The original manifesto on feminism and animal rights

I’m almost 35 years late, but I’m glad to have learned about and finally read Carol J. Adams‘ The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory (the original title said Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory), originally published in 1990 by Bloomsbury Academic. A 35-year anniversary edition will come out next year.

Your mind will start getting blown as you read the preface, which already cites so many examples of how feminism and animal rights intersect. Or, the way we treat women is like the way we treat non-human animals. Adams says that hetero women probably wouldn’t eat meat if it wasn’t for their husbands. Is that true for you? Not surprisingly, most feminists aren’t vegan nor do they eat plant-based.

Highlights I thought were worth mentioning:

• Meat has been equated with power throughout history, primarily carried by white men. For example, women were not invited to hunt (I’ve watched episode 3 of The Crown as I write this, and so far no woman’s carried a shotgun). During the time of slavery, slaves were not given meat to eat.
• Terms like “meaty” or “beefy” denote substance, whereas plant-related terms like “vegetative” mean death.
• Adams shows the parallels between murdered or dismembered women and meat, which is touched on again in the epilogue. Many of these instances appear in the Christian Bible, throughout literature, and in movies, including snuff films.
• The equipment used in sexual bondage is very similar to that used on animals. A butchering knife is a phallic symbol.
• As I’ve heard and repeated, male criminals hunt and kill animals before they move onto harming or murdering people.
• Adams talks about the dominant influence of language on patriarchal, meat-eating culture. She names who or what the language oppresses and explains the evolution of an alternative language. Language disempowers people who eat plant-based. Animals are part of a story that ends in death, and not eating interrupts this dominant narrative.
• Adams introduces 18th century literary critic and vegetarian Joseph Ritson who was discredited because of his racist views and mental state before his death. She goes onto talk about other plant-based writers from the Romantics (including Mary Shelley of Frankenstein) to female writers who published works about the unpatriarchal (feminist) nature of animals to Margaret Atwood (The Edible Woman), Mary McCarthy (Birds of America), and the 20th century female fiction authors whose characters ate plant-based. This was the era of feminist mythmaking.
• The 19th century feminists knew that plant-based diets freed women from baking, cooking, and serving huge meals to their families and that it led to better health and liberated sexuality, yet it didn’t catch on. If a girl or woman refuses to eat meat, it means that she rejects male dominance and power. This, Adams argues, is when feminist-vegetarian critical theory truly began. Even the suffragists refrained from eating meat.
• World Wars I and II were called the “Golden Era of Vegetarianism” because of food rationing. This even improved the mortality rate in Denmark. Feminism was seen as pacifist.
• Adams examines the plant-based body and why humans are herbivorous.
• In her following book, The Pornography of Meat, Adams says Amie Hamlin coined the term “anthropornography,” the sexualizing and feminizing of animals, especially those that are served as food. On her blog, Adams provides plenty of examples that occur later than the 2010s—in case you thought that we’re now so evolved that anthropornography doesn’t exist in the world anymore.
• Finally, Adams lists additional terms such as the “animalized woman” and “feminized animals.”

There’s much, much more to this book than is here, but you have to have an open mind. As Agnes Ryan put it, war will always exist so long as animal consumption exists. I’d add that war includes the war against women.

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