 For most families, Thanksgiving is not complete without a turkey. Sticking to tradition, mom and the other women in the family labor in the kitchen while the men find something else to do. After cooking all day, they serve the meal and something quite peculiar happens. Only the patriarch, or father figure, who usually takes his throne at the end of the table, is allowed to cut and serve the turkey. Now, mom just spent however long it took to thaw, baste, stuff, and cook the turkey, along with the "side dishes" of vegetable and complex carbohydrates, but the man of the house is the one who holds the knife. He does not serve the vegetables, he does not pass out the cranberry sauce, he cuts the turkey. Why?
I find cultural moments like Thanksgiving useful for just understanding our gendered relationship to meat. Suffice it to say that in America the man cuts the turkey and has control over the distribution of the meat because meat is for men. Within a fixed gender system, meat recurs as a male symbol of oppression and power
Gender, Hunting and Animal Rights During this past summer in Arkansas, two boys donned hunting caps and hunting rifles their father had bought them, and waited for their classmates to get out of school. They were supposedly hunting for one of the boys' past girlfriends, whom he later claimed he "wanted to hunt and kill." The boys opened fire on their classmates. Perhaps it is a coincidence that these two boys aimed only for the girls in the class, injuring two and killing four, or perhaps the boys were taught by their father that there is some connection to women and nonhuman animals which easily allows both women and animals to be seen as objects of sport. The issue surrounding this incident, which was only one of many teenage shootings this year, became parenting and guns in school, not the possible connection that men are encouraged to hunt prey both for sex and for sport.
Thinking of a predator killing a large mammal yields manly images of ferociousness, territorial imperative, armed hunting, aggressive behavior, the vitality and virility of meat eating. Furthermore, carnivorous predators such as the "masculine" wolf, panther and lion, provide both a paradigm for male sexual aggression as well as the proof that humans eat meat because it is "natural." "Sex" and "sport" have been used synonymously in Western literature. During winter break it seemed that I could not go a day without reading newspaper articles that conflated the two terms. While there is a real danger in equating "women" with "nature" and by extension as closer to nonhuman animals than "males," I want to suggest that perhaps the liberation of women is intimately connected to the liberation of another oppressed group: animals. And perhaps some forms of oppression the two groups share are not all that different.
Meat is King People with power in Western history have always consumed and controlled distribution of meat. In Medieval and Renaissance cultures the aristocracy of Europe consumed large courses of every kind of meat available while the laborer ate bread and vegetables. Dietary habits proclaim gender distinctions as well. A mythology permeates all classes that meat is a masculine food and meat eating a male activity. Men barbecue, men get steak dinners for Father's Day, men cut the turkey. Women, second-class citizens, are more likely to eat what we consider second-class foods: vegetables, fruits and grains.
Vegetables are "women's food," my grandfather teasingly reminds me on holidays. Since Western women have been made subsidiary in a male-dominated, meat-eating Western context, so has "their" food. Just as we think a woman cannot make it on her own in a male world, so we think that vegetables cannot make a meal on their own. This is despite the fact that vegetables provide, on the average, more than twice the vitamins and minerals of meat.
When we do kill animals, we use tools of violence like knives to kill and consume them. It is important to relation this to meat and ask ourselves: who traditionally wields these implements of violence and power? Mom can't cut the meat, not just because meat is masculine and therefore the male has control over its distribution and consumption, but because the knife is the implement of power, and only the male has this power. The knife, a metaphor to any implement of male power, gives the patriarch power over animals, power over all the other members of the family, and power over anything that succumbs to the blade. The fact that the father cuts the meat or cooks hamburgers out on the grill has nothing to do with his concern to be helpful, but rather it is a man's right to hold the knife, to cut the meat, to distribute the flesh. This is the sexual politics of meat. Meat represents both manhood and power over the female in our society.
Meat is male It has traditionally been thought/assumed that the working man needs meat for strength: that in eating the muscle of strong animals, males become strong. Visions of meat-eating football players, wrestlers, and boxers lumber through our minds. Though dieticians have proven (and vegetarians like Carl Lewis are proof that) the equation between meat and muscle is wrong, the myth remains: men are strong, men need to be strong, therefore men need meat.
