After being butchered, fragmented body parts are often renamed to obscure the fact that these were once animals. After death, cows become roast beef, steak, hamburger; pigs become pork, bacon, sausage. Since objects are possessions they cannot have possessions; thus, we say “leg of lamb” not a “lamb’s leg,” “chicken wings” not a “chicken’s wings.” We opt for less disquieting referent points not only by changing names from animals to meat, but also by cooking, seasoning, and covering the animals with sauces, disguising their original nature.
Only then can consumption occur: actual consumption of the animal, now dead, and metaphorical consumption of the term “meat,” so that it refers to food products alone rather than to the dead animal. In a patriarchal culture, meat is without its referent point. This is the way we want it, as William Hazlitt honestly admitted in 1826: “Animals that are made use of as food, should either be so small as to be imperceptible, or else we should . . . not leave the form standing to reproach us with our gluttony and cruelty. I hate to see a rabbit trussed, or a hare brought to the table in the form which it occupied while living.”21 The dead animal is the point beyond the culturally presumed referent of meat.
Consuming meat metaphorically
Without its referent point of the slaughtered, bleeding, butchered animal, meat becomes a free-floating image. Meat is seen as a vehicle of meaning and not as inherently meaningful; the referent “animal” has been consumed. “Meat” becomes a term to express women’s oppression, used equally by patriarchy and feminists, who say that women are “pieces of meat” Because of the absence of the actual referent, meat as metaphor is easily adaptable. While phrases such as “Where’s the Beef?” seem diametrically opposed to the use of “meat” to convey oppression, “Where’s the Beef?” confirms the fluidity of the absent referent while reinforcing the extremely specific, assaultive ways in which “meat” is used to refer to women. Part of making “beef” into “meat” is rendering it nonmale. When meat carries resonances of power, the power it evokes is male. Male genitalia and male sexuality are at times inferred when “meat” is discussed (curious locutions since uncastrated adult males are rarely eaten). “Meat” is made nonmale through violent dismemberment. As an image whose original meaning has been consumed and negated, “meat’s” meaning is structured by its environment.
Meat has long been used in Western culture as a metaphor for women’s oppression. The model for consuming a woman after raping her, as noted in the preface (page xxxvi), is the story of Zeus and Metis: “Zeus lusted after Metis the Titaness, who turned into many shapes to escape him until she was caught at last and got with child.” When warned by a sibyl that if Metis conceived a second time Zeus would be deposed by the resulting offspring, Zeus swallowed Metis, who, he claimed, continued to give him counsel from inside his belly. Consumption appears to be the final stage of male sexual desire. Zeus verbally seduces Metis in order to devour her: “Having coaxed Metis to a couch with honeyed words, Zeus suddenly opened his mouth and swallowed her, and that was the end of Metis.”22 An essential component of androcentric culture has been built upon these activities of Zeus: viewing the sexually desired object as consumable. But, we do not hear anything about dismemberment in the myth of Zeus’s consumption of Metis. How exactly did Zeus fit her pregnant body, arms, shoulders, chest, womb, thighs, legs, and feet into his mouth in one gulp? The myth does not acknowledge how the absent referent becomes absent.
Eliding fragmentation
Paralleling the elided relationship between metaphor and referent is the unacknowledged role of fragmentation in eating flesh. Our minds move from objectified being to consumable food. The action of fragmentation, the killing, and the dividing is elided. Indeed, patriarchal culture surrounds actual butchering with silence. Geographically, slaughterhouses are cloistered. We do not see or hear what transpires there.23 Consequently, consumption appears to follow immediately upon objectification, for consumption itself has been objectified. Discussing the alliance of women and workers during a lively 1907 challenge to vivisection, Coral Lansbury offers this reminder, “It has been said that a visit to an abattoir would make a vegetarian of the most convinced carnivore among us”24 In “How to Build a Slaughterhouse,” Richard Selzer observes that the knowledge that the slaughterhouse offers is knowledge we do not want to know: “Before it is done this field trip to a slaughterhouse will have become for me a descent into Hades, a vision of life that perhaps it would have been better never to know.”25 We don’t want to know about fragmentation because that is the process through which the live referent disappears.
Fragment #1: Implemental violence
Abandon self, all ye who enter here. Become component part, geared, meshed, timed, controlled.
Hell . . . Hogs dangling, dancing along the convey, 300, 350 an hour; Mary running running along the rickety platform to keep up, stamping, stamping the hides. To the shuddering drum of the skull crush machine, in the spectral vapor clouds, everyone the same motion all the hours through: Kryckszi lifting his cleaver, the one powerful stroke; long continuous arm swirl of the rippers, gut pullers. . . .
Geared, meshed: the kill room: knockers, shacklers, pritcher- uppers, stickers, headers, rippers, leg breakers, breast and aitch sawyers, caul pullers, fell cutters, rumpers, splitters, vat dippers, skinners, gutters, pluckers.
—All through the jumble of buildings . . . of death, dismemberment and vanishing entire for harmless creatures meek and mild, frisky, wild—Hell.
—Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio26
The institution of butchering is unique to human beings. All carnivorous animals kill and consume their prey themselves. They see and hear their victims before they eat them. There is no absent referent, only a dead one. Plutarch taunts his readers with this fact in his “Essay on Flesh Eating”: If you believe yourselves to be meat eaters, “then, to begin with, kill yourself what you wish to eat—but do it yourself with your own natural weapons, without the use of butcher’s knife, or axe, or club.” Plutarch points out that people do not have bodies equipped for eating flesh from a carcass, “no curved beak, no sharp talons and claws, no pointed teeth.”27 We have no bodily agency for killing and dismembering the animals we eat; we require implements.
The essence of butchering is to fragment the animal into pieces small enough for consumption. Implements are the simulated teeth that rip and claws that tear. Implements at the same time remove the referent; they bring about “the vanishing entire for harmless creatures.”
Hannah Arendt claims that violence always needs implements.28 Without implemental violence human beings could not eat meat. Violence is central to the act of slaughtering. Sharp knives are essential for rapidly rendering the anesthetized living animal into edible dead flesh. Knives are not so much distancing mechanisms in this case as enabling mechanisms. For farm slaughter some of the implements required include: hog scraper, iron hog and calf gambrel, stunning instrument, large cleaver, small cleaver, skinning knives, boning knives, hog hook, meat saw, steak knife, pickle pump, sticking knife, and meat grinder. Large slaughterhouses use over thirty-five different types of knives. Selzer notes that the men at a slaughterhouse “are synchronous as dancers and for the most part as silent. It is their knives that converse, gossip, press each other along.”29 Implements used against animals are one of the first things destroyed after the overthrow of people in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Fragment #2: The slaughterhouse
[The slaughterhouse] carries out its business in secret and decides what you will see, hides from you what it chooses.
—Richard Selzer30
Generally, if we enter a slaughterhouse we do so through the writings of someone else who entered for us. Early in the century, Upton Sinclair entered the slaughterhouse for his readers. He seized the operations of the slaughterhouse as a metaphor for the fate of the worker in capitalism. Jurgis, the worker whose rising consciousness evolves in The Jungle, visits a slaughterhouse in the opening pages. A guide ushers him t
hrough the place and he experiences what “was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.”31 Hogs with their legs chained to a line that moves them forward hang upside down, squealing, grunting, wailing. The line moves them forward, their throats are slit, and then they vanish “with a splash into a huge vat of boiling water.” Despite the businesslike aspect of the place, one “could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests—and so perfectly within their rights!”
Then came the dismemberment: the scraping of the skin, beheading, cutting of the breastbone, removal of the entrails. Jurgis marvels at the speed, the automation, the machinelike way in which each man dispatched his job, and he congratulates himself that he is not a hog. The next three hundred pages trace the rising of his consciousness so that he realizes that a hog is exactly what he is—“one of the packer’s hogs. What they wanted from a hog was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what they wanted from the working man, and also that was what they wanted from the public. What the hog thought of it and what he suffered, were not considered; and no more was it with labor and no more with the purchaser of meat.”32
In response to Sinclair’s novel people could not help thinking of the hogs. The referent—those few initial pages describing butchering in a book of more than three hundred pages—overpowered the metaphor. Horrified by what they learned about meat production, people clamored for new laws, and for a short time, became, as humorist Finley Peter Dunne’s “Mr. Dooley” described it, “viggytaryans.”33 As Upton Sinclair bemoaned, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit it in the stomach.”34 Butchering failed as a metaphor for the fate of the worker in The Jungle because the novel carried too much information on how the animal was violently killed. To make the absent referent present—that is, describing exactly how an animal dies, kicking, screaming, and is fragmented—disables consumption and disables the power of metaphor.
Fragment #3: The disassembly line as model
Those who are against Fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf.
—Bertolt Brecht, “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties”35
Using the slaughterhouse as trope for treatment of the worker in a modern capitalist society did not end with Upton Sinclair. Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards employs butchering imagery throughout the play to depict the inhumanity of large-scale capitalists like the “meat king” Pierpont Mauler. This capitalist does to his employees what he does to the steers; he is a “butcher of men.” With the activities of the slaughterhouse as the backdrop, phrases such as “cut-throat prices” and “it’s no skin off my back” act as resonant puns invoking the fate of animals to bemoan the fate of the worker.36 Appropriately, the choice of the trope of the slaughterhouse for the dehumanization of the worker by capitalism rings with historical verity.
