The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams

The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory Reviews

• 
  Sean Barrs

  “If the body becomes a special focus for women's struggle for freedom then what is ingested is a logical initial locus for announcing one's independence. Refusing the male order in food, women practiced the theory of feminism through their bodies and their choice of vegetarianism.”
  
  This book questions the nature of feminism; it questions its purpose, it’s incompleteness and its prejudices within the world at large.
  
  Now that an odd thing to say isn’t it? Prejudices, in a movement that argues for equality between the sexes? Now let me explain. Feminism is about the protection of the female body; it’s about the fruition of equal rights for women in society: it’s about breaking the stupid misogynistic rules set by the dominating patriarchy that cause differences. Feminism argues that we all deserve choice, the basic right to make our own decisions and exist on the same level as everyone else. It’s not a big ask, freedom and equality should belong to all regardless of sex, gender or race.
  
  “Dominance functions best in a culture of disconnections and fragmentation. Feminism recognizes connections. Imagine.”
  
  However, Carol J. Adams extends this idea to the non-human. The questions she raises are very pertinent. On a basic level, she asks feminists to consider what they are arguing for. As advocates of female rights and motherhood they would naturally be opposed to sexual exploitation and the forced separation between a mother and a child (which occurs in all forms of animal agriculture.) Adams suggests that in the very act of eating meat, feminists are defeating their own objectives. She argues that one cannot call themselves a feminist if they partake in such things. In a way, they are destroying the female body by consuming it.
  
  And it’s a very interesting point. Rather than offering criticism, she suggests all feminists need to be vegetarian in order to be stronger feminists. Now lets rewind, this isn’t an effort to reduce the achievements of feminist or what they do. There have been many great feminists who achieved wonders for women, regardless of what they happened to eat. What Adams is suggesting, through cold hard logic and fact, that in order to be a better feminist, a more complete feminist, one should be a vegetarian or a vegan. By avoiding meat, it is a direct challenge to the patriarchy and the norms that set a slaughtered female body on our plates and call it dinner.
  
  “In some respects we all acknowledge the sexual politics of meat. When we think that men, especially male athletes, need meat, or when wives report that they could give up meat but they fix it for their husbands, the overt association between meat eating and virile maleness is enacted. It is the covert associations that are more elusive to pinpoint as they are so deeply embedded within our culture.
  
  Toxic masculinity is also an issue. Adams brings to the fray the idea that men need meat. It’s associated with masculinity, and vegans and vegetarians who don’t partake are often represented as weak or womanly. This is of course false within society. Vegans and vegetarian can be world leading athletes; yet, this label remains. Adams addresses some of the propaganda and societal conditioning that creates this sense of unease for men. Disproportionately, there is a much larger percentage of women who don’t eat meat than there are men who do not. Food for thought, I think.
  
  This is a very important book in the realms of animal studies and ecocriticism. And, from a personal point of view, it has influenced me greatly as both a vegan and a student of literature. I urge people to read it, even if it is just to see a perspective different to their own. This was written 30 years ago now, and when considering the recent surge in green movements, animal rights advocacy and veganism, it’s more relevant now than ever. These ideas are gaining more credence and authority as time goes on.
  
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• 
  Zanna

  Recently my adult English class were studying the topic of 'nature' which had a section on 'animals'. One of the opinions on the page was something along the lines of 'the world would be a healthier and happier place if everyone went vegetarian and it would be good for the environment too'. After giving time for students to discuss this and other ideas, I asked if they agreed with it and was answered by a chorus of heartfelt 'no!'s. Why not, I wanted to hear, and the students vehemently insisted that eating meat was essential to survival and health. You have to eat meat they said, using the strongest form for expressing obligation available to them. Since I've mentioned that I'm a vegan before, my students were arguing against the evidence standing in front of them, and perhaps I should have demanded an explanation as to how I had somehow survived for the past 16 years during which I haven't eaten meat, but I focussed on dismissing The Protein Myth, which has folks believing that essential amino acids are missing from vegetable foods, or that the amino acids in such foods are not the same as the ones we need to make proteins in our bodies. I wanted to squash the bad science quickly and move the class on to ethical arguments. I was unprepared for this wall of resistance and strength of conviction in the necessity of meat.
  
  I don't know why I was so surprised, since I had been reading Carol Adams' book 'The Sexual Politics of Meat', which addresses the mysterious difficulties of vegetarians to be heard over the dominance of 'the texts of meat'. Since these are written into white culture we are heard as aggressive in our very refusal to partake. Plutarch is quoted suggesting vegetarians flip the question everyone asks us and invite the interlocutor to explain why they feel it's alright to eat the dead flesh of animals, but this level of provocation usually backfires. One of the uses of spurious scientific arguments against vegetarianism is obviously to deflect the possibility of an ethical discussion; likewise the hypotheticals wise guys and gals love to bombard us with relating to desert islands and other unlikely situations. 'What would you do if I put a gun to a cow's head and threatened to pull the trigger if you refused to eat a burger?' wondered a classmate of mine recently, surely begging the question 'but... why would you do that?'
  
