August
2003
Connecting
Oppressions: Women and Animals
Book Review by Beth Fiteni
|
|
|
The Pornography of Meat by Carol J.
Adams (New York: Continuum, 2003). $24.95 Hardcover. 192 pages.
To say “I read” this book would be an understatement. It’s
more like I devoured it faster than my favorite veggie burger. In The
Pornography of Meat, Carol Adams again provokes us to think about
the connection between our meat infused-culture and our culture’s
oppression of women. Unlike Adams’s earlier book, The Sexual
Politics of Meat, a denser, more historically referenced work,
The Pornography of Meat brings us images and commentary—the
distillation of a slide show she has developed over the past decade.
The terminology “absent referent,” meaning the animal or
woman rendered invisible by language, discussed in her first book serves
as the foundation for The Pornography of Meat. Here, the focus
is brought to the process—how oppressors are taught to view “something”
and not “someone.” Adams compellingly illustrates how women
and animals are culturally turned into things.
She calls upon many examples of how both men and women are culturally
brainwashed by superimposed depictions of women and animals. The 173
pages are filled with images primarily from advertisements. Some of
them are ghastly, and she unburies the subtle underlying messages which
might otherwise pass through our subconscious unnoticed. Though the
reader may not agree with every analysis provided, it is definitely
thought-provoking. Getting inside the minds of the advertisers who would
sexually blend animals with female humans reminds us, as Katherine MacKinnon
did (ever so controversially) in the 1980s, that pornography is not
just “speech” it is also the documentation of an act, an
act of oppression and should be viewed as such. Adams makes it clear,
with a sense of humor even, that these images are not just jokes—they
actually say something serious about our culture. It is refreshing to
see in the sea of feminist scholars who make excuses for pornography,
someone who is still willing to openly question it and the harm it is
doing to people’s attitudes, which often is dismissed as intangible.
Adams reminds us of the violence that can result when humans think of
other living beings as “things” instead of individuals that
deserve respect: animals being cut open while still alive in incompetent
slaughterhouses, and machines sold in agricultural magazines to masturbate
the male pig or turkey in order to generate sperm used to artificially
inseminate the females of their respective species, neither of which
is the most pleasant job. But someone has to do it—and this is
what we don’t think about when we order meat at a restaurant because
it is so hidden away. It is partially hidden by the language we use—instead
of cow we say beef, just as instead of woman we say “chick, old
biddy,” etc. The result is de-animalized meat and dehumanized
women, broken down into parts, as a negative result of inequality.
She also discusses and challenges the common belief that men’s
manhood is somehow defined with eating meat, which represents dominance
and privilege over other beings, and also with hunting, using the example
of one hunter straddling the boar he just killed and pulling its ears
saying “I grab it like I grab my women.” It obviates the
widely accepted belief that I (and author Naomi Wolf) have always questioned
as being not biological but cultural—that men are the chasers
and women are the prey, the temptations. If nudity is shown in films/magazines,
for example, it’s almost always female and not male. Adams points
out that this protects men’s status while exposing women and making
them more vulnerable, something to be possessed. She poignantly illustrates
the lack of consideration exhibited by PETA, one of the best known animal
rights organizations, when it uses porn as a means to get out a message
about vegetarianism. This is trading the oppression of one group to
stop the oppression of another. It crosses the line of appropriateness
and reinforces a mindset of dominance which has no place in a peaceful
world. If men truly want sex and meat, as our current paradigm suggests,
would they not derive more pleasure from them if they were not oppressing
others to get them?
Overall the book has a good flow, and one chapter builds upon the last.
Sometimes it is a little difficult to follow her reference when it is
something the reader may not be familiar with, but each scenario described
is cited in the back. This book would be eye-opening to many, not just
feminists, and certainly would make readers more savvy of the subtle
message behind an advertisement for chicken legs or breasts that is
purposefully sexualized. What amazes me about Carol Adams is that she
has the dedication to put all of this information together and yet remain
positive enough to be the author of two books on the Inner Art of
Vegetarianism… she is quite the role model to any activist!
She beckons us to educate others and to bravely continue bringing consistent
and compassionate ideas to the society around us.
Beth Fiteni is a long-time animal, environmental,
and feminist activist from Long Island, who has worked for various nonprofit
advocacy organizations in New York and Washington, DC.
