# The Sexual Politics of Meat > A summary of the 25th-anniversary edition of Carol J. Adams's *The Sexual Politics of Meat*, considered a classic of vegan feminism. A summary of the 25th-anniversary edition of 's *The Sexual Politics of Meat*, considered a classic of [vegan feminism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegan%20feminism.txt). ## Notes The book's order is the twentieth-anniversary preface, tenth-anniversary preface, original preface, and main text. For chronological reading, I have arranged this summary as original preface, main text, tenth-anniversary preface, and twentieth-anniversary preface. The author distinguishes from meat eating. The Korean title translates as "The Sexual Politics of Meat Eating," but "The Sexual Politics of Meat" would be better. I will try to maintain that distinction in this summary. ## Preface to the original edition She begins by saying that when she first became vegetarian, she did not recognize the relationship between [vegetarianism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegetarianism.txt) and [feminism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Feminism.txt), but now she does. She argues that is human control over animals, and that many hidden connections link the two. The book aims to reveal them. Understanding the [text of meat](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Text%20of%20meat.txt) is the first step in discussing its sexual politics. Meat conveys the message that animal corpses are food and an essential source of nutrition. This meaning is expressed consistently and repeatedly at meals, in advertisements, and in conversation, and constitutes a coherent system comprising food production, attitudes toward animals, tolerance of animal abuse, and so forth. Meat is therefore a text we can read. The idea of animal flesh as food contains patriarchal attitudes: that ends justify means, that [objectifying](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Objectification.txt) other beings is essential to life, and that violence can and should be concealed. All this forms part of the sexual politics of meat. Just as [feminist](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Feminism.txt) theory has things to learn from [vegetarian](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegetarianism.txt) insights, [animal rights](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Animal%20rights.txt) theory needs integration with feminist principles. Meat eating symbolizes something that has always been there but remained invisible: patriarchal control over animals. ## Part I. The Patriarchal Text of Meat ### Chapter 1. The Sexual Politics of Meat **Male identification and meat eating** In almost every meat-eating culture, men have eaten meat while women, as second-class citizens, have been prohibited from eating it or restricted in doing so. Male identification has been equated with meat eating: eating meat is masculine, and abstaining feminine. **Meat is for men alone** In modern technological society, cookbooks reflect the assumption that meat is for men. Many recommend meat dishes mainly for men. This was also true in the English-speaking world of the and . [Sex discrimination](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Sexism.txt) in meat distribution diminished, however, when supplies were plentiful. **The racial politics of meat** Meat eating was linked to and class discrimination as well as sexism. Scarce meat went preferentially to the white ruling class. Even in the , medical opinion held that "brain workers" needed meat, while "savages" and lower-class people did not. supposedly derives from Spanish conquerors' mispronunciation of "Caribbean people." They falsely accused Indigenous people of eating humans to justify conquest. There was little evidence of cannibalism, however, and even if it occurred, it is unclear how it differed from Europeans eating nonhuman animals. **Meat is king** The author identifies a superstition linking masculine strength with meat: eating strong animals' muscles will make us strong. Men are strong, and must be strong, so men supposedly need meat. "Meat is king" reveals meat as a symbol of male power. "Vegetables" sometimes means everything other than meat. (Korean likewise uses "greens" to mean everything other than meat in expressions such as "How can you live on nothing but greens?" —ak) Meat is regarded as the irreplaceable center of a meal. Vegetables, second-class food for second-class citizens, cannot threaten its place. The message is that since women cannot be king, neither can women's food. **Gender inequality and species inequality** Gender inequality is linked to species inequality, since men do the in most cultures. Anthropologist found correlations between plant-based economies and female power, and meat-based economies and male power, in nontechnological cultures. Greater reliance on meat and larger prey also correlate with less male involvement in childcare. **Plants: symbols of feminine passivity?** Historically, both "men" and "meat" have narrowed in meaning. "Man" once meant all humans but now excludes women; "meat" once meant all food but no longer does. "Meat" also acquired the meaning of something's essential core, while "vegetable" became a symbol of passivity. The latter's meaning was particularly reversed: it originally meant lively and active. Once vegetables became associated with women's food, they acquired "feminine," passive connotations. The philosopher even said that the difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. **Meat as a patriarchal symbol** Meat eating also symbolizes . A common excuse offered by husbands in many cases was that their wives had not prepared proper food—that is, meat. "Real" men must eat meat; men who do not are seen as rejecting masculine privileges. ### Chapter 2. The Rape of Animals, The Butchering of Women *Playboar*, calling itself "the Playboy for pig farmers," once published a photograph of a pig in a bikini posed as though masturbating (). The author juxtaposes this with 's <1987> rape and dismemberment of women, whose flesh he literally "fed" to other victims. **The absent referent** She argues that these events connect within Western cultural traditions of 1) against women and 2) fragmentation and dismemberment of nature and bodies. To explain this connection, she introduces the [absent referent](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt). (One of the book's most important concepts; "absent" contrasts with "present." —ak) Animals' presence is erased in three ways. - **Slaughter**: Humans slaughter animals, transforming them so that they can no longer exist as animals, only as food. - **Language**: Giving new names to parts of animal corpses erases animals linguistically and transforms them into food. In the context of "meat," the animal is a referent no longer present—an absent referent. "Meat" refers to something that no longer exists. Its absent referent is the animal. Absent referents let us forget animals as independent subjects. - **Metaphor**: Animals made absent referents become metaphors for other beings' experiences: "I felt like a piece of meat," for example. The animal's death is transformed into the woman's life. The absent referent is simultaneously present and absent. We can discover it through inference, but