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

by Carol J Adams

  CHAPTER 3

  MASKED VIOLENCE, MUTED VOICES

  Women have had the power of naming stolen from us. . . . Inadequate words have been taken as adequate.

  —Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father

  In the previous chapter, we were concerned with the consumption of the referent so that through metaphor it lost all meaning except by its reference to something else. In this chapter our concern is with the objectification of consumption through language, so that meat’s true meaning is cast out. Behind every meat meal is an absence, the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. With the word “meat” the truth about this death is absent. Thus, in expressing their concern about eating animals, vegetarians cannot ignore the issue of language. In this they are not unlike feminists who find that issues of language imbricate women’s oppression.

  After using feminist insights to explore how language usage upholds meat eating, this chapter identifies the fusing through language of the oppressions of women and animals. It then considers the muting of vegetarian voices. Vegetarianism exposes meat eating as an effort at subordinating the natural to the human. But since meat eating carries legitimate meaning in the dominant culture that encourages the eating of animals, vegetarian meaning, like nature, is subordinated by meat eating.

  Language as mask

  We have no language that is free of the power dualisms of domination.

  —Beverly Harrison

  “Sexism and the Language of Christian Ethics”1

  So far feminism has accepted the dominant viewpoint regarding the oppression of animals rather than shed the illuminating light of its theory on this oppression. Not only is our language male-centered, it is human-centered as well. When we use the adjective “male,” such as in the preceding sentence, we all assume that it is referring solely to human males. Besides the human-oriented notions that accompany our use of words such as male and female, we use the word “animal” as though it did not refer to human beings, as though we too are not animals. All that is implied when the words “animal” and “beast” are used as insults maintains separation between human animals and nonhuman animals. We have structured our language to avoid the acknowledgment of our biological similarity.

  Language distances us further from animals by naming them as objects, as “its.” Should we call a horse, a cow, dog or cat, or any animal “it”? “It” functions for nonhuman animals as “he” supposedly functions for human beings, as a generic term whose meaning is deduced by context. Patriarchal language insists that the male pronoun is both generic, referring to all human beings, and specific, referring only to males. Similarly, “it” refers either to non-animate things or to animate beings whose gender identity is irrelevant or unknown. But just as the generic “he” erases female presence, the generic “it” erases the living, breathing nature of the animals and reifies their object status. The absence of a non-sexist pronoun allows us to objectify the animal world by considering all animals as “its.” I recommend using [sic] when an animal is called “it” just as feminist critics have done when “he” is used generically. Should we even refer to a butchered part of an animal’s body as “it”? Is meat an “it”? Isn’t the choice of “it” for meat the final capitulation to the dominant reality that renders real animals invisible and masks violence? (Due to the lack of a generic pronoun, I will use “she” in this book to refer to any animal, alive or dead, whose sex is unknown.)

  We also distance ourselves from animals through the use of metaphors or similes that distort the reality of other animals’ lives. Our representations of animals make them refer to human beings rather than to themselves: one is sly as a fox, hungry as a bear, pretty as a filly. When we talk about the victimization of humans we use animal metaphors derived from animal sacrifice and animal experimentation: someone is a scapegoat or a guinea pig. Violence undergirds some of our most commonly used metaphors that cannibalize the experiences of animals: beating a dead horse, a bird in the hand, I have a bone to pick with you. (See Figure 2: Liberate Your Language.)

  From the leather in our shoes, the soap we use to cleanse our face, the down in the comforter, the meat we eat, and the dairy products we rely on, our world as we now know it is structured around a dependence on the death of the other animals. For many this is neither disturbing nor surprising. The death of the other animals is an accepted part of life, either envisioned as being granted in Genesis 1:26 by a human-oriented God who instructs us that we may dominate the animals or conceptualized as a right because of our superior rationality. For those who hold to this dominant viewpoint in our culture, the surprise is not that animals are oppressed (though thisis not the term they would use to express human beings’ relationship to the other animals), the surprise is that anyone would object to this. Our culture generally accepts animals’ oppression and finds nothing ethically or politically disturbing about the exploitation of animals for the benefit of people. Hence our language is structured to convey this acceptance.

