The Sexual Politics of Meat
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The Sexual Politics of Meat
A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory
Carol J. Adams
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
In memory of
56 billion each year,
153.4 million each day,
6.4 million each hour,
106,546 each minute
It is not possible now, and never will be, to say I renounce. Nor would it be a good thing for literature were it possible. This generation must break its neck in order that the next may have smooth going. For I agree with you that nothing is going to be achieved by us. Fragments—paragraphs—a page perhaps: but no more. . . . The human soul, it seems to me, orientates itself afresh every now and then. It is doing so now. No one can see it whole, therefore. The best of us catch a glimpse of a nose, a shoulder, something turning away, always in movement. Still it seems better to me to catch this glimpse.
—Virginia Woolf to Gerald Brenan Christmas Day, 1922
We have learned to use anger as we have learned to use the dead flesh of animals, and bruised, battered and changing, we have survived and grown and, in Angela Wilson’s words, we are moving on.
—Audre Lorde
“The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”
Say Stella, when you copy next,
Will you keep strictly to the text?
—Jonathan Swift
“To Stella, Who Collected and Transcribed His Poems”
Contents
Illustrations
Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition
Preface to the Original Edition
Foreword by Nellie McKay
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary/Bloomsbury Revelations Edition
Part I The Patriarchal Texts of Meat
1The Sexual Politics of Meat
2The Rape of Animals, the Butchering of Women
3Masked Violence, Muted Voices
4The Word Made Flesh
Part II From the Belly of Zeus
5Dismembered Texts, Dismembered Animals
6Frankenstein’s Vegetarian Monster
7Feminism, the Great War, and Modern Vegetarianism
Part III Eat Rice Have Faith in Women
8The Distortion of the Vegetarian Body
9For a Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory
Epilogue: Destabilizing Patriarchal Consumption
Afterword to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary/ Bloomsbury Revelations Edition
Notes
Select Bibliography
Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Bibliography
Copyright Acknowledgments
Index
Illustrations
Frontispiece First American paperback edition of The Sexual Politics of Meat, 1991.
1Ursula Hamdress.
2Liberate Your Language.
3Mrs. Pig, horrified by her son’s choice of words.
4He as a Major Power; She as a Minor Power.
5Joseph Ritson as his contemporaries saw him.
6“So Good, Even Guys Like Our Salads.”
7June 2009 Muscle and Fitness cover.
8“Give Your Boyfriend a Lesson in How to Bring Home the Bacon.”
9“Putting together a Barbecue.” Lion Red Beer.
10“Porca Vaca,” Italy.
11Playboy in Brazil.
12“Pollo Campero’s.”
13Domino’s pizza box cover.
14Cows standing on painfully overgrown hooves at small-scale “dairy” farm.
15“Fat Selfish Bitch.”
16“Moanin’ for the Bone.”
17Memphis in May 2013.
18“Shrimplee D’Licious.”
19“Stand Up and Take It Like a Woman” T-shirt.
20“Amanti della Carne,” Italy.
21Sexual politics of meat grid.
22Filthy Cow, Manchester, England.
23Burger King “Gold Collection,” Germany.
24Dutch vegan-feminist graffiti.
25Resistance through great vegan food.
PREFACE TO THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION OF THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF MEAT
* * *
Imagine the day when women walk down streets and are not harassed, stalked, or attacked. Imagin
e the day when we don’t need battered women’s shelters. Imagine the day when the most frequent mass murderers in our culture are NOT those who kill their families.
Better yet, imagine the day when we live in a world where women are safe wherever they are, family members are safe within their homes, and we don’t have mass murderers.
Imagine the day when people respond to someone who says “but I need my sausage in the morning,” by saying, “oh that’s so twentieth century. You know, the century when some of the earliest people talking about climate change were animal activists who understood the interconnections between environmental destruction and animal agriculture”
Better yet, imagine the day when people no longer feel they need a “sausage” in the morning.