the meaning assigned to it can persist only because the referent itself is no longer present. **Women and animals: overlapping but absent referents** In violence against women, women become [absent referents](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt), allowing "" to serve as a metaphor for others' experiences, as in "the rape of nature." Some terms are so strongly linked to oppression of particular groups that applying them elsewhere can be exploitative. "Rape" is strongly linked to violence against women; "butchering" to violence against animals. The chapter title, "The Rape of Animals, The Butchering of Women," is problematic in that sense, yet she criticizes feminists for using such expressions without recognizing the problem. and intersect through the structure of absent referents. Social imagery of sexual violence—and actual sexual violence—depends on our knowledge of animal slaughter and meat eating. , author of *Female Sexual Slavery*, describes a sex establishment called the "[Slaughterhouse](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Slaughterhouse.txt)" where six or seven girls "serve" 80–120 customers nightly. Similarly, pornography's bondage equipment—chains, dog collars, ropes—evokes animal control. Conversely, women are [absent referents](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt) in animal slaughter, their experiences used metaphorically. The seductive pig's image depends on an absent but imaginable "attractive, fresh young woman." **Racism and absent referents** Deeply rooted in Western culture, this structure shapes individual thought and behavior without people realizing it. Consequently, women too eat meat and sometimes treat other women as "meat." Humans exclude animals from moral consideration, regard poor people, Black people, and women as animal-like, and tolerate abuse. The absent-referent structure names one oppressed group while defining its corresponding group. (I understand this to mean that "rape of animals" names animal oppression while defining absent women, and "butchering of women" names women's oppression while defining absent animals. —ak) This structure also connects to . It requires helpers to remove animals through [alienated labor](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Alienated%20labor.txt), in fur production as well as . One reason American targeted Black rather than Indigenous people was that Indigenous people supplied fur. Recognizing the absent referent's function would lead us to criticize oppression of both groups linked by this structure. Civil rights activist , for example, compared and [slaughterhouses](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Slaughterhouse.txt) and consequently criticized both slavery and meat eating. **Sexual violence and meat eating** Because the [absent referent](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt) is literally absent, it prevents us from experiencing connections among oppressed groups. Cultural images of slaughter and abuse of women are so deeply intertwined that some discourse has used animals as absent referents. , for example, described pornography as portraying women as a "female piece of meat." (Examples from , , and omitted.) In each case, violence against animals serves only as a metaphor for women's experience, erasing the animals' own experience. Such discourse fails to integrate animal oppression into analyses of , overlooking the powerful historical alliance between [feminism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Feminism.txt) and [vegetarianism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegetarianism.txt). **The cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption** The author calls for an alternative theory connecting oppression of women and animals, proposing the [cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Cycle%20of%20objectification,%20fragmentation,%20and%20consumption.txt). 1. Through [objectification](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Objectification.txt), oppressors treat the oppressed as objects and, because they are objects, inflict violence against their will. 2. Through this process, oppressors fragment the oppressed. 3. Finally, they consume them. Men rarely literally consume women, but all men consume women's visual images. Consumption is the fulfillment of oppression. **Consuming meat metaphorically** Meat eating has long served as a metaphor for women's oppression in Western culture. In , rapes Metis and then eats her. Eating seems to be the final stage of male sexual desire. Core elements of male-centered culture appear to rest on such myths. *(Korean also has many expressions such as "eat her" or "looks delicious." —ak)* **Concealing fragmentation** The Zeus myth does not describe how Metis is eaten. The same goes for [slaughterhouses](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Slaughterhouse.txt): what happens inside is hidden. Consumption consequently seems to follow [objectification](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Objectification.txt) directly, without fragmentation. We do not want to know about fragmentation because it is the process in which the once-living referent disappears. The author lists several aspects of fragmentation. 1. **Implemental violence**: Humans are the only animals requiring slaughter facilities. Lacking the bodily equipment for meat eating, we need tools that simulate teeth and claws. said violence always requires implements. Humans cannot eat meat without implemental violence. (In , Arendt said that unlike power, force, and strength, violence always requires implements. —ak) 2. **[Slaughterhouses](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Slaughterhouse.txt)**: In [slaughterhouses](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Slaughterhouse.txt), killing and dismemberment proceed at tremendous speed, causing great suffering. *The Jungle* vividly depicts scenes in a [slaughterhouse](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Slaughterhouse.txt), using the circumstances of [slaughterhouse](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Slaughterhouse.txt) pigs as a metaphor for workers under capitalism. Readers, however, thought of pigs rather than workers. Vivid accounts of how referents die and are dismembered made absent referents present, stripping away their metaphorical power. 3. **The disassembly line as model**: Visiting a [slaughterhouse](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Slaughterhouse.txt) inspired 's automobile production line. The author argues that modern is built on severance and fragmentation. [Slaughterhouse](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Slaughterhouse.txt) workers must regard living animals as "meat" in advance, becoming alienated from their own bodies. Ford devised a way to sever labor's meaning, increasing productivity while depriving workers of a sense of being productive. Assembly-line workers experience human fragmentation but fail to connect it to the [slaughterhouse](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Slaughterhouse.txt) model. 