Gallery Carre
The Sexual Politics of Meat (Carol J. Adams)
Sep 17th, 2008 by Viviane
Sexual Politics of Meat Carol J. Adams
An evolving 1 and 1/4 hour dynamic and challenging presentation that discusses the images of women and animals in contemporary popular culture by drawing upon the ideas found in The Sexual Politics of Meat and Neither Man nor Beast. It introduces the concept of the absent referent through autobiography and then systematically applies an analysis of how it functions to explain the animalizing of women in contemporary cultural images and the sexualizing of animals used for food. It draws upon images that have been sent from around the world and is constantly being updated as it tracks changes in popular culture.
Carol Adams is widely adored by anti-porn activists in the animal rights scene, but folks like myself take serious issue with her anti-sex worker bigotry and generally nonsensical conclusions about women, sex, and death. Sex worker Mirha Soleil-Ross wrote a great long piece in response to Adams’ work, including how Carol Adams mockingly outed her as a transwoman at a conference as a means to discredit her: http://www.vegporn.com/board/showthread.php?t=99
I’m probably going to get crucified for saying this, but doesn’t the connection between food and sex predate mass media? I think it’s been hard-wired since the first time an australopithecine gatherer looked at the hunter who brought back a kill rather than eat it on the spot, and decided to give a reward of nookie.
Not only that, but when you say “meat” what is the gender that comes to mind first? I don’t know about anyone else but for me that’s a metaphor for men more than women. The slideshow is full of counterexamples, of course, so the connotation isn’t universal, but I think the connection between feminism and vegetarianism is a bit strained.
What do you call a battle where the (almost universally male) soldiers are suffering high casualties? You call it a “meat grinder”. Like perhaps the battle of “Hamburger Hill”?
Of course I needn’t list the euphemisms for male genitalia involving meat.
That being said, from a purely evolutionary perspective, the human body just isn’t put together to eat a whole lot of animal protein. All the evidence seems to point to an origin that actually has more to do with the beach than the savanna, and we seem to be built to eat fish rather than steak. Too bad there isn’t enough there to feed us all anymore, and as such a vegetarian diet may be the only healthy choice left.
It’s easy to grab a bunch of images with a common thread, and use them to make a convincing assertion about culture. Convincing, however, doesn’t mean well-proven. Now I haven’t seen the slideshow, and I haven’t heard the presentation. What is the point? What is she actually saying?
You say, “…to explain the animalizing of women in contemporary cultural images and the sexualizing of animals used for food.” What is that explanation? I don’t have the central theme.
as someone who farms on a small scale i would say this: i eat far more male animals than female animals. on a practical level, you only need one rooster, for instance, for ten chickens. if you have too many males, not only do they consume more food, but they get into horrible fights with each other and will dominate or even harm the females. this, in my experience, applies to chickens, ducks, geese, and goats. so, we kill and eat nine out of ten male animals for practical and of course tasty reasons. they aren’t cost productive to raise and if too many are around, they cause problems. i can’t say how factory farms do things, but anyone i know on a small scale is far more likely to cull and process the males versus the females. it just makes more sense.