  Anyway, while the terminology seemed a bit out of date to me, much of the analysis was valuable. The idea of meat as a macho food is overt, but Adams seeks to illuminate how deep the parallels run between the status and optics of women and of animals in white Euro-USian culture and society. I was actually most moved by the opening section in which she points out that women everywhere go without food, especially meat, to ensure that men eat well and eat meat. The discussion of rape though, made neither logical nor intuitive sense to me, and I lost the thread of the argument at times.
  
  A key topic that does resonate for me is the development of meat consumption. Adams identifies four historical stages, the first being vegetarianism, followed by hunting, followed by subsistence farming, followed by industrialised agri-business. The Euro-USian world is obviously in 'the fourth stage', which is mostly pretty horrific. Adams considers meat-eating on the scale of this cultural group to be enmeshed with white supremacy and to some extent imposed with colonisation around the world. Listening to Radio 4's Farming Today I regularly hear reports on British farmers seeking expanding markets in 'BRIC' countries where animalised and feminised protein (meat, dairy products and eggs in Adams' terminology) are being consumed in increasing quantities. The analysis on the radio never gets beyond 'they want it because they can afford it now', continually reinforcing the food hierarchy with meat at the top. Little attention is paid to the health or environmental implications, or the farmers' intention to create demand. Compassion for 'livestock' is obviously unmentionable.
  
  While I appreciate Adams' reflections on meat-eating as white supremacy, and agree with her critique of Pat Parker's poem 'To my Vegetarian Friend', I feel the aspect of intersections between culture and racism and meat industries is underdeveloped. Reading Toni Morrison's Beloved, one of many books that confronts me with the fact that Black slaves in the US were treated far worse even than animals raised for food who, as Adams points out, receive 'the trappings of care' from humans, I am reminded that white veg*ans like myself are regularly guilty of
  reinflicting, reinscribing or callously ignoring white supremacy and other aspects of kyriarchy. This week I read about
  vegans of colour protesting the antics of Thug Kitchen. The Sistah Vegan Project and other
  thoughtful, intersectional work should be required reading for vegan activists!
  
  Still, Adams started the ball rolling taking veggies to task for misogyny, not that it's over. Tweeting as my local Green Party branch on the topic of raising the number of women in parliament, I received a response from a white man: "why not focus on helping animals instead? #govegan" presumably, only male animals. Adams makes an intriguing connection between the fragmentation of animal bodies and of texts, specifically, the silencing of women's texts and especially as 'bearers of the vegetarian word'. It is important that Frankenstein, much analysed and admired, has been ignored as a vegetarian text, and also that so many attempts have been made to attribute it to Shelley's husband, since it's inconceivable that a woman can have written something so brilliant. I really enjoyed the literature analysis, and I will add veg*anism to the lenses I try to look through in my reading, as it seems to be all too rarely applied.
  
  One of the questions addressed by Adams' analysis is that of why women, and specifically some feminists, have been drawn to vegetarianism. Aside from the clear association of meat and masculinity, to what extent have women embraced plant based diets as a form of protest against patriarchal violence? Because feminism and vegetarianism both tend to be ridiculed and excluded from mainstream discourse, there is a need for loving excavation of vegetarian reflections in woman oriented texts, such as the work of Alice Walker.
  She mentions an (Victorian?) article about teenage girls who refuse to eat meat, which treats the behaviour as an eating disorder (but, happily, recommends kindness and healthy alternatives, not coercion). This apparently common experience of the body rejecting meat, of meat becoming ineffably wrong was my own at the age of fourteen. Disgust is a strange emotion, and I still cannot say whether mine has its roots in my conscience. I can only say that as I have removed animal products from my diet, I have ceased to see them as food, and increasingly I can't imagine how I ever ate them. I was led to vegetarianism by disgust, and ethical conviction followed; perhaps then, I act, and afterwards find my action good! Going vegan though, I was led by concern for hungry people and warming planet, and compassion for other animals, and disgust came after. It is not possible for me to separate them - when asked why I am vegan, I say 'all the reasons', so I note that this journey out of eating animals is very personal and full of obstacles. I have to thank countless people for clearing my way, including Adams, but I also have to acknowledge many privileges that have enabled me, such as money, time, whiteness, education, and living in a place with an active and creative vegan community where veganism has some recognition.
  
