Even though the non-human female animals are alive, dairy products and eggs are not victimless foods. Female non-humans are the absent referents in the consumption of dairy/eggs.
Flesh eaters often justify their actions saying that, “the animals wouldn’t exist if I didn’t eat them.” In fact, there would be no flesh eating if female non-humans weren’t constantly made pregnant. Female animals are forced to manufacture “meat” for production through their reproductive abuse. Talk about alienated labor! Reproduction is devalued and kept captive. As Barbara Noske explains:
While for the male home and work are separate, and for the female work is in the home as well, animal “workers” cannot “go home” at all. The modern animal industry does not allow them to “go home”—they are exploited 24 hours a day. In the case of animals the “home” itself has been brought under factory control. . . . Indeed, it is often the sphere of reproduction (mating, breeding, the laying of eggs), which the capitalist seeks to exploit.22
Out of the day-to-day suffering inflicted on female farmed animals arises a contempt that those who suffer for us are beneath our notice; names associated with the female reproductive system become insults: cow, pig, sow, hen, old biddy, bitch all have negative connotations . . . terms for women derived from females who have absolutely no control over their reproductive choices.
Figure 14 The Canadian photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur spent a full day at a small-scale dairy and veal farm, witnessing milk line production, artificial insemination, and the birth of a calf who was taken away from her mother less than fifteen minutes after she was born to become a veal calf. After being dumped in a wheelbarrow, she was wheeled to her new home, a veal crate. The first food for the veal calf was colostrum from a bottle.
McArthur reports that the cows at the small-scare farm know no pasture. Their days are spent standing on hard surfaces. Painfully overgrown hooves are a result of sedentary days and the cement they stand on their whole lives.
This photograph shows the mothers being milked through a meticulously motorized and computerized system as they stand on their painfully overgrown hooves.
For photographs that record McArthur’s day at this small-scale dairy see www.weanimals.org under “Dairy and Veal Farm.”
Photograph copyright © Jo-Anne McArthur. Used with permission.
How is reproductive slavery normalized and naturalized? It may seem counterintuitive, but one way is to exhibit it. In the past, this involved selling enslaved African-Americans at public auctions or encouraging artistic depictions of “odalisques” (female slaves in the Ottoman Empire).23 Now, sows are transported to the California State Fair and kept on display in farrowing crates with their babies. This form of reproductive slavery begins with synchronizing sows’ pregnancies and delivery (including inducing labor). After giving birth, the sows are placed in farrowing crates. Farrowing crates were ostensibly created to keep the sow from rolling over and crushing her offspring. One wonders how pigs avoided extinction for all the centuries that they birthed prior to the creation of these body-gripping cages.
The farrowing crate frames female re-productivity: the supposedly revered maternal body is controlled, dominated, displayed, and objectified. In fact, this captive reproduction deprives sows of expressing their maternal instinct which is to nurse and care for the piglets away from people.
The sow is burdened by sexist cultural representations that show her as wanting to be dominated, pregnant, and consumed. Consider “Lisa,” a part of an exhibit at the annual convention of “pork producers.” (The sow is—against her will—the real “pork producer.”) Lisa, a buxom cartoon pig with stockings, heels, garters, lipstick, was a part of an exhibit for pharmaceuticals. In the six foot high advertisement, a human-size Lisa gazes toward exhibitors while fondling the medicine that is being advertised. The large exhibit announces, “Lisa gives you one more pig per year.” For “Lisa,” production and reproduction are the same act, and her body is the raw material of production. It is because of the sow that “pork” and “bacon” exist; her status is so low she can be exhibited in her painful, cramped cage of motherhood. Exhibiting her is the act of reassurance that such treatment is okay. We can consult our own bodies (for instance after a cross country flight), and know that being confined and having restricted movement is not comfortable. Upon landing, besides reaching for their luggage stowed above them, people rise from their seats and stretch.
Any exhibit of sows in farrowing crates wants us to gawk, and in gawking be reassured. Discomfort? Anguish? “Lisa” and her sisters never get to stretch. Instead she invites, with her sexy pose, “I want you to use me.”
