Neither Man nor Beast

by Carol J Adams

  A fifth linking of violence against women, children, gender nonconforming men, and animals to human male sexual violence is the killing of animals by serial murderers and other murderers who rape and mutilate. Serial killers share some common features: they are likely to report their crimes, are almost always men and usually younger than thirty-five, and “the earliest acting out of sadistic impulses often occurs in the early teens in the form of torturing and killing animals such as cats and dogs.”33 For instance, as a child, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer searched the neighborhood for roadkills that he kept in a toolshed; kept the bones of racoons, dogs, cats, groundhogs, squirrels, and chipmunks inside formaldehyde-filled pickle jars; kept an animal graveyard with skulls on top of crosses; and collected stuffed owls, rabbits, and small birds. According to one psychologist, David Silber, “His behavior didn’t change. The objects changed.”34 Cruelty to animals in childhood was one of the significant differences in behavioral indicators between sexual murderers who were themselves abused before they became abusers and murderers without such a history.35

  Last, sexual harassment often includes pornographic material involving explicit depictions of human-animal sexual activity or reference to this material. Since an adequate discussion of sexual harassment takes me beyond the scope of this chapter, I mention it here only to be sure it is included in the patterns of ways human male sexual violence has operated to subordinate women, children, and animals in interconnected ways. According to the testimony of their victims, sexual harassers incorporate this pornography that depicts animals with women into their victimization activities. Moreover, again according to victims and akin to Marchiano’s experience, it is this aspect of sexual harassment that is the most humiliating. For instance, during the hearings to review the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, held in October 1991 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, we heard from Anita Hill of Thomas’s references to pornography: “I think the one that was the most embarrassing was his discussion of pornography involving these women with large breasts and engaged in a variety of sex with different people or animals. That was the thing that embarrassed me the most and made me feel the most humiliated.”36

  Philosophical Implications of the Empirical Connections

  We have seen how animals are victims, too, through a variety of acts of sexual violence and exploitation. Truly this material on the connection between abuse of women, children, and gender nonconforming men and abuse of animals is painful to encounter. But only by taking this material seriously can we expand our knowledge about sexual violation. The intersection of abuse of women and animals has implications for feminist philosophy in the specific areas of conceptual analysis, epistemology, political philosophy, environmental philosophy, and applied philosophy.

  Conceptual Analysis

  The empirical evidence cited above details a shocking hostility to the bodies of disenfranchised others—women, children, gender nonconforming men, and animals. As Elizabeth Spelman recognized when she proposed the concept of somatophobia (hostility to the body), one of the important reasons for feminists to recognize somatophobia is to see the context for women’s oppression and the relationship it has with other forms of oppression. Clearly, women’s oppression is interwoven with that of animals, so that women and animals are both trapped by the control exercised over their own and each other’s bodies (i.e., women and children who stay silent because of abusers’ threats to their pets; pets who are killed to establish a climate of terror).

  Spelman believes that it is important for feminists to recognize the legacy of the soul/body distinction and its use in denigrating women, children, animals, and “the natural,” who are guilty by association with one another and with the body.37 The problem is not only that women are equated with animals’ bodies, for instance in pornography, but also that animals are equated with their bodies. The soul/body split that concerns Spelman and that she identifies as a part of Western philosophical tradition is acutely evident in notions of animals having no soul, and in the current secular period, of animals having no consciousness, undergirding the instrumental ontology of animals as usable.

  Spelman recognized that somatophobia is enacted in relationships such as men to women, masters to slaves, fathers to children, humans to animals;38 now we see that it is actually often enacted in relationships such as men to women and animals, fathers to children and animals. The connections between the abuse of women and the abuse of animals make explicit that somatophobia applies to species as well as gender, race, and class interactions. It also requires that we rethink philosophical arguments that rely on anthropocentric notions of harm from sexual objectification.39

  The testimony of Anita Hill about the humiliating experience of hearing about pornography that included women with animals illuminates Spelman’s formulation of somatophobia, particularly the insights that it applies to gender, race, class, and species, and that oppression is interwoven. Consider, for instance, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s brilliant article on how feminist and antiracist narratives are structured in such a way as to exclude understanding the experience of a black woman such as Anita Hill. Crenshaw describes the working of interwoven oppressions of race and sex in the racializing of sexual harassment: “While black women share with white women the experience of being objectified as ‘cunts,’ ‘beavers,’ or ‘pieces,’ for them those insults are many times prefaced with ‘black’ or ‘nigger’ or ‘jungle.’ ”40 The sexual aggression experienced by women of color often will simultaneously represent their subordinate racial status. (Consider this example from Lorene Cary’s memoir, Black Ice, of the racialized sexual politics of meat: Cary worked as a waitress with white waitresses and black cooks: “A few customers told me with a leer that they preferred dark meat.”41 )

  In her discussion of the representation of African-American women in pornography and the way such representation enabled the pornographic treatment of white women, Patricia Hill Collins ties together the racialization of sexual aggression against black women with the racist view that equated black women with animals:

  Within the mind/body, culture/nature, male/female oppositional dichotomies in Western social thought, objects occupy an uncertain interim position. As objects white women become creations of culture—in this case, the mind of white men—using the materials of nature—in this case, uncontrolled female sexuality. In contrast, as animals Black women receive no such redeeming dose of culture and remain open to the type of exploitation visited on nature overall. Race becomes the distinguishing feature in determining the type of objectification women will encounter. Whiteness as symbolic of both civilization and culture is used to separate objects from animals. . . . The treatment of all women in contemporary pornography has strong ties to the portrayal of Black women as animals. . . . This linking of animals and white women within pornography becomes feasible when grounded in the earlier denigration of Black women as animals.42

  As Collins points out, race and gender have been inscribed onto species: the pre-existing division upon which pornography imposes its images is of animals—beasts, bodies not redeemed by souls—and animal nature, the notion that there is some pure, unmediated bodily sexuality that is not socially constructed. Sander Gilman writes that Buffon, for instance, “stated that this animallike sexual appetite went so far as to lead black women to copulate with apes.”43 Pornography that features black women and animals together may function specifically as a racializing of both sex and species hierarchies. In fact, it may be that women of color are more likely to be used in pornography that shows bestiality.44 Thus, sexual harassment of women of color by reference to such pornography will carry an added dimension to its demeaning and controlling message. Given the view of black women as animals, and the white pornographic imagination that cast black women sexually with an imals, Anita Hill may have experienced a specific form of racialized sexual harassment in Thomas’s references to bestiality. Only by including animals within the lens of feminist analysis can the extent an
d effect of somatophobia in a culture be made visible.

  Epistemological Issues

  If something is invisible we do not have access to it for knowledge. Much of the sexual victimization of women, children, and animals takes place in such a way as to be invisible to most people. In addition, there is the general invisibility of culturally accepted forms of animal abuse, such as corpse eating, hunting, animal experimentation. What will overcome the invisibility of animal abuse and of the connection between abuse of animals and abuse of women? A relational epistemology helps overcome this culturally structured invisibility. To the person who has a relational epistemology, who has significant relationships with animals, and who values these interactive relationships, animal abuse will be less invisible.

  A relational epistemology also means that a woman experiencing abuse does not isolate her experience, but empathetically may see one’s experience as like, rather then radically different from, another’s.

  As a feminist speaker in the animal-defense movement, I have been approached by many sexual abuse survivors throughout the country who tell of how they made connections between their own sexual abuse and the use and abuse of animals. In 1990, one woman told me how the experience of being choked by her abusive husband transformed her relationship with animals. Suddenly she realized that just as her husband claimed to love her yet was trying to kill her, she claimed to love animals yet she ate them. She survived his attack, left the marriage, and became active in vegetarian and animal-defense activities in her community.

  A relational epistemology, in itself, does not automatically result in concern for animals. Aspects of animals’ lives and their experience of oppression may remain invisible because of a dominant metaphysics that views animals instrumentally and accepts a value hierarchy. But if one starts to extend out a relational epistemology, this value hierarchy breaks down a little more and a metaphysical shift may occur.45

  Second-person relationships provide the foundation for such a metaphysical shift. The concept of second persons, introduced by Annette Baier and amplified by Lorraine Code, recognizes that our knowledge is never atomistically individualistic or “self-made.” Instead we become persons through our dependence upon other persons from whom we “acquire the essential arts of personhood.”46 Lives begin in communality and interdependence; thus in our acquisition of knowledge, “persons are essentially second persons.”47 The connections between the abuse of animals and the abuse of women suggests that second-person relationships exist between humans and animals as well as between humans and humans. Women and children victimized by abusers reveal intense second-person relationships with animals as well as humans. Otherwise how could control be so inexorably established by the brutalization of pets? How else could they see their death prefigured in the death of the pet?

  This second-person relationship can serve as a catalyst to change one’s metaphysical stance vis-à-vis the other animals. As happened with the woman being choked by her husband, she suddenly recognized through second-person relations that she had accepted a value hierarchy that failed to protect or value animals. As Code explains: “Imposing meaning on someone else’s existence from a position removed from it and ignorant of, or indifferent to, its specificities is at the furthest remove from second-person relations in their normative dimension.”48 Second-person relations enable second-person thinking, from which the metaphysical shift evolves. With second-person thinking “knowledge claims are forms of address, speech acts, moments in a dialogue that assume and rely on the participation of (an)other subject(s).”49 Significantly, for the battered woman and many others, these other subjects are/include animals.