  I am publishing this review in celebration of the start of World Vegan Month and the 70th birthday of the Vegan Society! I invite all my readers to get involved in some delicious way - you definitely don't have to be vegan to <3 vegan ice cream, for example ; )
• 
  Tuğçe Kozak

  Kadını ve hayvanı nesneye indirerek tüketen ataerkil zihniyete tokat gibi bir kitap. Çevremdeki herkese okutmak istiyorum. Kitabı okurken çok fazla yerde durup, buna bu açıdan hiç bakmamışım dedim. Kesinlikle ufuk açıcı. Ataerkillik ve türcülük arasındaki paralellikleri çok güzel işliyor. Lütfen yolunuz bu kitap ile kesişsin ☘️
• 
  Amy Laurens

  How could I resist a title like this? This is supposed to be a classic, whatever that means. And I really came at this book wanting to like it, being a vegetarian feminist that's long wished for ANY critical theory that I don't consider to be a massive inward-looking circle jerk. But unfortunately it is quite bonkers.
  
  There are some basic points I was on board with. There are some interesting ways that women and meat are connected by "da patriarchy": meat eating is associated with strength and virility and was reserved for men in many cultures through history or if food was scarce. Sexism and eating meat both involve the reduction of women/animals to body parts for consumption, and as a result necessitate a certain denial of the existence of women/animals as conscious beings (Adams calls this phenomenon the "absent referent" which is probably the best concept in here). Thus there's some very early 90s feminist linguistics examining phrases like leg man/breast man and associating this with the names we have for meat and the fact they're usually different from what we call the animals themselves.
  
  This is all thought provoking but she's stretching these associations to the point of borderline insanity by arguing that women and animals are in the same boat with regards to "patriarchal oppression". This is as insulting to farm animals as it is to women. I mean, I may have been groped in a club but I've never had to live in a cage so small I can't even turn around in it have I? Men let us live in their own houses with them! Like pet dogs! Lucky us!
  
  Thank god I'm not a lit theory student any more. How is this sort of wooly thinking supposed to solve actual problems? There is nothing here that will help us achieve global access to education for women. Or close the pay gap. Or achieve higher standards of welfare for animals on farms while still supporting farmers. Or solve the conundrum that, in fact, the best way to protect a rare breed is to vote with your feet and eat it. Or to even consider that, due to industrial farming, it's impossible to even eat vegetables without decimating the lives and natural habitat of all sorts of animals. I could go on. No, the only thing books like this are good for is to make the already converted feel insufferably pleased with themselves. It utterly fails to be persuasive.
  
  This is the sort of raving pseudo-intellectualism that gives us feminist vegetarians a bad name.
• 
  Elizabeth

  let me preface this review by saying that carol adams is a true pioneer in the field of eco/vegetarian-feminist critical theory. she sheds light on how systems of oppression intersect with one another and how capitalism, patriarchy, racism and classism converge and are expressed in the oppression and exploitation of animals. i think this is a seminal work in the field and warrants thoughtful reading. it provides an alternative critique of capitalist and patriarchal systems of oppression and is a good starting point for feminists interested in furthering this area.
  
  that being said, i felt that this work lacked a basis in existing theory and research. this weakened some of adams' claims and arguments. it would have been helpful for adams to painstakingly trace the lineage of her arguements for the reader, especially for those who do not have a background in feminist critical theory or animal liberation. without this, she seemed to leave gaps in many of her claims and conclusions -- which could lead the reader to question the validity of her arguments.
  
  i would recommend this book to anyone who is involved in animal liberation or ecofeminism. it is controversial and stimulating.
• 
  michelle

  Look, this book was OK. The things that make me not consider it to be a better work, was the cissexism and transphobia throughout the piece. It turns out Adams' mentor was Mary Daly, notorious for not just her radical feminism, but her extreme transphobia.
  
  The most blatant (and simple) demonstration of Adams' prejudice was her treatment of Doctor James Barry.
  
  When Dr. Barry died, it was discovered that he was apparently born female. Once she reveals this of Barry, Adams proceeds to repeatedly refer to him as "her", just so she can further her arguments about women and an alleged "natural" preference for vegetarianism.
  
  The threads of her bigotry wove through the entire text, popping up now and again to be a bit more obvious (such as with Barry), and distracted from her overall point.
  
  I cannot recommend this as a good feminist text.
• 
  Shel

  
  The New York Times runs an essay contest on the ethics of meat eating. The judges are animal rights advocates and plant-based nutrition gurus. They are all men.
  
  Carol J. Adams wrote
  "The Sexual Politics of Ethics" and questioned the choice of an all male panel. Why wasn't a single female included (Karen Davis, Pattrice Jones, Lauren Ornelas, Erica Meier, Josephine Donovan, Greta Gaard, Lori Gruen, Marla Rose, Laura Wright, Kim Socha, Breeze Harper, Jasmin Singer or Mariann Sullivan for example)?
  
  Why not
  Carol J. Adams?
  
  I looked up from the article. A lot of my own animal rights and plant-based diet role models and heroes are men. Wait, all men. And I hadn't heard of most of these women. Uh oh.
  
