The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams

  I recently had the privilege to see the greatest band of all time—Propagandhi—two nights in a row. On both nights, they took a break from playing their recent album and went back to 1996 for two minutes to play their song “Apparently, I’m a ‘P.C. Fascist’ (Because I Care About Both Human and Non-Human Animals),” which (on their album Less Talk, More Rock) transitions into the song “Nailing Descartes to the Wall / (Liquid) Meat Is Still Murder.” When the music stops, there is a spoken word transition that everyone knew to sing along with at the concert: “Consider someone else. Stop consuming animals.”

While Propagandhi have been much less militant than their reputation from the 90s, singer Chris Hannah still took a moment to advertise the book Little Red Barns by Will Potter, which was for sale at their merch table, and advertised the message that “it’s never too late to learn about animal agriculture” and to make changes. It was a really affirming moment, especially since I had just finished The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams, which I believe to be a seminal text in the animal liberation movement.

I have a complicated relationship with meat in that I recognize the problems of consuming animal corpses and yet I still haven’t made the leap to being vegetarian or vegan. I have significantly reduced my consumption of meat and dairy from my younger years, but I’m still not there yet.

In this vein, I read The Sexual Politics of Meat, which is an account of how vegetarianism and feminism are part and parcel with one another. The feminization of animals and the animalization of women have occurred concurrently and have led to the devaluation of each. Adams’ argument hinges on what the opening paragraphs of this review already reveal: the “absent referent.” The absent referent is the idea that reality is displaced, hidden, or abstracted through a series of tactics. For example, we talk about beef, not animal corpse. We talk about pork instead of dead big. Through this concealment, people like me are able to continue eating meat, since it exists in the abstract.

I think what most surprised me about Adams’ argument is how much of it hinges on literary referents. She offers a review of feminist literature and highlights their long history of connection to animal liberation. She also documents the reactionary responses that strove to minimize or trivialize both women and animal activism. A particularly compelling part of the book is a reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The chapter-length analysis goes through the way that Victor Frankenstein’s creature is aligned with subalterns like women and animals, highlighting in particular the creature’s vegetarianism as an indicator of its status as a virtuous outsider.

Adams also goes through a number of ways that anti-vegetarian movements have tried to de-politicize the choice not to eat meat. For example, when abstaining from meat was reframed as a matter of health, it took away its fangs as a truly subversive act. Adams discusses the “history of distortion” that revises our cultural narrative so that, rather than seeing society as dysfunctional, we see individual people as dysfunctional. Within vegetarianism is a “critique of the dominant culture by attributing psychological motives rather than political motives” and society offers explanations “such as status displacement, the erosion of rural society, or a strong identification with pets” as “obvious attempts to eviscerate” those critiques and diminish “those who protest the activities of the dominant culture.” There’s a great quip from Nobel Laureate Isaach Bashevis Singer in response to people who say they became vegetarian for their health; he responds: “I do it for the health of the chickens.” I think it’s a great way to restore the subversiveness to the defanged claims of casual vegetarianism.

She continues on to note that “one way that the dominant culture avoids the radical critique of vegetarianism is by focusing on individuals who seem to disprove the claims of vegetarians.” She points to the fact that people refer to Hitler being a vegetarian (Adams notes that he was not) as a way of showing how the choice not to eat meat is disconnected from morality, politics, or ethics. I can’t possibly think of any contemporary examples of people (falsely) pointing to one exceptional example and building an entire case against a political movement. Not a’one.

In any case, Adam makes a compelling case against eating meat by exposing how women and animals have been conflated by the patriarchal system that offers them both up to consumption via the absent referent. As a work of literary criticism, there is a lot to discuss. As a work of social justice, there is a lot to discuss. As a seminal text of an ongoing discourse towards the liberation of all living beings, there is a lot to discuss.

Happy reading!

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

    I remember once hearing the argument that the appeal of post-apocalyptic narratives is rooted in our desire to be unique. We are perpetually subjugated to forces beyond our control, making us feel insignificant and we have near endless access to the lives of others, making us feel like passive observers. In a world devoid of most other human life, we have the capacity to stand out.

    I’m not sure that argument really holds up for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The novel has essentially two main characters: the man and the boy. The man is a father, the boy his son. The two are traveling, trying to get to the ocean at the end of the road. The man’s wife appears in a flashback, as well, and it’s a pretty tragic arc in which she fears living in the apocalyptic and the man fails to convince her not to take her own life. The man struggles with a similar impulse but persists for the sake of his son.

    The apocalypse itself is tastefully unexplained. We just see the remnants: a dark and ashy world, seemingly without animals, where the man and boy hunt for canned food and boiled water to survive. The pair push around shopping carts and hide under tarps as they make slow progress down the road with just one bullet in their gun to defend themselves.

    The Road might be the most distinctly American post-apocalyptic narrative I’ve read. Throughout the book, I couldn’t help but feel a resonance with The Great Gatsby and its illustration of the American dream in decline. Early in the book, Fitzgerald describes the valley of ash: “where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.” In The Road, everything has that same ashiness and the description of men moving dimly and crumbling through the powdery air feels like such an accurate reflection of the characters in McCarthy’s work. The Road also sees the characters find Coca-Cola and the man gives it to his son as a respite and a symbolic moment of the last dregs of American commercialism. Meanwhile, the pair hold a simplified notion of Good Guys and Bad Guys, continually reassuring themselves that they are the former and that they are pioneering highway heroes.

    To the young boy’s credit, he is exploring the nuances of the world much more thoroughly than his father. He’s of an age when moral absolutes become confusing instructions to follow, and seeing his development has a tenderness amidst the disaster. His father still tries to shield his innocence from the horrors of death, which ultimately proves impossible. In one of the more haunting scenes, the pair enter a bunker to discover a cannibalism ring, which is presented with enough detail to make it disturbing and enough subtlety to make it unnerving.

    In fact, most of the book reads as episodic. It wouldn’t be a far reach to reimagine this book as a television show. Sure, the novel progresses in the sense of there being a goal and they are literally walking towards it. On the other hand, though, it feels static, aimless, meandering—just as it would feel to experience the apocalypse.

    The episodic nature of the text is supplemented by a sparse and repetitive style. A student of mine read Blood Meridian and talked about how the sentences were so lengthy and lush. I found it such an interesting difference to The Road which has a number of simple sentences in succession. I opened to a random page and the first paragraph reads: “The falling snow curtained them about. There was no way to see anything at either side of the road. He was coughing again and the boy was shivering, the two of them side by side under the sheet of plastic, pushing the grocery cart through the window. Finally he stopped. The boy was shaking uncontrollably” (94). If I’m correct, there’s only one subordinate clause in the bunch. The unpunctuated dialogue between the characters is even more direct and repetitive. Here’s another random sample: “You don’t have to tell me, the man said. It’s all right. / I’m scared. / It’s all right. / No it’s not. / It’s just a dream. / I’m really scared. / I know” (189).

    This isn’t to say that McCarthy doesn’t have flourishes of lush style. Particularly with respect to the landscape, The Road includes some vivid imagery and surprising word choices. There were some passages early on that felt poetic and enigmatic, but I forgot to mark them, so I’ll include just two passages from towards the end of the book as representative. One passage starts as follows: “The days sloughed past uncounted and uncalendared” (273). Uncalendared! What a word! The passage continues as follows:

Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel. The nights dead still and deader black. So cold. They talked hardly at all. He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He’d stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle. (273)

Each one of those sentences, in my mind, has something distinctive about it. The “incinerate” corpses, having an odd echo of “interstate” from a few sentences earlier and distinctly not in adjectival form gives the sentences a strange disembodying quality. I’d never even heard of the word “crozzled.” The inversion of “they talked hardly,” which would be more natural as “they hardly talked” again stilts the flow of the sentences in an unnatural progression. The final line of the paragraph referencing the unimaginable future and the road “glowing in that waste like a tabernacle” again feels to me like an echo of Gatsby’s disillusionment in the green light.

The final passage of the book is largely unrelated to the “action” of the book and again provides some vivid imagery, this time in a more focused manner. McCarthy writes the following:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins whimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. (287)

The symbolism of the final passage shines through with a world no longer possible. The fact that fish still existed and they offered maps and mazes—presumably that we didn’t follow, hence the apocalypse—points to the directionlessness of the future. Even the seeming happy-ish ending is really just an aimless prolonged excursion. 

    Overall, The Road was pretty good. I’m not sure it’s the masterpiece everyone makes it out to be, but McCarthy does a lot right as a stylist and an explorer of themes. The characters feel a little thin. The plot is arguably thinner. But, it still offers a particular voice and a story of connection and endurance against a cold and bitter world.

    Happy reading!