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194 reviews for:
The Sexual Politics of Meat (20th Anniversary Edition): A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory
Carol J. Adams
3.91 AVERAGE
194 reviews for:
The Sexual Politics of Meat (20th Anniversary Edition): A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory
Carol J. Adams
3.91 AVERAGE
informative
slow-paced
**THIS IS A LONG REVIEW. So you know where I'm coming from, I'm first going to explain what made me decide to be vegan. If you don't care, the book review will commence after some asterisks. But not these ones -->**
One warm autumn night in Los Angeles, I had a dream. I was on a lunch date with my mom and an old friend at a nice Chinese restaurant I’ve never been to before. The walls and décor were dark, red, paper lanterns and dragons on the walls. It was busy, and we could barely hear the newscast on the television in the corner, but we weren’t really paying attention anyway. After lunch, we were going to go shopping for a bit. As we paid the bill, the news cut to an unexpected press conference at the White House. The restaurant quieted, wanting to hear. The President stepped out and greeted the viewers. He explained that for the past two days, he had been meeting with other world leaders, discussing an unexpected event—an event that the world needed to know about. But they wanted as much information as possible first, so everyone would be well-informed and not start a mass panic. He took a deep breath and said that an extraterrestrial craft had landed in Russia, with extraterrestrial beings aboard, alive, and able to communicate with humans. They had actually come in peace, wanting to learn about their space-companions on Earth, wanting to help improve our lives. They had no political agenda. One of their attributes was being able to change their appearance, and so, to help humanity deal with their presence, they decided to appear as human.
He introduced a woman with black hair, in a white skirt suit and a bright smile. One of the aliens. Other aliens were with other world leaders, being introduced to other countries at their simultaneous press conferences. Our alien looked and sounded human, and she calmed our fears. The interview went on for hours; she was very patient about our questions. Needless to say, I did not go shopping after lunch.
For the next few months, human life improved. More ships arrived. The aliens taught us technological and medical advances that—were humanity to continue for millennia—I can’t say we would have figured out on our own. Life was safe and exciting.
There were some problems, though. Sometimes people went missing. Rumors started that the aliens were taking people for their own experiments on their ships, that they often changed their human appearances, that they were lulling us into submission. Despite these rumors, nobody could deny the gifts they had brought us. Some humans even said that a few missing people here and there was a small price to pay for the advancement of our species.
A year after the aliens arrived on Earth, I tripped on a street curb and tore up my knee and forearm. While I’m usually pretty careful about where I walk, I was distracted by some new alien-human collaboration on a gorgeous building, and of course, nobody, alien or human, could stop pure accidents. My injuries looked pretty bad, but I could walk, so I walked to the hospital just down the street. No one was waiting in the reception area, and the nurse at the desk greeted me as soon as I walked in. Our voices echoed. She took me to an actual room just down the hall and asked me to wait while she got a doctor.
A few minutes went by. Nobody came to my room, nobody walked by the door; there were no sounds at all besides the white noise of the air conditioning. I was already wearing a dressing gown, but the curious silence unnerved me. I limped to the door, holding my elbow, and looked down the hallway. Nobody. I started walking down the hall, away from the reception area. Half the ceiling lights were off, and every room was dark, the doors closed. I found a stairwell and went downstairs. I thought there might be answers in the morgue, which is usually in basements of hospitals, according to movies.
The hallway at the bottom of the stairs was well lit. I didn’t see anyone, but I could hear a woman yelling, and walked toward the sound. It must have been the wrong part of the hospital for the morgue; there were only more rooms like the ones upstairs, still closed and dark, though the hallway was bright.
Her yelling became screaming, as I approached an open door, and several voices talked quietly. I peeked around the doorway and saw a young woman in labor. An older male doctor and two younger female nurses were standing around her, looking at a clipboard.
“It’s time,” the doctor said.
“My baby,” said the woman in labor.
