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

by Carol J Adams

  Racism is perpetuated each time meat is thought to be the best protein source. The emphasis on the nutritional strengths of animal protein distorts the dietary history of most cultures in which complete protein dishes were made of vegetables and grains. Information about these dishes is overwhelmed by an ongoing cultural and political commitment to meat eating.

  Meat is king

  During wartime, government rationing policies reserve the right to meat for the epitome of the masculine man: the soldier. With meat rationing in effect for civilians during World War II, the per capita consumption of meat in the Army and Navy was about two-and-a-half times that of the average civilian. Russell Baker observed that World War II began a “beef madness . . . when richly fatted beef was force-fed into every putative American warrior.”22 In contrast to the recipe books for civilians that praised complex carbohydrates, cookbooks for soldiers contained variation upon variation of meat dishes. One survey conducted of four military training camps reported that the soldier consumed daily 131 grams of protein, 201 grams of fat, and 484 grams of carbohydrates.23 Hidden costs of warring masculinity are to be found in the provision of male-defined foods to the warriors.

  Women are the food preparers; meat has to be cooked to be palatable for people. Thus, in a patriarchal culture, just as our culture accedes to the “needs” of its soldiers, women accede to the dietary demands of their husbands, especially when it comes to meat. The feminist surveyors of women’s budgets in the early twentieth century observed:

  It is quite likely that someone who had strength, wisdom, and vitality, who did not live that life in those tiny, crowded rooms, in that lack of light and air, who was not bowed down with worry, but was herself economically independent of the man who earned the money, could lay out his few shillings with a better eye to a scientific food value. It is quite as likely, however, that the man who earned the money would entirely refuse the scientific food, and demand his old tasty kippers and meat.24

  A discussion of nutrition during wartime contained this aside: it was one thing, they acknowledged, to demonstrate that there were many viable alternatives to meat, “but it is another to convince a man who enjoys his beefsteak.”25 The male prerogative to eat meat is an external, observable activity implicitly reflecting a recurring fact: meat is a symbol of male dominance.

  It has traditionally been felt that the working man needs meat for strength. A superstition operates in this belief: in eating the muscle of strong animals, we will become strong. According to the mythology of patriarchal culture, meat promotes strength; the attributes of masculinity are achieved through eating these masculine foods. Visions of meat-eating football players, wrestlers, and boxers lumber in our brains in this equation. Though vegan weight lifters and athletes in other fields have demonstrated the equation to be fallacious, the myth remains: men are strong, men need to be strong, thus men need meat. The literal evocation of male power is found in the concept of meat.

  Irving Fisher took the notion of “strength” from the definition of meat eating as long ago as 1906. Fisher suggested that strength be measured by its lasting power rather than by its association with quick results, and compared meat-eating athletes with vegetarian athletes and sedentary vegetarians. Endurance was measured by having the participants perform in three areas: holding their arms horizontally for as long as possible, doing deep knee bends, and performing leg raises while lying down. He concluded that the vegetarians, whether athletes or not, had greater endurance than meat eaters. “Even the maximum record of the flesheaters was barely more than half the average for the flesh-abstainers.”26

  Meat is king: this noun describing meat is a noun denoting male power. Vegetables, a generic term meat eaters use for all foods that are not meat, have become as associated with women as meat is with men, recalling on a subconscious level the days of Woman the Gatherer. Since women have been made subsidiary in a male-dominated, meat-eating world, so has our food. The foods associated with second-class citizens are considered to be second-class protein. Just as it is thought a woman cannot make it on her own, so we think that vegetables cannot make a meal on their own, despite the fact that meat is only secondhand vegetables and vegetables provide, on the average, more than twice the vitamins and minerals of meat. Meat is upheld as a powerful, irreplaceable item of food. The message is clear: the vassal vegetable should content itself with its assigned place and not attempt to dethrone king meat. After all, how can one enthrone women’s foods when women cannot be kings?

  The male language of meat eating

  Men who decide to eschew meat eating are deemed effeminate; failure of men to eat meat announces that they are not masculine. Nutritionist Jean Mayer suggested that “the more men sit at their desks all day, the more they want to be reassured about their maleness in eating those large slabs of bleeding meat which are the last symbol of machismo.”27 The late Marty Feldman observed, “It has to do with the function of the male within our society. Football players drink beer because it’s a man’s drink, and eat steak because it’s a man’s meal. The emphasis is on ‘man-sized portions,’ ‘hero’ sandwiches; the whole terminology of meat-eating reflects this masculine bias.”28 Meat-and-potatoes men are our stereotypical strong and hearty, rough and ready, able males. Hearty beef stews are named “Manhandlers” Head football coach and celebrity Mike Ditka operated a restaurant that featured “he-man food” such as steaks and chops.

  One’s maleness is reassured by the food one eats. During the 1973 meat boycott, men were reported to observe the boycott when dining out with their wives or eating at home, but when they dined without their wives, they ate London Broil and other meats.29 When in 1955 Carolyn Steedman’s mother “made a salad of grated vegetables for Christmas dinner,” her husband walked out.30

  Gender inequality/species inequality

  The men . . . were better hunters than the women, but only because the women had found they could live quite well on foods other than meat.