4. **The rape of animals**: Rape victims often report feeling "like meat." Why do rape and meat eating connect so readily? The author says both require treating the other as an immobile object incapable of thought or feeling. Images of "animals wanting to die and be eaten," used to justify meat eating, work similarly. A common myth is that some women want and even enjoy rape. But animals do not want to die, and women do not want rape. Thus both meat eating and rape often involve anesthesia. 5. **The butchering of women**: Butchering as a metaphor for violence against women 1) recalls violence against slaughtered animals and 2) reinforces victims' feeling of being "pieces of meat." Sexual butchering consists of 1) the butcher's knife (the camera in pornography), 2) a perpetrator seeking to control, consume, and defile the victim's body, 3) fetishism of body parts, and 4) meat eating, evoking images of slaughtered animals. The author again criticizes theory (Dworkin's and others') for participating linguistically in animal exploitation. Feminist theory that uses animal oppression metaphorically lacks awareness of the actual animals being oppressed. Its language should express and challenge the structure interdependently linking both oppressions. [Animal rights](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Animal%20rights.txt) activists must likewise exercise care when using rape metaphors for animals' experiences. Analysis of the social context in which human culture views women's rape must come first. Using animal oppression as metaphor without resisting the violence underlying it fails to recognize the interlocking structure of oppression. ### Chapter 3. Masked Violence, Muted Voices Chapter 2 examined how the [absent referent](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt) loses its original meaning and comes to mean only something else for which it serves as metaphor. This chapter addresses the "objectification of consumption" through language, which removes meat's true meaning. **Language as a mask** The author attends to language's role as a mask concealing violence. Language is human-centered as well as male-centered. Most readers will naturally have thought of human males on reading "male-centered." "Animal" is similarly used to imply humans are not animals. Animals are also called "it" rather than "he" or "she," reflecting their treatment as objects. "Man" means both human and male; "it" applies to both objects and animals. Just as the generic "man/he" erases women/females, the generic "it" erases animal life. Human clothing, eating, and washing all depend on other animals' deaths, yet most people are neither troubled nor surprised. Rather, they are surprised that anyone is troubled. Our language reflects a culture that broadly accepts animal oppression. Meat has multiple meanings, but meat eating reveals the most significant oppression of animals. [Peter Singer](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Peter%20Singer.txt) likewise argues that because meals are humans' most direct encounter with nonhuman animals, meat eating is central to defining our attitude toward them and is the most important point we can change. **False naming** We call [slaughterhouses](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Slaughterhouse.txt) meat factories, ham, dead "fresh young chickens," and chickens without necks, feet, or feathers "whole chickens." pointed out the problem with "forcible rape": all rape is forcible. "Humane slaughter" is similarly problematic. **Fused oppressions** Language also fuses women's and animals' inferior status in . analyzes "he" as symbolizing animate + power, and "it" as inanimate + no power. Where gender is distinguished, "he" denotes major power and "she" minor power. This fusion of women's and animals' oppression through naming reaches back to . Adam is authorized to name Eve (before the Fall) and animals (after the Fall). Since Adam, patriarchal culture has maintained the tradition of oppressors naming and defining the oppressed. **Thinking literally** False names hide behind the [dichotomy](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Dichotomy.txt) between literal and symbolic thinking. "Meat is the corpse of a killed, fragmented animal" displaces symbolic thought and invites literal thought. This is part of the struggle to communicate [vegetarianism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegetarianism.txt). Children's reactions to literal truth suggest how far our language has drifted from it. Children also often try to restore the [absent referent](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt)'s meaning. **Muted voices** Vegetarians must persuade others of meat eating's problems within cultures that accept it. According to anthropologist 's [dominance–mutedness theory](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Dominance-mutedness%20theory.txt), "muted groups must communicate their beliefs within forms permitted by the dominant structure." Arguments against slaughter are dismissed as sentimental, childish, or feminine—a common way for dominant groups to silence criticism. They seem "feminine" because women's voices are also muted by that same structure, . **New naming** Vegetarians have therefore coined new words to reform inadequate language. [Vegetarianism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegetarianism.txt) is one example. Before <1847>, people who did not eat meat were called Pythagoreans. **New naming: vegetarianism** Early Oxford dictionaries recorded the word as derived from "vegetable," but vegetarians argued for Latin *vegetus*, meaning whole, sound, fresh, or lively. They sought a philosophical, ethical meaning beyond simply eating vegetables. Over time, however, neutralization and generalization weakened the meaning, producing the notion that anyone avoiding red meat was vegetarian. A new word became necessary. **New naming: animalized protein, feminized protein** The animal is absent from "meat." "Animalized protein" was proposed to challenge this, explicitly restoring the hidden animal referent. Some called products of female animals, such as milk and eggs, "feminized protein." **New naming: vegan** As the dominant structure diluted "vegetarian," proposed [vegan](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegan.txt) in <1944>. Vegan describes a way of life rejecting all products of animal exploitation, including leather and fur as well as food. "Vegan" combines the first three and last two letters of "vegetarian." **New naming: "the fourth stage"** Methods of animal exploitation introduced after came to be called, euphemistically, [factory farming](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Factory%20farming.txt). The author proposes instead "the fourth stage" of meat eating. The first was early ; the second, collective hunting with tools, introduced distance through bows, spears, and so forth. The third was , when meat eating increased greatly. The fourth is animal imprisonment: animals are kept apart from almost everyone until they become "food," and "meat production" is industrialized. Each stage increases dependence on the [absent-referent](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt) structure. Once we stop taking meat eating as nutritionally or evolutionarily inevitable, we can freely examine how its language has historically served as a strategy of justification. Literature of resistance unravels the language of violence against animals and weaves new language. One central task is reframing the questions meat eaters ask vegetarians. Asked why he was vegetarian, reportedly replied, "Why should I explain why I eat decently?" This is the next chapter's subject. ### Chapter 4. The Word Made Flesh This chapter concerns the between those persuaded by vegetarianism and those unpersuaded. Subtle obstacles to persuasion go mostly unnoticed. First is the assumption that because we were persuaded, others will be too. Second is the absence of a feminist analysis revealing the political and cultural forces surrounding meat eating. The third and most important is the setting where discussion usually happens: dinner. Meat on the table and people eating it create unfavorable terrain. "Words made flesh" (the familiar biblical expression. —ak) has three meanings. 