  A relational epistemology paves the way for a metaphysical shift because it acknowledges the value of relationships, and of thinking relationally. Given this position, it is harder to say that our relationships are only with human beings, because many of us have significant relationships with animals. Thus seeing ourselves as born into relationships rather than as atomistic, self-made individuals allows for an important metaphysical shift too: no longer seeing humans as radically other than nonhuman life forms, no longer erecting a boundary between the presumably “self-made human” and the presumably “nature-made animal.” Someone who has a relational epistemology is in a position to see what the dominant culture in its metaphysics has constructed as invisible and acceptable; the relational epistemology disables the functioning of somatophobia and its undergirding of animal oppression. This metaphysical shift involves valuing animals as other than objects or bodies and repudiating a subject-object relationship premised on domination rather than respect. It acknowledges that animals have a biography not just a biology, and that what is required is an anthropology, not an ethology, of animals.50

  Feminist philosophers may distrust the activism of animal defenders because animal-rights philosophy is not based on a relational epistemology. However what may be going on is that many animal defenders (75 percent of whom, let us recall, are estimated to be women) become committed to animal defense based on a relational epistemology that enables a metaphysical shift that repudiates somatophobia. However, in the absence of a well-developed and popularized defense of animals based on a relational epistemology, they seek for a way to verbalize that which has not been bridged—their knowledge stance with an activist language. Philosophical defenses of animals that draw upon either Tom Regan’s explication of animal rights or Peter Singer’s explication of animals’ liberation have so far gained currency in the animal advocacy movement as the appropriate activist language. The result is that because the animal-defense movement has been thought to have been begotten in the image of its “fathers” (Regan and Singer), feminism may have misread what is happening epistemologically.

  Political Philosophy

  The gender-specific public/private distinction is a conceptually flawed one. Historically, in Western culture, female gender-identified traits have been associated with the private (“domestic,” “home”) sphere, while male gender-identified traits have been associated with the public (“civic,” “political”) sphere. According to Catharine MacKinnon, the private sphere is, for women, “the distinctive sphere of intimate violation and abuse, neither free nor particularly personal.”51 Carole Pateman argues further that the subordination of women in the private sphere, (“the sexual contract”) is what enables the construction of modern political theory (“the social contract”).52 Not only does the public/private distinction inscribe sexual difference and domination, it keeps invisible the empirical connections between human male sexual violence and violence toward women, children, and animals that this chapter identifies. This prevents feminist philosophy from recognizing the importance of ecofeminist insights into what Karen Warren calls “women-nature connections” as being at the heart of feminist philosophy.

  If we review the features of an oppressive conceptual framework that Warren has identified,53 the way that the public/private distinction operates in the abuse of women and animals will become clearer. Among the features of an oppressive conceptual framework is value-hierarchical thinking or “up-down thinking” that places higher value, status, or prestige on what is up rather than what is down. Abuse enacts a value hierarchy—through abusive behavior a person establishes control, becoming “up” rather than “down”—while originating in value hierarchies: those who are “down” in terms of (public) status—women, children, gender nonconforming men, and animals—are more likely to be victimized.

  Warren also identifies value dualisms as part of an oppressive conceptual framework. Disjunctive pairs such as human/animal, male/female, adult/child, white/nonwhite are seen as oppositional rather than as complementary, and exclusive rather than inclusive. Higher value is accorded the first item in each dyad. Until recently, violence in the “private” home was not closely scrutinized by the public sphere (women, children, and animals having less value than men, adults, and humans respectively). Feminist peace politics seeks to change this. As Sara Ruddick observe
s, “As there is no sharp division between the violences of domestic, civic, and military life, there is also no sharp division between the practices and thinking of private and public peace.”54 It is essential for feminist peace politics to recognize the human/animal dualism central to public/private distinctions. From Aristotle on, the conception of “manhood”—the public, civic man—depended heavily on seeing women not merely as “lesser humans than men but less-than-human.” As Wendy Brown reminds us “it was precisely the sharpness of the Athenian conception of manhood that bore with it a necessary degradation and oppression of women, a denial of the status of ‘human’ to women.”55 Thus, women were devalued through association with devalued animals. While we have progressed from this theoretical equation of women with animals, we have not eliminated the value dualism that undergirded such public/private separations, the value dualism by which biology determines who is “mind” and who is “body.” We have just removed the human species from this debate. Whereas biology is no longer acceptable for determining human value, it remains acceptable for determining animals’ less-than-human value. The role of biology as a central determining factor in the perpetuation of the human/animal dualism is similar to and interrelated with the way that privacy perpetuates the male/female dualism: that is, biology and privacy provide alibis for abuse.56

  Finally, the “glue that holds it all together”57 is a logic of domination: “a value-hierarchical way of thinking which explains, justifies, and maintains the subordination of an ‘inferior’ group by a ‘superior’ group on the grounds of the (alleged) inferiority or superiority of the respective group.”58 The idea of the private/public division protects the private domain from being the focus of certain ethical and philosophical concerns, concerns such as justice, that are often presumed to pertain only to the public realm.59 This private/public division functions as a part of the logic of domination: the “I-have-a-right-to-do-what-I-want-in-my-own-home” patriarchal justification for abusive behavior against those constructed as “inferior”—adult female partners, children, and animals.