Imagine the day when women and children are not sold into sexual slavery or prostituted or pornographed.
Better yet, imagine the day when equality, rather than dominance, is sexy.
Equality isn’t an idea; it is a practice. We practice it when we don’t treat other people or other animals as objects. We practice it when we ask “what are you going through?” and understand that we ask the question because it matters to all of us what some are experiencing.
Once upon a time, people thought vegan food wasn’t tasty and that feminists were puritans. They thought that if you accepted the logic of The Sexual Politics of Meat it meant you had to give up things, you had to “sacrifice.” The entire point of the sexual politics of meat is that there is something on the other side of this culture of oppression—and that something is better, better for us, better for the environment, better for relationships, better for the animals.
As I explain in the preface to the tenth anniversary edition, The Sexual Politics of Meat exists because of activism. It is engaged theory, theory that arises from anger at what is; theory that envisions what is possible. Engaged theory makes change possible. It doesn’t just sit down next to you at a dining table and ask, “Do you know what you are participating in as you choose what to eat?” It also says, “There is something more exciting, more fulfilling, more honest than eating a dead animal as hamburger or pork loin.” It doesn’t only offer a critique—a critique of sexist ads on behalf of animal activism or a vegan strip club, or sexist ads from Burger King, or a “Gentlemen’s” steak club. It affirms: “There is a life of integrity that you can live when you recognize women’s equality.” Engaged theory exposes problems, but also offers solutions.
Engaged theory makes resistance empowering. We are creating a new culture—a culture not of top down thought or top down actions. We don’t need “deciders” who abdicate principles; we need “engagers” who understand that everything is connected.
The Sexual Politics of Meat is about making connections. It is about liberation from harmful and limiting beliefs.
For the past twenty years, The Sexual Politics of Meat has changed the lives of readers because through this book they grasp the possibility of the world on the other side of oppression—and they have understood the importance of activism in bringing this world into being.
For some, The Sexual Politics of Meat has given new meaning to their longtime activism for women, for animals, for the environment. For others, it has introduced a new idea that jolts them into a realization of why the world they live in has been so alienating. It makes sense of their lives.
I have loved all the ways that people have responded to the ideas in The Sexual Politics of Meat. I love all the zines—anarchist, radical fem-veg, teenage vegan werewolf (I made that one up), that have been inspired by the book. I love all the letters that I get that say “my cousin lent me your book and when I was done my mother read it and now my sister is reading it.” I love that The Sexual Politics of Meat was read in jails after people arrested for protesting animal abuse were waiting for arraignment. I love that a group of women got the same words from The Sexual Politics of Meat tattooed on different parts of their bodies. I love that readers find in it what they need, and inspired by it are creating new relationships. I love that one woman told me how she had fallen in love with someone, but before they could marry, she insisted her lover read the book. He did; he grasped its meaning, flew across the United States, and at their marriage celebration had the most luscious vegan chocolate cake. (They shared the recipe with me.)
I love hearing from young people, sometimes several years after they were first introduced to the ideas of The Sexual Politics of Meat, who have seen or heard something and it confirms the analysis found in the book. They write to share it with me.
Parents have bought the book for children, children for their parents, grandparents for their grandchildren, lovers for their partners, students for their teachers.
I know this book only from the inside out. I know it from my years of trying to make sense of an intuitive glimpse at a connection, which then demanded that it be written. At first, I did not know it would change my life so thoroughly, that after it was published people would send me images, commercials, menu covers, matchbooks, and newspaper articles. I did not know that I would be on a continual quest to make sense of these images, creating a slide show to explain the ideas of the sexual politics of meat, that I would end up traveling around the country, and the world, to discuss these ideas and show these images. I only knew that I could not live with myself if I didn’t find a way to make sense of what I had intuited. The idea would not let go of me until I explained it. Because of the images I received and needed to interpret, I was compelled by my readers to write The Pornography of Meat, an image-based companion volume to The Sexual Politics of Meat.