1. When persuasion succeeds and someone becomes vegetarian, words acquire flesh. 2. When meat eaters oppose vegetarianism while eating meat, the flesh of meat and their words reinforce each other. 3. Through subtle incorporation of meat eating into traditional narrative structures, a story's words and meat's flesh become interchangeable. (A difficult expression, but clearer in light of Part II, which analyzes vegetarian messages in feminist literature. I understand it to concern messages intricately intertwined across multiple layers of works and authors' lives, sometimes literal and sometimes metaphorical. —ak) **When vegetarians' words acquire flesh** Various people became vegetarian through books: examples begin in classical Greece with the and Plutarch, and include Mandeville's *The Fable of the Bees*. **Embattled dialogue** Conversations with meat eaters about vegetarianism usually happen at dinner. They ask assorted questions and demand answers; some are hostile. Like feminists asked "Do you reject beauty norms too?", vegetarians hear "Are you a health obsessive too?" (The original expressions are "bra burners" and "health nuts." —ak) Meat eaters also ridicule vegetarians' concerns by saying plants are alive, or that the lettuce and tomatoes they eat feel pain. (See [Plant sentience](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Plant%20sentience.txt).) Trivialization is their first tactic. Answer plant-pain questions seriously and you are criticized as overly aggressive. What matters to us politically, personally, ontologically, and ethically becomes entertainment over dinner for them. Next comes challenging legitimacy. Feminists hear "Does my wife look oppressed to you?"; vegetarians hear "Should omnivorous animals also be vegetarian?" They are cast as radicals trying to reform supposedly sacred, natural relationships (marriage, instinct). Here, meat eaters' words recapitulate the text of meat, separating our words from our flesh. You are the rabbit and your interlocutor the hunter. **Although you are actually oppressed, you are cast as the oppressor seeking to redefine, restrict, and disempower meat eating.** **The story of meat** The story of meat is a worldview in which meat is accepted as food. Stories have endings; meals have meat. Stories also have meat; meals have endings. A meal without meat is a story stripped of meaning. ("Meat" also means substance or essence. —ak) Humans share stories to give life meaning. Narratives have endings that reveal the whole story's meaning. Meat eating is a story applied to animals, defining the meaning of their existence. Animals' lives and bodies become material for human stories. This is the third sense in which the word becomes flesh. This resembles religious narratives of a god's birth, dismemberment, and resurrection. It begins with an animal's birth, which supposedly would not have occurred without meat eating. Since humans gave life, taking it is considered justified. Words then change to interpret death positively (see chapter 3). The dead animal is resurrected as meat rather than animal. Two threats confront this narrative: [vegetarianism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegetarianism.txt) and [feminism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Feminism.txt). Vegetarianism argues that human meaning cannot redeem an animal's death. Feminism criticizes patriarchal narratives in which men explore and women remain passive. The story of meat merely substitutes animals for objectified, passive women. If words acquire flesh through the story of meat, we can go further and say bodies are texts and texts bodies. Transforming an intact animal into food resembles transforming an intact text into something more palatable. Both animal and text are dismembered. ("Dismemberment" can concern both cutting up bodies and distorting texts. —ak) ## Part II. From the Belly of Zeus ### Chapter 5. Dismembered Text, Dismembered Animals Distortions of vegetarian literature follow chapter 2's [cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Cycle%20of%20objectification,%20fragmentation,%20and%20consumption.txt). 1. **Objectification**: Reduce a text to a few essential elements, making it available for close scrutiny and criticism. 2. **Fragmentation**: Break it apart and separate it from context. 3. **Consumption**: Interpret it as containing nothing new and posing no threat to the existing meat-eating culture. **Defining dismemberment** Vegetarianism can be dismembered in many ways: ignoring a text's vegetarian message, mentioning vegetarianism without context, treating it as unimportant, or forcing its meaning into the dominant meat-eating culture's framework. Feminist writers face the same critical distortions. If texts are destined to be dismembered and consumed, women and animals face the same fate. Feminists and vegetarians have therefore produced writing against the text of meat, establishing new definitions in opposition to patriarchal authority. **Vegetarian-at-arms: Joseph Ritson** is an exemplary life linking the dismemberment of texts and animals. He devoted great effort to criticizing critics' dogmatic textual interpretations, spelling, etymology, and related matters. He opposed meat eating too, raging against both textual distortion and animal dismemberment. Scholars of his time sharply criticized his . Some claimed old age had brought him mental illness. Yet his later was regarded in the twentieth century as pioneering. Did someone mentally ill in old age produce a pioneering work when still older? **Writing the literal; writing vegetarianism** Writers writing about vegetarianism can be seen as "bearing the vegetarian word." ("Bear" means to carry or give birth. I have rendered it as carrying within and conveying, since in this context women may be messengers or themselves the message. —ak) [Margaret Homans](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Margaret%20Homans.txt), for example, explains how 's *Frankenstein* recalls language from 's *Alastor*. Mary bears Percy's words within her novel. *(Percy was Mary's spouse. —ak)* Vegetarianism is a touchstone for the literal because it addresses literal meat eating and what is literally eaten/consumed. In , for example, the creature lacks paper and pen and writes on trees and rocks—nature itself. Readers thus receive words explicitly written on nature. One message is itself a mutilation of nature while reminding us of violence against it: > There is a dead hare nearby; eat and recover your strength. **Bearing the vegetarian word** The author identifies several ways women writers bear the vegetarian word. 1. Allude to vegetarian words in earlier texts. 