  There are some thoughtful ideas about "
  What’s Wrong with Only White Men Judging a Contest Defending Meat-Eating?"
  
  But the source of my "uh oh" was discomfiting
  de ja vu — when I'm not reading the women I'm missing out.
  
  I bought the 20th Anniversary Edition of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory and started reading. There are three prefaces — to the original book (1990), to the 10th anniversary edition, and to the 20th edition — and a foreword before the actual book begins.
  
  The book describes the intersection between feminism, pacifism and vegetarianism (conversely male dominance, war, and meat-eating).
  
  The early chapters such as, "The Rape of Animals, the Butchering of Women," link the consumption of animals and women. They are painful reading. Adams draws attention to gut-churning abuses that mirror modern news headlines i.e.
  Georgia Republican Compares Women to Cows, Pigs, And Chickens (His thinking: Pigs must carry dead fetuses to term and so must women. Sad, but that's life. Abortion is unethical).
  
  It's reading a book about an atrocity during the atrocity — reading about the dystopia you inhabit.
  
  When I read news like this I think, "We shouldn't treat animals like that either." and "If we raised the bar for how we treat animals, we'd treat ourselves better."
  
  This idea of including animals "within the moral circle of consideration" is part of a vegetarian body of thought and literature. Vegetarians have been expressing this idea before the word vegetarian was coined in 1847 (They were called Pythagoreans before. The followers of Pythagoras had religious and ethical beliefs including metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls into the bodies of other animals, which excluded the eating of animals).
  
  Adams dives into this discussion in the middle of the book and the chapter "The Word Made Flesh" where she talks about how, "Meat eating is a story applied to animals, it gives meaning to animals' existence." and the alternate vegetarian narrative. Instead of a hero's journey, she describes a "vegetarian quest" wherein dietary choices conflict with the dominant culture.
  
  By the final chapters, I was wildly adding to my
  to-read list. In the last chapter, "Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory," Adams lists numerous works of fiction with feminist-vegetarian themes.
  
  The book ends on a utopian note, "Feminist-vegetarian activity declares that an alternative worldview exists, one which celebrates life rather than consuming death; one which does not rely on resurrected animals but empowered people." and with a call for the "creation of vegetarian rituals that celebrate the grace of eating plants" and help counter patriarchal consumption.
  
  
  
  Of note, some feminist science fiction and utopian connections: the chapter "Frankenstein's Vegetarian Monster" explores the Creature's vegetarianism and notes other works by Romantic vegetarians including Percy Shelley's Queen Mab (arguably the first feminist, vegetarian, pacifist Utopia, Adams says)
  
  
  
  Fact: the average American eats 43 pigs, three lambs, 11 cows, four calves, 2,555 chickens and turkeys and 861 fishes in a lifetime
  
  
  
  Pairs well with: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle; Percy Shelley's Queen Mab; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; "Eat Rice Have Faith in Women," Fran Winart
  
  
  
  Quotes:
  
  "It's a difficult task, o citizens, to make speeches to the belly which has no ears." — Cato
  
  "The men were better hunters than the women, but only because the women had found that they could live quite well on foods other than meats. — Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar
  
  "[The slaughterhouse] carries out its business in secret and decides what you will see, hides from you what it chooses." — Richard Selzer
  
  "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." — Emarel Freshel
  
  "As long as man kills the lower races for food or sport, he will be ready to kill his own race for enmity. It is not this bloodshed or that bloodshed, that must cease, but all needless bloodshed — all wanton infliction of pain or death upon our fellow beings." — Henry Salt
  
  "May the fairies be vegetarian!" — Judy Grahn, "The Queen of Swords"
• 
  Jeffrey Spitz Cohan

  
  It’s hard not to feel ambivalent – strongly ambivalent – about this book.
  
  Unless you’re a student, or teacher, of feminist literature, it is somewhat of a slog to get through this book. “The Sexual Politics of Meat” is mainly an analysis of feminist literature and most of the works to which Adams refers will seem obscure to the average reader.
  
  On the other hand, this book is considered a classic in the veg*n genre and for good reason. Adams artfully conveys a number of important ideas, chief among them that meat-eating is strongly interrelated to other forms of oppression.
  
  As she puts it, “Meat eating is to animals what white racism is to people of color, anti-Semitism is to Jewish people, homophobia is to gay men and lesbians, and woman hating is to women. All are oppressed by a culture that does not want to assimilate them fully on their grounds and with rights.”
  
  Amen to that.
  
  As a Jew, it is upsetting to me that most of my co-religionists do not see the obvious parallels between the oppression and exploitation of animals, which is inherent in meat-eating, and the oppression and exploitation of Jews throughout almost all of our history.
  
  And although I’m a male, I’m disappointed that the feminist movement largely ignores the exploitation of female organs in the dairy and egg industries.
  
