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

by Carol J Adams

  him again. His milk is not for him.

  And when the milk slows too slow,

  she will join him on the line, pounds

  of ground. And how we will dine!

  And talk of our glossy dogs! Her body

  will break up on our forks, as mothers

  beg us for the grain we stuffed her with,

  and children beg us for the water

  scouring her blood from the factory walls.

  And when her wastes and gases and panic

  heat our air so hot our world stops

  breathing—then will we stop?

  Then will we grow kind,

  let the air cool and mothers breathe?

  AFTERWORD TO THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY/BLOOMSBURY REVELATIONS EDITION

  Over the past 25 years the sexual politics of meat as a function of the dominant culture has continued to structure inequality and violence. Readers from around the world have resisted the messages of images that reinforce the sexual politics of meat and called them to my attention. If we examine them, we can recognize their naked assumptions of power over non-dominant beings as well as an almost desperate attempt to reinforce a gender binary of men/women, male/female, masculine/feminine.

  Figure 6 The author taking a photograph of Snappy Salads’ claim “So Good, Even Guys Like Our Salads” as an example of the sexual politics of meat. Richardson, Texas, June 2014. Photograph copyright © by Benjamin Buchanan. Used by permission.

  Figure 7 The June 2009 Muscle and Fitness magazine cover proclaims the tired cliché that associates eating meat, manhood, and muscle strength.

  In 1990, I identified how meat eating bestows an idea of masculinity on the individual consumer, creating the expectation that men should eat meat. Twenty-five years later and we have Esquire magazine’s Eat Like a Man cookbook (published in 2011), with a well-cooked piece of steak on the cover. The Family Handyman entitled their article on building a grill, “Men. Meat. Fire! (And beer)” (May 2011). The January–February 2011 AARP Magazine offered “The Steaks Were High: A big ol’ rib eye bridges the gap between a father and son.”1 In 2015, a Facebook meme announced, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Unless he’s a vegetarian. Then you can get there through his vagina.”

  Figure 8 Richard Twine saw this advertisement reinforcing traditional gender roles and meat eating in a New York City subway car, November 2012. Photograph copyright © Richard Twine. Used by permission.

  Since The Sexual Politics of Meat first appeared in 1990, the regressive reassertions of the idea that men need to eat meat keep making their appearances. A. E. Hotchner in the May 2013 Vanity Fair contributes these hackneyed claims: “What does steak say to us and about us? Well, it’s manly. If food came with gender appellations, steak would definitely be at the top of the bloke column.”2

  He continues, “A steak feels, looks, and tastes like winning—a direct connection to our bipedal ancestors. The original reward of victors.”3 (Actually, our earliest bipedal ancestors were probably scavengers—eating insects and the remains of dead animals left by carnivores.) Hotchner’s ridiculous rewriting of anthropology is a reminder of the 1960s pop anthropologists who celebrated “man the hunter.” At first, reading Hotchner, I thought I was reading a joke, someone taking the ideas that mythologize meat eating and manliness and lampooning them to show how ridiculous they were especially with sentences like, “Steak has become the butch foodie communion, and tellingly not just for flinty-eyed, Armani-suited leaner-than-thou businessmen, but for metrosexuals who wish to beef up their cultural testosterone.”4 Why this need to keep reinforcing that these are men’s masculine ways?

  We even find this association of meat eating and “manly” acts in ads for other products appealing to men consumers. The poster for Lion Red beer (Figure 9) suggests the power of tofu to threaten masculinity. Are manly acts so unstable that they can be undone by cooking tofu (tofu being the synecdoche for all of veganism to destabilize normative masculinity)? Unlike library cards, do “man cards” have to be renewed daily?

  Figure 9 The math in “Putting Together a BBQ” reveals the anxious and unsettled nature of masculinity.

  As a sign of male dominance, meat eating must be anxiously reiterated. The aggressive rearticulation shows how anxious and unsettled identity is. Apparently you have to keep participating in the construction of maleness by eating animals, proving meat eating and masculinity as both unstable and yet normative.

