The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations)
Page 10
In Total Joy, Marabel Morgan unites women and animals through the use of the metaphor of hamburger. Morgan fosters her own Shmoo syndrome in advising women to consider themselves like hamburger in serving their husbands’ needs: “but like hamburger you may have to prepare yourself in a variety of different ways now and then.”50 Her sentence structure—“like hamburger you may”—implies that hamburger prepares itself in a variety of ways, and so must you. But hamburger, long before arriving in the kitchen of the total woman, has been denied all agency and can do no preparing. “You,” woman/ wife, refers to and stands in for hamburger. Women stand in relationship to the “total woman” as they do to “hamburger,” as something that is objectified, without agency, that must be prepared, reshaped, acculturated to be made consumable in a patriarchal world. Though the referent is absent, women cannot escape recognizing themselves in it. And just as animals do not desire to be eaten, Morgan’s sentence structure subverts her attempt to convince women that they do.
How does one turn a resistant, kicking, fearful subject into pieces of meat? To be converted from subject into object requires anesthetizing. G. J. Barker-Benfield tells us of a nineteenth-century medical man who came to the assistance of a man who wished to have sex with his wife. The physician arrived at the residence of the couple two or three times a week, “to etherize the poor wife.”51 The anesthetizing of animals as a prelude to butchering reminds us of this doctor’s complicity in marital rape. What cannot easily be done to a fully awake and struggling body can be accomplished with an anesthetized one, as we have learned with the development of “rape drugs” like GHB, rohypnol, and ketamine.
Anesthetization is an essential practice in butchering.52 A seduced animal results in a more economical operation, safer and better working conditions for the butcher, and, quite simply, produces higher quality meat. Animals’ muscular tissue contains sufficient glycogen to produce a preservative, lactic acid, after death. But this glycogen can be used up by physical and nervous tension before death. Thus, a seduction routine to calm the victim, and medical intervention to anesthetize the victim, act as the prelude to butchering. Excited, frightened, and overheated animals will not bleed fully, and their dead flesh will be pink or fiery, making them “unattractive carcasses.”53 “Eat My Fear,” a fiberglass cow created for New York City’s Cowparade 2000 by filmmaker David Lynch, was barred from participation: a reminder that consumers desire desensitization, too.
The seduction of “meat-producing animals” begins with tranquilizers, which are either injected into the bodies or inserted into the animals’ feed. With a minimum of excitement and discomfort, the animals must then be immobilized. Immobilization may occur by mechanical, chemical, or electrical methods. The goal is not to kill the animals outright—as Arabella informs Jude in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure—but to stun them and initiate bleeding while the heart continues to beat, helping to push the blood out.
Curiously, as the animals move closer to the actual act of slaughter, the descriptions of the meat industry use language that implies the animals are willing their own actions. The more immobilized the animals become the more likely the words describing the slaughtering process will refer to them as though they were mobile, so their movements appear entirely their own: “emerging,” facing in the same direction, and “sliding.”54 The concept of seduction has prevailed; animals appear to be active and willing agents in the “rape” of their lives.
Fragment #5: Jack the Ripper
I had always been fond of her in the most innocent, asexual way. It was as if her body was always entirely hidden behind her radiant mind, the modesty of her behavior, and her taste in dress. She had never offered me the slightest chink through which to view the glow of her nakedness. And now suddenly the butcher knife of fear had slit her open. She was as open to me as the carcass of a heifer slit down the middle and hanging on a hook. There we were . . . and suddenly I felt a violent desire to make love to her. Or to be more exact, a violent desire to rape her.
—Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting55
The overlap of categories of violated women and butchered animals is illustrated by the response to Jack the Ripper, who killed eight women in 1888. At the heart of his male violence was not murder alone, but sexual mutilation and possession by the removal of the uterus. He displayed skill in handling his implement of butchering; as the police surgeon concluded, he was “someone very handy with the knife.”56 In addition, he displayed knowledge of women’s bodies by his precise butchering of specific body parts. “Indeed the principal objective of the murderer seems to have been evisceration of the body after the victim had been strangled and had her throat cut. When the murderer had enough time, the uterus and other internal organs were removed, and the women’s insides were often strewn about.”57 For instance, after Katharine Eddowes was murdered, her left kidney and her uterus were missing.
The image of butchered animals haunted those who investigated the crimes. Women’s fate became that traditionally reserved for animals. First, women were disemboweled by Jack the Ripper in such a fashion that it allowed for but one comparison, as the police surgeon reported: “She was ripped open just as you see a dead calf at a butcher’s shop.”58 After viewing one victim whose small intestine and parts of the stomach were lying above her right shoulder and part of the stomach over her left shoulder, a young policeman could not eat meat. “My food sickened me. The sight of a butcher shop nauseated me.”59 The absent referent of meat suddenly became present when the objects were butchered women.
Secondly, Jack the Ripper’s demonstrated skill with the implement of butchering, the knife, led the authorities to suspect the killer was either a butcher, hunter, slaughterman, or properly qualified surgeon. According to the police report, “seventy-six butchers and slaughterers have been visited and the characters of the men employed enquired into.”60
Thirdly, one of the motives proposed for Jack the Ripper’s interest in the uterus demonstrates that women felt they were being treated like animals in terms of medical experimentation: it was rumored that an American was paying twenty pounds a womb for medical research. Jack the Ripper was thought to be supplying him.61 Lastly, one London minister, the Reverend S. Barnett, proposed that public slaughterhouses be removed because seeing them tends “to brutalise a thickly crowded population, and to debase the children.”62
Fragment #6: The butchering of women
Now I get coarse when the abstract nouns start flashing.
I go out to the kitchen to talk cabbages and habits.
I try hard to remember to watch what people do.
Yes, keep your eyes on the hands, let the voice go buzzing.
Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh,
watch who they beat and who they eat
—Marge Piercy, “In the men’s room(s)”63
Animals’ fate in butchering is exploited in the oppression of women, and it is invoked by feminists concerned with stopping women’s oppression. While animals are the absent objects, their fate is continually summoned through the metaphor of butchering. Butchering is that which creates or causes one’s existence as meat; metaphorical “butchering” silently invokes the violent act of animal slaughter while reinforcing raped women’s sense of themselves as “pieces of meat.” Andrea Dworkin observes that “the favorite conceit of male culture is that experience can be fractured, literally its bones split, and that one can examine the splinters as if they were not part of the bone, or the bone as if it were not part of the body.” (We dwell on the T-bone steak or the drumstick as if it were not part of a body.) Dworkin’s dissection of the body of culture resounds with meaning when we consider the concept of animals’ status as absent referent: “Everything is split apart: intellect from feeling and/or imagination; act from consequence; symbol from reality; mind from body. Some part substitutes for the whole and the whole is sacrificed to the part.”64 Dworkin’s metaphorical description of patriarchal culture depends on the reader�
��s knowledge that animals are butchered in this way.
Images of butchering suffuse patriarchal culture. A steakhouse in New Jersey was called “Adam’s Rib.” Who do they think they were eating? The Hustler, prior to its incarnation as a pornographic magazine, was a Cleveland restaurant whose menu presented a woman’s buttocks on the cover and proclaimed, “We serve the best meat in town!” Who? A woman is shown being ground up in a meat grinder as Hustler magazine proclaims: “Last All Meat Issue.” Women’s buttocks are stamped as “Choice Cuts” on an album cover entitled “Choice Cuts (Pure Food and Drug Act).” When asked about their sexual fantasies, many men describe “pornographic scenes of disembodied, faceless, impersonal body parts: breasts, legs, vaginas, buttocks.”65 Meat for the average consumer has been reduced to exactly that: faceless body parts, breasts, legs, udders, buttocks. Frank Perdue plays with images of sexual butchering in a poster encouraging chicken consumption: “Are you a breast man or a leg man?”