  Adams gives voice to these concerns, particularly the latter one.
  
• 
  melis

  o kadar uzun zamandır elimde süründürüyorum ki bu kitabı, okumaya başladığımı unuttuğum zamanlar bile oldu.
  
  döneminin postyapısalcılık ve yapısökümcülüğünden fazlasıyla nasibini alarak metin-dil odaklı ilerliyor kitap ve o kadarıyla da kalıyor. bu zaten çok büyük bir problem. öncelikle, hayvanların "kayıp gönderge" (terminolojinin kendisi zaten neye odaklanıldığını vurguluyor yeniden) olduğunu söylüyor adams. hayvanların (ces)et parçalarına but, göğüs, pirzola gibi adlar vererek o parçaların ardında bir hayvanın, bir canlının bulunduğunun unutturulduğundan bahsediyor. evet, tamam. ama yüzlerce sayfa boyunca dildeki türcü ifadeleri ve çok büyük bir çoğunluğunu edebiyat metinlerinin oluşturduğu eserleri tarayıp deşifre etmenin; ama yalnızca ve yalnızca bunu yapmanın da, adams'ın terminolojisini kullanacaksak, hayvanları yeniden birer kayıp göndergeye dönüştürdüğünü düşünüyorum. hayvan sömürüsü, tecavüzü ve kıyımı, metin düzleminden ibaret bir şey değil, fiziksel bir gerçeklik oysa.
  
  bu metin odaklı yaklaşım kendini "paramparça metinler, paramparça hayvanlar" bölümünde bariz bir şekilde gösteriyor. kadınların yazdığı metinlerin kanona dâhil edilmemesi, editör elinde "parçalanması", siyah kadınların yazdıklarının hor görülmesi gibi örnekler, hayvanların "parçalanması"na eşdeğer görülüyor. sömürüyle yaşam süresi kısaltılan ve bu sürede de mümkün olan her türlü işkenceye maruz kalan hissedebilir bir varlığın katledilmesi, bir metnin, örneğin, sansürlenmesiyle nasıl eşdeğer olabilir? böyle bir kıstasa girmek de zaten bir problem. sömürü, ötekileştirme ve daha pek çok açıdan parallelikler kurulabilecekken böyle bir eşlemeye gitmek, hem de bunu metin düzleminde yapmak...
  
  incelenen görsel örneklere gelirsek, neredeyse hepsinin (kitabın kapağındakinin de olduğu gibi) kadın bedeninin hayvan bedeniymiş gibi resmedilmişi olduğunu görüyoruz (hatırladığım iki istisna var buna, biri "feminen" kıyafetler giydirilmiş, şampanya içen domuz görseli, diğeri de hamburgerleri iki memeyi anıştıracak şekilde yerleştirmiş bir reklam). bu görseller arasında kurulan bağlantı, (kadınların "etinden sütünden" faydalanılacak, kesilip tüketilecek "ürün"ler olarak görülmesi) metnin savının büyük bir bölümünü oluşturuyor. alt başlığı feminist-vejetaryen eleştirel kuram olan bir kitabın, mizojini ve ataerki ile türcülük arasında kurduğu bağı bu görseller (ve bunlara paralel kadın yazını) üzerinden ortaya koymasının, yine insanmerkezciliği pekiştirdiğini düşünmeden edemiyorum (tamam, görseller elindeki kaynaklarla da ilgili genel olarak ama başka şeyleri ele alması da mümkün sonuçta). özellikle de yumurta ve süt endüstrilerine neredeyse hiç değinilmediği ve dişi hayvanların dişi oldukları için çektiklerinin metinde esamesinin okunmadığı düşünülürse. örneğin, devamlı olarak süt versin diye ineklerin, sonradan "tecavüz kolu" diye anılmaya başlanan suni yöntemle döllendirilmesine hiç değinilmiyor. değinilmemesini geçtim, adams'a göre zaten bu bir tecavüz değil, çünkü ona göre tecavüz "kadınların tecrübe" ettiği bir şey (sadece kadınlar? buraya milyonlarca soru işareti).
  
  bu kitabın yıllar (hatta onyıllar) süren bir araştırmanın ürünü olduğunu biliyorum ama adams'ın salt metin odaklı, özcü ve bireyci yaklaşımı, kadınların vejetaryen olmasını "anne şefkati" gibi sözlerle ifade etmesi, bir şiirden alıntılayıp slogana çevirdiği "pilav ye, kadınlara inan" sözünü "çözüm" olarak sunması, bu sözle de veganlığı "beslenme tercihi"ne eşitlemesi ve bununla feminizm arasında direkt bir bağ varmış gibi davranması (kitabın sondan bir önceki cümlesi: "pilav yemek kadınlara inanmak demektir" [italik yazara ait]) gibi daha da çoğaltılabilecek detaylardan ötürü bu kült eser bana ne yazık ki umduğumu veremedi.
  
