Re: Sex, beauty and beasts

[Guest guest]

That was an absolutely eye opening post. I joined this group for the macrobiotic part, not the vegan part. I had been on another vegetarian site but the combination of all the ready foods they ate, the recipes with all sorts of ingredients I don't eat, and on top of that worries about animals' health, but not their own health, turned me off. I always had an awareness of something skewed in eating animals, but your putting together the treatment of animals and the treatment of women has put it altogether on another level. btw, if any of you are interested in the vegetarian site, it's http://groups.yahoo.com/group/theferalvegetarian/ It's not vegan, tho some people on the site are and talk about it. And as I said, it's definitely not macro, tho I tried to introduce ideas of mb a long time ago and there

wasn't much response. But as good as the article was is left me pretty depressed. Now can you find something more optimistic for balance!!! Klarafidyl wrote: [This is for Reggie per our dinner conversation - Fidyl]Sex, beauty and beastsnew internationalistissue 215 - January 1991http://oneworld.org/ni/issue215/sex.htmCelia Kitzinger links the oppression of women with that of animals -and finds sexism recycled in the Animals Rights movement.`A woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order.'Those are the words of Edmund Burke, a British elder statesman in thelate eighteenth century. In the 1960s the North American writerNorman Mailer

reiterated the same sentiment: `women', he said, `arelow sloppy beasts'.1In colloquial male language we are `chicks', `pets', `sex-kittens',`bitches', `cats' and `cows'. Our genitals are `pussies' or`beavers'.Just as animals are denied `human rights', so too, for centuries,were women. Aristotle linked women and animals by excluding both fromparticipation in political life, and the centuries-long debate overwhether women have souls parallels similar discussions about themoral status of animals.When Wollstonecraft wrote her Vindication of the Rights ofWomen, one male writer tried to reduce her arguments to sheerabsurdity with the anonymous publication in 1792 of a satiricalvolume entitled, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes.2 Incharacterizing women as lower animals, and themselves as the apex ofcreation, men justify the oppression, exploitation, domination andtorture of women and other animals

alike.Recognizing that animals, like women, were excluded from the `rightsof man', many first-wave feminists advocated animal welfare reform.Amongst the feminist vegetarians and anti-vivisectionists who drewparallels between the oppression of women and animals were suchleading figures as Wollstonecraft, Harriet Beecher Stowe, B , Cady Stanton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and LucyStone. Women were the primary activists of the nineteenth centuryanti-vivisection movement.3This lends a horrible irony to the fact that some recent AnimalRights campaigns, while recognising and seeking to eradicatespeciesism - the exploitation by humans of other species - continueto recycle sexism.One poster, showing a woman wearing a fur coat dripping with blood,proclaims, `It takes 10 dumb animals to make it; one dumb animal towear it'. Another read simply, `Rich bitch! Poor

bitch'.ComplicityWhen they wear fur coats, women are certainly complicit in cruelty toanimals. Millions of wild animals - coyotes, beavers, arctic foxes,minks, leopards - are caught in barbarous steel-toothed traps whichfasten on the leg of their victim until it dies of exposure orstarvation.To comply with the dictates of fashion for women, crocodiles areslaughtered to make handbags, African elephants threatened withextinction to make ivory jewellery, and the foetus or newborn ofastrakhan sheep killed for fur. Special care is taken to kill tigerswithout marring their valuable skins: one system used is to insert awhite hot iron into the animal's anus.2Women's toiletry and cosmetic items further implicate us in crueltyto animals. Many contain animal substances - the boiled down offalfrom the slaughterhouse in some soaps, and ambergris, a grey waxysubstance coughed up by the sperm whale or extracted from

itsintestines after death, in some perfumes. Many are tested on animalsin experimental laboratories where soaps and shampoos are injectedinto rabbits' eyes to test their irritant properties, and lipsticksrubbed into wounds on guinea pigs' skin to check for allergies.Because many women wear clothing and use products which involvecruelty to animals we are responsible for supporting oppressivepractices. But women have undoubtedly been less guilty of activeabuse and destruction of animals: it is overwhelmingly men who arethe hunters, bull-fighters, laboratory scientists, and abattoirworkers.As Virginia Woolf observes in Three Guineas: `the vast majority ofbirds and beasts have been killed by you; not by us'.Organized predatory violence has always been a male monopoly, whetherpractised against animals or women.In (male-authored) theories of evolution, hunting is given enormousimportance and related to the

division of labour between the sexes.According to anthropological theory, man's hunting activities accountfor all the achievements of civilization. Without hunting he wouldhave advanced no further than the ape. Women, left to gather berriesand root for vegetables, are supposed not to have required muchintelligence - instead they developed wider pelvises in order toaccommodate larger-brained offspring.In fact, there is plenty of evidence showing that human survivalrelied more heavily on the skills necessary in gathering vegetablefood than on meat, and women cooperated and fashioned agriculturaltools well before men started hunting. With this hunter theory ofevolution, men glamorize the torturing and killing of animals,elevating it to proof of their own masculine intelligence, their ownsuperiority over women and the natural world.4PornographyThis link between masculinity and the killing of animals exists

notjust in evolutionary theory, but in poetry and pornography too. Womanbecomes the hunted, man's rightful prey; man is a `lady-killer', inpursuit of a piece of meat. According to Alfred Lord Tennyson, `Manis the hunter; woman is his game'.1The association of woman with `fair game' is explicit in a photographin Hustler magazine, captioned `Beaver Hunters'. Two men, dressed ashunters, guns erect, sit in a black jeep. Tied, spread-eagle, ontothe hood of the jeep, is a naked woman, pubic hair and crotch deadcentre of the photograph. The caption reads: `Western sportsmenreport beaver hunting was particularly good throughout the RockyMountain region during the past season. These two hunters easilybagged their limit in the high country. They told Hustler that theystuffed and mounted their trophy as soon as they got home.' Thehunters are figures of masculine virility: the double entendre of`stuffing' and

