The Sexual Politics of Meat

Since I am developing a basic understanding of feminist theory, its language, I had so many personal revelations about language just from the prefaces of this book (There were 3 prefaces!). This book is about veganism even though the word vegetarianism is used, it is also about feminism and their symbolic usage of meat. It as well contains lots of literary and historical facts about veganism which I never heard before which makes this an utmost delightful read.

The sexual politics of meat is interested in the links of social movements and the injustices they seek to oppose, to dismantle thinking that only partly lets us get to a more ideal world. It is interested in connecting, uniting and strengthening us against the patriarchy and violent concepts that already have all the support and strength in the unawakened people. Being awake is being aware of the social justices so strongly that you cannot support our current systems anymore. You cannot think or read the same and your priorities shift onto different goals because you are so aware of the closed off world the ones who participate in the injustices live in.

The links between feminism and veganism are everywhere, they are highly apparent, examples used are countless and the book couldn't collect them all. If you are not familiar with the way feminists construct their arguments and aren't vegan I would think this would be a challenging read for you because you might just not be able to accept some of these links. You have to recognize the concepts discussed in the book as harmful in the first place for your brain to make the dots.

The most important fact about recognizing and hearing all those facts and analyses of old vegetarian literature is that we predominantly live inside corrupted imaginations of old, cowardly men, their horrible developed language and invisible constraints. We need to develop ways and take action to destroy their imaginations, challenge them so that they don't get to do horrendous actions and then get away unscraped. We need to live in our own imaginations and give meaning in our lives to actions that actually matter regardless of how devalued they are in our current broken, polluted and settled society. We need to be conscious of our language to create a world that serves us all as fellow human animals and nonhuman animal beings.

Examples of the terrible culture we created (These concepts build off each other like piles of corpses we leave behind!):

Meat gets sexualized in advertisements and minds of men subconsciously through the normalisation of violence and the acceptance of war, men even inflict violence in their imaginations via meat through feminising it and using the labels of animals as abusive, violent slang. As long as there is meat there will be wars. Animal lives and importance are hidden behind the label meat, it lets people to forget the process the animal goes through to become meat. Meat has been long associated with virile symbols while women have been left with gardening and the vegetables. Instead of recognizing that meat comes from the animal's flesh our society has created it as a symbol of power. Even though women were left off with better food, less meat they were historically told that they were weaker for it.

Lots of feminists don't recognize that using meat as a metaphor for their suffering invalides the suffering of the animals, but there is also a large number of eco-feminists who have eventually recognized this link. Lots of vegan activists could benefit from a familiarisation with feminist theory, it fills the gaps as to how to battle injustices and to not commit them further.

I love this book so much! It introduced me to so many new voices and I have so many more books to read now. Instead of people deflecting on us about how we should care about other specific issues, how about we recognize that social injustices are more connected than it at first appears? How about we build concepts instead of demolishing them, and heal collectively instead of going backwards?

Quotes:

“By the time Rush Limbaugh began talking about The Sexual Politics of Meat on his radio and television shows, I was inured to my work being an object of speculation. And when people buttonhole me demanding “What about the homeless, what about battered women?” and insist that we have to help suffering humans first, I am not thrown off by such assertive narrowing of the field of compassionate activism. I know that vegetarianism and animal activism in general can accompany social activism on behalf of disenfranchised people. I also know that this question is actually a defensive response, an attempt to deflect from an issue with which the interrogator feels uncomfortable. It is an attempt to have a moral upper hand. Only meat eaters raise this issue. No homeless advocate who is a vegetarian, no battered-women's advocate who is a vegetarian, would ever doubt that these issues can be approached in tandem. In addition, the point of The Sexual Politics of Meat is that we have to stop fragmenting activism; we cannot polarize human and animal suffering since they are interrelated.”

“Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The “absent referent” is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our “meat” separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the “moo” or “cluck” or “baa” away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone.”

“After being butchered, fragmented body parts are often renamed to obscure the fact that these were once animals. After death, cows become roast beef, steak, hamburger; pigs become pork, bacon, sausage. Since objects are possessions they cannot have possessions; thus, we say “leg of lamb” not a “lamb's leg,” “chicken wings” not a “chicken's wings.” We opt for less disquieting referent points not only by changing names from animals to meat, but also by cooking, seasoning, and covering the animals with sauces, disguising their original nature.”

“Correspondingly, vegetables and other nonmeat foods are viewed as women's food. This makes them undesirable to men. The Nuer men think that eating eggs is effeminate. In other groups men require sauces to disguise the fact that they are eating women's foods. “Men expect to have meat sauces to go with their porridge and will sometimes refuse to eat sauces made of greens or other vegetables, which are said to be women's food.””

“As Jo Stepaniak explains the coining of the word in The Vegan Sourcebook, the impetus was finding a word to replace
total vegetarian to describe vegetarians who do not use dairy products. The term prevailed over other suggestions at the time including dairybans, vitans, neovegetarians, benevores, bellevores, all-vegas, sanivores, and beaumangeurs. It was derived from the word vegetarian by taking the first three letters (veg) and the last two letters (an) because “veganism starts with vegetarianism and carries it through to its logical conclusions.””

“The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary recognized the word vegan in 1962. At some point, toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Microsoft Word's spelling program stopped underlining the word “vegan” as though it were a misspelling of something. For any vegan writer, this was a moment of lexicographical liberation. The word veganism, however, took longer.”

“For instance John Frank Newton's The Return to Nature; or, Defence of Vegetable Regimen posits that the two trees in the Garden of Eden represent “the two kinds of foods which Adam and Eve had before them in Paradise, viz. the vegetables and the animals.” The penalty for eating from the wrong tree was the death that Adam and Eve had been warned would befall them. But it was not immediate death; rather it was premature, diseased death caused by eating the wrong foods, i.e., meat.”

“Lappé argues that the land required to feed livestock would be better devoted to feeding humans.
This was a longstanding vegetarian issue and its first traces appear in Plato's Republic when Socrates tells Glaucon that meat production necessitates large amounts of pasture. Resultingly, it will require cutting “off a slice of our neighbours' territory; and if they too are not content with necessaries, but give themselves up to getting unlimited wealth, they will want a slice of ours.” Thus Socrates pronounces, “So the next thing will be, Glaucon, that we shall be at war.””