2. Depict characters recalling historical vegetarians. 3. Translate earlier vegetarian texts. 4. Mention dead animals, revealing the [absent referent](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt). 5. Persuade readers to become vegetarian. ### Chapter 6. Frankenstein's Vegetarian Monster By making a creature assembled from dismembered parts vegetarian, attempts to re-member rather than dismember the vegetarian tradition. The novel has attracted extensive critical attention and detailed analysis over the past thirty years, yet its creature's vegetarianism has received almost none. This chapter offers literary, historical, and feminist analysis. (The author introduction in one Korean translation I read—the Hummingbird Classics *Frankenstein*—said: > Author: Mary Shelley > > Born in London, England, she was the daughter of social thinker W. Godwin and the second wife of poet P. B. Shelley. *Frankenstein* (1818), written while staying in Switzerland and inspired by conversations with her husband and the poet Byron, concerns a grotesque, gigantic artificial human with human abilities, and became the origin of modern science fiction. It identifies 's father as and her husband as , but omits that her mother was the prominent twentieth-century women's rights activist . It also says Dr. Frankenstein's creature possesses "human abilities," but not that it differs from humans in lacking their "cruelty and [speciesism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Speciesism.txt)." —ak) **Closed circles and vegetarian consciousness** The creature includes animals within his circle of moral consideration, but however hard he tries, humans will not include him or animals within theirs. Vegetarianism also declares his distinction from his creator: he follows a more inclusive moral principle. **Bearing the Romantic vegetarian word** Critics have called the essence of 's life and learning. Through her father , she associated with prominent contemporary vegetarians and was influenced by . She consequently became a Romantic vegetarian and, like other writers of the time, reinterpreted and the myth of . **The vegetarian Eden and the Fall** A common interpretation is that everyone in Eden was vegetarian. Romantic vegetarians additionally interpreted meat eating as the curse following the Fall. Rather than the patriarchal fixation on Eve tempting Adam with forbidden fruit, or women as the origin of evil, this directs attention toward connections between cursed meat eating and masculinity. **The Prometheus myth** Usually read as resistance to a tyrant, the myth was interpreted by Romantic vegetarians as linking the discovery of fire with the beginning of meat eating: cooking makes it palatable and conceals violence. On first encountering fire, Frankenstein's creature rejects meat and experiments with roasting fruit, beans, and roots. **The Golden Age and the Natural Diet** Various passages make clear that the creature's diet reflects the vegetarian messages in the "Golden Age" of 's and 's . This is one of the author's previously described ways of bearing the vegetarian word. **A diet for a small ** Watching cows on a small farm, the creature also notes the inefficiency of getting so little milk relative to the effort of feeding them. This is read as reflecting French ecological vegetarian 's . (For more recent efficiency calculations, see [Efficiency of plant-based diet](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Efficiency%20of%20plant-based%20diet.txt). —ak) **The slaughterhouse as the creature's source** The creature is born into a fallen world, and is also its child, since parts of his body came from a slaughterhouse. Since slaughterhouse animals are herbivores, the author says, he has anatomical vegetarian elements too. **Restoring muted meanings** The creature bears feminist as well as vegetarian meanings. The scene in which the DeLacey family's mother teaches her daughter intellectual aspiration and independence recalls the author's mother, . Women have been excluded from the "closed circle." Many male colleagues excluded Mary Shelley, and the author suggests her resulting anger appears in the creature's anger. Hoping to enter the circle of "humanity," but excluded and divided into "them" and "us," the creature reflects contemporary vegetarians' and feminists' circumstances. ### Chapter 7. Feminism, the Great War, and Modern Vegetarianism After , many modern women writers began to see male domination as the source of war and meat eating. The war highlighted connections between pacifism and [vegetarianism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegetarianism.txt). Vegetarianism could thus challenge war, and pacifism challenge meat eating. Vegetarians challenged a world at war by deliberately bearing the vegetarian word. Chapter 7 summarizes feminist analyses of political violence, explains how war modernized vegetarianism, and analyzes representative works. It aims to reveal deep connections between vegetarianism and pacifism in twentieth-century women's writing, broadening understanding of meat's sexual politics. **The sexual politics of war** During World War I, some antiwar feminists, including , argued that women tend toward love and peace. Others, such as , argued that the issue was circumstances—male domination and the absence of women in power—rather than disposition. Pacifist and *Woman's Journal* editor and her husband became vegetarian during the war. Thinking it permissible to kill animals can lead to thinking it permissible to kill humans, helping justify war. Persuading children to eat meat, she says, is like persuading them that killing can sometimes be justified. If meat eating and war are closely related, refusing meat can enact opposition to war. Many women, including , deeply understood their shared cruelty; many feminist–vegetarian–pacifists were active during World War I. **The Great War: modernizing vegetarianism** Just as antiwar feminists believed women's empowerment would end war, vegetarians believed abolishing meat eating was a step toward peace. After the war, writers beyond ethical vegetarians began noticing these connections, partly through the experience of war itself. Seeing rats eat dead companions' bodies makes similarities between humans and animals unavoidable. Philosopher argues that the Great War marked a turning point in human attitudes toward animals: scientific evidence for, and interest in, human–animal continuity grew substantially afterward. **Women's fiction and the extended front** 's phrase "Man the Hunter and Man the Soldier" in connects two forms of violence while emphasizing the actor's gender. Women's vegetarian–feminist fiction recalls this too. The tradition starts by recognizing an extended front wherever animals are killed. Some feminists follow this understanding, which the author classifies into four themes. 1. **Rejecting male violence**. If meat eating places women on the front line, rejecting it is antiwar action on that front. 2. **Identification with animals**. Recognize that animals and women are both treated as objects and possessions, and stand in solidarity with animals. 3. **Vegetarianism as resistance to male control and violence**. Reject dependence on men and a world at war through vegetarianism. 