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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.

 


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