Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.89 AVERAGE
3.89 AVERAGE
maestro_cerrotorcido's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
I agree with other that this is a bit of a tough read, but I think it is definitely worth it. Working through this book is certainly rewarding and you learn so much. An education on feminism is incomplete without this book.
struanyoung97's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
lisavegan's review against another edition
3.0
I don’t know whether it was the style or some other nebulous reason, but I found this book difficult to read. It was well worth the effort, though, because the author presents an important hypothesis about the correlation between the ways women and animals are treated and regarded in society. I found this book to be unique, as some of the information and ideas it presents I’ve found in no other books.
jessalin's review against another edition
5.0
"We are continuously eating mothers. The fact is that we proclaim and reinforce the triumph of male dominance by eating female-identified pieces of meat. "
"By speaking of meat rather than slaughtered, butchered, bleeding pigs, lambs, cows, and calves, we participate in language that masks reality."
Magnificent! This was very enlightening and thorough. I highly recommend to anyone even remotely interested! Adams did a wonderful job in painting a very broad context that shows us the very serious repercussions of eating meat and demeaning women. I particularly thought the language of absent referent, Frankenstein's creature, and The Great War were very eye-opening.
"By speaking of meat rather than slaughtered, butchered, bleeding pigs, lambs, cows, and calves, we participate in language that masks reality."
Magnificent! This was very enlightening and thorough. I highly recommend to anyone even remotely interested! Adams did a wonderful job in painting a very broad context that shows us the very serious repercussions of eating meat and demeaning women. I particularly thought the language of absent referent, Frankenstein's creature, and The Great War were very eye-opening.
anotheranarchistdyke's review against another edition
5.0
This was a life-changing book. I was already well versed in feminism and vegan theory before I read it but being able to link the two ideologies really clicked everything into place for me. I read the 25th anniversary edition which included all the introductions from each edition, and being able to trace the book's impact from its publication, to being read in jails after animal rights protests, and to today when I read it, was revelatory. The dedication was to all the animals killed annually which was at the time of writing 56 billion each year, at my time of reading in 2019 the daily average including fishing and bycatch is 3 billion DAILY.
I had identified the way that meat is marketed to men (‘hero sandwich’, ‘man-sized etc) however, the book laid out how it creates a concept of masculinity that is built on the butchering and dominance of other bodies, women and animal. Patriarchal dominance functions best in a world that fragments and disconnects oppressions, but feminism recognises the connections. The pairing of meat-eater with ‘virile male’ and women with animals suggests another pairing as well: in talking about the fate of animals we are talking about a traditional female fate. We oppress animals by associating them with women’s lesser status. Many women are already aware of the nothingness of meat when they characterise their experiences as ‘like a piece of meat’ the next stage is to characterise the butchering of animals, like themselves, as morally wrong.
On the use of ‘I felt like a piece of meat’: Being raped does not approximate been eaten so why does it feel that way? Or rather, why is it so easily describe this feeling that way? Because if you are a piece of meat you are subject to a knife, to implemental violence... correspondingly, female animals are forcibly impregnated, a reproductive slavery that is required to insure plentiful supplies of meat and cows milk.
One of the foundations of a rapist culture is that women not only ask for rape they also enjoy it; that they are continually seeking out the butcher’s knife. Similarly advertisements in popular culture tell us that animals like Charlie the tuna and al capp’s shmoo wish to be eaten. The implication is that women and animals willingly participate in the process that renders them absent.
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.
The chapter on the history of vegetarianism was such a refreshing resource for when people say that veganism is a fad when in actuality some of the first vegetarian literature was written by the greek philosopher Plutarch and mathematician Pythagoras. It also looked at how throughout history there has been a tendency for women to develop a distaste for meat and vegetarianism is included in women’s literature but the significance of each has not been thoroughly explored. Women may have coded their criticism of the prevailing world order in the choice of female identified foods. In this case women’s bodies become the texts upon which they inscribed their dissent through vegetarianism. We cannot tell the truth about women’s lives if we do not take seriously those dietary choices which were at odds with dominant culture. Vegetarianism spoke to women. They would not have maintained it, proselytised for it, if vegetarianism were not a positive influence on their lives. The attack on vegetarians and women for being emotional demonstrates how the dominant culture attempts to deflect critical discourse... To assert that someone other than oneself has rights is not sentimental. Not that would be the gravest of sins if it were. ‘Sentimentalist’ is the abuse with which people counter the accusation that they are cruel. There was also a notable woman Anna Kingsford who was one of the first English women to obtain a degree in medicine and she was a vegetarian so she was the only student to have completed the degree without experimenting on a single animal.