When people write to tell me how the book changed their lives, I am given a sense of the book from the outside in, of how The Sexual Politics of Meat affirmed that one’s life decisions mattered, and that what our culture viewed as discrete concerns (feminism and veganism) were deeply interconnected.
I know The Sexual Politics of Meat gave new justifications for caring about animals. It provided a theory for an activist life committed to change, to challenging objectification, to challenging a culture built on killing and violence.
As for scholars who have written me, it appears that The Sexual Politics of Meat was one of the books that provided a model for placing animals in the center of scholarship, helping birth the fields of animal studies and ecocriticism.
It’s hard to know precisely—to bridge the gap that always exists between writer and reader—but I think these are some of the reasons the New York Times called The Sexual Politics of Meat “a bible of the vegan community.”
The Sexual Politics of Meat speaks to people because they too imagine a day in which equality prevails.
I was not the only one in 1974 imagining a future that liberated us from limited and oppressive beliefs. I was part of a community. We had been protesting a war for many years (sound familiar?) and we were creating alternative institutions. We imagined a world different from the one we lived in. Some of what we worked for has come into being. Thanks to the work of radical feminists of the 1970s, sexual harassment has been recognized in the law, domestic violence shelters have been created and funded, rape shield laws have been passed. As we worked to end violence, we also worked to protect its victims.
What is “the sexual politics of meat”? It is an attitude and action that animalizes women and sexualizes and feminizes animals. In 2008, we learned about the chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who posted materials to a website including a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a partially- dressed man interacting with a sexually aroused farm animal.1 The woman, animalized; the animal, sexualized. That’s the sexual politics of meat.
The Sexual Politics of Meat is also the assumption that men need meat, have the right to meat, and that meat eating is a male activity associated with virility. Recent examples of this include Burger King ads against “chick foods” (asparagus quiche) in which men proclaim the right to eat meat and throw a truck off an overpass to
affirm their maleness. Another example is a US male military camp with a ceremony that concludes with a steak dinner being given to new recruits by their “fathers,” that is, older recruits.2 That’s the sexual politics of meat, too.
I wish our culture did not offer abundant examples of The Sexual Politics of Meat. Since the publication of the Tenth Anniversary Edition, the Bush Presidency, and the reign of the Republicans through most of the first decade of the twenty-first century, contributed countless examples. Steak restaurants returned to popularity in Washington after Bush was installed as President by the Supreme Court. Bush’s cultivated image of “rancher/cowboy” was all part of the creation of a macho “decider” persona.
At Abu Ghraib, the infamous Iraqi prison, American soldiers reduced Iraqis to animal status and exploited male-female roles to insult Iraqi men and destroy resistance. With this example, the Bush Presidency reinscribed the sexual politics of meat at a new level.
As Susan Faludi shows in The Terror Dream, after 9/11 the media hyped John Wayne-like masculinity, Superman-like male powers, and the hypervirility of rescuers and politicians. Thus we learned that, after the World Trade Centers fell, the first meal Mayor Guiliani wolfed down was a sandwich made of “meats that sweat.”3 Where there is (anxious) virility, one will find meat eating.
A 2006 Hummer advertisement features a man buying tofu in a supermarket. Next to him a man is buying “meat that sweats”—gobs of it. The tofu-buying man, alert to and anxious about his virility because of the man with all his meat next to him in the line, hurries from the grocery store and heads straight to a Hummer dealership. He buys a new Hummer and is shown happily driving away, munching on carrot. The original tag line for the ad was “Restore your manhood.”4 The sexual politics of meat.
If Bush’s policies and the media hype around politicians like Guiliani created a new urgency to expose the sexual politics of meat, we feminist-vegan activists received help from an unexpected source—a great French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. At the same time that the first edition of The Sexual Politics of Meat went to press, Derrida’s “Eating Well” was published in English. In this text, the idea of “carno-phallogocentrism” was introduced.