The late Marty Feldman observed that the connection between meat and malehood has to do with the function of the male within our society. Football players (and spectators) drink beer because it's a man's drink and eat steak because it's a man's meal. The emphasis is on 'man-sized portions' and 'hero' sandwiches. Hearty beef stews are named "Manhandlers." "Meat-and-potatoes" men are stereotypically strong and hearty, rough and ready, able-bodied males.
In a sense it is a bit ironic that I use the phrase "meat is male," because most animals and animal products labeled "consumable" are female. Western culture depends on female animals for "feminized protein" such as milk and eggs. The fact that the cow or chicken is slaughtered once she stops producing milk or eggs indicates that her value lies in her reproductive ability. Furthermore, industrialized meat-centered societies subsist by and large on the female flesh of cows and chickens rather than bulls and roosters. When we exploit the maternal abilities of these animals, what are the implications for women's rights? Can feminists who claim that women are oppressed consistently use and consume the female bodies of animals oppressed by the same means? One might ask how this gendered use of animals influences the notions of a "woman's place" in Western human culture.
The objection to killing animals is equated with sentimentality, childish emotions, or "Bambi-morality." This objection is seen as "womanish," or feminine. The modern philosopher Spinoza's oft-quoted opinion was that the objection to killing animals was "based upon an empty superstition and womanish tenderness, rather than upon sound reason." In a society that equates females with emotions and "irrational" behavior, it is no wonder that vegetarianism has been seen as a woman's project, as sentimentalist, and equated with women's status in patriarchal culture.
Meat and Language We live in a culture that has institutionalized the oppression of domesticated animals on at least two levels: in formal structures (such as slaughterhouses, meat markets, zoos, laboratories, and circuses), and in language. Language influences meat consumption by replacing references to living animals with the parts of the animals that are consumed and defining "meat" in exclusively positive terms. That we refer to eating "meat" rather than "animals" is one example of an "absent referent," or how language erases the thing it refers to.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines "meat" as "the essence or principle part of something." Thus we have the "meat of the matter," and a "meaty question." To "beef up" something is to somehow improve it. "Vegetable," on the other hand, represents less desirable characteristics: "suggesting or like a vegetable, as in passivity or dullness of existence, monotonous, inactive." Meat is "something one enjoys or excels in." Vegetables represent someone who does not enjoy anything: "a person who leads a monotonous, passive, or merely physical existence." To vegetate is to lead a passive existence, just as to be feminine is to be passive. The irony, of course, is that fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds are the only living food (i.e. the cells are still alive), while meat is a dead, fiberless, lethargy-producing "food." Nevertheless, once vegetables are viewed as "women's food," then by association they become viewed as feminine, passive. To rethink gender categories and limits of terms such as "masculine" and "feminine" is to rethink the categorizing and inherent hierarchy of meat and non-meat food.
Objectification, Fragmentation, Consumption Animal oppression through meat consumption is fundamentally related to women's oppression through our language. Men use language to equate women and parts of women's bodies with animals. Men derogatorily call women "chicks," "bunnies," "bitches," "squirrels," "pussycats," "cows," "nags," "foxes," "old bats," "biddies," and a woman's vagina "beaver." Why do these metaphors work? And how do they work to perpetuate the oppression of both women and animals?
Both women and animals go through a process, metaphorically and literally, of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption which links butchering and sexual violence in our culture. Objectification permits an oppressor to view another being as an object or thing. The oppressor then violates this being by object-like treatment: e.g. rape or butchery.