The chapter on language was particularly enjoyable because it articulated the vegetarian influence on major texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as well as the instances of how we talk about animals which presumes their edibility. Since objects are possessions they cannot have possessions; thus, we say a ‘leg of lamb’ not ‘lamb’s leg’, ‘chicken wings’ not a ‘chicken’s wings’. In our culture we generally append the word ‘meat’ to an animal’s name only when that form of meat is not consumed e.g horsemeat, dogmeat. The use of adjectives in the phrases ‘humane slaughter’ and ‘forcible rape’ also promote a conceptual mis-focusing that relativises these acts of violence... just as all rapes are forcible, all slaughter of animals for food is in humane regardless of what its called.
The creature in Frankenstein is vegetarian as Mary Shelley was influenced by many other Romantic Vegetarians such as Joseph Ritson, Rousseau, and Percy Shelley:
‘My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.’
This demonstrates another way in which the creature is rejected by society and presents an argument on what is ‘evil’ and what constitutes Utopia.
For romantic vegetarians, the story of Prometheus’s discovery of fire is the story of the inception of meat eating... without cooking, meat would not be palatable. According to them, cooking also masks the horrors of a corpse and makes eating psychologically and aesthetically acceptable. Percy Shelley provides the Romantic vegetarian interpretation of this myth: Prometheus (who represents the human race) effected some great change in the condition of his nature and applied fire to culinary purposes; thus inventing an expedient for screening from his disgust the horrors of the shambles. From this moment his vitals were devoured by the vulture of disease. It is notable how the creature in a tale subtitled the modern Prometheus does not adopt meat eating but rather learns how to cook vegetable food.
While Frankenstein used a graveyard to construct his creature (graveyards were obligatory in Gothic tales) he also visited a slaughterhouse. Shelly’s extended a ‘grave site’ to a slaughterhouse because to Romantic Vegetarians they are the same. Romantic vegetarians also held that humans had a herbivorous body and is so with the creature, herbivorous animals are eaten by humans and so his body is anatomically vegetarian. In Frankenstein we find a creature seeking to establish the Golden Age of a vegetarian diet with roots and berries; a creature who eats Rousseau’s ideal meal; a Being who, like the animals eaten for meat, finds itself excluded from the moral circle of humanity.
The section on Anthropornography was brutal to read because if I hadn’t seen the particular advertisements and cultural signifiers first I would have thought they were exaggerated and ludicrous due to their cruelty and ubiquitous disdain for women; but in reality the interconnectedness of the butchering of animals and the rape of women is unnervingly clear.
Anthropornography is a neologism coined by Amie Hamlin in 2003 in ‘the pornography of meat’ to identify the sexualising and feminising of animals, especially domesticated animals consumed as food. Animals in bondage... are posed as sexually available as though their only desire is for the viewer to want their body. 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... it is misogyny expressed through the depiction of sexualised farm animals.
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’. Because women aren’t being depicted, no one is being harmed and so no one has to be accountable.
Anthropornography is hate speech: in the feminising and sexualising of dead animals, violence against women and animals is normalised...animalising discourse is a powerful tool in oppression.
The disempowerment of women is inscribed visually by depicting females in non-dominant positions, in which large burgers hang over their bodies, hang beside their bodies or are being stuffed into their mouths. The burgers dominate the physical space over or around a women. They reveal and enact fantasies about women’s big mouth and what we can swallow. Women are symbolically silenced by having their mouths stuffed with flesh, that innate and originating patriarchal symbol of power over and violence.
There is a cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption which links butchering and sexual violence in our culture. Objectification permits oppressor to view another being as an object. The oppressor then violates this by object-like treatment: e.g., The rape of women that denies women The freedom to say no, or the butchering of animals that convert animals from living breathing beings into dead objects. This process allows fragmentation or brutal dismemberment and finally consumption. While the occasional man may literally eat women we all consume visual images of women all the time. Consumption is the fulfilment of oppression and annihilation of will, of separate identity.
