Women are subdued and held by straps so they can be mounted and flogged more easily, and they always end as grateful victims, trained to enjoy the whip and the straps, proud to provide pleasure for their masters. There is an uneasy similarity between the devices made to hold women for sexual pleasure and those tables and chairs, replete with stirrups and straps, which made women ready for the surgeon’s knife.24
In protesting the vivisection of the other animals, nineteenth-century women revolted “against a world of [human] male sexual authority.” Further, Lansbury argues, “continually animals were seen as surrogates for women who read their own misery into vivisector’s victims.”25 The antivivisection movement of the late nineteenth century was predominantly composed of women who saw themselves as the referent in vivisectionists’ activities.
The rage these women felt toward vivisection of other animals might have been because they were separated by a vast psychological distance from medical doctors’ activities; they were viewed as holding childlike opinions about animals; they were seen as being close kin to the animals themselves; they saw symbols of their own suffering in animal victims. The absent referent in the vivisection of other animals was for these women hardly absent—they saw themselves similarly positioned. As Alice Park wrote with alarm to the Vegetarian Magazine: “A physician who will deliberately vivisect helpless, harmless, little animals will just as deliberately vivisect women or any human being he can find to experiment on.” Concerned by the increasing role “the medical trust” was exercising in the United States, she encouraged women to “drop all worry about the ballot for a few weeks and get out your ‘hatchet’ to smash all fond hopes these AMA physicians have to eventually rule our nation.”26
The permeability of categories remains for us today: we frequently read of studies determining that a high proportion of gynecological surgeries performed in the United States are unnecessary. Cesarean deliveries have skyrocketed for women. Andrea Dworkin, in Pornography: Men Possessing Women, and Gena Corea, in The Mother Machine, argue the patriarchal source of the epidemic of cesarean section in the United States. Interestingly, cesarean deliveries have become, as well, the standard way to “produce” the most commonly used laboratory animals. The Charles River Breeding Laboratory emphasizes that their animals are “Cesarean-Derived,” assuring animal experimenters that they are thereby receiving “pure” strains.
Problem 6: Knowledge
In characterizing scientific and objective thought as masculine, the very activity by which the knower can acquire knowledge is also genderized. The relation specified between knower and known is one of distance and separation. It is that between a subject and an object radically divided.
—Evelyn Fox Keller27
It is clear that the pursuit of knowledge in the dominant society is gendered to begin with. The originating structure that determines both the sorts of experiments to be undertaken and the kind of quantifiable knowledge to be gained is a patriarchal one. Animal experimentation rigidly upholds cultural sex-role presumptions. Because pregnancies are undesirable in many experiments, researchers using mice rely on “seventy males for every thirty females.”28 Other experiments look at female animals precisely for their femaleness. Carolyn Merchant reports that in England in the 1630s William Harvey “dissected large numbers of King Charles’ does just after coition with bucks.”29 Modern experimenters can place an order for pregnant animals with the Charles River Breeding Laboratory. Not only is the control of females reified in the act of the experiment itself, but so also are the categories of “maleness” and “femaleness” as the subjects under study. A fixation on femaleness moves smoothly from the realm of representation to the realm of experimentation.
Men’s distance from women, from their own parenting ability and their capacity to feel for others, determines experiments such as Harry Harlow’s in which baby monkeys are denied maternal care. Harlow has described the restricted environment he constructed to insure the denial of all affection to the baby monkeys. This environment of nonfeeling mirrors the standard for scientific ideas: reason rules and feelings are controlled. Norma Benney caustically noted that these experiments proved “what most women know and certainly every mother knows, namely, that young ones need the love of their mother.”30
Although other animals can be experimented upon only because they are not human, if they were not like humans nothing would be gained for humans by studying them. But what precisely is gained? How can pain be measured, quantified, interpreted, especially if chronic pain changes an animal’s response? Once gained, how is the knowledge applied? Once the dilemma (animals are different from us; animals are like us) is acknowledged, it attaches itself to the rationale of the animal experiments: Animals are different from us so we can . . . , animals are like us so we conclude . . . . The wedge of differentiation between humans and other animals, which can never be precisely located, is both necessary for and undercuts the premise of scientific knowledge.
That the observer cannot but influence the experiment by the very watching reinforces yet again our awareness of how a patriarchal subject constitutes himself. It is a fact that experiments are often repeated or so designed that they produce results that are not even arguably useful. For instance, although the practical shortcomings of the Draize test are widely admitted, some companies, like Gillette, have scarcely modified or curtailed the use of it. Where experimenters’ behavior is so obviously ritual rather than purposive, we must consider the question of agency and sadism.
Problem 7: Agents and Sadism
We are told that animal experimentation is not sadism. But what mental gymnastics are required to consider what in fact happens to other animals without imputing any human, let alone malignant, agency? The argument is made that experimenters are the products of conditioning in which their peers and superiors reinforce the legitimacy of painful experiment on animals. Experimenters do not see themselves as agents of pain, cruelty, etc., because they do not see themselves as agents. Routine and ritual insulate them from their activities. By viewing animals as tools toward their research ends, they render the transitive verb intransitive; they eliminate agency.