Our patriarchal society fragmentizes women and animals through the same process. Men describe women through their breasts, legs, thighs, ass, and vagina, connecting them to the consumable body parts of a chicken, pig, or cow. This form of objectification denies women as whole, complex and living entities. They are simply bits and pieces to be consumed: a piece of ass, women's breasts, and a pussy. Similarly, people do not recognize that the animal on their dinner plate was once a living creature; they see only a side of steak, chicken breasts, a liver and ribs. When a man says "nice rack," we must look to see if his reference is an animal's body part or a woman's. In Tom Petty's video, "Don't Come 'Round Here No More," the male Mad Hatter cuts up Alice as if she were a birthday cake (white on the outside, red on the inside) and consumes her with the other males in the group while she screams in pain. The controversial cover of a Hustler Magazine two decades ago showed a woman going into a meat grinder and coming out as ground beef. In countless movies, from "Brother Moon, Sister Sky" to "Footloose," women are referred to as "dessert," consumable and deliciously sweet. Women's flesh becomes food, nourishing the patriarchal order of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption of both women and animals.
Meat and Radical Feminism Animals become absent referents in at least three ways. Animals are literally absent from meat eating because they are dead. Another absent referent is definitional-when we eat animals we change the way we talk about them. We refer to baby cows as veal, steers as roast beef, steak, and hamburgers, pigs as pork, bacon, and sausage, chickens as breasts and legs. The third way in which animals become absent referents is metaphorical. The fate of animals becomes a metaphor for describing people's experiences: "I feel like a piece of meat." Animals become absent referents because their fate is a metaphor for someone else's experience. The meaning of the treatment of animals is undercut and absorbed into a human-centered hierarchy of meaning.
Cultural images of butchering and sexual violence are so connected that animals act as absent referents even in radical feminist discourse. In this sense, radical feminist theory participates in the same set of representational structures it seeks to expose. Radical feminists appropriate the experience of animals to interpret their own violation. They have claimed that that pornography depicts woman as a "female piece of meat," that "women in brothels can be used like animals in cages." Linda Lovelace claims that when presented to Xaviera Hollander for inspection, "Xaviera looked me over like a butcher inpecting a side of beef." In each of these examples, feminists have used violence against animals as metaphor, literalizing and feminizing the metaphor, occluding the fate of the animal.
In constructing stories about violence against women, feminists have drawn on the same set of cultural images as their oppressors. According to Carol Adams, feminist critics collapse sexuality and consumption and have titled this nexus "carnivorous arrogance" (Simon de Beauvoir), "gynocidal gluttony" (Mary Daly), "sexual cannibalism" (Kate Millet), "psychic cannibalism" (Andrea Dworkin), "metaphysical cannibalism" (Ti-Grace Atkinson). These feminist theorists take us to the intersection of the oppression of women and the oppression of animals and then do an about-face, seizing the function of the absent referent to forward women's issues and so imitating and complementing a patriarchal structure. These women co-opt what is actually done to animals.
I suggest that these feminists should theorize in ways that show an understanding of why their metaphors work. If women are going to claim that they have the experience of being oppressed in bodily ways, through sexual violence realized in objectification, fragmentation, and consumption, then why don't they use meat metaphors to liberate both their situation and the plight of other oppressed sentient beings?
Conclusion June Brindel in Carol Adam's The Sexual Politics of Meat, writes: "The plant world, in contrast to the animal world, supplies the food, clothing and shelter of people since time out of mind, as well as our model of the wonder of life-in its cycle of growth and decay, blossom and seed, wherein death and life appear as transformations of a single, superordinated, indestructible force." The plant world yields imagery of tending, nurturing, slow evolutionary change, and harmony with the seasons. However, the institutionalized violence of meat consumption needs to be understood in the context of vegetarian alternatives without romanticizing women as more "natural." The political implications of vegetarian feminist activism are derived from a sense of organic unity rather than disjunction; harvest rather than violence; living in harmony rather than having dominion over others. We should not be afraid of wanting a more peaceful, organic, less violent society to live in. We should, however, be afraid of objectification of women as somehow like animals, which allows the suppression of women in a patriarchal society. Nevertheless, animals are exploited in similar ways to women because both are objectified, fragmentized, and consumed by a patriarchal culture. To conclude, the affirming goal of uniting feminist and vegetarian insights is this: to create a political symbolism based on an affirmation of a diet drawn from the plant world.
_________ * This essay was largely inspired by and has benefited immeasurably from the theorizing of Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan. See Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat and Neither Man nor Beast. For a copy of works cited, quote sources, and location of photographs used, please call Evan at x5023. |