The description of the cycle of meat eating put words to what I was myself rebelling against by being vegan but hadn’t been able to articulate: The institution of butchering is unique to human beings. All carnivorous animals kill and consume their prey themselves... We have no bodily agency for killing and dismembering the animals we eat, we require implements. Meet eating is the most oppressive and extensive institutionalised violence against animals. In addition, meat eating offers the grounds for subjugating animals: if we can kill butcher and consume them - in other words completely annihilate them - we may as well experiment upon them, try and hunt them exploit them, and raise them in environments that imprison them such as factory and fur- bearing animal farms. We give them life and later we can take it precisely because in the beginning we gave it. Based on our knowledge of how the story is going to end we interpret the beginning. The way in which the story of meat is conceptualised is with constant references to humans’ will; we allow animals their existence and we begin to believe that animals cannot exist without us.... only through meat eating does meat achieve its meaning and provide the justification for the entire meat production process... vegetarianism challenges the notion that animals death can be redeemed by applying human meaning to it. Vegetarians realise the cultural aspects of meat eating... since meat is not eaten in its natural state - raw off the corpse- but is instead transformed through cultural intervention, vegetarians have directed their energy toward analysing the specifics of this cultural intervention. They claim that the structures that transform flesh as it is eaten by other animals into meat as it is eaten by human beings are not unimportant or trivial, especially as they signal the degree of distancing that our culture has determined is necessary for consumption of animals to proceed.
The connection between being a pacifist and a vegan was also articulated: Wars justify meat eating as they establish a morality that recognised some forms of killing as legitimate. It is as though the way to create a child’s acceptance of animals deaths is by convincing them that sometimes humans must be killed too. To challenge meat eating is to challenge a world at war.
During WW1 dr hindhede, who had been conducting experiments on ‘low protein’ mostly vegetarian diets since 1895 found that after directing the rationing program necessitated by the war - a milk and vegetable diet- danish people’s mortality rates improved.
Quotes I enjoyed:
Equality isn’t an idea; it is a practice.we practice it when we don’t treat other people or animals as objects. We practice it when we ask ‘what are you going through?’ And understand that we ask the question because it matters to all of us what some of us are experiencing.
Fran Winant: eat rice, have faith in women
Those who are against fascism without being against capitalism element over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, I like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf - Bertolt Brecht, ‘Writing the truth: five difficulties’
If the words which tell the truth about meat as food are unfit for our ears the meat itself is not fit for our mouths.
Dorothy Watson coined the term vegan in 1944. Oxford dictionary recognised the work in 1962. It begins with the word vegetarian and take the first three letters (veg) and last two (an) because it starts with vegetarianism and follows it through to its logical conclusion (rejecting all forms of animal exploitation including animalised and feminised protein but also fur, leather and honey)
‘I take no credit for abstaining from flesh eating. I was born without any desire or relish for meat - Lucinda chandler after 45 years of being vegetarian
I had identified the way that meat is marketed to men (‘hero sandwich’, ‘man-sized etc) however, the book laid out how it creates a concept of masculinity that is built on the butchering and dominance of other bodies, women and animal. Patriarchal dominance functions best in a world that fragments and disconnects oppressions, but feminism recognises the connections. The pairing of meat-eater with ‘virile male’ and women with animals suggests another pairing as well: in talking about the fate of animals we are talking about a traditional female fate. We oppress animals by associating them with women’s lesser status. Many women are already aware of the nothingness of meat when they characterise their experiences as ‘like a piece of meat’ the next stage is to characterise the butchering of animals, like themselves, as morally wrong.
On the use of ‘I felt like a piece of meat’: Being raped does not approximate been eaten so why does it feel that way? Or rather, why is it so easily describe this feeling that way? Because if you are a piece of meat you are subject to a knife, to implemental violence... correspondingly, female animals are forcibly impregnated, a reproductive slavery that is required to insure plentiful supplies of meat and cows milk.
One of the foundations of a rapist culture is that women not only ask for rape they also enjoy it; that they are continually seeking out the butcher’s knife. Similarly advertisements in popular culture tell us that animals like Charlie the tuna and al capp’s shmoo wish to be eaten. The implication is that women and animals willingly participate in the process that renders them absent.