4. **Connections and oppression; a connected ideal world**. Link human male domination to women's oppression/war/meat eating, and a perfect world before the Fall to vegetarianism/pacifism/women's equality. **The vegetarian Golden Age and women's fiction** In , argued that a plant culture supported by and horticultural evidence had been replaced by a blood culture. Some twentieth-century women writers accepted this view. 's short story depicts women's as originally free of taboo, later made taboo by men. (Such depictions recur throughout history. , called the father of medicine, claimed menstrual blood was poisonous because women, unlike men, could not expel impure matter through sweat. made similar claims. Among renowned scholars from antiquity through the , it is hard to find a man who did not say such things. The tradition continues into the . —ak) **Interruption as a narrative strategy** These works connect vegetarianism and violence through feminist insight. They share a literary technique the author calls "interruption": inserting vegetarian messages to produce a gestalt shift in the reader's perspective. Writers signal interruptions in various ways. 1. Dots, dashes, "interruption" markers. 2. Stammering, pauses, vagueness, or confusion in a character previously controlling the situation. 3. Turning the narrative toward food or eating habits. 4. Mentioning important people and events in vegetarian history. These devices establish an interruption through which vegetarian messages can be conveyed. **Overcoming the dominant perspective** By redefining the battlefield and declaring every site of meat eating a front, modern women writers strongly asserted women's rights. The tradition of [feminism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Feminism.txt), [vegetarianism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegetarianism.txt), and pacifism emerging from declares that this war is not yet over. ## Part III. Eat Rice Have Faith in Women ("" is a poem by . The author reads it in two ways: "Eat vegetarian food, **and** have faith in women," and "Eating vegetarian food **is** having faith in women." —ak) ### Chapter 8. The Distortion of the Vegetarian Body Many scholars tend to ignore the alliance between feminism and vegetarianism. This chapter analyzes that phenomenon, first defining the vegetarian body—both the body as writing subject and the body suited to vegetarian eating. **Defining the vegetarian body** She presents anatomical evidence that humans' bodies resemble herbivores' more than carnivores', archaeological evidence of predominantly vegetarian living, and medical evidence linking meat eating to and . (This section mixes the author's claims with those of her sources and interviewees. An anniversary preface clarifies that she knows humans are omnivores and uses "vegetarian body" metaphorically. —ak) **Critical distortions** Historians explain vegetarianism away rather than explaining it. There are various distortions. 1. **Vegetarians supposedly avoid meat because they consider meat eating animalistic**: They reject human meat eating because it is unnatural (tools, cultural packaging, etc.) and unnecessary. 2. **Vegetarians supposedly conservatively seek a return to preindustrial Europe**: On the contrary, chapter 6 showed Romantic vegetarians to be politically radical reformers who considered vegetarianism dietary reform and a progressive diet. 3. **Distortion by focusing on individuals**: For example, the claim that was vegetarian. Logically unsound, it is also factually wrong: Hitler's vegetarianism was exaggerated through propaganda. 4. **Distortion casting vegetarians as racist**. Against this background, 's is both problematic and suggestive. Responding to a friend criticizing her meat eating, Parker explains that the pig intestines, neckbones, and tails she eats connect her to ancestors who survived generations of and . This seems a conflict between antiracism and vegetarianism, but reads it differently. The meat eating Parker defends is not, even if Parker does not see it this way, modern capitalism's "fourth-stage meat eating" (see chapter 3's "New naming"). An enormous gulf separates Parker's modern meat eating from her ancestors'. Parker also emphasizes food's ritual significance. Adams does not deny this, but notes that plant-based soul food is possible. She is critical, however, of using meat metaphorically for ancestral oppression (intestines, neckbones, tails), since using animal violence as metaphor for something else contributes to the [absent-referent](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt) structure. Women's history has been concealed, and its vegetarian messages distorted and concealed in turn: the feminist–vegetarian alliance is doubly hidden. In feminist criticism, [vegetarianism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegetarianism.txt) becomes an [absent referent](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt), trivialized, dismissed as personal, or deemed less appropriate than sex, power, politics, and other subjects. **Sexuality and the vegetarian body** The author finds it interesting that earlier writers discussing the vegetarian body discussed only the human body, rather than female or male bodies. Such discussions were not entirely absent, though. , who popularized vegetarianism in the , left feminism a mixed legacy. While spreading vegetarianism, his ridiculous claims about meat's effects on male sexual organs gave critics another pretext to ridicule feminism–vegetarianism. He claimed meat eating sexually overstimulated men. Given marital rape and child sexual abuse, controlling male sexuality is a legitimate feminist subject. The problems, Adams says, are identifying meat as the cause of sexual urges and treating masturbation as immoral. For women, promised double liberation: from arduous kitchen work, and, if vegetarianism improved family health, from nursing the sick, then largely women's responsibility. [Vegetarianism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegetarianism.txt) was also expected to encourage exchange among women. Women additionally believed it reduced labor pains and enabled healthy births, persuading many to adopt it. Similar claims appeared in , edited by 's friend M. W. Davies. The idea that meat overstimulated male sexual organs also made vegetarianism a means of male abstinence and control of male sexuality. Some vegetarian women advocated the right to enjoy sex. For these reasons, vegetarianism was sometimes regarded as the diet of utopia. **A meat phobia?