  The New York Times provided a tongue-in-cheek yet serious review of a steakhouse in a strip club: the mid-town Penthouse Executive Club. Then-restaurant critic (but soon to become the Times’ first openly gay op-ed columnist) Frank Bruni wrote, “It may be laughable when someone says he gets Penthouse magazine for the articles. It’s no joke when I say I went to the Penthouse Executive Club for the steaks.”5 The objectification of women is so normalized that Bruni writes, “You can find bliss in the soulless cradle of a strip mall. Why not the topless clutch of a strip club? And so, early this month, I gathered three friends for an initial trip (dare I call it a maiden voyage?) to the Penthouse club—or, more specifically, to the restaurant, Robert’s Steakhouse, nestled inside it.”6 He found himself “more aroused by the side dishes than the sideshow: underdressed, overexposed young women in the vestibule.”7 He refuses the offer of one of the women that she would get naked for him, “But the beef, I devoured—breathlessly, ecstatically.”8 He adds, “you’ll be turned on by the quality of the plated meat.”9 The title of the review? “Where Only the Salad Is Properly Dressed.”

  When Paul Levy reviewed Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book for the Times Literary Supplement, the review was entitled “A Bit of Skirt.”10

  Figure 10 The cow sexualized and feminized. Photographed by Eva Lisa Negro, Villa Guardia, Italy, on August 30, 2014. Photograph copyright © by Eva Lisa Negro. Used by permission.

  Figure 11 An advertising campaign for this issue of Playboy in Brazil.

  We fail to recognize that the act of viewing another as an object and the act of believing that another is an object are actually different acts because our culture has collapsed them into one. David Lubin argues that “gazing at women voyeuristically is a means by which men may experience, reexperience or experience in fantasy their virility and all the potency and social worth that implies. Voyeurism by any definition, suggests detachment, estrangement, viewing from a distance.”11

  In 2015, at a Los Angeles branch of Trader Joe’s a poster placed above the fragmented pieces of dead animals announces, “Finest quality cuts that ‘meat’ everyone’s approval.” It shows men leering at a woman who has meat tied to her hat with a ribbon. It offers voyeurism of voyeurism, teaching others how to consume.

  In Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation, Michael Harris points out that “societies articulate their values and social hierarchies visually in many grand and subtle ways.” He describes three recurring aspects concerning women in Western art: evidence of patriarchal structures, the assumption of the universality of the white male perspective, and the appropriation of female bodies.12 Trader Joe’s gives us all three, along with the selling of dead bodies.

  William O’Barr’s Culture and the Ad notes that hierarchy, dominance, and subordination are the most frequently depicted qualities of social relationships in advertisements. Rarely are ads egalitarian. Ads advance someone over something. In postmodern times, advertisement strategies have saturated the visual field influencing art and the news media, superimposing images and creating referentiality across their once discrete fields.13

  In Chapter 2, I refer to a steakhouse in New Jersey called “Adam’s Rib” asking, “Who do they think they were eating?” This trope (and bad theology) continues. In February 2015, while at the Cowboy Brazilian Steakhouse for a meeting about a Criminal Domestic Violence bill, South Carolina Senator Shealy—the only woman senator in the state senate—challenged Senator Tom Corbin for attacking women. Corbin’s reply? “Well,
you know God created man first.” Corbin continued with a smirk, “Then He took the rib out of man to make woman. And you know, a rib is a lesser cut of meat.”14 In 2013, a new Israeli steakhouse, “Angus” in Haifa and Nes Ziona, promoted itself with the image of a blonde woman’s naked body (the photograph is from the side). In Hebrew, her body parts are labeled as though she were meat. The ad asks, “Do you ever have the desire to bite a choice piece of meat?”

  In the 2014 movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, M. Gustave tells Zero, the lobby boy, “She was dynamite in the sack by the way. . . . When you’re young it’s all filet steak, but as the years go by you have to move on to the cheaper cuts.” Wes Anderson put these words into the mouth of the fictional beloved writer speaking in 1985, ostensibly quoting an elderly hotel owner from 1968, who heard the words from M. Gustave, a man already out of date in 1932. The movie offers a tidy illustration of the transmission of the sexual politics of meat. It is as though M. Gustave had read the nineteenth-century guidebook to brothels that opens Part One of this book.