A popular poster in the butcher shops of the Haymarket section of Boston depicted a woman’s body sectioned off as though she were a slaughtered animal, with her separate body parts identified. In response to such an image, dramatists Dario Fo and Franca Rame scripted this narrative:
There was a drawing of a naked lady all divided up into different sections. You know . . . like those posters in the butcher’s shop of a cow? And all the erogenous zones were painted these incredible colours. For instance, the rump was painted shocking pink. (Does a bump and grind and laughs.) Then this part here (Putting her hands on her back just below her neck) . . . butchers call it chuck. It was purple. And the fillet . . . (Briefly diverted) What about the price of fillet nowadays eh? Terrible! Well anyway, it was orange.66
Norma Benney in “All of One Flesh: The Rights of Animals” describes the centerfold of a music magazine that “showed a naked woman, spread-eagled and chained on an operating table in a butcher’s shop surrounded by hanging animal carcasses and butchers’ knives and cleavers while a man in a red, rubber, butcher’s apron prepared to divide her with an electric saw.”67 In this context, colloquial expressions such as “piece of ass,” “I’m a breast man,” and “I’m a thigh man” reveal their assaultive origins. (Although men may be called “stud” and “hunk,” these terms only reconfirm the fluidity of the absent referent, and reinforce the extremely specific, assaultive ways in which “meat” is used to refer to women. Men possess themselves as “meat,” women are possessed.)
These examples suggest a paradigm of metaphorical sexual butchering of which the essential components are:
•the knife, real or metaphorical, as the chosen implement (in pornography the camera lens takes the place of the knife, committing implemental violence)
•the aggressor seeking to control/consume/defile the body of the victim
•the fetishism of body parts
•meat eating provides the image of butchered animals
Metaphoric sexual butchering recurs in literature and movies extolling images of butchered women. We find the rape and subsequent butchering of a woman in the Hebrew Bible book of Judges. A Levite allows his concubine to be savagely raped by strangers: “They raped her and tortured her all night until the morning.”68 She falls down at the doorway of the house where the Levite is staying. He puts her on his donkey —we do not know if she is dead or alive—and takes her to his house. “He took the knife and he seized his concubine. He cut her, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel.”69 Similarly, in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Woman Who Rode Away” a New Woman rides into a situation where she is to be sacrificed to the sun by a group of men in a cave. Lawrence’s language evokes both literal and sexual consumption. Kate Millet offers an acute analysis of this tale: “This is a formula for sexual cannibalism: substitute the knife for the penis and penetration, the cave for a womb, and for a bed, a place of execution—and you provide a murder whereby one acquires one’s victim’s power.”70
Sexual butchering is a basic component of male pornographic sexuality. The infamous “snuff movies,” so-named for the snuffing out of a woman’s life in the last few minutes of the movie, celebrate women’s butchering as a sexual act:
A pretty young blond woman who appears to be a production assistant tells the director how sexually aroused she was by the stabbing [of a pregnant woman] finale. The attractive director asks her if she would like to go to bed with him and act out her fantasies. They start fumbling around in bed until she realizes that the crew is still filming. She protests and tries to get up. The director picks up a dagger that is lying on the bed and says, “Bitch, now you’re going to get what you want.” What happens next goes beyond the realm of language. He butchers her slowly, deeply, and thoroughly. The observer’s gut revulsion is overwhelming at the amount of blood, chopped-up fingers, flying arms, sawed-off legs, and yet more blood oozing like a river out of her mouth before she dies. But the climax is still at hand. In a moment of undiluted evil, he cuts open her abdomen and brandishes her very insides high above his head in a scream of orgasmic conquest.71
“Snuff” movies are the apotheosis of metaphoric sexual butchering, embodying all the necessary components: the dagger as implement, the female victim, the defiling of the body and the fetishism of female parts. In the absence of an actual victim, snuff exists as a reminder of what happens to animals all the time.