While the image of “Lisa” committed discursive violence, it existed to support a material form of violence. The sows at the California State Fair are not representations; they are actual beings like the sow from an undercover investigation by Mercy for Animals.
Figure 15 “Fat Selfish Bitch” from Mercy for Animals’ undercover investigation of Iowa Select Farms, the largest pig factory farm in the state. As Nathan Runkle points out, “On a notecard above a sow’s gestation crate, a worker wrote the words, ‘Fat/Selfish Bitch.’ Such comments give a true glimpse into the mindset of the workers at these facilities—who all too often lose their own humanity when put into situations where they perpetuate violent, domination, and oppression as part of their job.” Courtesy Nathan Runkle, President, Mercy for Animals. The video from the investigation is at www.mercyforanimals.org/pigabuse.
From a sexualized female who “wants” to give you another baby through reproductive captivity to “fat selfish bitch,” the arc of the narrative being told about the child-bearing sow enforces on their lives and perpetuates some of the painful regressive stereotypes applied to women. Fat selfish bitch? Maybe she wanted to stretch.
Getting captive animals to move when they are ill or have been captive for months or years can be a challenge that the low-paid workers at industrial farms are not well equipped to handle. Undercover animal activists have exposed many instances of abusive behavior. Undercover video in North Carolina showed workers “dragging hogs by their ears, beating them with metal gate rods, and gouging their eyes—all in an effort to get stubborn [sic] sows to move from gestation crates to farrowing crates, where they would give birth and suckle their piglets.”24
With the industrialization of the production of animal flesh, everything is sped up—not just the kill line. If the slaughterhouse line inspired the factory line (p. 32), the sped-up factory line and the integrated industrial approach to production has influenced the production of dead flesh. The pressure to increase supply by increasing the speed of the production line in slaughterhouses and the painful effects on, and huge costs for, the worker and the animals are detailed in Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Ted Genoways’ The Chain. Viewing undercover footage reveals that forcing animals to live in factory farms is itself mistreatment.
Besides the inherent mistreatment of lives within factory farm is the egregious abuse that occurs against recalcitrant, frightened, or sick animals. PETA sent two undercover investigators to an Iowa factory farm that housed 6,000 sows and ten of thousands of newborn piglets. They found that sows were being beaten relentlessly on the back.25 “In another [video shot], workers turned electric prods on a crippled sow and kicked pregnant sows repeatedly in the belly. A close-up showed a distressed sow knocked out, her face royal blue from a Prima Tech marking dye sprayed into her nostrils by a worker who said he was trying ‘to get her high.’ In one of the most disturbing sequences, a worker demonstrated the method for euthanizing underweight piglets: taking them by the hind legs and smashing their skulls against the concrete floor.”
Robert Ruderman, a PETA undercover investigator, “noticed that many sows arriving in the farrowing barn from the breed barn bore the signs of abuse—red welts across their back from the herding canes and unexplained bloody gouges in their rumps.”
The second PETA undercover investigator, Michael Stein
berg, recorded Richard Ralston “admitting to a series of abuses—including anally penetrating the sows with gate rods and herding canes. ‘When I get pissed or get hurt or the fucking bitch won’t move,’ he says in a portion of the video, ‘I grab one of those rods and I jam it in her asshole.’ ”
When Steinberg was “having trouble moving a frightened and balking gilt from isolation back to the breed barn, Ralston and another worker, Shawn Lyons, jumped in and started kicking the agitated hog. Finally, Ralston turned to Steinberg and said, ‘Stick your finger in her butt.’ ”
Ralston also bragged about “ ‘giving it’ to a sow with his cane.” “ ‘I was shoving it in her pussy.’ ”
The assistant manager, Alan Rettig had been seen cracking the gate rod “down on the sow’s back twice, each blow echoing through the barn. ‘Don’t be afraid to hurt ‘em!’ he shouted. Another time, Rettig exhorted Ralston, ‘Hit ‘em hard! Show ‘em your dick! Show ‘em your penis!’ ”26
In response to undercover campaigns that expose what happens in factory farms, various states in the United States are passing “ag-gag laws” that make it illegal to film on a factory farm or to misrepresent oneself to obtain access to a factory farm. Such laws recognize the power of the image in dispelling the consumer’s nonchalance in consuming animal products, alerting them to the fact that this “commodity” had a life before ending up on a plate or before her milk became someone’s coffee creamer. The ag-gag laws have been passed to prevent a specific kind of seeing, a specific kind of representation, a representation of the real lives and deaths of farmed animals.27
Barbecue images often show sexually-free, sexually-inviting feminized subjects who want to be ravished/consumed.