And all three of them fell upon her, tearing her belly apart with their teeth, their jaws changing shape as they ripped her flesh, exposing and eating the child, too. The woman screamed, then fell silent, limp. My heel bumped a cart behind me, and the doctor’s head snapped up, his black eyes boring into me. He was beside me before I could move, grasping my arm with talons, pulling me close to his face. Blood dripped from his chin. He exhaled, and bits of flesh stuck between his teeth shivered.
“Why?” I whispered. He laughed, spraying me with blood.
“Because you humans taste so damn good,” he said.
“Do you need to?”
“Obviously not. We’ve survived this long without you. Like I said, you’re just delicious. Pregnant women are our favorite.”
“Monster.”
“You first.” He opened his mouth, and the darkness blinded me.
I woke up in a cold sweat, panting, fumbling for the bedside lamp. And even though I was drunk with sleep-grogginess, my first thought was, “I need to be vegan.” Somehow I knew that was the moral of the dream, and the terror I felt was so vivid, I vowed that I would never put another living being in that situation, either by my own hand or through my inaction. I haven’t eaten animals since.
Until I read The Sexual Politics of Meat, I had never connected the outcome of the dream--needing to save animals from slaughter--to the actual imagery of a pregnant woman being devoured. Now, I like to think that having a degree in gender studies prompted my subconscious to make the connection between the two. Suddenly, things make more sense. I’m just upset with myself that my conscious mind couldn't figure it out on its own.
************
If you’ve studied gender and/or race issues or have some familiarity with critical theories and how they’re presented, you should have no problem following the logic here. If you’re a feminist/equalist and/or vegan without much experience with critical papers, it may seem dense and repetitive. I’ve read other reviews criticizing Adams’s repetition: In critical theory, you have to not only provide evidence supporting your hypothesis, but also connect the conclusions in chapter 3 or 5 or 10 with what you said in previous chapters. That way, everything ties together, and the book is cohesive. If she had been re-hashing previous ideas using the same references, that would be repetitive. Fortunately, each chapter’s theories are used as either segue or support of subsequent theories, and the references are fresh each time.
It’s dangerous to assume that her conclusion is that all men subscribe to an animal- and woman-oppressed society, but it’s just as dangerous to assume that she’s full of crap. I just read on the BBC that studies show 30% of women worldwide have suffered from physical and/or sexual abuse. THIRTY PERCENT. If you know two other ladies, the odds are that one of you has been victimized. But despite the overwhelming evidence presented in this book, Adams doesn’t hate men. In fact, she calls out “feminism” as a word that ultimately undermines its own validity: it’s a movement promoting equality between the sexes, yet it’s named after only one of them.
Another dangerous response that I’ve seen is ladies saying, “If that’s oppression, it’s all right with me! In that case, I like being oppressed.” Yeah. Then you don’t know what oppression is. Adams also addresses this point in the book, when a wife asks defensively, “Do I look oppressed?” It’s a defense response, made by people who don’t want to look at the world as it is, or don’t want to believe it, despite overwhelming evidence, facts, observations. But because they don’t want to appear stupid, naïve, or obstinate, they try to make feminists/vegetarians feel bad for NOT subscribing to the socially acceptable (read: oppressive) mindset.
I can’t tell you how many people have tried to start fights with me about being vegan. Who does that? At a restaurant, at Thanksgiving dinner, whenever, I quietly get my meal, trying to avoid attention. Because I know, I KNOW, some d-bag will try to start something. This is something I just can’t fathom. I don’t have any say over what other people eat, I don’t try to “convert” anyone, but somehow, people think the lack of meat on my plate makes it acceptable for them to comment on my diet. It don’t. And it’s one thing if someone wants to engage in an enlightened conversation based in fact, but that is never the case. Without provocation, they want to make me feel bad or inadequate, over-sensitive, bleeding-heart, naïve, less-than, etc. etc. Whenever someone sees the lack of meat, they immediately become nutrition experts based on what they’ve seen on McDonald’s commercials.
