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Feminism and Animal Rights

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's Rape Rack

Created on 2004-11-25 05:46:14 (#5260814), last updated 2009-10-22

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Basic Info

Website:	Resisting the Symbolic Order
Membership:	Open
Posting Access:	All Members

Contact:

thecarolynconspiracy@yahoo.com

About

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
-Alice Walker

Community Purpose:

This community is for people who identify as both feminists and animal rights activists/vegetarians/vegans. It is for people who recognize the inherent connections between these two movements. It is also for people who are respectfully interested in this connection and finding out more about it.

The following explanation of vegetarian ecofeminism is taken from a pamphlet by Carolyn Zaikowski entitled "Why feminists should care about animal rights: a primer". To get a copy or pdf file of this booklet for your own use/distribution, email thecarolynconspiracy@yahoo.com.

A culture constructed around the domination of women and animals:

For centuries, ruling men in “Western” culture have subjugated women, nature, and animals simultaneously, often using very similar ideologies and actions against each to prove the superiority and transcendence of the Human Male. Ecofeminists believe that the function of Western patriarchy may be to control and dominate that which has been constructed as the natural, the animal, and the feminine. How have nonhuman animals occupied this space, and how can we speak for them with a feminist voice?

To start, meat and masculinity have a long history of symbolizing and constructing one another. Need I list all of the euphemisms for the penis and penis related activities? In our culture, “real” men must have meat on their bones so that they can be strong and dominant. Vegetarian men, like small-bodied or less dominating men, are called fags, pussies, or girls because they aren’t fulfilling their masculine/meat-eating role. Vegetables, passive and weak, are feminine. Hunting is also constructed as “masculine”. 90 percent of sport hunters are men; about 90 percent of the hunters of women are also men. The language and psychology of the hunt itself is sexualized, with the images of the hunted and the hunter so gendered that it is often hard to logically/linguistically pull hunters and sexists apart. Marti Kheel, in a study of this phenomenon, writes, “[Hunter] Ortega y Gassett goes so far as to assert the ‘unequaled orgiastic power’ of blood, contenting that wildlife photography is to hunting what Platonic love is to the real thing.”

Science also reflects sexism/speciesism. Vivisection was created by men, within patriarchy; the nonhumans that have suffered through it have often done so in the same rooms as women who have suffered unethical testing, forced sterilizations, lobotomies, and misogynist and racist pathologizing. In fact, the Witch Trials, a holocaust of women, happened as modern masculinist science and vivisection were taking hold. Francis Bacon, leader in the Scientific Revolution and also a lead prosecutor of witches, wrote that nature has to be “hounded in her wanderings,” “bound into service” and “made a slave”; she was to be “put in constraints” and it was the job of [male] scientists to “torture nature’s secrets from her.”

The same patriarchal schools of thought-- Descartes, Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, etc. -- that deemed women as having no souls/no inherent worth, deemed the same about nonhuman animals. They often meshed the two groups together, animalizing women and feminizing animals, using both as a means of exalting the rational, transcendent Human Male. In what is arguably our most influential cultural myth, it was not just Eve who ruined Paradise. It was the snake, too. This myth is a fascinating example of women and animals (and nature) occupying a subjugated place in opposition to the Human Male.

Theorists like Joan Dunayer have documented that in English, many more insulting animal words exist for women than for men. These words sometimes connote domesticated animals-- cows, biddies, chicks, henpeckers, bunnies, dogs, bitches, etc. When they connote wild (non domesticated) animals, it is often directed at women who are seen as threatening or as sexual prey, like foxes and vixens. It is interesting to note how one of our most popular female-derogatory terms, “bitch”, gets its offensive power: The bitch, unlike the usually friendly dog (man’s best friend), is famously contemptible in the eyes of breeders. She is difficult; she has to be forced to have sex with the male breeding dog. So as women, we are literally bitches when don’t want to be fucked.

A national study of domestic violence shelters was done in the U.S. and it was found that 85 percent of women and 63 percent of children in shelters have witnessed companion animal abuse at the hands of their abusers. Yet only 21 percent of shelters had questions about animal abuse on their intake interviews, and only 6 percent had collaborative programs with animal shelters. Clearly, domestic violence is another issue in which women’s and animal’s fates so often intertwine. Many women do not enter shelters for fear of what will happen if their beloved companion animals are left with their abusers.

Indeed, many theorists have demonstrated that the model for human subjugation and slavery may have been the enslavement of animals which happened during the Agricultural Revolution.

As feminists, we have to ask ourselves: Do we truly consent to all of this? Now that we have a little more power to act and define, why don’t we speak up? If the subjugation of nonhumans has been a crucial part of Western patriarchy, shouldn’t we analyze it, even if it means questioning some of our most basic assumptions and practices?

Farmed animals and their lack of sexual, reproductive, and bodily autonomy:

In the West, the meat and dairy industry is now almost entirely run through factory farms. This is one of the most lucrative industries in the world. It is estimated that every year, 10 billion animals are killed in factory farms in the U.S. alone. That is more than the entire human population, in one country alone, in one year.

In factory farms, nonhuman females are hooked up to machines which are solely designed to suck eggs and milk from their bodies in the most lucrative way possible. Dairy cows are forced to have at least one calf every year and are milked up to 10 times more than they should be. As a result, most dairy cows develop deadly reproductive and other diseases. Cow mothers have been seen wailing and physically fighting as their babies are taken from them. Pigs and chickens go through similar processes. Pigs, who are highly regarded as being as intelligent as dogs, are forced to suckle their babies through metal bars until their babies are taken from them. It’s been noted that they often pace for hours, throw themselves against their crates, and rip their mouths apart biting the bars out of sheer madness. Chickens, who live their lives covered in urine and feces with their feet growing around the wires of battery cages, are forced to lay as many eggs as possible and often have water and food withheld from them to shock their bodies into laying. Many such chickens live entirely in the dark, some in constant searing light. They never spread their wings or roost, and they often peck one another’s eyes out with sheared off beaks, out of boredom and madness. They are often genetically altered to create larger thighs and breasts, which are in high demand. Female animals are sent through such processes as many times as possible and then killed for hamburgers, chicken breast and legs, bacon, sausage, etc. when their reproductive systems are no longer profitable. Sometimes, their meat is low grade and so they are simply left to die, often in dumpsters.

Carol Adams has called dairy food “feminized protein”. As for the place where female animals are artificially inseminated: Factory farmers have nicknamed it “the rape rack”.

Female animals are not the only ones who suffer in factory farms, of course; male animals also occupy the patriarchal “animal” space. Male chicks, deemed useless, are often thrown away alive in dumpsters by the thousands. Bulls becomes honorary females, having their testicles burned off with hot irons. Male calves are usually sent to veal crates, where for the sake of creating tender meat, they are chained and not allowed to move, as well as fed all-liquid diets until they become anemic. These are just a few examples of the manner in which nonhuman animals-in-general become the meat, the ultimate objectification, that women so fight against becoming.

Most farmed animals are administered antibiotics and hormones that are dangerous to both them and their consumers. It is a cruel irony that the hormones injected into dairy cows have been discovered, in turn, to give human females reproductive cancers.

The factory farm industry, which has the highest job turnover rate of any other industry, is also notorious for its systematic human rights abuses. It is noted as one of the most dangerous and unhealthy jobs that exist. It has also been found that the industry continually seeks out undocumented immigrant workers. People of color are also over-represented in factory farm labor. This is not to mention the psychological trauma that factory farm workers experience after witnessing and participating in such extreme violence.

Factory farms are not the only place in which male and female animals lack bodily, reproductive, and sexual autonomy. Fur farms, breeding, vivisection, and other industries engage in similar practices. Non-factory farms-- even “free range” farms-- also engage in severe manipulation and abuse of nonhumans.

One has to wonder-- in a feminist world, would factory farms and similar industries exist? Can feminist visions come true in a world where most of what we put into our own bodies comes from a place called the rape rack? In a feminist world, would anyone, human or nonhuman, male or female, black or white, two legs or four, ever be defined solely based on their use to this horrid machine? Based on how many times they can be inseminated on the rape rack, give birth, have their children stolen from them, drugged, be hooked up to a machine solely designed to suck milk or eggs out of the female body, have those milk and eggs taken from them, and then be sent back to the rape rack? In a feminist world, would such unprecedented physical, reproductive, and sexual violence be central to our diets? Factory farms represent the most large-scale, institutionalized control of female reproduction, and of bodies in general, that exists. They represent one of the basest forms of patriarchal domination. They are the logical outcome of a world in which the Human Male dominates; they are the logical outcome of a world in which both women and nonhuman animals are domesticated, dominated, objectified, fragmented, and turned literally or figuratively into meat.

The feminist defense against animal rights:

Unfortunately, many feminists are not informed about animal rights or are actually against the movement. Even though animal rights is but a logical extension of feminism, many feminists still look at nonhuman animals with the same eyes that many men look at women. Here are a few examples of how:

Speciesism: To paraphrase Peter Singer in Animal Liberation, sexists give greater weight to the interests of their own sex; racists give greater weight to the interests of their own race; speciesists give greater weight to the interests of their own species. It is just as arbitrary to decide somebody’s worth based on their sex or race as it is based on their species.

False Dichotomies: Feminists fight to break down the feminine/masculine false dichotomy and other dualisms. Yet many feminists put great faith in archetypal false dichotomy of animal/human and the dominator-dominated relationship that it has modeled.

Objectification: Many feminists, though we struggle to be seen as whole, subjective beings who have inherent worth-- worth beyond men-- still view nonhumans as having worth only in relation to humans. We do not want to be treated like meat because meat is the ultimate fragmentation, objectification, and denial of beinghood. Should this not tell us something about the meat we actually put into our bodies? We do not want to be treated like animals because we understand, consciously or not, the nature and extent of animal oppression.

Naturalizing/De-politicizing: As many cultural forces have had us believe that men’s domination over women is natural, similar forces have naturalized human’s domination over the entire animal kingdom. As people who are so aware of the social construction of power arrangements, we have to be weary of naturalizing and de-politicizing domination. To quote Carol Adams, “Since feminists believe that the personal is political, it appears tthat many feminists do not think their personal choice of animal foods reflects a feminist politics.”

Unreasonableness or irrelevance of the issues being raised: The issues being raised about species and feminism are no less reasonable than issues feminists have raised about race, class, nation, or sexuality. Feminism has done an analysis of many other hierarchical power arrangements. Yet when feminists have arrived at places where the next logical question would have been what about animals, they have generally stopped, locked up their wellsprings of inquiry and empathy, refused to analyze human identity, and written animals off in ways frighteningly similar to the ways in which men have written off women.

Human rights are more important than nonhuman rights: It is not necessary to set up one group in opposition to another-- to do so replicates some of the most basic logistics of patriarchy. There is enough justice to go around for all groups. To extend justice beyond humans does not mean trading the human struggle for the nonhuman one. To validate and witness nonhuman survivors does not mean that we are invalidating human survivors. It means that both struggles will attain a new depth, and that we’ll knock one more spoke out of the wheel of violence.

A misogynist animal rights movement:

Many vegetarians and animal rights activists are not informed about feminism. Most of the animal rights theory that is considered acceptable by activists is written by men who, although their thoughts are incredibly important and necessary, do not take into account the feminist analysis that may be crucial to animal liberation. Many feminists have critiqued organizations like PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) for using sexist, racist, sizeist, and sensationalist themes to promote animal rights. Additionally, many animal rights activists are anti-choice even though the lack of reproductive, sexual, and bodily autonomy that defines the nonhuman experience is mirrored in the human female experience. Though many animal rights activists view the anti-choice stance as a logical extension of animal rights, many silenced vegetarians/AR activists believe that a pro-choice stance is actually much more consistent with animal rights. One of the missions of feminism must be to demand a feminist and women’s presence in the animal rights movement.

POSTING RULES- PLEASE READ:

-See the memories section for some important topics and debates. See the interests for relevant topics. Generally any issues concerning women's rights, human rights, animal rights, and/or connections between these things is on topic. You can share articles, advice, links, information, poetry, papers, and epiphanies. You can ask questions, make angry rants, be emotional, and draw connections. Posts about activism are especially encouraged.

-All triggering, exceptionally large, or gory posts/pictures abolutely must be behind a cut or will be deleted.

-Absolutely no sexist, racist, colonialist, classist, transphobic, homophobic, heterosexist, ablist, speciesist, ethnocentric, anti-choice, etc. comments/posts.

-Please remember that this is not a United States-only space.

Abortion Debate

-One of the major ways in which both women and nonhuman animals are violated and oppressed is through mass-scale, often institutionalized reproductive control and sexual violence. There are virtually no safe places in which to recognize this connection and all of its implications, as those who recognize it are generally silenced by both the feminist and animal rights movements. For these and other reasons, this community is pro-choice and believes that fetus rights and animal rights are not comparable issues. Issues surrounding pro-life vegetarianism and the like are not up for debate in this space.

-We also believe that sexual violence against anyone-- human or nonhuman-- needs to be named as oppression, and that each act of sexual domination needs to be recognized as upholding an oppressive system in which women's and animal's fates so often construct and maintain one another. We believe that it is entirely possible to validate both human and nonhuman victims and survivors without downplaying the others' experience. We believe that, while no oppression or act of violence is qualitatively the same as any other, there are parrallels between systems of power and violence which should be critically analyzed.

-This is not a debate community. People who aren't feminists, vegetarians, or animal rights activists are one-hundred percent welcome here, but come with the attitude of learning, not teaching.

-If you are banned or your post deleted: Don't feel entitled to prior notice. Don't feel entitled to whine about censorship-- this space, like all others, is organized in a certain way, around certain ideas and rules. Your being here is an agreement that you have accepted and understood these ideas and rules. So if you don't like this community, don't whine about it; go start your own.

-This community strives to be as drama-free as possible. Any posts inciting drama will be deleted.

-This community is the sibling community of

ecofeminism, which is similar. Check out ecofeminism's user info for extensive links and information. Feel free to cross-post.

Both are maintained by