They are “Ursula’s” sisters and they share her fate (see p. 20). “Ursula Hamdress” is probably one of the founding images of anthropornography. Anthropornography is a neologism coined by Amie Hamlin and introduced in 2003 in The Pornography of Meat to identify the specific sexualizing and feminizing of animals, especially domesticated animals consumed as food. Animals in bondage, particularly farmed animals, are shown “free,” free in the way that “beautiful” women have been depicted as “free”—posed as sexually available as though their only desire is for the viewer to want their bodies. Because pigs are prisoners before their violent deaths, the hostility of the message about women is clear. We all—women and pigs—want to be subordinated, consumed.
Cartoon pigs are shown stripping on a Canadian website that sells dead flesh. Or there is the “the turkey hooker” (a large Captain Hook-type curved hook used to remove a turkey corpse from the oven; “an easy pick up from pan to platter,” it promises). In 2011, the New York Times’ “Media Decoder” promoted rather than covered a promotional competition for an organic meat store.28 The winners created a campaign that carried “the cheeky theme ‘Lust for better meat.’ The campaign uses a burlesque theme, replete with puns and double entendre, to underline a commitment by Fleisher’s to reveal all—that is, to be transparent in its production and sales practices by sharing information with its customers. One poster ad, showing a chicken in lingerie, carries the headline ‘Sultry Poultry’ and declares, ‘We love our breasts all natural.’ Another poster ad presents a lamb performing a can-can dance; the headline reads, ‘Hot for Ewe.’ A third poster ad depicts a steer performing a fan dance, dubbed the ‘rump and grind.’ ” Misogyny expressed through the depiction of sexualized farmed animals.
Figure 16 An animal given a violent death represented as celebrating her violent death as if it were a sexual pleasure. Vero Beach, Florida, July 2013. Photograph copyright © Adam Sugalski. Used with permission.
It’s a sign of a fragmented and fragmenting culture that this ad campaign gets lifted into the stratosphere of the Times. But that’s the strength of the sexual politics of meat—its seamless adoption throughout all levels of culture, from menus to television ads, from the local butcher to the paper of record for the United States.
Figure 17 In 2013, this poster for the World Barbecue Contest appeared as part of the Memphis in May Festival. It was criticized by the Memphis Area Women’s Council for its sexist imagery. The image was drawn directly (though transposing a woman into a pig) from a 1966 PopArt poster by Wes Wilson, “father of the rock concert poster.” The barbecue poster was defended as art in response to the feminist critique. “It’s art and art is as subjective as tasting the barbecue,” Memphis in May Executive Vice President Diane Hampton told the Memphis Commercial Appeal. When I was interviewed for the same newspaper story, I told the reporter that I believed it was hate speech.29
Barbecues often reinforce the sexual politics of meat in several ways, not only by inscribing masculinity for the role of the barbecuer, but by inscribing femininity upon the victim of the barbecue, and celebrating violence as a means to an end.
With anthropornography, the inequality of species conveys the inequality of gender. What appears to be a feature of life is actually a one-sided construct. The point of view of the entire culture, reiterated through advertisements, newspaper illustrations, a melding of pornography and popular culture, is actually only a particular point of view. Anthropornography provides a way for men to bond publicly around misogyny. Men can publicly consume what is usually private. It makes the degradation and consumption of women’s images and of meat appear playful and harmless, “just a joke.” (No disparagement is meant.) Because women aren’t usually being depicted, no one is seen as being harmed and so no one has to be accountable. Everyone can enjoy the degradation of women without being honest about it. “We’re just looking at a pig.” “We’re just eating at Hooters or Penthouse.” “It’s just a poster.”