** The dominant culture sometimes calls vegetarians' responses to "food" a phobia. Adams calls this a "naming compulsion" seeking to control interpretation: opposition to meat eating simply cannot be given a positive name. **Embodied meanings** How can women's meanings be expressed in a that silences them? The author suggests they may have used vegetarian eating, regarded as feminine food, to express opposition to the dominant culture. found that women used food symbolically more often than men. Animals' bodies contain meaning, which does not disappear when they become meat. Our own bodies express meaning through food choices. Connections among vegetarian bodies, the author argues, can restore [absent referents](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt) and bodily mediated knowledge. ### Chapter 9. For a Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory Major moments in feminist history and major figures in women's literature have joined [feminism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Feminism.txt) and [vegetarianism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegetarianism.txt), revealing continuity. Developing feminist–vegetarian theory rests on recognizing that continuity. Since is embedded in male domination, vegetarianism symbolizes "dis-ease" within . (The hyphen seems intended to express both disease and the negation of ease. —ak) Literary and historical alliances between feminism and vegetarianism from the through the clearly establish a feminist–vegetarian tradition. **Reconstructing the history of feminism and vegetarianism** Feminist–vegetarian critical theory starts by recognizing women's and animals' similar positions in patriarchy: objects rather than subjects. The , for example, instruct men how to treat women and animals: "You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, male or female servant, ox, donkey, or anything belonging to your neighbor." compared women in industrialized Western society to zoo animals. Through the patriarchal [absent-referent](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt) structure, oppression of women and animals overlaps, requiring a joint feminist–vegetarian challenge. Yet women and animals experience it separately, so their movements are often fragmented too. Dominant forces defending patriarchy often see arguments for women's rights as leading to arguments for animal rights—another manifestation of the alliance between these oppressions. A man mocking the reportedly asked, "What next—educate cows?" The parody , published in response to , belongs in the same context. (According to [Peter Singer](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Peter%20Singer.txt), the anonymous parody's author was Cambridge philosopher .) There are also feminist–vegetarian–lesbian (or homosocial) connections. ("Homosocial" here seems different from Eve Sedgwick's term for nonsexual bonds among men—that is, male solidarity. —ak) Adams says vegetarianism is inseparable from an autonomous, independent female identity. In practice, it was resistance to domination. **The vegetarian quest** The author proposes three stages in the quest of someone adopting [vegetarianism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegetarianism.txt). - Stage 1: Revelation of meat's nothingness. - Stage 2: Naming the relationship with animals. - Stage 3: Rebuking the meat-eating world. The **first stage** reveals meat's nothingness as food. *("Reveal" also carries the religious sense of revelation, as though God briefly discloses an intention. —ak)* It recognizes the transformation of an animal that was something/someone into no-thing/no-body. This revelation entails recognizing the [absent-referent](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt) structure. We realize we are eating corpses rather than food. But context and interpretation are necessary for this recognition to lead to vegetarianism. The **second stage**, therefore, names relationships: between meat on the table and living animals, between ourselves and other animals, between ethics and diet, and the recognition of meat eating's unnecessary violence. Through interpretation, awareness of meat's nothingness becomes conviction that killing animals is wrong. One aspect of naming relationships is recovering appropriate words in place of "meat": new words offering a vision of human–animal relationships instead of euphemisms, distortions, and false names. The **final stage** rebukes the meat-eating world. Through practice, vegetarians reveal an alternative to meat eating. Healthy vegetarians demonstrate the "vegetarian body." Many seek to change the world rather than merely demonstrate possibility. Vegetarianism criticizes patriarchal as well as meat-eating society, since, as earlier chapters showed, meat eating connects with male power. Recognizing this "vegetarian quest" allows richer, undistorted historical interpretations of individual women's actions. **Vegetarian meaning and literary criticism** [Vegetarianism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegetarianism.txt) puts imagination into practice and is the ability to imagine alternatives to the text of meat. As chapter 5 showed, women's fiction carries vegetarian messages in various ways. If the vegetarian quest reveals meat's nothingness, dead birds in feminist fiction reveal a once-living "some-oneness." Chicken in the film *The Birds*, or hundreds of dead birds in , expose the absent-referent structure. The phenomenology of vegetarianism parallels that of writing. Both seize language and reveal gaps and silences. Vegetarian phenomenology includes revealing animals and their fates; questions of utterance, when to speak and when to remain silent; food choices; and questioning patriarchal myths permitting meat eating. **A feminist–vegetarian reading of the vegetarian body** > Feminists do not see things others cannot see. They see what others see differently. Feminist consciousness, cautiously put, transforms "facts" into "contradictions." — We cannot claim to tell the truth about women's lives without seriously considering those who chose diets outside the dominant culture. They would not have chosen, maintained, and spread vegetarianism unless it positively affected their lives. Scholars must acknowledge and answer this historical fact. Although many feminists practiced vegetarianism, their activities and writings have been analyzed without adequately recognizing what they said about meat eating. This now needs closer examination. What meanings did feminist vegetarians give their actions? What compromises did they make? How many writers and activists were vegetarian or reflected it in their works? What exchanges took place among them? What did meat-eating feminists think? We must ask and answer these questions. Vegetarianism resists patriarchal consumption, the consumption of death. It declares an alternative worldview honoring life instead of consuming death, relying on motivated people rather than **resurrected** animals. ("Resurrection" borrows 's expression: "Animals die so that humans may live. … We eat death. Dead Christ-flesh is **resurrected** within our bodies, giving us life." —ak) ## Epilogue. Destabilizing Patriarchal Consumption Because dominant discourse permits meat eating, we are compelled to accept, ignore, neutralize, and tolerate the fact that we eat dead animals. What does all this coercion imply? Women's position in patriarchal culture also needs further consideration. Women are both swallowed and swallowing, consuming/eating and consumed/eaten. Their bellies have no ears and cannot hear, yet they seek to speak inside the belly of someone who cannot hear. Meat eating reflects and represents patriarchal values, inscribing male power at every meal. The patriarchal gaze sees delicious food rather than butchered flesh or dead animals. If meat symbolizes male domination, its presence declares women's disempowerment. In rituals of various nontechnological societies, meat symbolizes the father, and killing animals is understood to resolve hostility toward him. The dead animal symbolizes the