When I told my husband how much it bothered me, he was able to shed some light on the problem: Even though he knows that I make food decisions for myself, and only myself, and that I’m an adult who is able to do that, and that I don’t make those decisions to make other people feel bad (obviously, I’m just trying to eat my lunch or whatever), other people see what I’m eating and feel bad about themselves. They look at my plate and realize that I’m actually doing something in practice that they feel guilty about NOT being able to do. And instead of acting like a mature adult and blaming themselves for not being able to commit to something that would rid them of that guilt, they blame me for putting them in a situation where they have to think about how they don’t like themselves. Is that my fault? Nope. Is it fair? Absolutely not. It’s unfortunate that meat-eaters feel threatened by my vegan diet, but my relationship with food is not their business.
And after reading this book, I feel empowered again. I feel like I’ve been given the tools I need to navigate the harsh world of being judged by people “for eating decently”, as Shaw says. Even before finishing the book, I was seeing examples of sexualized animals and animalized women everywhere: television shows, commercials, billboards, even at work. The newest movement is to stop bullying, but this has to extend to women of all ages (not just school-aged boys), and animals. Need some facts and tools to help you act? Read this book.
One warm autumn night in Los Angeles, I had a dream. I was on a lunch date with my mom and an old friend at a nice Chinese restaurant I’ve never been to before. The walls and décor were dark, red, paper lanterns and dragons on the walls. It was busy, and we could barely hear the newscast on the television in the corner, but we weren’t really paying attention anyway. After lunch, we were going to go shopping for a bit. As we paid the bill, the news cut to an unexpected press conference at the White House. The restaurant quieted, wanting to hear. The President stepped out and greeted the viewers. He explained that for the past two days, he had been meeting with other world leaders, discussing an unexpected event—an event that the world needed to know about. But they wanted as much information as possible first, so everyone would be well-informed and not start a mass panic. He took a deep breath and said that an extraterrestrial craft had landed in Russia, with extraterrestrial beings aboard, alive, and able to communicate with humans. They had actually come in peace, wanting to learn about their space-companions on Earth, wanting to help improve our lives. They had no political agenda. One of their attributes was being able to change their appearance, and so, to help humanity deal with their presence, they decided to appear as human.
He introduced a woman with black hair, in a white skirt suit and a bright smile. One of the aliens. Other aliens were with other world leaders, being introduced to other countries at their simultaneous press conferences. Our alien looked and sounded human, and she calmed our fears. The interview went on for hours; she was very patient about our questions. Needless to say, I did not go shopping after lunch.
For the next few months, human life improved. More ships arrived. The aliens taught us technological and medical advances that—were humanity to continue for millennia—I can’t say we would have figured out on our own. Life was safe and exciting.
There were some problems, though. Sometimes people went missing. Rumors started that the aliens were taking people for their own experiments on their ships, that they often changed their human appearances, that they were lulling us into submission. Despite these rumors, nobody could deny the gifts they had brought us. Some humans even said that a few missing people here and there was a small price to pay for the advancement of our species.
A year after the aliens arrived on Earth, I tripped on a street curb and tore up my knee and forearm. While I’m usually pretty careful about where I walk, I was distracted by some new alien-human collaboration on a gorgeous building, and of course, nobody, alien or human, could stop pure accidents. My injuries looked pretty bad, but I could walk, so I walked to the hospital just down the street. No one was waiting in the reception area, and the nurse at the desk greeted me as soon as I walked in. Our voices echoed. She took me to an actual room just down the hall and asked me to wait while she got a doctor.
A few minutes went by. Nobody came to my room, nobody walked by the door; there were no sounds at all besides the white noise of the air conditioning. I was already wearing a dressing gown, but the curious silence unnerved me. I limped to the door, holding my elbow, and looked down the hallway. Nobody. I started walking down the hall, away from the reception area. Half the ceiling lights were off, and every room was dark, the doors closed. I found a stairwell and went downstairs. I thought there might be answers in the morgue, which is usually in basements of hospitals, according to movies.