Kappeler writes, “Representation foregrounds content . . . and obscures the agent of representation.” Science foregrounds knowledge and obscures the role of the scientist, the agent of scientific experimentation. An experiment on an animal is like representation because neither is “really” happening. It is not happening because the agent is not willing it to happen or to be hurtful. Kappeler reminds us to look at the role of the subject: all else arises out of the subject’s need to confirm his subjectivity. How else, really, to explain the repetition of experiments? Repetition, Kappeler suggests, is an essential aspect of pornography, of constructing the subject in patriarchy—“there is a plot: the cultural archeplot of power.”31
Sandra Harding implicates the capitalist and patriarchal structure of science. She sees a division of labor involving a select group of white decision-making men and women who essentially become scientific technicians: “Because the priorities conceptualized by white males often create ambivalences about the social value of particular projects, research priorities may differ from those of their private lives outside science. Who would choose a career goal of building bombs, torturing animals, or manufacturing machines that will put one’s sisters and brothers out of work?”32 While the division of labor and the control of power reinforce the structure of white men’s control and posit an absence of agency at the technician level, the arrogant eye is not without a role also. Direct observation of animal “torture” by notable scientists and the fact that scientists achieve notability by their direct involvement in animal experimentation (viz., Pavlov, Harlow, Seligman) confirms the presence of agency. They need to be able to say “I observed ‘y’ reaction in these animals after we had done ‘x’ to them.” Scientific knowledge depends on “quantifiable” information; in the case of animal experimentation this requires close attention. Enter t
he gaze of the arrogant eye, both as an action and a rationale. And that human male gaze involves, to some degree, agency: “I am watching it.”
Theresa Corrigan has remarked on the similarity between the conceptual framework suggested here and Mary Daly’s description of the sadoritual syndrome in her book, Gyn/Ecology. A fascinating case can be made that inevitably a sadoritual syndrome that targets women will also theoretically undergird the intertwined oppression of animals. Many of the components of the sado-ritual syndrome described by Daly are evident in animal experiments as well as other forms of oppressing animals, such as eating flesh and wearing animal skins: absence of agency, obsessive repetition, token torturers, otherwise unacceptable behavior taken as normal, and scholarly legitimation.
Once the formula for knowledge is understood as shaky if not bankrupt (“animals are not like us so we can. . . ., animals are like us so we conclude . . .”), then the two sides to this formula can be disengaged one from the other. The actions of the former do not neatly lead to the conclusions of the latter. In breaking the premise of the cause and effect of the experiment, in stripping animal experiments of the legitimacy they gain as gendered scientific knowledge, in questioning the premise of “animals are like us so we conclude . . . ,” then we are free to look specifically at the phrase, “animals are not like us so we can. . . .” This leads to scrutinizing the agency of the experimenters. What exactly are they doing? We do not necessarily have the absence of sadistic violence, we have the refusal to acknowledge agency.
Problem 8: Consumption
Representations are not just a matter of mirrors, reflections, key-holes. Somebody is making them, and somebody is looking at them, through a complex array of means and conventions.
—Susanne Kappeler
Animal experimenters reify us as consumers, objects who consume, rather than subjects who decide about the ethics of consumption. This concept explains the testing on animals of cosmetics that promote the “feminine” look, as well as experiments to define what our proper food is—flesh? food coloring? with what levels of toxins? In addition, we become consumers of animal experiments: many of us hear about them without noticing that what is exactly being described happened to certain animals. News reports discussing advances in cancer research or AIDS research usually name the animals used—“a study of rats” or “a study of monkeys.” We consume the information, congratulating ourselves, if we are healthy, that science proceeds, helping us to protect ourselves from illness.
But it is also because we are consumers that many scientific experiments continue. Because we (some of us) consume flesh and smoke cigarettes we have scientific experiments on animals to discover cures for the resulting cancer; because we (some of us) use cosmetics, cleansers, etc., product testing on animals continues. If we restructured consumption, we would eliminate the need for many animal experiments. But this is not the point, of course. Animal experimentation is not only a means to an end—a way by which we can hope to continue consuming without changing habits of harmful consumption; animal experimentation is both socially and economically an end in itself. How many people earn their living experimenting on animals? How many people earn their living supplying animals to be experimented on? The Charles River Breeding Laboratory (1–800-LAB-RATS) had sales of $45 million in 1983. How many people earn their living supplying food, cages, and transportation for “lab” animals? What percentage of university budgets is raised from grants funding animal experiments?
Problem 9: What’s the Difference?
Meat is like pornography: before it was someone’s fun, it was someone’s life.