  —Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar31

  What is it about meat that makes it a symbol and celebration of male dominance? In many ways, gender inequality is built into the species inequality that meat eating proclaims, because for most cultures obtaining meat was performed by men. Meat was a valuable economic commodity; those who controlled this commodity achieved power. If men were the hunters, then the control of this economic resource was in their hands. Women’s status is inversely related to the importance of meat in non-technological societies:

  The equation is simple: the more important meat is in their life, the greater relative dominance will the men command. . . . When meat becomes an important element within a more closely organized economic system so that there exist rules for its distribution, then men already begin to swing the levers of power. . . . Women’s social standing is roughly equal to men’s only when society itself is not formalized around roles for distributing meat.32

  Peggy Sanday surveyed information on over a hundred nontechnological cultures and found a correlation between plant-based economies and women’s power and animal-based economies and male power. “In societies dependent on animals, women are rarely depicted as the ultimate source of creative power.” In addition, “When large animals are hunted, fathers are more distant, that is, they are not in frequent or regular proximity to infants.”33

  Characteristics of economies dependent mainly on the processing of animals for food include:

  •sexual segregation in work activities, with women doing more work than men, but work that is less valued

  •women responsible for child care

  •the worship of male gods

  •patrilineality

  On the other hand, plant-based economies are more likely to be egalitarian. This is because women are and have been the gatherers of vegetable foods, and these are invaluable resources for a culture that is plant-based. In these cultures, men as well as women were dependent on women’s activities. From this, women achieved autonomy and a degree o
f self-sufficiency. Yet, where women gather vegetable food and the diet is vegetarian, women do not discriminate as a consequence of distributing the staple. By providing a large proportion of the protein food of a society, women gain an essential economic and social role without abusing it.

  Sanday summarizes one myth that links male power to control of meat:

  The Mundurucu believe that there was a time when women ruled and the sex roles were reversed, with the exception that women could not hunt. During that time women were the sexual aggressors and men were sexually submissive and did women’s work. Women controlled the “sacred trumpets” (the symbols of power) and the men’s houses. The trumpets contained the spirits of the ancestors who demanded ritual offerings of meat. Since women did not hunt and could not make these offerings, men were able to take the trumpets from them, thereby establishing male dominance.34

  We might observe that the male role of hunter and distributer of meat has been transposed to the male role of eater of meat and conclude that this accounts for meat’s role as symbol of male dominance. But there is much more than this to meat’s role as symbol.

  “Vegetable”: Symbol of feminine passivity?

  Both the words “men” and “meat” have undergone lexicographical narrowing. Originally generic terms, they are now closely associated with their specific referents. Meat no longer means all foods; the word man, we realize, no longer includes women. Meat represents the essence or principal part of something, according to the American Heritage Dictionary. Thus we have the “meat of the matter,” “a meaty question.” To “beef up” something is to improve it. Vegetable, on the other hand, represents the least desirable characteristics: suggesting or like a vegetable, as in passivity or dullness of existence, monotonous, inactive. Meat is something one enjoys or excels in, vegetable becomes representative of someone who does not enjoy anything: a person who leads a monotonous, passive, or merely physical existence.

  A complete reversal has occurred in the definition of the word vegetable. Whereas its original sense was to be lively, active, it is now viewed as dull, monotonous, passive. To vegetate is to lead a passive existence; just as to be feminine is to lead a passive existence. Once vegetables are viewed as women’s food, then by association they become viewed as “feminine,” passive.

  Men’s need to disassociate themselves from women’s food (as in the myth in which the last Bushman flees in the direction opposite from women and their vegetable food) has been institutionalized in sexist attitudes toward vegetables and the use of the word vegetable to express criticism or disdain. Colloquially it is a synonym for a person severely brain-damaged or in a coma. In addition, vegetables are thought to have a tranquilizing, dulling, numbing effect on people who consume them, and so we can not possibly get strength from them. According to this perverse incarnation of Brillat-Savarin’s theory that you are what you eat, to eat a vegetable is to become a vegetable, and by extension, to become womanlike.

  Examples from the 1988 Presidential Campaign in which each candidate was belittled through equation with being a vegetable illustrates this patriarchal disdain for vegetables. Michael Dukakis was called “the Vegetable Plate Candidate.”35 Northern Sun Merchandising offered T-shirts that asked: “George Bush: Vegetable or Noxious Weed?” One could opt for a shirt that featured a bottle of ketchup and a picture of Ronald Reagan with this slogan: “Nutrition Quiz: Which one is the vegetable?”36 (The 1984 Presidential Campaign concern over “Where’s the Beef?” is considered in the following chapter.)

  The word vegetable acts as a synonym for women’s passivity because women are supposedly like plants. Hegel makes this clear: “The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. Men correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants because their development is more placid.”37 From this viewpoint, both women and plants are seen as less developed and less evolved than men and animals. Consequently, women may eat plants, since each is placid; but active men need animal meat.