The hallway at the bottom of the stairs was well lit. I didn’t see anyone, but I could hear a woman yelling, and walked toward the sound. It must have been the wrong part of the hospital for the morgue; there were only more rooms like the ones upstairs, still closed and dark, though the hallway was bright.
Her yelling became screaming, as I approached an open door, and several voices talked quietly. I peeked around the doorway and saw a young woman in labor. An older male doctor and two younger female nurses were standing around her, looking at a clipboard.
“It’s time,” the doctor said.
“My baby,” said the woman in labor.
And all three of them fell upon her, tearing her belly apart with their teeth, their jaws changing shape as they ripped her flesh, exposing and eating the child, too. The woman screamed, then fell silent, limp. My heel bumped a cart behind me, and the doctor’s head snapped up, his black eyes boring into me. He was beside me before I could move, grasping my arm with talons, pulling me close to his face. Blood dripped from his chin. He exhaled, and bits of flesh stuck between his teeth shivered.
“Why?” I whispered. He laughed, spraying me with blood.
“Because you humans taste so damn good,” he said.
“Do you need to?”
“Obviously not. We’ve survived this long without you. Like I said, you’re just delicious. Pregnant women are our favorite.”
“Monster.”
“You first.” He opened his mouth, and the darkness blinded me.
I woke up in a cold sweat, panting, fumbling for the bedside lamp. And even though I was drunk with sleep-grogginess, my first thought was, “I need to be vegan.” Somehow I knew that was the moral of the dream, and the terror I felt was so vivid, I vowed that I would never put another living being in that situation, either by my own hand or through my inaction. I haven’t eaten animals since.
Until I read The Sexual Politics of Meat, I had never connected the outcome of the dream--needing to save animals from slaughter--to the actual imagery of a pregnant woman being devoured. Now, I like to think that having a degree in gender studies prompted my subconscious to make the connection between the two. Suddenly, things make more sense. I’m just upset with myself that my conscious mind couldn't figure it out on its own.
************
If you’ve studied gender and/or race issues or have some familiarity with critical theories and how they’re presented, you should have no problem following the logic here. If you’re a feminist/equalist and/or vegan without much experience with critical papers, it may seem dense and repetitive. I’ve read other reviews criticizing Adams’s repetition: In critical theory, you have to not only provide evidence supporting your hypothesis, but also connect the conclusions in chapter 3 or 5 or 10 with what you said in previous chapters. That way, everything ties together, and the book is cohesive. If she had been re-hashing previous ideas using the same references, that would be repetitive. Fortunately, each chapter’s theories are used as either segue or support of subsequent theories, and the references are fresh each time.
It’s dangerous to assume that her conclusion is that all men subscribe to an animal- and woman-oppressed society, but it’s just as dangerous to assume that she’s full of crap. I just read on the BBC that studies show 30% of women worldwide have suffered from physical and/or sexual abuse. THIRTY PERCENT. If you know two other ladies, the odds are that one of you has been victimized. But despite the overwhelming evidence presented in this book, Adams doesn’t hate men. In fact, she calls out “feminism” as a word that ultimately undermines its own validity: it’s a movement promoting equality between the sexes, yet it’s named after only one of them.
Another dangerous response that I’ve seen is ladies saying, “If that’s oppression, it’s all right with me! In that case, I like being oppressed.” Yeah. Then you don’t know what oppression is. Adams also addresses this point in the book, when a wife asks defensively, “Do I look oppressed?” It’s a defense response, made by people who don’t want to look at the world as it is, or don’t want to believe it, despite overwhelming evidence, facts, observations. But because they don’t want to appear stupid, naïve, or obstinate, they try to make feminists/vegetarians feel bad for NOT subscribing to the socially acceptable (read: oppressive) mindset.