In constructing stories about violence against women, feminists have drawn on the same set of cultural images as their oppressors. Feminist critics perceive the violence inherent in representations that collapse sexuality and consumption and have titled this nexus “carnivorous arrogance” (Simone de Beauvoir), “gynocidal gluttony” (Mary Daly), “sexual cannibalism” (Kate Millet), “psychic cannibalism” (Andrea Dworkin), “metaphysical cannibalism” (Ti-Grace Atkinson); racism as it intersects with sexism has been defined by bell hooks in distinctions based on meat eating: “The truth is—in sexist America, where women are objectified extensions of male ego, black women have been labeled hamburger and white women prime rib.”72 These feminist theorists take us to the intersection of the oppression of women and the oppression of animals and then do an immediate about-face, seizing the function of the absent referent only to forward women’s issues, not animals’, and so reflecting a patriarchal structure. Dealing in symbols and similes that express humiliation, objectification, and violation is an understandable attempt to impose order on a violently fragmented female sexual reality. When we use meat and butchering as metaphors for women’s oppression, we express our own hog-squeal of the universe while silencing the primal hog-squeal of Ursula Hamdress herself.
When radical feminists talk as if cultural exchanges with animals are literally true in relationship to women, they invoke and borrow what is actually done to animals. It could be argued that the use of these metaphors is as exploitative as the posing of Ursula Hamdress: an anonymous pig somewhere was dressed, posed, and photographed. Was she sedated to keep that pose or was she, perhaps, dead? Radical feminist theory participates linguistically in exploiting and denying the absent referent by not including in their vision Ursula Hamdress’s fate. They butcher the animal/woman cultural exchanges represented in the operation of the absent referent and then address themselves solely to women, thus capitulating to the absent referent, part of the same construct they wish to change.73
What is absent from much feminist theory that relies on metaphors of animals’ oppression for illuminating women’s experience is the reality behind the metaphor. Feminist theorists’ use of language should describe and challenge oppression by recognizing the extent to which these oppressions are culturally analogous and interdependent.
So, too, should animal advocates be wary of language that uses rape metaphorically to describe what happens to animals, without basing their analysis on a recognition of the social context of rape for women in our culture. Metaphoric borrowing that depends on violation yet fails to protest the originating violence doe
s not acknowledge interlocking oppressions. Our goal is to resist the violence that separates matter from spirit, to eliminate the structure that creates absent referents.
It is tempting to think that all that has been discussed in this chapter are words, ideas, “abstract nouns,” how images work: that there is no flesh and no kitchen. But there is fragmented flesh and there are kitchens in which it is found. Animals may be an absent referent point in discourse but this need not continue. What if we heeded Marge Piercy’s response to abstract nouns; let’s go into the kitchen and consider not only “who they beat” but “who [we] eat”? In incorporating the fate of animals we would encounter these issues: the relationship between imperialism and meat eating in imposing a “white” diet of meat eating on the dietary folkways of people of color; the ecological implications of what I consider to be the fourth stage of meat eating— the eating of institutionalized, factory-farmed animals (after stages of (1) practically no meat eating, (2) eating meat of free animals, and (3) eating meat of domesticated animals); the meaning of our dependence on female animals for “feminized protein” such as milk and eggs; issues of racism and classism that arise as we consider the role of the industrialized countries in determining what “first class” protein is—all of which are a part of the sexual politics of meat.
There is a model for us of living, breathing connections awaiting incorporation in our theory; a logical next step in the progression of feminist thought is politicizing the ambiguity and slippage inherent in the metaphors of sexual violence, as well as their social, historical, and animal origins. The next chapter begins this politicizing process by analyzing the role of language in masking violence and defining the conflict between a dominant worldview that accepts meat eating and the muted minority viewpoint of vegetarianism.