  A “bum burger” advertisement in 2013 in Australia showed women’s rear end as buns for a hamburger and was challenged for being sexist. The Advertising Standards Bureau Case Report summarized the problem: “The advertisement features a woman lying on the beach in a bikini. The photo is focused on her bottom which has the contents of a burger including lettuce, tomato, cheese and a meat patty between the cheeks of her backside. The text reads: ‘Goodtime Burgers’ and ‘The freshest fun between the buns.’ ”

  One of the complaints explained, “A burger patty and accompanying lettuce etc is lodged in a woman’s private part, the woman’s body and private parts are objectified as something for people (probably men) to consume.”15 Carl’s Jr., the US burger chain, did a similar ad, but in the US there is no mechanism for challenging it. Indeed, challenging a misogynist ad usually results in promoting it.

  In 2014, five women chefs in Philadephia posed for a promotional shoot before a five-course “Fine Swine Pork and Beer Dinner.” Dressed in a human anatomy leotard, one of the chefs posed for a shot of her rear end as she stood next to the behinds of dead pigs with their anuses prominently displayed. The reporter for Philadelphia Magazine, Victor Fiorillo, refers to the photo and suggests it be called “Pig Butt.”16 The women chefs in Philly were animalized in the meat locker (a popular location for pornographic shots, and the site of a competition in the America’s Next Top Model TV show in which the contestants had to wear raw flesh panties and bras). They seemed to acknowledge, “See us as meat if that will get you to our event.”

  In our culture, “meat” operates as a mass term,17 defining entire species of animals. Mass terms refer to things like water or colors; no matter how much you have of it, or what type of container it is in, it is still water. You can add a bucket of water to a pool of water without changing it at all. Objects referred to by mass terms have no individuality, no uniqueness, no specificity, no particularity. When we turn an animal into “meat,” someone who has a very particular, situated life, a unique being, is converted into something that has no distinctiveness, no uniqueness, no individuality.

  What is on the table in front of us is not devoid of specificity. It is the dead flesh of what was once a living, feeling being. We make someone who is a unique being and therefore not the appropriate referent of a mass term into something that is the appropriate referent of a mass term.

  With farmed animals their consumability determines their treatment, their post-mortem state permits constructing their lives imprisoned within industrial farms. In Neither Man nor Beast, I coined the term “terminal animals” for farmed animals who are raised to be killed and become dead flesh for consumption. Attitudes of human exceptionalism, entitlement, and disrespect play a central role in the social rejection of the idea that other animals matter, but equally so does the status quo, “Why else do they exist?”18

  The Rhode Island Coalition against Domestic Violence created a campaign in 2009 that said, “It’s not acceptable to treat a woman like one.” One public service ad showed a punching bag. But another showed a side of “beef” hanging from a hook clothed with a tank top and short denim skirt. In other words, it is not acceptable to treat women like a piece of meat; but it is acceptable to treat a nonhuman animal as one. European human rights campaigners, including Amnesty International, have created several public service ads against human trafficking showing women covered with cellophane as though they were packaged like meat. Again, the message is “don’t treat women like terminal animals, but you don’t need to disturb your treatment of terminal animals.”

  Figure 12 The fluidity of fragmenting language as it moves from referring to parts of dead chickens’ bodies to a woman’s body and back. Los Angeles, June 2013. Photograph copyright © by Carolyn Merino Mullin. Used by permission.

  Sexual references massage the dead flesh into a doubly consumable object, referencing women’s fragmentation as well: “piece of ass,” “breast man,” “leg man.”