  çevirisiyle de ilgili bir şey söylemek istiyorum kitabın. böyle metin odaklı ve söylem analiziyle ilerleyen, ingilizcedeki deyimler ve kelime oyunlarıyla neredeyse her sayfada yeniden ve yeniden haşır neşir olan, dolayısıyla atfını yine ingilizceye yapan bir metnin türkçeye aktarımını, hatta okura gözleri kısıp "bu ne demek şimdi be," dedirtmeden aktarımını başarılı gördüm. öte yandan, feminist bir eserde "insanoğlu" ve "adamakıllı" gibi ifadelerin kullanılmasını abes buldum. ingilizcesinde böyle bir şey varsa (küçük bir ihtimal dahi olsa "mankind" denmiş olsun hadi, ama "adamakıllı"?) bile, dipnotlarda neden bu kelimelerin kullanıldığı belirtilmeliydi.
• 
  Mark Robison

  Amazing book. This academic text read like a thriller for me, as each page turned up new insights. It looks at how patriarchal society treats women and nonhuman animals as objects and how if one wants to overturn patriarchy, one must give up meat because it is part of patriarchal power.
• 
  Vegantrav

  “Our dietary choices reflect and reinforce our cosmology, our politics.”
  
  This sentence, the third-to-last sentence in The Sexual Politics of Meat, nicely summarizes Carol Adams’s basic thesis in this book wherein she ties together her feminist critique of patriarchy with her vegetarian critique of patriarchy. These two social critiques, argues Adams, are not merely related but are part of an organic whole: to live fully the feminist protest against the heterosexual male oppressiveness of patriarchy, one must recognize the kinship that women’s oppression shares with non-humans animals and act accordingly.
  
  Patriarchy objectifies women: within the patriarchal system, women are not beings for themselves; rather, they are instruments to serve men: they serve men as mothers, as marital servants, as food preparers, as bodies for sating male sexual desires, etc. In these roles, women are no longer subjects with a first-person perspective but are dehumanized and objectified; they are “fragmented” in Adams’s terms: they are broken down into parts: in the dominant patriarchal narrative, any particular role that a woman has is viewed in terms of that particular role in serving the interests and desires of men. Thus, a woman takes her objectified identity from her various positions in relation to the male power structure and loses her subjective identity as a person for her own self.
  
  In similar fashion, non-human animals are fragmented and objectified: the corpses humans eat are literally fragmented when they are chopped into pieces, and the non-human animal becomes not a free, living, sentient being pursuing its own goals in nature as a subject with its own perspective but becomes merely an object: food for humans. This is especially evident in the way that language attempts to remove from our minds the fact that the corpses that are eaten were once living subjects themselves: humans eat meat, not corpses; humans eat beef and hamburgers and steak, not cows; humans eat pork and bacon and ham, not pigs; humans eat chicken or turkey (notice the missing indefinite articles), not a chicken or a turkey; humans eat mutton, not a sheep.
  
  The fragmentation and objectification of non-human animals, Adams argues, is carried out largely by the patriarchal power structures: men are the hunters, the butchers, the killers, and women are forced to comply with this system in preparing meat and in eating it, too. Thus, in preparing meat and eating meat, women are acting against their own interests in being subjects for themselves by helping to objectify non-human animals just as men objectify women.
  
  Adams argues for this thesis drawing on history, anthropology, biology, myth, and literature. She makes her argument skillfully and in the manner of academic feminists and Marxists, of literary deconstructionists, and of post-structuralist social critics, but she does so with a clarity and precision that is often missing in academia. Her arguments are not rigorously deductive arguments but proceed in a classical inductive fashion, adding detail upon detail, example upon example, to support her thesis.
  
  And Adams also points out (though the scope of this book does not really grant her the opportunity to argue this point in much detail) that not only are feminism and vegetarianism necessarily linked in opposition to patriarchy, but this opposition is also shared by critiques of patriarchal racism and homophobia and militarism; thus, just as feminists, if they are truly to practice an authentic critique of patriarchy, must be vegetarians, so too must feminist-vegetarians rise up against racism, homophobia, and war as must those in the civil rights community (both ethnic minorities and the LGBT community) and the pacifist community make common cause with the feminist-vegetarians.
  
  As an aside, I should mention that Adams wrote this book in 1989, when the term vegan was not much used; had she written this book in this decade, she probably would have used the term vegan in lieu of vegetarian as Adams herself is not merely a vegetarian but also a vegan.
  
  Perhaps the best summation of this book is to be found in this paragraph in Adams’s last chapter:
  
  “Eating animals acts as mirror and representation of patriarchal values. Meat eating is the re-inscription of male power at every meal. The patriarchal gaze sees not the fragmented flesh of dead animals but appetizing food. If our appetites re-inscribe patriarchy, our actions regarding eating animals will either reify or challenge this received culture. If meat is a symbol of male dominance, then the presence of meat proclaims the disempowering of women.”
  