  Figure 2 Liberate Your Language

  We live in a culture that has institutionalized the oppression of animals on at least two levels: in formal structures such as slaughterhouses, meat markets, zoos, laboratories, and circuses, and through our language. That we refer to meat eating rather than to corpse eating is a central example of how our language transmits the dominant culture’s approval of this activity.

  Meat carries many meanings in our culture. However, no matter what else it does, meat eating signals the primary oppression of animals. Peter Singer observes that “for most humans, especially those in modern urban and suburban communities, the most direct form of contact with non-human animals is at meal time: we eat them. This simple fact is the key to our attitudes to other animals, and also the key to what each one of us can do about changing these attitudes.”2 Because animals have been made absent referents it is not often while eating meat that one thinks: “I am now interacting with an animal.” We do not see our meat eating as contact with animals because it has been renamed as contact with food.

  On an emotional level everyone has some discomfort with the eating of animals. This discomfort is seen when people do not want to be reminded of what they are eating while eating, nor to be informed of the slaughterhouse activities that make meat eating possible; it is also revealed by the personal taboo that each person has toward some form of meat: either because of its form, such as organ meats, or because of its source, such as pig or rabbit, insects or rodents. The intellectual framework of language that enshrouds meat eating protects these emotional responses from being examined. This is nothing new; language has always aided us in sidestepping sticky problems of conceptualization by obfuscating the situation.

  While self-interest arising from the enjoyment of meat eating is obviously one reason for its entrenchment, and inertia another, a process of language usage engulfs discussions about meat by constructing the discourse in such a way that these issues need never be addressed. Language distances us from the reality of meat eating, thus reinforcing the symbolic meaning of meat eating, a symbolic meaning that is intrinsically patriarchal and male-oriented. Meat becomes a symbol for what is not seen but is always there—patriarchal control of animals and of language.

  False naming

  Undoubtedly our own meanings are partially hidden from us and it is difficult to have access to them. We may use the English language our whole lives without ever noticing the distortions and omissions.

  —Dale Spender3

  Him:

  I can’t go to Italian restaurants with you anymore because I can’t order my favorite meal: veal Parmesan.

  Her:

  Would you order it if it were called pieces of butchered, anemic baby calves?

  Dale Spender refers to “the falseness of patriarchal terms.”4 Falseness pervades language about animals whom we eat. Recently, the British Meat Trades Journal—concerned about the association between meat and slaughtering—proposed replacing the words “butcher” and “slaughterh
ouse” with “meat plant” and “meat factory.”5 To this Emarel Freshel, an early twentieth-century vegetarian, would have retorted: “if the words which tell the truth about meat as food are unfit for our ears, the meat itself is not fit for our mouths.”6

  Through detachment, concealment, misrepresentation, and shifting the blame, the structure of the absent referent prevails: we see ourselves as eating pork chops, hamburger, sirloins, and so on, rather than 43 pigs, 3 lambs, 11 cows, 4 “veal” calves, 2,555 chickens and turkeys, and 861 fishes that the average American eats in a lifetime.7 By speaking of meat rather than slaughtered, butchered, bleeding pigs, lambs, cows, and calves, we participate in language that masks reality. As an objector to meat eating complained in 1825, “No man says, therefore, of such an ox at pasture, Lo! how he lasheth his beefsteaks with his tail,—or he hath a fly upon his brisket.”8 Many vegetarians protest the use of euphemisms such as speaking of white meat rather than of breasts and of dark meat rather than thighs. Dismembered bodies are called “whole,” creating the contradiction of purchasing a “whole bird” whose feathers, feet and head are missing. Can a dead bird really be a “fresh young chicken” as the plastic wrapping at the meat counters proclaims?