Perhaps no area of representation intersects race, sex, and species as much as barbecue images. In Making Whiteness, Grace Elizabeth Hale argues that the “New South” of the early twentieth century constructed whiteness (and its enforcer Jim Crow laws) as an identity in response to the success of the Black middle class.30 Her work is concerned with racial making. Barbecues that use images of full-bodied white female sexual beings are a strange legacy of this constructed whiteness. Pigs are many colors, but the whiteness becomes an anthropocentric anchor to show the lowering of white women. It’s about class, too; many of these cartoon pigs announcing barbecues are dressed as though they are Southern white trash. With the images that advertise barbecues, what you see is what you get—visual and literal consumption of the full-bodied female body with a reiteration of class/race signs.
Figure 18 This picture was taken at Dirty Dick’s Crab House in Nags Head, North Carolina, summer 2014. Photograph copyright © by Mitch Goldsmith. Used with permission.
Figure 19 An item in a T-shirt store, Cody, Wyoming, summer 2012. Photograph copyright © Jasmin Singer. Used with permission.
Attitudes about sex, race, and class imposed on an other-than-human body are retrograde and oppressive, yet these attitudes escape the kind of scrutiny that would be brought to bear if the representation were imposed on a human. (Discussed more fully in “Why a Pig?”31)
Anthropornography is hate speech: in the feminizing and sexualizing of dead animals, violence against women and animals is normalized. With the sexual politics of meat, privilege creates perspective. Then the privilege disappears and what the privilege allows access to—fun with the bodies of others—is seen only as a personal choice. Inequality, already made sexy, is also made tasty.
A cookbook entitled 50 Shades of Chicken is filled with double-entendres that reference bondage, boomeranging off of the 50 Shades of Grey bestseller while exposing a fascinating truth:
Dead chicken = Anastasia Steele
Chef who binds and trusses and cooks dead chicken = Anastasia Steele’s lover
The cook is not just a man, but a human, the consumed is not just female, but an animal. Thus the parody reminds us of how the man–woman gender binary intersects with the human–animal binary and a dominant–subordinate binary. Inequality both sexy and tasty.<
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Cary Wolfe proposes that within Western tradition we need to think in terms, not of human/animal, but in terms of humanized human, animalized human, humanized animal, animalized animal.32 Though Wolfe sees the humanized human and the animalized animals as ideological fictions, with the hybrid designations doing much of the heavy lifting in illuminating humanist presumptions, I see his grid—when nudged—functioning to illuminate the sexual politics of meat. The humanized human in Western culture has often been white male, the one who had the right to vote and own property. Casting individuals as animalized humans is usually influenced by race, sex, and class. Animalizing discourse is a powerful tool in oppression.33 Animalizing discourse, also, often substitutes for an analysis of why violence against women happens; that is, rapists and batterers or others who commit acts of violence are often animalized (called “brutes,” “animals,” etc.), when in fact they are acting like humans, in that their violence is deliberate and often planned.
Figure 20 After feminists protested this image, developed for a restaurant in Italy, the restaurant removed it.
As for the humanized animal: the humanized animal often occurs as a sort of animal exceptionalism. In Cary Wolfe’s example, the humanized animal is the “pet,” the animal who can be saved in Silence of the Lambs, since clearly the lambs are not. The great Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer reported that in 1944 the dog, who belonged to the farmer for whom Hamer worked, had an indoor bathroom, whereas Hamer lived in a small house with no working indoor toilet.34 Hamer was treated like an animalized human; the dog, a humanized animal. The traditional arguments of animal liberation and animal rights that show how the other animals are like us, can feel, suffer, etc., are also attempts to humanize the animal. Anthropocentrism still determines what it is to be a being who matters. The animalized animals are the ones who can be discarded or eaten—or perhaps it is the same act.
The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations) Page 28
