later, cast in a Broadway play, I found myself involved in a production sodden with exaggerated misogyny (in the playing) and animal suffering (in the costumes). Some of the cast, including myself, raised objections over the use of fur, leather and feathers and the anti-woman characterizations. The director, with the support of the writer and stars, expressed outrage at these “divisive” criticisms and told us we were “injecting politics into this play”—this being a play by Bertolt Brecht. In the end I got rid of what speciesism I could—but in silent compromise, the misogyny stayed. It was the common dilemma of being forced to choose between causes, because both could not prevail.

  This resistance to animal rights and feminism—in supposedly “liberal” spheres, among intellectuals and artists—dismays me. I’ve worked on film sets and in studios where there was no recycling whatsoever, nevermind vegan alternatives. Environmentalists and advocates for the poor, who surely know something about the devastation meat production wreaks—from global warming to disabled workers—have jokingly dangled pieces of meat in my face. Tenants advocates have dismissed outspoken vegetarianism as “elitist”, lacking the humility of Gandhi—yet Gandhi was a vegetarian decades ahead of his time. Though animal rights activists are overwhelmingly female, men are more likely to be the face of the movement to the outside world, and to dominate decision making within.