I can’t tell you how many people have tried to start fights with me about being vegan. Who does that? At a restaurant, at Thanksgiving dinner, whenever, I quietly get my meal, trying to avoid attention. Because I know, I KNOW, some d-bag will try to start something. This is something I just can’t fathom. I don’t have any say over what other people eat, I don’t try to “convert” anyone, but somehow, people think the lack of meat on my plate makes it acceptable for them to comment on my diet. It don’t. And it’s one thing if someone wants to engage in an enlightened conversation based in fact, but that is never the case. Without provocation, they want to make me feel bad or inadequate, over-sensitive, bleeding-heart, naïve, less-than, etc. etc. Whenever someone sees the lack of meat, they immediately become nutrition experts based on what they’ve seen on McDonald’s commercials.
When I told my husband how much it bothered me, he was able to shed some light on the problem: Even though he knows that I make food decisions for myself, and only myself, and that I’m an adult who is able to do that, and that I don’t make those decisions to make other people feel bad (obviously, I’m just trying to eat my lunch or whatever), other people see what I’m eating and feel bad about themselves. They look at my plate and realize that I’m actually doing something in practice that they feel guilty about NOT being able to do. And instead of acting like a mature adult and blaming themselves for not being able to commit to something that would rid them of that guilt, they blame me for putting them in a situation where they have to think about how they don’t like themselves. Is that my fault? Nope. Is it fair? Absolutely not. It’s unfortunate that meat-eaters feel threatened by my vegan diet, but my relationship with food is not their business.
And after reading this book, I feel empowered again. I feel like I’ve been given the tools I need to navigate the harsh world of being judged by people “for eating decently”, as Shaw says. Even before finishing the book, I was seeing examples of sexualized animals and animalized women everywhere: television shows, commercials, billboards, even at work. The newest movement is to stop bullying, but this has to extend to women of all ages (not just school-aged boys), and animals. Need some facts and tools to help you act? Read this book.
I initially read the intro chapter to this book back in 2003 when I was taking an EcoFeminism class at university. I was a new vegetarian, and many of the things that Carol J Adams mentioned in that chapter stayed with me over the years to the point when I saw her tweet something about the book, I decided that I had to go back to this text. It's been years, and now I'm a vegan and it's still just as - if not more - relevant to me.
Adams does several things with this book. She makes you really rethink the language you use on a daily basis, making common insults that people bandy about such as "pig" or swear words like "son of a b*%#!" take on new meaning. She draws attention to what she calls the "absent referent," or the ways in which animals, women, meat, and violence against both animals and women figure into our language or are hidden by our language. For example, when women are raped, they often describe feeling like a piece of meat, which refers back to animals and the violence that is enacted upon them to make the meat "we" eat. These aspects, especially, the absent referent, come up again and again in this ground-breaking book through her analysis of historical vegetarianism/veganism, analysis of advertisements that blend sexism and speciesism, and literary analysis of several books, including Frankenstein, in which vegetarianism figures prominently.
This book will cause you to rethink your version of feminism and your entire life. Must read.
Adams does several things with this book. She makes you really rethink the language you use on a daily basis, making common insults that people bandy about such as "pig" or swear words like "son of a b*%#!" take on new meaning. She draws attention to what she calls the "absent referent," or the ways in which animals, women, meat, and violence against both animals and women figure into our language or are hidden by our language. For example, when women are raped, they often describe feeling like a piece of meat, which refers back to animals and the violence that is enacted upon them to make the meat "we" eat. These aspects, especially, the absent referent, come up again and again in this ground-breaking book through her analysis of historical vegetarianism/veganism, analysis of advertisements that blend sexism and speciesism, and literary analysis of several books, including Frankenstein, in which vegetarianism figures prominently.
This book will cause you to rethink your version of feminism and your entire life. Must read.