—Melinda Vadas33
Ron Martin, producer of a live sex show in New York, was asked if he does not think that he degrades women for profit. His reply: “I know I do. So does The New York Times. I have one girl who felt degraded every time she stepped outside. She came here because she was constantly getting hit up by men anyway, so why not get paid? Is working here any more degrading than walking down the street?”34 Some pornographers say, What’s the difference between us and the New York Times? Animal experimenters say, What’s the difference between what we are doing and what you are doing? You eat animals, don’t you? Aren’t you wearing leather? You benefit from what we do, so why shouldn’t we experiment on animals? The subject status imputed to our acts as consumers of information, flesh, and other animal products veils the subject status of the experimenters. Animal oppression thus becomes the legitimating force for the continuance of the system. Neither science nor art stand apart from culture: patriarchal culture is deeply implicated in both.
It has been by and large Euro-American middle-class and upper-class men who have created scientific theorems, ethics, and the ground rules for animal experimentation. They have created these out of the perspective by which they approach the world: as subjects surveying an object world. Zuleyma Tang Halpin observes how intersubjectivity radically threatens such an approach:
Once a scientist begins to feel for his or her research animal, the self versus other duality begins to break down, and it becomes easier for the interrelatedness of subject and object to be acknowledged. Once this happens, it becomes easier to question the paradigm which proclaims power, control, and domination as the ultimate goal of science. Viewed from this perspective, the animal welfare issue poses a major threat to patriarchal science.35
Nonhuman animal experimentation is not an isolated case of animal oppression nor is it unrelated to human male dominance.36 Animal experimentation is inherent in the way men, especially privileged Euro-American men, have made themselves subjects in the world by making others objects. The human male gaze—the arrogant eye of patriarchy—constructs animal experiments.
Chapter 3
Abortion Rights and Animal Rights 1
A woman attempts to enter a building. Others, amassed outside, try to thwart her attempt. They shout at her, physically block her way, frantically call her names, pleading with her to stop, to respect life.
Is she buying a fur coat or getting an abortion?
On the face of it, the similarity of tactics of the antifur and antiabortion movements, and the focus on “woman as culprit and taker of life” connect the defense of animals with the fetal right to life movement.
In a deliberate echoing of the language of abortion rights, the Fur Information Council of America queries: “If fashion isn’t about freedom of choice, what is?” (Abortion, of course.) They continue, “Personal choice is not just a fur industry issue. It’s everybody’s issue.” Obviously the subtext here is hardly submerged. Personal choice isn’t just “everybody’s issue,” it’s specifically a woman’s issue.
The emphasis on “choice” connects the fursellers and fur wearers with the pro-choice movement.
The general viewpoint of the antiabortion contingent in the United States, that is reproduced by some animal defenders as well, is “how can animal defenders be concerned about animals and not about human babies [as they erroneously call the fetus in the womb]?” A bumper sticker I have seen in various parts of the country queries: “How Come America? We brake for animals, we save the seals, and protect the whales but we murder our unborn children!!” Other bumper stickers say “Save a whale but kill a baby?” and “When you folks come out against abortion, I’ll give up my fur coat.” Profetal life writer Nat Hentoff proposes that “the pro-choice Left” should “think of the fetus as a baby seal, in utero.” 2
I know this angry viewpoint of antiabortion activists. It has greeted me in radio interviews, letters to the editors, and in the pages of various publications, including the Village Voice and Animals’ Agenda. In Dallas, I wrote to the weekly alternative paper complaining that they had listed an antiabortion group under the category “feminism” and a pro-animal experimentation group under the category “animal rights.” The following week, a response appeared: “It is difficult for me to understand how Ms. Adams could be such an avid supporter of animal rights and not support the rights of unborn human
animals. Aren’t babies just as important as other animals and shouldn’t they have as many and more rights?” (Instructive in this matter is the decapitating of an abortion counselor’s cat in the midst of other acts of antiabortion terrorism.)3
Meanwhile, some feminist writers are concerned about the language of animal defenders because it appears to uphold the claims of antiabortionists: Donna Haraway, for instance, complains that the tones of animal defenders
resonate with the pro-life/antiabortion question, “Who speaks for the foetus?” The answer is, anybody but the pregnant woman, especially if that anybody is a legal, medical or scientific expert. Or a father. Facing the harvest of Darwinism, we do not need an endless discourse on who speaks for animals, or for nature in general. We have had enough of the language games of fatherhood.4
It is time to say clearly what the difference between a human fetus and the other animals is; to enunciate a politics of abortion rights and animal defense that recognizes their logical intersections not their superficial differences, to repudiate the language games of fatherhood.5 The fetus, as Susanne v. Paczensky, German abortion rights activist, defines it, is “a human being to be created and grown by a woman if she chooses to do so.”6 But the choice has already been made for the other animals—created, grown, and born. A fetus’s dependency upon the pregnant woman—since the fetus is internal to and part of the woman—does not obtain for the other animals, once born.
Neither Man nor Beast Page 8