  To think comfortably about meat we are told in effect to “Forget the pig [or a cow, a chicken, etc.] is an animal.” Instead, call her and view her as “a machine in a factory.”9 She becomes a food-producing unit, a protein harvester, an object, product, computerized unit in a factory environment, egg-producing machine, converting machine, a biomachine, a crop. A recent example of erasure of animals can be found in the United States Department of Agriculture’s description of cows, pigs, and chickens as “grain-consuming animal units.” As Colman McCarthy observes, this makes meat eaters “animal consuming human units.”10

  Language can make animals absent from a discussion of meat because the acts of slaughtering and butchering have already rendered the animal as absent through death and dismemberment. Through language we apply to animals’ names the principles we have already enacted on their bodies. When an animal is called a “meat-bearing animal” we effect a misnomer, as though the meat is not the animal herself, as though the meat can be separated from the animal and the animal would still remain.

  The desire to separate the concept of meat from thoughts about animals can be seen in the usage patterns that determine when the word “meat” is appended to the names of animals, such as we find in words like dogmeat or horsemeat. In our culture we generally append the word “meat” to an animal’s name only when that form of meat is not consumed. As Paul Postal describes it, we form compounds with the word “meat” [such as horsemeat, dogmeat] “where the first element is the name of an animal type [such as horse, dog] only if American culture does not sanction the eating of that animal.”11 Thus we have wombat-meat but not sheepmeat, dogmeat but not chickenmeat, horsemeat but not cowmeat. Renaming is a constant: sheepmeat becomes mutton, chickenmeat drops the “meat” reference, and cowmeat undergoes numerous changes depending on the location from which the meat was derived (chuck, etc.) or the form (hamburger). If we retain the name of the animal to describe her as food, we drop the article “a” stripping the animal of any individuality: people eat turkey, not a turkey.

  Josiah Royce and Mary Daly argue that “it is impossible to consider any term apart from its relations to the whole.”12 Vegetarians who challenge the fragmenting of the whole animal into edible parts wish to reunite the segmented terms with the whole. Joseph Ritson, an eighteenth-century vegetarian planned “A new Dictionary” that would have included these definitions:

  Carrion. The flesh of animals, naturally dead, or, at least, not artificially murdered by man.

  Lobster. A shel-fish [sic], which is boiled alive, by people of nice feelings & great humanity.13

  Elsa Lanchester recalls how her mother, “Biddy” Lanchester—feminist, suffragette, socialist, pacifist, vegetarian—challenged the false naming of meat. When Elsa refers to the word “offal” she explains, “Biddy the vegetarian inspired the use of this word. That’s what meat was to her.”14 Vegetarians choose words that parallel the effect of feminist terms such as manglish and herstory, which Varda One calls “reality-violators and consciousness-raisers.”15 To remind people that they are consuming dead animals, vegetarians create a variety of reality-violators and consciousness-raisers. Rather than call meat “complete protein,” “iron-rich food,” “life-giving food,” “delectable,” or “strength-inducing food” they refer to meat as “partly cremated portions of dead animals,” or “slaughtered nonhumans,” or in Bernard Shaw’s words, “scorched corpses of animals.” Like Benjamin Franklin, they consider fishing “un-provok’d murder” or refer, like Harriet Shelley to “murdered chicken.”16 (Buttons, T-shirts, posters, and stickers are now available announcing “meat is murder.”17)

  Granted, vegetarian naming wrests meat eating from a context of acceptance; this does not invalidate its mission. One thing must be acknowledged about vegetarian naming as exemplified in the above examples: these are true words. The dissonance they produce is not due to their being false, but to their being too accurate. These words do not adhere to our common discourse which presumes the edibility of animals.