  The media participates in the saturating of an over-saturated culture and normalizes and weaves together misogyny and consumption of nonhuman animals. The front page of the Business section of The Dallas Morning News announced, “Hooters alum to help augment Twin Peaks” (breast “augmentation” being the referent). The word “augment” shows the seamlessness of the media’s perspective and Hooters’ and Twin Peaks’ viewpoints, re-presenting and re-inscribing the “breastaurant” business of selling food—especially “male” comfort food of dead animals—through women’s bodies.19

  In September 2014, Fox News host Eric Bolling, responding to news reported by news host Kimberly Guilfoyle about the United Arab Emirates’ first female pilot landing a plane, asked, “Would that be considered boobs on the ground or no?” conveying not only his view of a professional woman pilot but his colleague, the woman news host, reduced to a female body part. When Steven Colbert responded to this comment, in mocking the “cocks on Fox” he spent more time further sexualizing and fragmenting the pilot, referring to “a pair in the air,” “a rack over Iraq,” and “You haven’t seen weapons of mass destruction like this pair of Abu Double Dhabis.” (A Chicago menu featured “The Double D Cup Breast of Turkey Sandwich.”)

  Bolling had to apologize twice, his first apology being so ineffectual. During his second apology he said with a straight face, “My remark was not intended to be disparaging of her, but that’s how it was taken.” Colbert, however, never had to apologize for being a comic who disparaged her, nor did the restaurant that offered fragmented body parts.

  Once fragmented, consumption happens. The consumption of a being, and the consumption of the meaning of that being’s life, so that the referent point changes.

  In 2013, the police department of a community started to receive calls about strange noises that the residents were hearing: “Strange noises turn out be cows missing their calves.” The police chief explained to the local newspaper that “The noises are coming from mother cows who are lamenting the separation from their calves and their babies.”20 After a showing of The Sexual Politics of Meat Slide Show, a young woman approached me. She told me that her baby had died at birth and how awful it felt to have full breasts and milk for her baby, but not a baby to feed. When people want to know why she is vegan, she feels it is such a personal decision, informed by tragedy, it is hard to speak of it. But she knows herself how milk comes from a grieving mother.

  Figure 13 Domino’s pizza box cover, purchased in Sarasota, Florida, February 2015. Sent by Beatrice Friedlander who points out “the element of false camaraderie is similar to hospital staff referring to old, sick people by their first names instead of Mr. or Ms. The reference to ‘lovely ladies’ is very patronizing; and the three additional names preceded by ‘a’ (when you see ‘a Bessie Buttercup or Daisy’) is demeaning and a denial of their individuality.” Photograph copyright © Margo Miller. Used by permission.

  Feminized protein is plant protein produced through the a
buse of the reproductive cycle of female animals (p. 62). Humans require a sexual slavery with chickens in battery cages and dairy cows in a constant cycle of forced pregnancy and lactation. Nathan Runkle, President of Mercy for Animals, explains: “Selective breeding and artificial hormones are often used to push these animals’ bodies to their limits. While cows can live up to 25 years, in the dairy industry they are typically so worn out from repeated pregnancies and unnaturally high milk production that they are considered ‘spent’ by the time they are 5 or 6 years old. Most ‘spent’ cows end up being killed for ground beef, which helps disguise the poor condition of their flesh. The constant cycle of pregnancy needed to sustain dairy production means there are lot of ‘surplus’ baby calves born on dairy farms. On most dairy farms, calves are ripped away from their mothers almost immediately after they are born and are typically fed an artificial milk replacer so that all of their mothers’ milk can be sold for profit.”

  Runkle continues, “While some female calves are grown out and used as replacements for the ‘spent’ cows in the dairy herd, many of them are slaughtered for beef as babies. Since males will never produce milk, they are usually sold, as babies, for beef or veal. In the veal industry, calves are crammed into tiny wooden boxes, often chained by the neck, unable to even turn around or lie down comfortably for months until they are killed.”21

  In addition to the cruelties inherent in dairy production, undercover investigations by Mercy For Animals (MFA) and other animal protection groups consistently expose sadistic acts of animal abuse by desensitized workers on factory farms. Countless undercover videos at dairy farms across the country reveal workers, managers, and owners viciously kicking, beating, and punching these gentle animals in the their faces and bodies, and dragging them by their necks with chains attached to tractors. MFA recently conducted an investigation at a massive dairy factory farm in New Mexico that was a supplier to Leprino Food, the world’s largest pizza cheese manufacturer and a supplier to Pizza Hut (as well as Domino’s and Papa Johns). The treatment of cows in the Pizza Hut supply chain is filled with fear, exploitation, and blatant abuse. The undercover video can be viewed at www.sliceofcruelty.com.