father passing ancestral power to his son. Meat becomes a metaphor for resolving father–son tensions over power. Yet we rarely eat intact, mature male animals. How did meat eating come to symbolize the father? That metaphor conceals a reality behind the curtain: the [absent-referent](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt) structure. What we actually eat is mainly mothers—females. How can we overturn patriarchy while eating its symbols of power? Autonomous, antipatriarchal beings must surely be [vegan](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegan.txt). Destabilizing patriarchal consumption requires interrupting patriarchal meals. To destabilize it, we must . We can thereby free Metis from 's belly and make severed human–human and human–animal relationships whole again. . Our food choices will be reflected in our cosmology and politics. Or we might say: "Eating rice *is* faith in women." On this grace may we all feed. ## Preface to the tenth-anniversary edition The original preface begins, "My becoming vegetarian had nothing to do with my feminism. Or so I thought at the time." This was the first sentence of a paper submitted for Professor 's feminist ethics course in <1975>. Adams says she opened the book this way to honor her. This preface describes how and why the book was written. Feminism challenges the gender binary, but also offers a tool for analyzing the social construction of relationships between humans and . Chapter 9 quoted on feminists seeing things differently. How did Adams come to see meat eating differently? Near the end of her first year at Yale Divinity School, a horse kept by her family was shot dead. Eating a hamburger that evening, she wondered what distinguished the horse from the cow such that she mourned only the horse. The truth struck her, and she stopped eating the burger. She did not immediately change completely. The following year, living with a feminist vegetarian roommate, she became fully vegetarian. Professor encouraged further research into feminism–vegetarianism and suggested sources. This research appeared in *Amazon Quarterly* and the <1975> issue of *The Lesbian Reader*. In 1976, she received publication and other proposals, but declined, feeling the work incomplete. She then entered social activism, including support for domestic violence survivors. Yet she continually felt disconnected when seeing anti-violence-against-women activists eating hamburgers, feminist biographers ignoring vegetarianism, and antiwar activists wearing leather. Anger, alienation, and determination led her to decide to write the book. Much later, from <1987>, she could devote herself to writing while caring for her child. Reading [Margaret Homans](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Margaret%20Homans.txt)'s [Bearing the Word](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Bearing%20the%20Word.txt), she discovered the [absent referent](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Absent%20referent.txt), recognizing it as the key connecting women's and animals' oppression. The book took almost fifteen years to complete. Journalists and critics call it scholarship, but Adams does not identify as a scholar. She is an activist interested in scholarship and remains an activist. She is pleased that this anniversary preface allows her to make clear that an activist wrote the book. criticized it on his show as based on conjecture. Some ask, "What about homeless people? Violence against women?"—shouldn't human suffering come first? Adams suggests these questions are defensive responses: only meat eaters ask them. A central point of *The Sexual Politics of Meat* is that activism should not be severed this way. Human and animal suffering are interconnected and cannot be polarized. The book argues that the construction of gender politics connects to how we see animals, particularly those we eat. Masculinity is culturally constructed, at least partly, through access to meat and control over others' bodies. Are insights from twenty-five years earlier *(forty-five years earlier as of <2020>. —ak)* still valid? Sadly, she says they are more relevant than ever. The sexual politics of meat has expanded culturally and quantitatively. The first edition dedicated the book to 600 million animals killed for food; the annual figure is now 950 million. Over the past decade, more has become known about [factory farming](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Factory%20farming.txt)'s environmental effects and inhumane treatment of animals, yet meat eaters still regard theirs as a humane diet. One concern since publication was that animal rights activism might distract women from women's oppression, since roughly 80% of animal rights activists are women. But she describes meeting women worldwide who recognize the issues' connections and work on both. **On "the vegetarian body"** Adams knows humans evolved as omnivores, though several interviewees believed humans physiologically herbivorous. "The vegetarian body" is metaphorical, but also expresses the transformative nature of becoming vegetarian. Humans themselves have not evolved, yet vegetarians and vegans have, in a sense, evolved vegetarian bodies. **On accusations of essentialism** She clarifies that she does not consider women inherently more caring or peaceful. Such statements in the text convey her sources' views. She does believe, however, that groups without power may be more sensitive to these issues, and that caring matters. What connects [feminism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Feminism.txt) and [vegetarianism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Vegetarianism.txt)? She says vegetarianism should not be adopted merely because it resists domination. It is proactive and transformative—and delicious. The justice it seeks must be capable of extending beyond . ## Preface to the twentieth-anniversary edition Vegan food is often considered tasteless and feminists puritanical. People assume accepting the book's reasoning means sacrificing something. Its central message, however, is that alternatives exist that are better for humans, animals, and the environment alike. As the tenth-anniversary preface explains, the book grew from activism. Its theory is engaged in activism, born of anger, carrying a vision of what is possible and offering better alternatives as well as criticism. The sexual politics of meat describes attitudes and practices that animalize women and feminize animals. It also means the belief that men need meat, are entitled to it, and engage in meat eating as a masculine activity associated with virility. Around the first edition's publication, 's "Eating Well" appeared in English, introducing carno-phal-logocentrism. Adams asked continental philosophy authority about intersections between their work. Calarco identified the clearest connection: both emphasize meat eating's central role in becoming a subject. Both explicitly locate it at the heart of traditional subjectivity, especially male subjectivity. Dominance works best in a severed, fragmented culture. [Feminism](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Feminism.txt) is a movement to recognize severed connections. Adams ends by inviting us to imagine a world in which the book is no longer true, and work together to make it real.