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.
The chapter on the history of vegetarianism was such a refreshing resource for when people say that veganism is a fad when in actuality some of the first vegetarian literature was written by the greek philosopher Plutarch and mathematician Pythagoras. It also looked at how throughout history there has been a tendency for women to develop a distaste for meat and vegetarianism is included in women’s literature but the significance of each has not been thoroughly explored. Women may have coded their criticism of the prevailing world order in the choice of female identified foods. In this case women’s bodies become the texts upon which they inscribed their dissent through vegetarianism. We cannot tell the truth about women’s lives if we do not take seriously those dietary choices which were at odds with dominant culture. Vegetarianism spoke to women. They would not have maintained it, proselytised for it, if vegetarianism were not a positive influence on their lives. The attack on vegetarians and women for being emotional demonstrates how the dominant culture attempts to deflect critical discourse... To assert that someone other than oneself has rights is not sentimental. Not that would be the gravest of sins if it were. ‘Sentimentalist’ is the abuse with which people counter the accusation that they are cruel. There was also a notable woman Anna Kingsford who was one of the first English women to obtain a degree in medicine and she was a vegetarian so she was the only student to have completed the degree without experimenting on a single animal.
The chapter on language was particularly enjoyable because it articulated the vegetarian influence on major texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as well as the instances of how we talk about animals which presumes their edibility. Since objects are possessions they cannot have possessions; thus, we say a ‘leg of lamb’ not ‘lamb’s leg’, ‘chicken wings’ not a ‘chicken’s wings’. In our culture we generally append the word ‘meat’ to an animal’s name only when that form of meat is not consumed e.g horsemeat, dogmeat. The use of adjectives in the phrases ‘humane slaughter’ and ‘forcible rape’ also promote a conceptual mis-focusing that relativises these acts of violence... just as all rapes are forcible, all slaughter of animals for food is in humane regardless of what its called.
The creature in Frankenstein is vegetarian as Mary Shelley was influenced by many other Romantic Vegetarians such as Joseph Ritson, Rousseau, and Percy Shelley:
‘My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.’
This demonstrates another way in which the creature is rejected by society and presents an argument on what is ‘evil’ and what constitutes Utopia.
For romantic vegetarians, the story of Prometheus’s discovery of fire is the story of the inception of meat eating... without cooking, meat would not be palatable. According to them, cooking also masks the horrors of a corpse and makes eating psychologically and aesthetically acceptable. Percy Shelley provides the Romantic vegetarian interpretation of this myth: Prometheus (who represents the human race) effected some great change in the condition of his nature and applied fire to culinary purposes; thus inventing an expedient for screening from his disgust the horrors of the shambles. From this moment his vitals were devoured by the vulture of disease. It is notable how the creature in a tale subtitled the modern Prometheus does not adopt meat eating but rather learns how to cook vegetable food.
While Frankenstein used a graveyard to construct his creature (graveyards were obligatory in Gothic tales) he also visited a slaughterhouse. Shelly’s extended a ‘grave site’ to a slaughterhouse because to Romantic Vegetarians they are the same. Romantic vegetarians also held that humans had a herbivorous body and is so with the creature, herbivorous animals are eaten by humans and so his body is anatomically vegetarian. In Frankenstein we find a creature seeking to establish the Golden Age of a vegetarian diet with roots and berries; a creature who eats Rousseau’s ideal meal; a Being who, like the animals eaten for meat, finds itself excluded from the moral circle of humanity.
The section on Anthropornography was brutal to read because if I hadn’t seen the particular advertisements and cultural signifiers first I would have thought they were exaggerated and ludicrous due to their cruelty and ubiquitous disdain for women; but in reality the interconnectedness of the butchering of animals and the rape of women is unnervingly clear.
Anthropornography is a neologism coined by Amie Hamlin in 2003 in ‘the pornography of meat’ to identify the sexualising and feminising of animals, especially domesticated animals consumed as food. Animals in bondage... are posed as sexually available as though their only desire is for the viewer to want their body. 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... it is misogyny expressed through the depiction of sexualised farm animals.
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’. Because women aren’t being depicted, no one is being harmed and so no one has to be accountable.