The division of labor on the assembly lines owes its inception to Henry Ford’s visit to the disassembly line of the Chicago slaughterhouses. Ford credited the idea of the assembly line to the fragmented activities of animal slaughtering: “The idea came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef.”37 One book on meat production (financed by a meat-packing company) describes the process: “The slaughtered animals, suspended head downward from a moving chain, or conveyor, pass from workman to workman, each of whom performs some particular step in the process.” The authors proudly add: “So efficient has this procedure proved to be that it has been adopted by many other industries, as for example in the assembling of automobiles.”38 Although Ford reversed the outcome of the process of slaughtering in that a product is created rather than fragmented on the assembly line, he contributed at the same time to the larger fragmentation of the individual’s work and productivity. The dismemberment of the human body is not so much a construct of modern capitalism as modern capitalism is a construct built on dismemberment and fragmentation.39
One of the basic things that must happen on the disassembly line of a slaughterhouse is that the animal must be treated as an inert object, not as a living, breathing, being. Similarly the worker on the assembly line becomes treated as an inert, unthinking object, whose creative, bodily, emotional needs are ignored. For those people who work in the disassembly line of slaughterhouses, they, more than anyone, must accept on a grand scale the double annihilation of self: they are not only going to have to deny themselves, but they are going to have to accept the cultural absent referencing of animals as well. They must view the living animal as the meat that everyone outside the slaughterhouse accepts it as, while the animal is still alive. Thus they must be alienated from their own bodies and animals’ bodies as well.40 Which may account for the fact that the “turnover rate among slaughterhouse workers is the highest of any occupation in the country.”41
The introduction of the assembly line in the auto industry had a quick and unsettling effect on the workers. Standardization of work and separation from the final product became fundamental to the laborers’ experience.42 The result was to increase worker’s alienation from the product they produced. Automation severed workers from a sense of accomplishment through the fragmentation of their jobs. In Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Harry Braverman explains the initial results of the introduction of the assembly line, “Craftsmanship gave way to a repeated detail operation, and wage rates were standardized at uniform levels.” Working men left Ford in large numbers after the introduction of the assembly line. Braverman observes: “In this initial reaction to the assembly line we see the natural revulsion of the worker against the new kind of work.”43 Ford dismembered the meaning of work, introducing productivity without the sense of being productive. Fragmentation of the human body in late capitalism allows the dismembered part to represent the whole. Because the slaughterhouse model is not evident to assembly line workers, they do not realize that as whole beings they too have experienced the impact of the structure of the absent referent in a patriarchal culture.
Fragment #4: The rape of animals
“Chickens fly in on the table with knife and fork in their thighs,” begging to be eaten.
—Nineteenth-century Swedish ballad writer on the plenitude of meat in the United States44
“He would tie me up and force me to have intercourse with our family dog . . . He would get on top of me, holding the dog, and he would like hump the dog, while the dog had its penis inside me”45 In this description of rape, the dog as well as the woman is being raped. Most rapes do not include animals, yet the phrases used by rape victims when describing their feelings suggest that animals’ fate in meat eating is the immediate touchstone for their own experience. When women say that they feel like a piece of meat after being raped, are they saying there is a connection between being entered against one’s will and being eaten? One woman reported: “He really made me feel like a piece of meat, like a receptacle. My husband had told me that all a girl was a servant who could not think, a receptacle, a piece of meat.”
In Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth conveys how meat becomes a receptacle for male sexuality when Portnoy masturbates in it: “ ‘Come, Big Boy, Come’ screamed the maddened piece of liver that, in my own insanity, I bought one afternoon at a butcher shop and, believe it or not, violated behind a billboard.”46 Unless the receptacle is Portnoy’s piece of meat, a sexual object is not literally consumed. Why then this doubleness? What connects being a receptacle and being a piece of meat, being entered and being eaten? After all, being raped/violated/entered does not approximate being eaten. So why then does it feel that way? Or rather, why is it so easily described as feeling that way?47 Because, if you are a piece of meat, you are subject to a knife, to implemental violence.
Rape, too, is implemen
tal violence in which the penis is the implement of violation. You are held down by a male body as the fork holds a piece of meat so that the knife may cut into it. In addition, just as the slaughterhouse treats animals and its workers as inert, unthinking, unfeeling objects, so too in rape are women treated as inert objects, with no attention paid to their feelings or needs. Consequently they feel like pieces of meat. Correspondingly, female animals are forcibly impregnated, a reproductive slavery that is required to insure plentiful supplies of meat and cow’s milk.48 To feel like a piece of meat is to be treated like an inert object when one is (or was) in fact a living, feeling being.
The meat metaphors rape victims choose to describe their experience suggest that rape is parallel and related to consumption, consumption both of images of women and of literal, animal flesh. Rape victims’ repeated use of the word “hamburger” to describe the result of penetration, violation, being prepared for market, implies how unpleasurable being a piece of meat is. The other animals have been penetrated, violated, prepared for market against their will. Yet, overlapping cultural metaphors structure these experiences as though they were willed by women and animals.
To justify meat eating, we refer to animals’ wanting to die, desiring to become meat. In Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, meat is forbidden unless it comes from animals who died “a natural death.” Resultingly, “it was found that animals were continually dying natural deaths under more or less suspicious circumstances. . . . It was astonishing how some of these unfortunate animals would scent out a butcher’s knife if there was one within a mile of them, and run right up against it if the butcher did not get it out of their way in time.”49 One of the mythologies of a rapist culture is that women not only ask for rape, they also enjoy it; that they are continually seeking out the butcher’s knife. Similarly, advertisements and popular culture tell us that animals like Charlie the Tuna and Al Capp’s Shmoo wish to be eaten. The implication is that women and animals willingly participate in the process that renders them absent.
The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations) Page 9