• 
  Molly Smith

  stopped reading this halfway thru. yes we get it, you think the meat industry is like a brothel. yada yada. Idk I could probably read this more generously but it just didn’t resonate for me.
• 
  Lisa Vegan

  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.
• 
  Jean Grace

  This was the first book I bought the week I decided to be a vegetarian. I found it in a new agey store in Sedona, Arizona. It's an important book. It helped me understand omnivore aggression toward vegetarians at the table, which can be a baffling experience. This is good read for new vegetarians with an academic bent. It is actually a little painfully graphic to me now.
• 
  Jaq

  Vieni tenuta schiacciata a terra dal corpo maschile, come la forchetta tiene un pezzo di carne in modo che il coltello possa tagliarlo. Così come il mattatoio tratta gli animali e i suoi lavoratori, alla stregua di oggetti inerti, non senzienti e non pensanti, nello stupro sono le donne ad essere trattate come oggetti inerti. Perciò si sentono pezzi di carne. Analogamente, esistono cavalletti da stupro che permetto l'inseminazione degli animali contro la loro volontà.
  [...]
  Uno dei miti della cultura dello stupro è che le donne non solo chiedono di essere violentate, ma che a loro piace: tutte sono alla ricerca del coltello del macellaio. Analogamente, la pubblicità e la cultura popolare ci raccontano di animali che desiderano essere mangiati.

  
  Non si può essere femministi senza prima essere vegetariani.
  Non si può essere vegetariani senza prima essere femministi.
  ____
  
  Liberare il linguaggio.
  

  Il linguaggio è uno strumento potente. Le parole che scegliamo fanno molto di più che nominare o descrivere le cose: assegnano uno status e un valore. 'Sopprimere', 'sacrificare' sono i termini preferiti dai vivisettori. 'Gestire', 'sfoltire la mandria' sono i termini preferiti dai cacciatori. Queste parole significano uccidere, allora diciamo uccidere. Parlare di carne invece che di agnelli, maiali, mucche ci rende complici di un linguaggio che maschera la realtà. Il linguaggio rende gli animali assenti. [...] Mary Daly definisce l'asserzione stupro forzato un'inversione per ridondanza, perché implica che non tutti gli stupri siano forzati. Allo stesso modo macellazione compassionevole conferisce una certa etica a quella che è un'uccisione.

  
  
• 
  Robyn

  it has a tendency to be a tad one note... in truth the author really has two main points to get across to the reader... but she milks (ha ha! food analogy!) the material well. of interest are her sections on language and animal metaphors as they are employed to describe meat dishes (hero sandwiches, etc) as well as in how victims of sexual violence describe themselves ("i was a piece of meat")... the author navigates the theoretical aspects of this discussion reasonably well.
  
  thus far my only real complaints are that she makes reference in passing to Zeus raping and eating Metis as an example of the collapsing of sexual violence and meat eating... but she really doesn't get back into it much, save a chapter/section heading later on down the road.
  
  my other complaint is when she describes the violence against animals that comes with butchering them and/or hunting and the killing of family pets where men are presumed to be acting out an aggression that would otherwise be directed against their wives and children. sad and a little freaky... but i guess part of the package.
  
  but, overall, i'd say it's worth a skim!
  
  
• 
  Anna Filipponi

  Potentissimo, per me che sono vegetariana è stata una grande spinta verso il passo successivo, quello necessario del veganesimo. Il femminismo non può ignorare l'oppressione animale, e io non ho intenzione di farlo mai più, non ho più intenzione di mettermi le fette di mozzarella sugli occhi.
  Se esistono libri necessari, questo di certo lo è. La seconda parte (quella sul vegetarianesimo nella letteratura) l'ho trovata più lenta: anche se molto interessante ha un po' spezzato il ritmo incalzante di un libro che funziona come un manifesto.
  Da leggere e rileggere, e fare proprio pasto dopo pasto.
• 
  Liz

  I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I feel like the arguments are sometimes circular, the writing isn't fabulous, and I had a hard time getting through such a theoretical book. I admit that I skimmed the last half because I had already discussed it at book group and I was getting a bit bogged down in the repetition.
  