`mounting',referring both to sexual activity and to embalming, is supposed to bewitty.5Another series of pornographic presentations show scenes ofvivisection in which women are the victims. A magazine centrefoldshows a naked woman, chained on an operating table in a butcher'sshop, surrounded by hanging animal carcasses, knives and cleavers,while a man in a butcher's apron prepares to divide her into jointswith an electric saw.2Men's power over animals is virtually absolute. Over women, men haveless control. In pornographic depictions of women as animals, thefantasy of total male dominance is made explicit. Woman becomes theinferior animal, captured, cut up into pieces, displayed as a trophyto masculine power. As the feminist writer Dworkin points out,`The characterisation of the female as a wild animal suggests thatthe sexuality of the untamed female is dangerous to men. But thetriumph of the hunters is

the nearly universal triumph of men overwomen ...Any bitch can be tamed by a man who is manly enough'.5 Plagued by hisown desire for woman, by her power to arouse desire in him (remindinghim uneasily of his own animal nature), man degrades woman bydepicting her as part of a group that is even more clearly dominatedby him.Sometimes even this degraded representation of woman is toothreatening and men resort to sexual abuse of animals. According tothe Kinsey report, eight per cent of men use animals for sex, andthere are porn films showing men having intercourse with chickens inwhich the birds are literally disembowelled by the penis.2Laboratories in which animal experimentation is carried out mustpurchase their equipment and animals. The advertisements directed atthem make disturbing reading. Cages are advertised with mini-skirtedwhite-coated women draped over them, stroking the metal in apparenteagerness to

enter the larger ones themselves.The so-called `rape rack' is an established piece of laboratoryequipment for impregnating primates.Advertizers' animals are drawn or photographed in poses that conformto gender stereotypes. Subordinate female rabbits lure, allure andinvite abuse. A long-lashed pregnant hamster is advertized with thecaption, `Real Anxious to Please You'.Such images clearly address a male clientele titillated by coyattractive female animals which can be purchased, dismembered andkilled.4 The similarity between pornographic representations and thebreeders' sales pitch is striking.Power over animals reinforces man's sense of his own importance notjust in relation to other species, but also in relation to other men.In the nineteenth century, British men captured animals and put themin zoos as a symbolic representation of their conquest of distant andexotic lands.6In the same way, men seek to

conquer, subdue and possess women as ameans of flaunting their power not just over the `inferior sex', butalso over other men. With an expensively coiffured woman dressed inexotic furs on his arm, man proclaims his conquest of a wild and rareliving commodity, a symbol of his own wealth and success. A womanwearing furs is seen as proof of man's hunting prowess: he no longerliterally kills the animal whose coat she wears, but his ability tobuy it - and her - is evidence of financial success, his manlyachievement in the job market. Even when a man does not actually huntanimals, his success is still reflected in the kill.Women who dress to fuel male fantasies like these declare theiraccess to economic power: furs, like diamonds, are a status symbol.They are also making a statement about their own sexual desirability:men will kill for them. In a world in which women, like otheranimals, are raped, mutilated and murdered by men,

the woman who isgiven the skins of dead animals by her male `protector' is beingwarned of his power at the same time as she is reassured of hispatronage. The implicit threat serves as reminder of her own tenuoussafety in a man's world.Fear and beautyWomen's complicity in cruelty to animals is often born of our owndesperate attempt to survive or forestall men's cruelty to us. It isnot only animals who have been forced to suffer to satisfy men'sconcepts of feminine beauty. So too have women. Think of the Burmeseneck ring, the Chinese bound foot, the Western steel-ribbed corsetand whalebone stays. Men see themselves as representing Culture, andas such demand `improvements' upon Nature, to which women oftensubmit - cosmetic surgery, the removal of ribs to make the waist looksmaller, the extraction of teeth to make the cheek-bones moresalient. The `improvements' eroticized by men entail mutilation,violence and death,

to both animals and women.The animal rights movement needs to address explicitly these linksbetween the oppression of women and the oppression of animals. Womenare not the major perpetrators of cruelty against animals: rather we,like other animals, are the victims of male violence. Women's`choices' about the products we wear are made in the context of apatriarchal culture.Male campaigners might also reconsider their often contemptuousattitudes to `womanish pity' and `feminine sentiment'. Many men, like Singer author of the ground-breaking treatise Animal Liberationand Tom Regan, author of The Case for Animal Rights, are at pains todissociate their campaign from a sentimentalist approach to animalwelfare: they state that they are not `animal lovers': rather theybase their campaign on reason, rationality and objective argument. Inother words, they fear that to associate the animal rights cause with`womanish

sentiment' is to trivialize it.3It is simply not good enough to challenge speciesism - if at the sametime you are recycling sexism.Celia Kitzinger teaches psychology at the University of Surrey, UK.1 The Misogynist's Source Book, Fidetis ( Cape, 1989).2 Norma Benny in Reclaim the Earth: Women Speak Out for Life on Earth(The Woman's Press, 1983).3 phine Donovan in `Animal Rights and Feminist Theory',' SignsVol 15 no2 (1990).4 Rape of the Wild: Man's Violence against Animals and the Earth,Andr�e Collard with Joyce Contrucci (The Women's Press, 1988).5 Dworkin Pornography: Men Possessing Women, (The Women'sPress, 1981).6 About Looking, Berger (Penguin, 1980).FidylLive Simply So ThatOthers May Simply Livehttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/Yoga-With-/http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SignSoFla/http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SoFlaVegans/http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SoFlaSchools/

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