Anthropornography is hate speech: in the feminising and sexualising of dead animals, violence against women and animals is normalised...animalising discourse is a powerful tool in oppression.
The disempowerment of women is inscribed visually by depicting females in non-dominant positions, in which large burgers hang over their bodies, hang beside their bodies or are being stuffed into their mouths. The burgers dominate the physical space over or around a women. They reveal and enact fantasies about women’s big mouth and what we can swallow. Women are symbolically silenced by having their mouths stuffed with flesh, that innate and originating patriarchal symbol of power over and violence.
There is a cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption which links butchering and sexual violence in our culture. Objectification permits oppressor to view another being as an object. The oppressor then violates this by object-like treatment: e.g., The rape of women that denies women The freedom to say no, or the butchering of animals that convert animals from living breathing beings into dead objects. This process allows fragmentation or brutal dismemberment and finally consumption. While the occasional man may literally eat women we all consume visual images of women all the time. Consumption is the fulfilment of oppression and annihilation of will, of separate identity.
The description of the cycle of meat eating put words to what I was myself rebelling against by being vegan but hadn’t been able to articulate: The institution of butchering is unique to human beings. All carnivorous animals kill and consume their prey themselves... We have no bodily agency for killing and dismembering the animals we eat, we require implements. Meet eating is the most oppressive and extensive institutionalised violence against animals. In addition, meat eating offers the grounds for subjugating animals: if we can kill butcher and consume them - in other words completely annihilate them - we may as well experiment upon them, try and hunt them exploit them, and raise them in environments that imprison them such as factory and fur- bearing animal farms. We give them life and later we can take it precisely because in the beginning we gave it. Based on our knowledge of how the story is going to end we interpret the beginning. The way in which the story of meat is conceptualised is with constant references to humans’ will; we allow animals their existence and we begin to believe that animals cannot exist without us.... only through meat eating does meat achieve its meaning and provide the justification for the entire meat production process... vegetarianism challenges the notion that animals death can be redeemed by applying human meaning to it. Vegetarians realise the cultural aspects of meat eating... since meat is not eaten in its natural state - raw off the corpse- but is instead transformed through cultural intervention, vegetarians have directed their energy toward analysing the specifics of this cultural intervention. They claim that the structures that transform flesh as it is eaten by other animals into meat as it is eaten by human beings are not unimportant or trivial, especially as they signal the degree of distancing that our culture has determined is necessary for consumption of animals to proceed.
The connection between being a pacifist and a vegan was also articulated: Wars justify meat eating as they establish a morality that recognised some forms of killing as legitimate. It is as though the way to create a child’s acceptance of animals deaths is by convincing them that sometimes humans must be killed too. To challenge meat eating is to challenge a world at war.
During WW1 dr hindhede, who had been conducting experiments on ‘low protein’ mostly vegetarian diets since 1895 found that after directing the rationing program necessitated by the war - a milk and vegetable diet- danish people’s mortality rates improved.
Quotes I enjoyed:
Equality isn’t an idea; it is a practice.we practice it when we don’t treat other people or animals as objects. We practice it when we ask ‘what are you going through?’ And understand that we ask the question because it matters to all of us what some of us are experiencing.
Fran Winant: eat rice, have faith in women
Those who are against fascism without being against capitalism element over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, I like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf - Bertolt Brecht, ‘Writing the truth: five difficulties’
If the words which tell the truth about meat as food are unfit for our ears the meat itself is not fit for our mouths.
Dorothy Watson coined the term vegan in 1944. Oxford dictionary recognised the work in 1962. It begins with the word vegetarian and take the first three letters (veg) and last two (an) because it starts with vegetarianism and follows it through to its logical conclusion (rejecting all forms of animal exploitation including animalised and feminised protein but also fur, leather and honey)
‘I take no credit for abstaining from flesh eating. I was born without any desire or relish for meat - Lucinda chandler after 45 years of being vegetarian
emily2348's review against another edition
3.0
Eat and rice and have faith in women! I did like reading the actual theory of the book but the literary critique dragged on quite a bit and i did skip quite a few pages of it... The first part and epilogue are 100% worth the read though, i can’t fully agree with the idea that animals and women are on the same level when it comes to patriarchal oppression but this was still very intriguing to read.