  But. This book has probably given me more pause than anything I've read in a while, simply because she makes some interesting arguments that, while not the main thesis of the book, are related to her main point and have changed the way I think about so many things. For example - she points out that we refer to meat by its parts (a chicken thigh, rather than a chicken's thigh, for example) so that we can create enough distance from the living, breathing creature to justify our decision to kill it and eat it. Similarly, the over-sexualization and degradation of women happens the same way (hello, ads focusing only on boobs and headless naked women dancing in rap videos). When you just see a gyrating torso, you don't think about a woman as somebody's daughter/sister/mother, you think of it as an attractive piece of a body. When you see a boneless, skinless chicken breast, you think of it as dinner, not as the quirky chicken who always roosted on the left side of the coop and who was scared of leaves blowing through the yard. It's easier to treat something disrespectfully (or violently, even) if you only see it as a piece of itself - a set of boobs, a uterus, a thigh, whatever.
  
  3.5 stars. I liked it, it's interesting, and it's definitely a fun one to have sitting on my shelf when people come over.
• 
  John

  I'd read part of this for a previous class; read the whole thing this time, and am glad I did. It's both wonderful and awful. First the bad: bad use of theory, bad readings of literature, writing that lacks nuance, extremely polemical. But, at certain points the key argument really sings through, namely that feminism and vegetarianism both are anti-patriarchal and are inherently tied to one another. She also tries to re-establish a feminist-vegetarian literary and cultural history, which is admirable. Kudos to my prof for forcing us to deal with this.
• 
  Şule TÜzÜl

  “Kapitalizme karşı olmadan faşizme karşı olanlar, bir barbarlığın içinden çıkan başka bir barbarlıktan yakınanlar, buzağı eti yemek isteyen ama buzağıyı öldürmek istemeyen insanlara benzer.”
  Bertolt Brecht
  
  
  http://www.edebiyathaber.net/pilav-yi...
  
• 
  Kim Stallwood

  Singularly important book to read to understand why meat is so culturally important...and why it shouldn't be.
• 
  Melissa (YA Book Shelf)

  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.
  
• 
  Robin

  In this book, Carol Adams argues the intersection of feminist and vegetarian theory. She successfully demonstrates a connect between meat and power. There is also an interesting discussion of the use of language surrounding meat and vegetables ("beef up," "feel like a piece of meat," "a vegetative state"). I found her most compelling argument to be that people who claim to oppose war/are non-violent should also espouse that behavior in their food choices. Near the end of the book Adams raises some interesting topics that could have been further developed--the connection between the vegetarian movement and women's liberation from the kitchen, why early vegetarian leaders were also proponents of birth control.
  
  As a very veg-friendly meat eater, I thought this book might be the one to finally push me to fully commit to vegetarianism. It did not. However, it reinforced that voice in my head that tells me I should embrace life as a vegetarian, transcendentalist teetotaler.
• 
  Cheryl

  2.5 stars, really. I almost liked it, I liked parts of it. I enjoyed learning about the historical connections between vegetarianism and feminism. Adams makes a good point that these connections have generally been ignored. However, I disagree with many of her premises and conclusions. In particular, she presents diet choices as those who eat nothing but meat all day, every day, and those who abstain from meat in all circumstances. There is no room for a middle ground. I, myself, like to eat meat. I have no moral qualms about eating meat. However, I do not find it necessary to eat it every day and I certainly don't plan my life around it. She also makes sweeping generalizations about the health benefits of a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle and doesn't allow for any of the benefits of meat consumption except to say that you can get your protein elsewhere. She also does not touch on the fact that many vegetarian cultures still oppress women.
• 
  Martin Smrek

  I was looking forward to reading this for years. But I was mostly disappointed. There are couple of valid points stated in few chapters of the book, that were worth reading it and worth spreading too. But large swaths of the book were filled with dull interpretations of fictional books, from which a lot of far-fetched points were made. Occasional references to alternative medicine, including mention of vegetarianism curing small-pox, also did not help very much. However, considering the time it was written (70's-90's), it is an interesting probe into the state of the both movements at the time. And it could still provide some interesting parallels for feminists who were still not exposed to the reality of factory farming.
• 
  honeybean

  This book is incredibly good, and still relevant even though it was first published in 1990. From showing the paradox of Shelley's Frankenstein being considered a monster despite its vegetarian diet and higher constructs of thinking, to showing the struggles of women compared/shown through the rape and oppression of animals, this book highlighted ideologies and challenged me to be more intentional in my thinking and eating habits. I can't wait to read Adams new book (published this year!)
• 
  Sara

  Por partes me ha encantado y me ha parecido interesantísimo, y por partes me ha resultado arduo de leer y comprender y hay cosas que no sé si he llegado a entender del todo bien. Gana la primera parte, por cantidad y calidad, pero lo segundo le resta algunos puntos.
  En cualquier caso es un "must" para feministas defensoras de los derechos animales o cualquiera que esté reflexionando sobre esa intersección.
• 
  missy jean

  Different than I expected, but still so interesting. Adams links up the oppression of women and the oppression of animals, and explores the way that women's and animal's bodies have been dismembered and consumed by patriarchal systems. This book gave me a lot to chew on (ha! pun!), and I'm still digesting the ideas (ha! ha!)