The Sexual Politics of Meat
Our patriarchal culture animalizes women and sexualizes animals, and without compulsory pregnancy among human and nonhuman females, both patriarchy and animal agriculture would fail. Carol Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory, joins us. Highlights include:
How Carol got started on her personal journey to veganism;
Why patriarchal cultures associate masculinity with meat-eating and how women and animals become ‘absent referents’;
Why feminism and veganism have a long history of deep interconnection;
How sexism persists in the animals rights movement;
Why a vegan diet is a daily act of anti-oppressive resistance.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Carol Adams (00:00:00):
This anti-abortion, this pronatalist, compulsory pregnancy language had been going on all these years without us ever seeing it. So one of the things, as an abortion rights activist since 1970, that I notice is how without compulsory pregnancy, both patriarchy and animal agriculture would fail.
Alan Ware (00:00:29):
In this episode of OVERSHOOT, we talk with Carol Adams, feminist, vegan advocate, activist, independent scholar, and author of numerous books, including her highly influential book, The Sexual Politics of Meat: a Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory.
Nandita Bajaj (00:00:53):
Welcome to OVERSHOOT, where we tackle today's interlocking social and ecological crises driven by modern humanities demands on Earth's natural systems - demands that have outstripped nature's ability to recover and regenerate. On this podcast, we explore needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on earth. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware (00:01:23):
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. With expert guests covering a range of topics, we examine the force's underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that fuels overpopulation, the growth-obsessed economic systems that drive consumerism and social injustice, and the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all of life. And now on to today's guest.
(00:02:06):
Carol J. Adams is a feminist whose work explores the cultural construction of overlapping and interconnected oppressions, as well as the ethics of care. Adam's iconic, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory is now in a 35th anniversary edition. Other notable titles amongst Carol's many published books include Neither Man Nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals, and Living among Meat Eaters. She is author of Protest Kitchen: Fight Injustice, Save the Planet, and Fuel Your Resistance One Meal at a Time, and co-editor of the anthology, The Good It Promises The Harm It Causes: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Ms Magazine, Tikkun, and Truth Dig among others. She has been an activist against sexual violence, racism, and homelessness, and for reproductive justice and fair housing. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj (00:03:09):
Hi Carol, and welcome to our show. It's so great to finally meet you.
Carol Adams (00:03:14):
I'm thrilled to be on your show and thank you for the work you do in putting this on and helping educate people about these issues.
Nandita Bajaj (00:03:21):
Absolutely. And Carol, I first came across your work several years ago when my husband and I had just become vegan and were attending tons of animal rights conferences to learn more about the different forms of animal oppression. And I recall a blog you had written calling for the boycotting of one of these conferences, and the reason was that one of the organizers had allegations of previous misogynistic conduct, and we can talk about that a bit more later. But I just wanted to say that that was quite a revelation for me, and you really helped me see the complexity of oppression in its broader context. And more recently as we at Population Balance have been broadly exploring the links between patriarchy and human supremacy, your work continues to bear so much relevance in what we are doing and in educating all of us in understanding these overlapping systems of oppression. So we really are so delighted to have the opportunity to discuss these with you today. And yeah, I want to thank you again for your incredible work over the decades and for giving us your time today.
Carol Adams (00:04:38):
Thank you.
Nandita Bajaj (00:04:39):
So we can start with a little bit of history, Carol. You've spent decades of your life working on issues of feminism and veganism. What were some of the events and influences in your early life and young adulthood that awakened you to these issues?
Carol Adams (00:04:57):
I grew up in a rural village in Chatauqua County, upstate New York, western New York, a village of 900 people. And we always had animals. There were cats and there were dogs, and there was farms all around and lived in a big old house and it had a big barn. It could hold the ponies and the horses. And I would say riding for someone who's in that tween years before being a teen. And they talk about the experience of girls as tweens and that were, especially in the early sixties, were aware of a sort of devolution that's going to come in terms of power. And riding horses was just incredible. There was no Title IX that guaranteed women equality in sports, but here on horses, anything the Lone Ranger did, we could do practically. We were jumping on horses from behind and we were swinging off the tree branch onto a horse or off of the horse and switching horses in mid-cantor, very calisthenic and gymnastic.
(00:06:07):
But I think I was so touched by animals as a child and so shaped by my relationships with them that it reverberates in my life to this day. And I did a book of prayers a few years ago and somebody asked me about that and I realized that animals gave me so much, I'll probably never be done writing about them in return. But the formative moment for me in terms of veganism, vegetarianism was that after studying as an undergraduate, I enrolled at Yale Divinity School. And when I came home after my first year, I was unpacking and there was a neighbor at the door and he shouted that someone had shot our horse, and I ran with him up to the pasture where the two horses we had then were, and there was Jimmy, the pony given to us when I was in sixth grade, lying dead.
(00:07:07):
He had a little blood coming from his mouth and we could hear shots in the distance. The pasture was right by a woods and it was very frightening. The other horse, Nikki, was snorting and walking around and very uncomfortable, frightened, or knew something was terribly wrong. Eventually we learned that some kids had been target practicing. They claimed they had not shot him. There was a debate about whether though Jimmy being 24 had just collapsed from a heart attack from hearing the shots, so you don't know. But he died as a result of them being very nearby target practicing. That night I went to bite into a hamburger and I stopped and I thought, this is a dead cow. I would not eat Jimmy. Jimmy is dead as well, but I'm going to bury Jimmy tomorrow. We had to get a backhoe to bury him, but I'm willing to eat a cow, so why am I willing to eat a cow?
(00:08:10):
And I realized I was a hypocrite. It was I was only eating animals I did not know. I know that that kind of questioning had its sort of formulation, or I'd been trained to think that way, because I'd already been involved in the feminist movement and in consciousness raising where you're asking questions about your personal life and saying, what does this mean and what's the context? So I think my mind was already trained to make that intuitive leap, which I think lots of people do, but then they want to ignore it. But I knew I could not ignore it. It was as though Jimmy's death showed me something much more pernicious than the death of one animal, which was the assumption that we should eat dead animals. So I knew I had to become a vegetarian and then began the process on the path to first becoming a vegetarian, then asking myself, well, what about milk and dairy?
(00:09:13):
And while it took me a while, I eventually realized that dairy and eggs are implicated in animal agriculture, in meat production, and they were not foods I needed. And that the ethic I was trying to follow meant becoming a vegan, which then released a whole lot of positive energy. I had stopped asking the questions and so then I could pursue life as a vegan, which I would encourage your listeners to know is a really wonderful life. I've got probably, as someone who collects books, 500 vegan and vegetarian cookbooks. I could cook something different for the rest of my life every night and still not cover the gamut of what's available. So that in short is animals touched me so deeply, I want to always honor that and live within the truth of how we experience multi-species education.
Nandita Bajaj (00:10:12):
Thank you so much. That was so well captured. And it's such a beautiful and moving story of how you came to see all of these intricate connections. And of course not surprising that they were expressions of your own awakenings in your own personal life, which I think happens to so many of us, is we kind of grow up in these dominant narratives, dominant systems, doing whatever is considered to be quote end quote normal. And then we start asking these questions. And I really appreciate how you said it kind of released all this positive energy when you finally decided to become vegan, which I also think is reflective of how much energy it takes for a lot of people, a lot of us who have seen oppression but stay in denial of it, how much energy it takes to remain in denial or to kind of turn our back to it.
Carol Adams (00:11:04):
Well, I did a book called Living among Meat Eaters where I developed these ideas. I try to look at people as blocked vegans and that their conversations with me are telling me what's blocking them. And I think two main things that block people is guilt. They learn to live with guilt rather than to ask guilt, why are you here? I mean, the fact about guilt is it's not supposed to keep recurring. If you're constantly feeling guilty, something is asking you to look at it. It's like if you have a recurrent dream all the time of something or other, maybe there's an issue to look at. And the other thing is I think people are afraid of grief. Now, clearly the movement towards veganism began in grief, but in the western world, we don't model grief. Well, we give three days off if a spouse or a close relative dies.
(00:11:54):
We are sort of frightened by the emotions that grief provokes. And I know that when I talk to people sometimes they'll say, don't tell me. I don't want to know. I don't want to know about calves being taken from their mothers before the colostrum is even comes in so that the colostrum can get marketed as a vitamin or a cream. No, they don't want to know. Well, why don't they want to know? Because the information is frightening. We have a good model for what to do with the grief that you're going to feel when you know what animal agriculture does, this huge maw of consumption and that each animal is suffering. It's overwhelming. And so I think people are afraid of grief, and I would like to encourage people to know grief help makes us human in the sense of feeling the extensiveness of what our emotions can help us with. That grief reminds me I care. If I didn't grieve, it would mean I wasn't caring. But grief isn't going to kill us every day. I'll think, oh, here you are. Grief. Yes, grief, I see you. I just learned something or a truck went past filled with chickens or something has reminded me, but the grief isn't destructive. People think grief is destructive. Grief can be constructive and a gift and a reminder of connection. So I think people are afraid to change and they don't realize they're working hard or not changing than changing.
Alan Ware (00:13:33):
Yeah. Your grief with your pony then led you over several years to the writing eventually of your 1990 highly influential book, the Sexual Politics of Meat, a Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory, which now is celebrated. Its 35th anniversary. Right. And a new edition has the subtitle of Feminist Vegan Critical Theory, because you've discussed that veganism was not widely talked about at that time or known about. So in that book, one of the themes you explore deeply is how the cultural narratives in many societies like ours, associate me consumption with masculinity and dominance. And I was wondering if you could talk about some of the most prominent or interesting evidence that you've found in the past and in the present for that association between meat and masculinity.
Carol Adams (00:14:25):
What's interesting is that when the book came out, I thought, oh, have I finally finished it after having this idea back in 1974 and now it's coming out in 1990, and have I finally finished it? And maybe things are slightly getting better in terms of that trope. And the answer is absolutely not. But in chapter one where I explore this, I talk about the century legacy. One of the impacts of colonialism, especially settler colonialism and the land that we know of as North America was the bringing of cattle. Cattle are not native to the Americas. So the assumption about beef, I mean even when someone orders say a beef enchilada with cheese, that is not a native food to North America, that is settler colonialism. But one of the mythologies that was created in the 19th century in England was the idea that the British as beef eaters had defeated these rice eating feminized countries like India.
(00:15:33):
So there was this idea that a country could be rural and masculine through meat eating and that a culture that ate rice was feminized and weakened. So you begin with a mythology about veal nations, and it becomes also a mythology about veal men. You've got advertisements that reinforce this. And one of the things I talk about in the new introduction is how this reappears in 2008. I mean, it never goes away. And we know that because vegans and vegetarians, men are cast as sissies or because of homophobia thought that they're homosexual. There's what we would say an objection of vegan and vegetarian men because they don't fit this type. It's expected that men will eat meat, that you renew your manhood by a meat meal. And I always choke and say, my library card's good for three years, but if a man eats tofu at lunch, he's lost his man card.
(00:16:38):
I mean, it's so unstable that you lose it with one helping of tofu. And you could see that some vegans struggle with even using the word vegan, even for a while. About 15 years ago, male vegans were trying to see if they could call themselves vegans, which what that says to us is veganism is always talking about gender. The anxiety about the gender binary enacts itself through the sexual politics of meat. This is how we're going to reinforce it. Many this women eat that. And so veganism undercuts the gender binary at the same time that it undercuts animal agriculture. And rather than sort of just accept it and claim it, we see all these ways of trying to work around it because they really don't want to piss off the issue of gender inequality. Some vegans think, oh, it's just about what I'm eating. It's not about anything else.
(00:17:35):
It isn't if you live in the context of a patriarchal world, a misogynist world, what we're doing within that world is marked and veganism is marked whether you want it or not. So don't give us heins claim. It say, why do we assume this? Why is the masculine thought to need virility or what is courage? You're getting courage from buying a hamburger of a docile cow killed without even a chance to run away. There is no meat plus eating. It gives you something literally physically, it is only giving you something symbolically. So let's challenge the symbolism, even though it's said you can't argue with a culture mythology. Well, here I am 35 years later, still arguing with the culture's mythology about men and mediating.
Alan Ware (00:18:33):
And as he referred to the rise of more rightwing, authoritarians seemed to be glorifying, mediating and kind of equating it with a sort of freedom from the Davos set, insisting that you eat insects and vegetables, we're going to have the freedom to kill and eat whatever we want, kind of that that's coated as part of the masculinity.
Carol Adams (00:18:55):
This I think, is tied with the history of the United States because immigrants coming from Europe, they did not eat meat every day in Europe. There wasn't the land to grow animals for everybody to be consuming them. They were eaten on feast days or special days unless you were wealthy or royalty. But you came to the United States, and as part of settler colonialism, we grab the land of Native Americans and then convert it using cows as part of the instrument, right? Cows taking over the land in the Midwest, and now there was enough land to grow animals for everybody to eat. And I think part of the mythology became, it was your democratic right to be able to eat meat three times a day. People think, well, we're challenging your democratic, right? Is that this the right as an American, this basic identity is we eat and the need to assert it is a sign that it's already gone, that the link that you thought was there is gone. There wouldn't be so much insecurity about it. There wouldn't be so much proclamation saying, look, this is what we do. You would not need to say it. If it were true, it would be so true you would not name it. So what we see now perhaps, and what's different from 1990 is this anxiety that suggests, yeah, the gender dualisms already been threatened. They're trying to reclaim something that has been transformed. They're trying to put something back in a box. Well, good luck.
Nandita Bajaj (00:20:38):
Yes. And we see that trying to reclaim the gender dualism in both the media and culture, but also in the misogynistic rhetoric that has seen a reactionary rise along with the same masculinity that you're just speaking about. The trad wife culture is becoming more and more prominent. There is this reactionary colonialism blaming feminism for declining birth rates because of greater gender equality. Women choosing to have fewer children are a threat to nationalism or a threat to white supremacy or a threat to patriarchy. So there's also this notion that if we are unable to reclaim that gender binary, the dualism, then we will do it by any means necessary. And that any means necessary is also showing up in the form of abortion bans and greater sanctions on contraceptive healthcare, et cetera. Because so much of this masculinity is also tied to greater population growth, especially within the West. There's so much alarmism around declining fertility population is not declining around the world. It is maybe a little bit in some countries, but I think combined with what you're saying, the anti-immigrant rhetoric, the fertility decline rhetoric of certain people and this rhetoric around media eating, they all kind of happen to be coexisting and making a comeback in a really reactionary way.
Carol Adams (00:22:16):
What is striking to me is, well, right after sexual politics of meat first appeared in 1990, people started sending me images and animal activists often part of their job was to look at industry magazines and industry mailings. And some of the things that they sent me would be these ads of a sexy pig who wants to give one more piglet a year. So it's an ad for a drug company or another drug company. What would she do if she weren't pregnant? It's a cow. This anti-abortion, this prenatal list, compulsory pregnancy language had been going on all these years without us ever seeing it. But the assumption that someone should be made pregnant, that someone wants to be pregnant, you don't even have to feminize it. It had always been sort of a given that this is what women were meant for. But that conversation that we now see acceptable in the public had always been there.
(00:23:23):
So one of the things as an abortion rights activist since 1970 that I notice is how without compulsory pregnancy, both patriarchy and animal agriculture would fail. And so the increased attention to women's bodies at this time and its source in misogyny is very, very clear. But this conversation, and even some of the ads that I produced in the Pornography of Meat in the edition that came out in 2019, that show sexy animals who want to be consumed and is it a woman or is it a cow? Is it a woman or is it a chicken? This conflation and this intense overlap or confusion, there was a wonderfully powerful misogynistic message there. We are here to serve you,
Nandita Bajaj (00:24:22):
And you refer to when we're consuming, you're speaking about consuming of both the sexual exploitation but consuming through eating. But specifically when we're consuming meat, dairy products or eggs, the animals become what you call the absent referent. Can you speak a little bit more to that phrase?
Carol Adams (00:24:44):
So when I bid into that hamburger and I suddenly thought of a cow, I associated the meat with the dead animal who had to disappear to make that meat consumable. The cow had to disappear as a living being had to be killed. The cow had to disappear for most of us as a conceptual idea that I'm eating a dead animal who might've wanted to live, and the cow has to disappear bodily. We don't go after an entire cow. She's cut up, her muscle is renamed and reshaped. And so how meat eating is accomplished in industrial countries is by always keeping the absent reference absent. So the cow appeared to me when I took that bite and when we're conversing with non-vegan, especially if it's over a meal where they're eating meat, they don't want to make that conceptual link because it means something has to change.
(00:25:48):
Now there's a side debate. Well, we have the right to eat animals and all. It's so funny because all of those side debates arise once the absent referent has been named. But our culture has institutionalized language and industry so that the very link doesn't exist for most of us all the time. Now, at some point, children often say, well, where did this chicken come from? Or you mean chicken wing is from a chicken, and lots of children are made uncomfortable by that. And I remember my son when he was five, he was a great proselytizer for vegetarianism, and he convinced a friend to become a vegetarian. And the friend was over the next day and he said, well, they'd gone to McDonald's. And he said he didn't want to eat the chicken wing he'd been given. And his mother said, but if you don't, you won't get your dessert. So we might all have had experiences like that that we then disappear from consciousness because being reminded that we were once uneasy about this makes us uneasy. Now the basic fact is our culture lies to us. Our parents lied to us, the schools lied to us, and the culture lies to us. No, the animal did not want to be your meal.
Nandita Bajaj (00:27:07):
And you talk about the role of language in diminishing the bodies that are being dismembered and consumed and fragmented and the use of it and changing the names of the animal products, which makes it easier to then completely dissociate what's on the plate with who's on the plate. And I wonder, yeah, if you want to say anything more.
Carol Adams (00:27:31):
Part of the Republican campaign in 2024 when JD Vance said they're eating the dogs about immigrants who'd been invited to Springfield, Ohio was it points out the fulcrum of language in justifying media because for animals whom we in the west or in the United States or Canada don't eat, we'll say like dog meat, cat meat, horse meat, we append the meat because we don't see them as meat. So the minute you hear dog meat, one of the things that's being communicated is the people talking about this, don't eat dogs because we don't say cow meat or chicken meat or pig meat. We've renamed them. So one of the ways that they were able to exploit anti-immigrant fervor was by using the myth that whoever the targeted they were are doing wrong towards our animals, but the animals being protected are a certain group. So that's one way that language works to distance.
(00:28:44):
And of course, another way is the dispossession of the body parts. So people have a leg of lamb, they don't have a lamb's leg or chicken wings, not a chicken's wings. The animal can't possess their own body, which of course at that point they don't. It has been fragmented. But when I go into Whole Foods, which I have tried not to do because of Bezos and the failure of the Washington Post to endorse Kamala and Bezos is kind of bending the knee to Trump, but when I was there last year before Thanksgiving, and in the freezer it says whole fresh Turkey, but the turkey's been beheaded, disemboweled and is frozen, a whole fresh Turkey would be walking in with me. That's what a whole fresh Turkey is. So then we can get even further into other language of advertisement. But I think that covers the idea that there is a lot of work put into keeping us from making these connections because I think making the connections are so powerful.
Alan Ware (00:29:54):
And as you write in the sexual politics of meat, women like animals are the absent referent and patriarchal culture. And your insight of that interconnection gave rise to your broader feminist vegan critical theory. Could you elaborate on some of those connections between how women and animals are treated and how do you think feminist, vegan critical theory can be used to advance social justice advocacy in general?
Carol Adams (00:30:19):
So I didn't have this soundbite in 1990, but as I worked with all the images, and really I need to say that people say the book changed their lives, but the first person's life that book changed was mine because not only did I have to try to figure out what I wanted to say, but once I said it, people started sending me all these images that there was more work to do. What do these mean? So I didn't have this soundbite in 1990, but now eventually I figured out to say women are animalized and animals are sexualized and feminized. So women in imagery, advertisements in other ways, they might be shown just parts of their body. Pornographic tropes say of the 1970s, 1980s moved into our culture. There were certain pornographic tropes that assumed the availability of the body, but what they did is they often just showed women's body parts fixating, say, on the breasts or pelvic area.
(00:31:19):
And in the same way we found ads that just fragmented women and didn't show their full bodies. And of course, this is what happens with animals too, where they're fragmented. So one of the ways that this intersection happened is the famous saying by Colonel Sanders, supposedly, are you a breast man or are you a leg man whose breasts, whose legs they're having a lot of fun about who's consumable? Another way that women are analyzed would be to be shown on all fours be shown in positions that are associated with animals. Of course, women were animalized by western philosophy because the definition of homo sapiens tracks the definition of the white middle class man of the 18th century. So enlightenment thought, animalized women by assuming that men were the philosophers, that men were the people who thought. So women have been animalized in philosophy and in culture and in practice for centuries.
(00:32:23):
What was recent for the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century was as we moved into being a much more graphic oriented culture, that these tropes get laid onto women's bodies in advertisements. Meanwhile, animals are feminized or sexualized. I just cannot get over how many times a chicken or a pig or a cow is shown in a bikini with tights or stockings and high heels, always high heels, often red with lipstick or curled eyelashes. All the sort of mechanism by which women often were signaled to be sexually available were placed on top of animals. So animals were feminized and sexualized in a way that not only reminded us that the consumers being talked to were men in general, but also to say, what kind of consumption are we talking about here? So once we have this intersection in which one group's oppression is used or brought to bear on another's to intensify the other's oppression while reflecting and reinforcing the first, we see how culture becomes this sort of merry-go-round of oppression using one kind of oppression to reinforce another.
Alan Ware (00:33:48):
Yeah, we talk with Angela Sny about her book, the Patriarchs that talks about objectifying and commodifying animals and women in early Mesopotamia that they were property very much kept track of. Their reproduction was controlled, the animals, the women and the slaves for the good of state power, economic and military. And that dynamic of objectifying, fragmenting consuming that you talk about with both animals and women goes into kind of hyperdrive with the colonialism and global capitalism where we're objectifying nature, objectifying entire ecologies, fragmenting them for our own exploitation and consumption. So it does attach, it seems to me that exploitation of women and animals to broader ecological concepts also, and the absent referent idea reminds me of all the hidden commodities in global capitalism, whether it's these laptops we're using all the hidden ecologies that have been exploited, the social relationships that are exploitative, that are hidden.
Carol Adams (00:34:56):
One of the first papers that came out after sexual politics and me was published was talking about the sweatshop workers for the sweatshirts that were in colleges all over the country being absent reference. And I think that that recognizes that the way objectification works is to distance us to give us a distancing device so that we don't empathize. I think right now with what's going on around abortion and this attempt to go after birth control, I mean women are the opposite reference. They're the opposite reference in the abortion debate. They disappear in some of the imagery that anti-abortionists have used over the years as though the fetus is out there floating in space. It's not, it's within a body and that body matters. So I think helping us to see when that sort of interlocking or overlapping oppression requires us not to just respond in a fragmented way.
(00:35:55):
So for instance, when I would debate other animal rights, people would say, well, you go on with your theory. I'm just going to try to work to save animals. Well, yes, but what's the context? The context in which you're trying to do this matters? And we did a specific book for progressives protest kitchen, trying to get them to see that everything they care about, climate change, democracy, anti-racism, work, misogyny, compassion, all of that also needs to be looked at from a vegan point of view because veganism is part of the progressive solution. In fact, the book, which my co-author and I, Jenny Messina thought of right around the time of the 2016 election, we wanted to call it the anti-Trump diet and show people that here is one thing you can be doing amidst everything else you're doing, but come home to a vegan meal.
(00:36:51):
It can also help with anxiety and that sort of disconnect we feel. And here you can come home and have this meal at least a sort of healing meal in the midst of fighting the repressions that we're seeing. So to recognize that all the years that climate change was talked about, but we weren't looking at animals was because they were absent reference. If you're not thinking about eating an animal, you're not thinking about the amount of manure they've produced, the amount of water or food they needed, the amount of land, 33% of land in the world devoted to animal agriculture. If they're absent reference, you're not adding the consequences of a huge number of millions and millions and millions of quaded on land. So I think social injustice could feel so overwhelming, and those of us who care about these issues, I know we have to parcel out our energy.
(00:37:52):
We have to sleep, we have to have relationships. We can't be doing this all the time. But I just say to anybody who says, I'm too busy to add this as well, it's part of the myth that bringing veganism into a progressive or liberal point of view takes time. I don't take any more time than anybody else to eat or to think about my food. I've sort of liberated my mind into thinking about what those foods are. So the famous saying, you don't need to carry the canoe once you've crossed the river. Well cross the river and learn some recipes. Or I think more and more people should learn to cook anyway if they can during this time, but take a little time. It's not inconvenient. And it's investing in a life that makes these connections and might help you with the stress and strain that we are now feeling.
Nandita Bajaj (00:38:50):
Yeah, definitely. And you also provide examples and historical evidence that vegetarians and vegans have often been at the forefront of other social justice movements that were challenging the oppressions of their time, whether it was fighting against slavery, women's oppression or war. Could you share a couple of your favorite examples or most influential people who really informed your thinking?
Carol Adams (00:39:17):
Well, you've got Matilda Joslyn Gage. She was a suffragist feminist, lived in upstate New York in the 19th century, wrote about witches. She wrote about women's history and how witches were persecuted, and she was a vegetarian and she was very involved with the Native American struggle in onaga communities in upstate New York. So she was someone who made connections. I interviewed a lot of feminists in the seventies when I first started working on this in Boston, and they were vegetarian for vital reasons. They'd read Francis Moore Lappe about the inefficiency of animal agriculture, or one had gone to an anti-Vietnam war protest, and she was the one who was to pick up blood from a slaughterhouse to use at the protest. And when she left the slaughterhouse, she thought, well, isn't this violence too? So there are a lot of pathways for making the connection and then living the connection so that now we have feminist vegan artists, Susie Gonzalez in San Antonio doing incredible work, feminist vegan poets, Gretchen Primi and Catherine Kirkpatrick with just beautiful touching poetry. I think artists around the world who are helping us think and see. So the fact is people may be experiencing feminist vegan thought and not even know it.
Nandita Bajaj (00:40:50):
And I am grateful to you for bringing that to life for so many of us because I mean your work, and I know it was influenced by the work of so many others who came before you, but at least for our generation, feminism and veganism is a connection that once you make it, you really cannot unsee it. And for me, it's just a completely radical connection. And at the same time, it's the most natural connection. And that's why I often get quite disappointed when I see so many radical feminists that I admire still continuing to use animalized language when they are referring to the oppression of women treating a woman like a piece of meat. We often see that social justice advocates, including feminists, they don't always return the favor and pay attention to animal rights injustice in the same way as some of these animal rights advocates are advancing other social justice causes. Why do you think that's the case?
Carol Adams (00:41:55):
Well, I think there's probably several overlapping reasons. One, I think is that the animal rights movement was so masculinized and they weren't very diplomatic. You should, you must. But also, especially in the nineties and early aughts, except for Ingrid Newkirk who was at PETA and controversial for a variety of reasons, there was this sense that animal rights was first of all, a single issue oriented led by white men and did not have any kind of discourse that spoke to where feminists were. I was extremely grateful when Robin Morgan edited Ms., that she invited me to submit several essays about animals and ecofeminism to have that conversation. So I think the animal rights movement did not help us. Secondly, feminists like progressive, like many people, have an undisturbed sense of human exceptionalism, which means we think that humans are different, better than animals - that might have to do with consciousness, ability, that even though we struggle as feminists against a hierarchical view of the created order, we also might be accepting as that humans are above animals.
(00:43:13):
The third is we've got so much to do right now for women. I can't have anything else on my plate. And back in the eighties, I was on the New York Governor's Commission on Domestic Violence, and we would then have dinner and I'd just say, how can you all be eating hamburger? We've talked all day about violence against women. And you know what, back in the eighties, they'd look at me and they'd say, what the hell are you talking about, Carol? But yes, energy is limited. We are each individuals with a finite amount of energy, and we are asking people to put part of their energy, that already feels limited and stretched, towards somebody on the other side of that human exceptionalist barrier. And I'm not sure animal rights and vegans were very good at that conversation. I mean, the other thing that happened is once vegans discovered this notion of intersectionality, it was in a very attenuated way.
(00:44:15):
So intersectionality was a very specific concept that Kimberly Crenshaw introduces in 1989. Now, it was anticipated by the Combahee Collective in Boston in the 1970s when they talked about interdependent oppressions, as black women pointing out how we weren't looking at the interaction of white supremacy and misogyny. So Crenshaw illustrates it compellingly in her 1989 law review article, and slowly but surely intersectionality became something that you needed to do within the vegan mindset, but they didn't do it well at all. And what resulted was we had a lot of, or some white men deciding that they were going to go tell feminists that dairy was rape. And I would try to say, can you leave the conversation with feminists to feminists? I mean, is there anything more patriarchal than these guys who really haven't even thought about the feminist consequences of what they're doing taking on that one issue? It's like back in the eighties as the animal rights movement started to gain strength, what was the first thing they targeted - fur?
(00:45:31):
And how did they target it? By the street harassment of fur-wearing women, the consumer at the bottom level. Well, we already had sexual harassment on the street. All they had to do was add to that. They didn't disturb basic cultural practices about women. They just extended it. So that didn't help us talk with feminists, because women were seen as the culprits and they were seen as open targets for harassment. And it's continued so that how we approach these issues, who gets to decide? And the anti-feminist thread, we have not exposed it and we haven't stopped it. So why should feminists trust it?
Nandita Bajaj (00:46:17):
Right. Yeah, I really like what you're saying there. It brings me back to the comment I started off the conversation with of how I got introduced to your work when you were starting to expose some of these men within the animal rights movement who had been implicated within the Me Too movement. And I see even today, a lot of animal rights groups will call themselves intersectional, but at the same time, they will continue to valorize these same men on the grounds that well, they're really powerful and they can use their power to advance animal rights. And that animal rights is the main issue that we're fighting for. So it's a very utilitarian argument and it completely dismisses the intersection that you're really pointing to between misogyny and animal exploitation. But further, it actually perpetuates the same power hierarchies that have existed for so long within different movements, but definitely within the animal rights movement.
Carol Adams (00:47:23):
Well, it's a very depressing subject, and I'll say that sometimes I've asked, well, what part of the movement, animal liberation or animal rights movement, were you involved in? I don't know that that's easy to say, because the minute Sexual Politics of Meat came out, I started hearing from women who'd been sexually exploited in the movement. I've spent 35 years hearing those stories, and it's very painful. You've got a movement that is majority women, and yet we don't have the power and we haven't defined it. One of the things that I think is very interesting is that people care about animals, but in the animal rights movement, they've used this language of rights or utilitarianism. It's as though the movement itself wasn't able to begin by saying, we need to reclaim these emotions and feelings and commitments that have been identified with women because of a patriarchal world.
(00:48:28):
And as we reclaim those, we will get stronger. I mean, the other thing that was complicit in all this is that the media in the eighties and nineties responded to men as leaders more than women, and I'd hear from grassroots activists saying, well, the local reporter came and turned right to the vice president who was a man to ask his opinion, or men would come visiting and then they'd be interviewed. So the more you mirrored the way the dominant culture felt power was expressed, the more likely you were to be noticed. But I really do think that many of the major groups in the United States sort of conspired to protect, especially white men, as leaders and that's a crime. It wasted a lot of energy. We lost women who left because they'd been sexually exploited or knew about it, and they signed NDAs. I think about the number of women who we don't even have in the movement because there was no place for them.
(00:49:30):
So how do we look at the issue of a majority women movement that is unable to articulate women's rights to her own protection? When Sexual Politics of Meat came out, Andrea Dworkin, a radical feminist, she said, it's a consciousness-raising and consciousness-changing book. I wrote Andrea to thank her for blurbing my book, and she wrote back and she said, I think that women are joining the animal rights movement instead of the feminist movement. And there's a whole sort of feminist question of what movements are we comfortable with as women and that perhaps women are more comfortable fighting for someone else than for themselves. So that their solution in its own way becomes not to be feminist, except be feminist in their own living, but not to align with feminism, but to align with animal rights. There are times that you'll see this thing where people say, yes, I'm going to fight for animals because even battered women or rape victims, they have a voice, the animals don't have a voice
(00:50:41):
But it's such a perverse thing. First of all, animals have a voice. We don't need to speak for animals. We have to get out of the way and let what animals say when they run away or they move or that cows for two weeks after a calf is taken away, has a unique moo. Animals have voices, but secondly, rape victims and battered women, they sometimes have suppressed or denied voices. That was the whole Me Too movement. How long do you have to say something before it's heard? So this basic dialectic of either/or that constantly reappears when these issues come up is at the heart the problem. It isn't either/or.
Nandita Bajaj (00:51:27):
Absolutely. That was really good.
Alan Ware (00:51:30):
So you've lived through several decades of feminism and seen a change and the different so-called waves move through feminism. What are you finding most interesting about where feminism is today and where do you think it might be going in the coming years, decades?
Carol Adams (00:51:47):
I don't know that I have any easy answer. I ,of course, come out of the second wave feminist movement and the waves that came after that sometimes said, well, is there anything from the second wave to retain? And I felt like, yeah, I think there is, and I mean one of the things is that to be further behind in terms of abortion rights than we were when I was 22 is absolutely shocking. Why do we have waves in the first place? Because a patriarchal world is that strong. Because we are this threatening. We are back to the times of the Jane Collective in Chicago that performed abortions. I mean, one of the things was with Roe v Wade, abortion was accepted as a medicalized thing and the Jand Collective in Chicago that provided abortion safely but illegally proved that lay people could learn it. I think that the work of feminists of color is incredibly important, reminding us of who's being targeted often by these anti-abortion legislations and never to lose sight of white supremacy as this powerful force aligned with misogyny in the United States.
(00:53:12):
So that as a white woman, I need to be very carefully conscious of that. I'm hoping that people experience with shock what is actually the goal of the right-wing in the Trump administration and turn against it. And that could happen. It could be powerful and it could be quick. But I also just want to say to people, we do these activisms - we become vegan, we care about the world, because in a sense it's the right thing to do. It calls us to work for justice. Will we succeed? Will we find Roe v Wade in and then Roe v wade out, and then we cannot measure the success of what we do based on the outcome. We just have to keep at it. There's the wonderful song at the end of the Broadway play Suffs about the suffrage movement called Keep Marching. We keep marching because what else would we do? This is the vision of justice we're working for and we keep at it and we keep marching.
Nandita Bajaj (00:54:26):
Right. And on your website you note that resistance to such oppression includes also being attentive to our daily practices. You've written books on vegan living and the importance of personal dietary choices in the broader context of social and ecological justice. How do you see adopting a vegan lifestyle as a political act? I know you spoke briefly about it being an anti-Trump diet, and I wonder if you could speak a little more to how what seems like a really small act can actually be used to stand up against what you are referring to as so many overlapping systems of oppressions.
Carol Adams (00:55:09):
Well, I mean, we know that the petrochemical companies in the eighties knew their role in climate change and resisted it. We've had solutions for a long time, and if the companies changed, maybe there'd be less pressure on us as individuals. But in the world we're living in now, we have to recognize where we're situated and either we accept climate change is happening and passively decide our hamburgers matter more to us, or we don't and we enter into that world recognizing these are the things I can do right now even as I'm trying to change how companies work. I mean, how many animal agriculture companies were at the last climate summit last year? They know their role. They want to ameliorate it. The more vegans we have, the more we reject the lies that animal agriculture gives. Every little bit helps. So I think that veganism is proactive and reactive.
(00:56:18):
We're reactive to a world of injustice. I mean, let's just spend a second and talk about slaughterhouse workers. During the pandemic Trump and the meatpacking companies conspired to keep them at work and their death rates were higher than the public. There've been articles in the past year showing that kids are working in slaughterhouses. We've allowed prisoners to be taken over state lines to work in slaughterhouses. Who wants to work in a slaughterhouse if for no other reason than workers' rights? Why are we not ending slaughterhouses? It amazes me. Why would anyone hand over to someone else a job they absolutely know could kill someone or maim them? So every vegan not only helps change what's happening in their own household, but they're helping to change the city they're in by asking for vegan food. They're helping to change their friends by introducing vegan food to demystify it, and it's a boycott. Boycotts are legitimate actions that we've always had. In the early seventies, women boycotted meat not because of ethical issues, but because of price. And the result was animals had to stop being butchered. There was not the demand. Why do we not value boycotts now? Either you're boycotting the system or you're not. I'm not saying it's the only solution. I'm not saying the individual actions are sufficient, but when it comes to these issues, veganism is part of the response. It is an anti-Trump diet.
Nandita Bajaj (00:57:56):
And to your point about bringing back the power of boycotting, we've seen also in terms of the rise of reactionary pronatalism and authoritarianism, there has been a boycotting happening within the Korean feminist movement called the four B movement where they are refusing to engage in sexual relations and marriage and childbirth and dating until they are regarded as equal members of society and not as reproduction breeding machines who are continuing to be oppressed within this patriarchal culture. And I've seen some rumblings of a similar type of a boycott within the US in the post-Trump election, and I actually do hope some more women will take on some kind of actions, both in terms of their diet and in terms of refusing to participate in patriarchal institutions that rely on oppressing them. I don't know what that would look like, and I don't know how effective these types of movements are, but I completely believe that there just needs to be greater reactionism to all of this nonsense that's crippling up.
Carol Adams (00:59:08):
So, Andrea Dworkin, she did a book called Right-Wing Women that I think is absolutely brilliant and applies today. She said, right-wing women have the same analysis about violence as radical feminists, that the world's unsafe and rape is everywhere and all that. They've just chosen a different solution, which is the private home. I think the world is a threatening place, and to make a decision to accept that the threat can't be changed may mean that you accept losing your rights. I mean, that's what authoritarianism is. That's the world we're in right now. That change was this threatening, and we don't even have good models for how to work collectively for ourselves in a way that recognizes sort of overlapping oppression. We're still putting all that together and we're reliant on historians and wonderful theoreticians to help us see how we do that and how movements will evolve or appear.
(01:00:16):
I suspect that we are going to see in the next couple of years some wonderful plays, songs, art, that help lead us forward. I mean, I really believe the artistic vision is going to help us survive this. I mean, we're going to have to figure this out right now. Let's just say we're talking in January of 2025. Trump has been in office two and a half days participating in this sort of shock and awe that's trying to make us think that he is more powerful than he is. I believe that the democratic attorney generals are really going to be part of how we fight back, challenging what he's rolling out. I think abortion activists are figuring out how to do what we can do, and I think some of that can't even be discussed right now publicly. So I think I'd rather just say to conclude that awareness of injustice is a gift that calls us to respond to the world we live in and asks for empathy and courage, and you don't have to have the courage to do everything. All any of us need is the courage to do what we uniquely are placed to do, and I believe we all are placed to do something
Nandita Bajaj (01:01:31):
That seems like a beautiful place to wrap up this incredible conversation. Those are really wonderful words. Thank you, Carol, so much for sharing your time so generously with us today, but also for decades of exposing so many different forms of oppression and opening the eyes of so many advocates to these overlapping oppressions. It's been wonderful talking to you today.
Alan Ware (01:01:58):
Yes, wonderful conversation. Thanks.
Carol Adams (01:02:00):
Thank you for your work and your thoughtful questions, and for this time together.
Alan Ware (01:02:05):
That's all for this edition of OVERSHOOT. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you'll consider a one-time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj (01:02:33):
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for helping to advance our vision of shrinking toward abundance.
