We are taught that humans are the dominant species and that animals are meant for human consumption. We say things like, “eating meat is natural,” because we are taught to believe in a natural hierarchy of species. So, by eating meat we are continuing speciesism and the devaluation of animals lives. Also, by using women’s bodies to sexualize meat we are socially normalizing this idea that women’s bodies are meant for male consumption. This lowers women’s status on the hierarchy of species to the same level as animals and instills this notion that what is here on this earth is here for the utilization of men. To compare women to the consumption of meat is to figuratively annihilate women of their free will and to separate them of any personal identities (Adams 14).
In this first image, I see three men smiling obliviously to the fact that they are following the hegemonic influence of patriarchy in our society through the exploitation of women’s bodies to unnecessarily sell dead animals that were unwillingly killed, not only for human consumption, but to feed the masculinity in men. They smile as they wear the image of a woman’s body with a cow head. The individual human woman and nonhuman female cow have been lost to the mass term, meat, where their identities has been taken and they are now used as an object of male desired consumption. Their smiles either show a blissful ignorance or a complicit understanding of patriarchal domination, which do you think?
When I see this picture, I think of how humans profit off of animals bodies the same way they profit off of women’s bodies. The breasts, bottoms, thighs, abdomens are all of their own value, some prized more than the others, but everyone has their own taste. Are you a tasty bottom man or a breast man? Do you like girls with thick thighs? ….Wait, are we talking about animal meat or women?! Women’s bodies are sold through advertisement in a similar manner to how animals are sold in a meat market. We sexualize our products in order to make sales, and we sexualize our meat in order to make sales. To refer to this animal only in it’s parts, is to make the cow’s previous life disappear. They become the absent referent, as Adams would say (23). When we refer to women only in their body parts, aren’t we doing the same thing? Aren’t we minimizing her life down to what part of her can be (figuratively) consumed?
This picture makes me so uncomfortable. Carol Adam’s would refer to this as an example of anthropornography, the sexualization of animals for human consumption that is similar to how we sexualize women. To have a chicken dressed as a woman in a suggestive sexual pose is meant to make you think the chicken is, “asking for it,” as we tend to say. She is flaunting her stuff because she knows, “you want it”. Did the chicken really want you to take it’s life for a meal? No. Just like women don’t ask to be raped or beaten. Adam’s relates this kind of provocative advertisement to a females degraded status. The dead animal ready for consumption from the more powerful human consumer, is reflective of a woman being sexualized for the pleasure of a more powerful man in pornography. Degradation is hot and fun, and she likes it! “So, just as through pornography inequality is made sexy; through meat eating, inequality is made tasty,” (15).
I found this last picture to be interesting. It’s a Carl’s Jr. ad that is notoriously known for sexualizing women in the media. The woman has been crowned “Miss Turkey” from a beauty pageant and she poses in a bikini to hold a hamburger. From what I can see, the advertisement is implying she has won the title because of her body. Her body is the best for male consumption because of the meat she has. If a man were to buy the hamburger they are trying to sell, they will be just as satisfied as they would be with her body! It’s simple, her body is meant for a man to use as he pleases just like this hamburger was made just for him to eat as he pleases. The woman and dead animal have no other purpose but to help feed masculinity. Eating this burger would be like saying you slept with this woman, and that is suppose to make you feel more like a man.
All of these images reiterate Adam’s belief that depriving animals of their right to life in order to reassure our self-declared human superiority is no different from oppressing women for male superiority, and both are a result of a patriarchal dominance (14). She brilliantly writes, “consumption is the fulfillment of oppression,” and I see how women and animals are the targets of this consumption by and for men.
Adams, Carol J. and Annie Potts. “The Politics of Carol J. Adams.” Antennae, no. 14, 2010. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54792ff7e4b0674c74cb719d/t/55dc8dace4b0ad76d7277cb7/1440517548517/ANTENNAE+ISSUE+14.pdf. Accessed 3 March 2019.
Adams, Carol J. “Examples of The Sexual Politics of Meat.” https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54792ff7e4b0674c74cb719d/t/55dc8dace4b0ad76d7277cb7/1440517548517/ANTENNAE+ISSUE+14.pdf. Accessed 3 March 2019.
Tschorn, Adam. “New Carl’s Jr. Ad.” LA Times Blogs, 2011. https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/alltherage/2011/03/carls-jr-taps-reigning-miss-turkey-to-promote-its-new-burger.html. Accessed 3 March 2019.
Hi Victoria,
Nice post. I found it interesting when Adams’ explains the “animalization of women” and the “feminization and sexualization of animals”. She states, “They are working to maintain important aspects of consumer culture, to reinforce privilege by defining who is the consumer and who is the consumed, and to maintain the important fictions of essential differences between men and women and humans and nonhumans that enable power over the nondominant.” As I followed Adams dig deeper into the reasons why the advertisements of animal products are sexualized in order to be sold to the public I found her theories to be sort of out there. I believed what she was saying but what I mean by “out there” I found myself wondering if this is something that most of these advertisers were purposely doing or whether this style of advertising has been around so long that it is just following a trend. I’m having difficulty trying to phrase my questions correctly, I apologize. What I’m trying to ask is, has dressing up chickens and having beautiful women eat meat been around for so long that it’s more natural for advertisers to pull their ideas from decades ago and just make it more modern or more shocking? Or did they intentionally go with the idea that in order to sell meat/chicken we need to want to have sex with it? Part of me believes we are so desensitized to these types of adds that for the most part we don’t even notice the link any longer. I think Adams ideas are a bit over the top and extreme but at the same time I do think she’s making a lot of fantastic observations and doing important work. When someone takes ideas/theories to extremes and makes us interpret images we no longer notice, this is how we begin to stop being blind to what is happening and how we stop the patriarchy and furthering this agenda.
-Tara
Hi Victoria, you make lots of great points in your post. To answer your first question: I think blissful ignorance and understanding of patriarchal domination go hand and hand. Men like this usually are aware that the views they hold towards women and animals are ignorant and harmful, but because they directly benefit from it and/or in some cases genuinely do believe that their superior, they don’t care. I’ve given up in trying to make my feminism palatable to these types of people and learning the difference between trying to engage with people legitimately interesting in being educated vs. those believing you owe them a debate. In any case, the oppressed don’t owe their oppressors any explanation or justification, they don’t even owe them civility or non-violence.
Your analysis for the images, especially the one you selected, all speak to a similar idea of sexualizing our food (a byproduct of sexualizing women and animals). Your analysis that the image is supposed to suggest that “they will be just as satisfied [with the burger] as they would be with her body” reminds me of when someone eats something that they think is delicious and says something super cringey along the lines of “its like an orgasm in your mouth.” It is ridiculous to think that we’re are that sex obsessed as a society that even the basic task of eating is constantly sexualized. Like jeez, can set the horniness aside for a few minutes folks?! But no I suppose we can’t, because the connection forged between the exploitation of animals and women immediately sexualizes any form of animal consumption.
This guys in the T-shirt with the cow head and woman body reminded me of the story “tatterhood”. The girl born with a goat head have you heard or read of it. I wonder too if speciesism and sexism was the deeper meaning in this folk tale. The domination of the masculine deleting the feminine.
You ask this question.
Their smiles either show a blissful ignorance or a complicit understanding of patriarchal domination, which do you think?
I think some know about it while others are complicit to fit in therefore perpetuating the cycle of abuse of women and animals.
The photo of the chicken is hard to look at but hard to look away. It’s demeaning to animals for sure. I agree it’s another way men are getting a view to take what ever they want. They can it’s for them Adams says for white men who dominate the airways
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