  Just as feminists proclaimed that “rape is violence, not sex,” vegetarians wish to name the violence of meat eating. Both groups challenge commonly used terms. Mary Daly calls the phrase “forcible rape” a reversal by redundancy because it implies that all rapes are not forcible.18 This example highlights the role of language in masking violence, in this case an adjective deflects attention from the violence inherent in the meaning of the noun. The adjective confers a certain benignity on the word “rape.” Similarly, the phrase “humane slaughter” confers a certain benignity on the term “slaughter.” Daly would call this the process of “simple inversion”: “the usage of terms and phrases to label . . . activities as the opposite of what they are.”19 The use of adjectives in the phrases “humane slaughter” and “forcible rape” promotes a conceptual mis-focusing that relativizes these acts of violence. Additionally, as we ponder how the end is achieved, “forcibly,” “humanely,” our attention is continuously framed so that the absent referents—women, animals—do not appear. Just as all rapes are forcible, all slaughter of animals for food is inhumane regardless of what it is called.

  To understand ethical vegetarianism, we must define meat eating. Meat eating fulfills Simone Weil’s definition of force “—it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.”20 Meat eating is to animals what white racism is to people of color, anti-Semitism is to Jewish people, homophobia is to gay men and lesbians, and woman hating is to women. All are oppressed by a culture that does not want to assimilate them fully on their grounds and with rights. Yet, an enormous void separates these forms of oppression of people from the form in which we oppress the other animals. We do not consume people. We do consume the other animals. Meat eating is the most oppressive and extensive institutionalized violence against animals. In addition, meat eating offers the grounds for subjugating animals: if we can kill, butcher, and consume them—in other words, completely annihilate them—we may, as well, experiment upon them, trap and hunt them, exploit them, and raise them in environments that imprison them, such as factory and fur-bearing animal farms. Consider the reaction to the words of the dominant culture as portrayed in a children’s book about a family of pigs.

  “Quick,” said William, “Stand in a circle everyone,” and he began to count round:

  Ham, bacon, pork chop,

  Out you must hop.

  Mrs. Pig held up her trotters in horror and turned away her eyes. “Goodness me, where do they pick up such words? I am sure they have never heard them in this house.” (See Figure 3.)21

  What distinguishes William and his siblings from being ham, bacon, or pork chop is an act of violence. This is what Mrs. Pig knows with horror and what we construct our language to avoid acknowledging.

  F
used oppressions

  Now they are led back to the slaughterhouse. I hear the soothing murmur of the herder making his sweet deceit. “Come along now, ladies. Be polite. No need to crowd. It’s all the same in the end.”

  —Richard Selzer imagining the ideal slaughterhouse22

  Language fuses women’s and animals’ inferior status in a patriarchal culture. As we learned in chapter 1, meat-eating cultures are named virile cultures. In chapter 2 we saw that when violence against women is talked about, the referent point is slaughtered animals. The pairing of “meat eater” with “virile male” and women with animals suggests another pairing as well: In talking about the fate of animals we are talking about a traditional female fate. We oppress animals by associating them with women’s lesser status.

  Figure 3 Mary Rayner, Garth Pig and the Ice Cream Lady (New York: Atheneum, 1977), p. 5.

  A discussion of which pronouns one should use in reference to animals—whether one should call animals “it,” “she,” or “he”—demonstrates how in talking about the fate of animals we invoke femaleness. André Joly observes that the use of the word “it” “signifies basically that the animal is excluded from the human sphere and that no personal relationship of any kind is established with the speaker.”23 The use of the word “it” obviates any need to identify the sex of an animal. Yet, there are times when one uses “he” or “she” for an animal regardless of whether the animal actually is male or female. What grammatical rules decide this? Joly explains it this way: “Now any animal, however small or big, and irrespective of its sex, may be considered as a major power (he) or a minor power (she).” “He” is used when “whatever its size, the animal is presented as an active power and a possible danger to the speaker.” “She” on the other hand signals a “minor power.” This explains why whales are called “shes” and we hear from the crow’s nest the call “There she blows!” As Joly points out, “sportsmen will often speak of a hare and a fish as she.” He continues: