Carol J. Adams

The Pornography of Meat

--from a reader in BostonHow does someone become a piece of meat?

Carol J. Adams answers this question in this provocative book by finding hidden meanings in the culture around us. From advertisements to T-shirts, from billboards to menus, from matchbook covers to comics, images of women and animals are merged — with devastating consequences.

Like The Sexual Politics of Meat, which has been published in two editions, The Pornography of Meat uncovers startling connections:

·      Why pornography is fascinated with slaughtering and hunting.

·      Fixations on women's body parts expressed through ads for the breasts, legs, and thighs         of chickens and turkeys.

·      Animals to be eaten as meat presented in seductive poses and sexy clothing This Carol         calls "Anthropornography."(A term coined by feminist-animal activist Amie Hamlin)         Anthropornography is the depiction of animals as whores. With the pornography of meat         the attitudes towards women found in Playboy and other heterosexual pornography, can         be expressed freely in a disguised way–when animals are the objects.

·       Back-entry poses in pornography that imply that women — especially women of color —          are like animals: insatiable.

·      With meat eating, women's power of reproduction is reduced to female         enslavement–making more babies for meat eating. Reproduction is devaluted–PIG, SOW,         HEN, OLD BIDDY, BITCH–not a positive term among them.

·      How and why meat advertising draws on X-rated images.

With 200 illustrations, this courageous book establishes why Adams's slide show, upon which The Pornography of Meat is based, is so popular on campuses across North America and is reviled by the groups she takes on with insight and passion. Carol says, "Looking at the images of women and nonhumans that I was sent, I realized the hatred of women many of them express. I did not want to have this realization. But it was literally staring me in the face. There's a connection between male dominace and the exploitation of animals–you are not supposed to care, you are not supposed to ask of farmed animals, ‘what are you going through?' You are to be strong, and virile. A meat eating culture teaches men to love being macho and to hate women; to love steaks and to hate vegetarians. Perhaps meat eating advertisements are everyday reiterations of the mythic conquest of women and nonhuman animals."

Praise for The Pornography of Meat:

Is meat consumption linked to physical and sexual violence? Feminist, vegetarian, and activist Adams (The Sexual Politics of Meat) thinks so, and in 16 provocative essays she tells us why. These essays explore such diverse topics as the objectification of animals and women, the power of exploitative language to devalue, female bodies and body parts as advertisements for meat products, and the sexist aspects of lynching. In the especially controversial "Male Chauvinist Pig?" Adams deplores PETA's (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) use of nude photographs and posters and argues that there is no need to exploit women to save animals. Each essay is supported by documentation, including a dazzling array of visual images that reproduce cartoons, posters, magazine covers, restaurant menus, advertisements, etc. These images, some of which are disturbing and difficult to view, significantly heighten the book's impact and are its best feature. Even readers who do not share Adams's views should find themselves challenged and perhaps even enlightened by this unique work. Highly recommended for academic libraries and for public libraries with collections in vegetarianism.

-- Library Journal

Adams’s new book, The Pornography of Meat, collects some of the material in support of her ideas that she has been sent by admirers of her work. Here Adams focuses specifically on the relationship between the way we see meat (and the word itself is, Adams suggests, a reassuring euphemism), and the way women are presented in pornography. Adams’s definition of pornography is broad, taking in everything from how men look at prostitutes to Hustler magazine and sexually provocative adverts. Her target is the “male gaze”, and how it transforms both women and animals into objects that want to be consumed, metaphorically or literally. “Pleasurable consumption  of consumable beings is the dominant perspective of our culture”, Adams argues. In support of this assertion The Pornography of Meat  presents a vast range of examples in which meat is sexualized, or in which women are presented as meat. Adams’s argument is ore subtle than simply equating the two. While a model on a catwalk may well feel like “a piece of meat”, the cow in the abattoir is unlikely to compare its [Adams would have “her”] death and evisceration to the typical modeling job. What Adams instead argues is that the image of the “Playmate”
proffering her rump to the reader and the restaurant menu with the happy cow inviting us to eat them reinforce and evoke each other. Eating meat is presented as sexy, and women are presented as animals. Furthermore, Adams argues that in both cases the image takes the place of the subject themselves, and in doing so converts someone’s exploitation into someone else’s pleasure. “By sexualizing dominance”, Adams writes, “pornography and advertising … make it fun.” Where her critics accuse Adams of anthropomorphizing animals, this book puts the case that it is in fact the meat-eating culture that presents animals as our smiling friends, complicit in their own consumption.

Adams describes herself as an “activist immersed in theory” and The Pornography of Meat is a deliberately polemical exercise in consciousness-raising rather than a formal academic study. The book intends to disrupt the objectifying male gaze by presenting a way of “seeing the same thing differently”, as she puts it. By taking her material out of its usual context and rearranging it in sixteen themed chapters, Adams seeks to disrupt what is taken for granted about images of animals and women, and to expose the ideology that she argues underlies the presentation of both. Her approach is frequently exhilarating, but at times can be exasperating. The book is highly readable, her material often eye-opening.

--the Times Literary Supplement

Table of Contents: The Pornography of Meat

-    What Pornography?

-    More than Meat

-    Man to Man

-    Yoked Oppressions

-    Beasts

-    Hamtastic

-    Body-Chopping

-    Armed Hunters

-    Hookers

-    The Fish in Water Problem

-    Anthropornography

-    I Ate a Pig

-    Average White Girl

-    Hoofing It

-    The Female of the Species

-    Male Chauvinist Pig?

-    Epilogue