  Meat is a symbol of patriarchy

  In her essay, “Deciphering a Meal,” the noted anthropologist Mary Douglas suggests that the order in which we serve foods, and the foods we insist on being present at a meal, reflect a taxonomy of classification that mirrors and reinforces our larger culture. A meal is an amalgam of food dishes, each a constituent part of the whole, each with an assigned value. In addition, each dish is introduced in precise order. A meal does not begin with a dessert, nor end with soup. All is seen as leading up to and then coming down from the entrée that is meat. The pattern is evidence of stability. As Douglas explains, “The ordered system which is a meal represents all the ordered systems associated with it. Hence the strong arousal power of a threat to weaken or confuse that category.”38 To remove meat is to threaten the structure of the larger patriarchal culture.

  Marabel Morgan, one expert on how women should accede to every male desire, reported in her Total Woman Cookbook that one must be careful about introducing foods that are seen as a threat: “I discovered that Charlie seemed threatened by certain foods. He was suspicious of my casseroles, thinking I had sneaked in some wheat germ or ‘good-for-you’ vegetables that he wouldn’t like.”39

  Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America provides a fictional illustration of the intimidating aspect to a man of a woman’s refusal of meat. Miss Scott, a vegetarian, is invited to a NATO general’s house for Thanksgiving. Her refusal of turkey angers the general. Not able to take this rejection seriously, as male dominance requires a continual recollection of itself on everyone’s plate, the general loads her plate up with turkey and then ladles gravy over the potatoes as well as the meat, “thus contaminating her vegetable foods.” McCarthy’s description of his actions with the food mirrors the warlike customs associated with military battles. “He had seized the gravy boat like a weapon in hand-to-hand combat. No wonder they had made him a brigadier general—at least that mystery was solved.” The general continues to behave in a bellicose fashion and after dinner proposes a toast in honor of an eighteen-year-old who has enlisted to fight in Vietnam. During the ensuing argument about war the general defends the bombing of Vietnam with the rhetorical question: “What’s so sacred about a civilian?” This upsets the hero, necessitating that the general’s wife apologize for her husband’s behavior: “Between you and me,” she confides to him, “it kind of got under his skin to see that girl refusing to touch her food. I saw that right away.”40

  Male belligerence in this area is not limited to fictional military men. Men who batter women have often used the absence of meat as a pretext for violence against women. Women’s failure to serve meat is not the cause of the violence against them. Controlling men use it, like anything else, as an excuse for their violence. Yet because “real” men eat meat, batterers have a cultural icon to draw upon as they deflect attention from their need to control. As one woman battered by her husband reported, “It would start off with him being angry over trivial little things, a trivial little thing like cheese instead of meat on a sandwich.”41 Another woman stated, “A month ago he threw scalding water over me, leaving a scar on my right arm, all because I gave him a pie with potatoes and vegetables for his dinner, instead of fresh meat.”42

  Men who become vegetarians and vegans challenge an essential part of the masculine role. They are opting for women’s food. How dare they? Refusing meat means a man is effeminate, a “sissy,” a “fruit.” Indeed, in 1836, the response to the vegetarian regimen of that day, known as Grahamism, charged that “Emasculation is the first fruit of Grahamism.”43

  Men who choose not to eat meat repudiate one of their masculine privileges. The New York Times explored this idea in an editorial on the masculine nature of meat eating. Instead of “the John Wayne type,” epitome of the masculine meat eater, the new male hero is “Vulnerable” like Alan Alda, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Phil Donahue. They might eat dead fishes and dead chickens, but not red meat. Alda and Donahue, among other men, have not only repudiated t
he macho role, but also macho food. According to the Times, “Believe me. The end of macho marks the end of the meat-and-potatoes man.”44 We won’t miss either.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE RAPE OF ANIMALS, THE BUTCHERING OF WOMEN

  The first metaphor was animal.

  —John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”

  He handled my breast as if he were making a meatball.

  —Mary Gordon, Final Payments

  One could not stand and watch [the slaughtering] very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe.

  —Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

  A healthy sexual being poses near her drink: she wears bikini panties only and luxuriates on a large chair with her head rested seductively on an elegant lace doily. Her inviting drink with a twist of lemon awaits on the table. Her eyes are closed; her facial expression beams pleasure, relaxation, enticement. She is touching her crotch in an attentive, masturbatory action. Anatomy of seduction: sex object, drink, inviting room, sexual activity. The formula is complete. But a woman does not beckon. A pig does. “Ursula Hamdress” appeared in Playboar, a magazine that calls itself “the pig farmer’s Playboy.”1 How does one explain the substitution of a nonhuman animal for a woman in this pornographic representation? Is she inviting someone to rape her or to eat her? (See Figure 1.)

  In 1987, I described Ursula Hamdress on a panel titled “Sexual Violence: Representation and Reality” at Princeton’s Graduate Women’s Studies Conference, “Feminism and Its Translations.” In the same month, less than sixty miles away, three women were found chained in the basement of Gary Heidnik’s house in Philadelphia. In the kitchen body parts of a woman were discovered in the oven, in a stewpot on the stove, and in the refrigerator. Her arms and legs had been fed to the other women held captive there. One of the survivors reported that during the time that she was chained, Heidnick repeatedly raped her.2