status of “traditional truth or wisdom of the ages” and is therefore taken for granted.9 Common-sense thinking is apparent anywhere an argument takes on the air of a universal explanation. When this happens the history of a particular idea — the context in which it was first formulated, why and under what circumstances — is forgotten or ignored. When certain explanations are repeated time and again they take on the power of timeless truths, resistant to evidence of changing circumstances. For this reason it is important to ask about where arguments come from, how they have been passed down, and what may have gotten lost in transit.
The Sexual Politics of Meat is a book of its time and of a very particular kind of feminism. The language and theory Adams uses to explain the relationships between violence against women and other animals draws substantially on feminist critiques of pornography as they were developed in the U.S. in the decade before the book was published. In the 1980s a number of American feminists — most famous among them Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon — argued that pornography was a main cause of women’s oppression. In their understanding, pornography was much more than a series of representations of certain sexual practices; it was in itself a form of violence that affected all women. Not only did anti-pornography feminists like Dworkin and MacKinnon call for the legal censorship of pornography; they implied that all forms of sexuality, especially penetrative sex, were violent, and that all women were potential victims of violence.10 Sex, in their account, was basically dangerous for women.
Anti–pornography feminism was challenged by many other feminist activists, in the U.S. and elsewhere.11 But the work of Dworkin, MacKinnon and their allies was influential in some feminist circles in the West in the late twentieth century. This influence is very much discernible in The Sexual Politics of Meat and the later work of Carol Adams.12 It is important to recognise this because the world as seen through the eyes of anti-pornography feminism is a limited one. It excludes the perspectives of entire groups of people, most notably those who work in pornography and other parts of the sex industry. And by emphasising women’s experience of victimhood the theory of the absent referent presents women as having little agency. This is a problem for those of us who believe that women are active sexual beings, and it is a problem for vegans. This is because Adams’s writing does not explain the significant differences between the representation of women in pornography and advertising, on one hand, and the confinement and slaughter of farm animals for meat, on the other. It is just not possible to understand the complexities of either sexism or animal exploitation with reference to how some women and some animals are represented in a small range of cultural texts. When vegan activists cite The Sexual Politics of Meat they should keep this in mind: although the book has some valuable reflection on points of connection between sexism and the exploitation of animals, the theoretical framework and examples it draws on are limited. Ultimately, Adams’s reliance on anti-pornography feminism obscures and simplifies the experiences of women and animals. We could say that they both become absent referents in her work.
An early critic of the comparison between pornography and the fate of farm animals was sex worker, performance artist and animal rights activist Mirha-Soleil Ross:
I was always offended that women who are prostitutes or who work in pornography could be compared to animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses. Frankly we are talking about two different things. Yes there’s this image that appeared in a magazine a decade or two ago of a woman’s body going through a meat grinder but that was an image, big deal! There are real animals going through that grinder! What animals are enduring on factory farms, during transportation to the slaughterhouse, and during the slaughtering process is absolutely incomparable to our experiences as women consenting to being paid — and quite well thank you — for providing sexual services. Women who work in the sex industry do not think of themselves as pieces of meat and frankly if one did, she’d need a serious reality check. She would need to be dragged to a shed where hundreds of thousands of hens are piled up and rotting in battery cages. She would need to smell and hear and feel the blood and the fear and the agony that goes on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 12 months a year for billions of animals in thousands of slaughterhouses across this continent. So I always found that the comparison was offensive and really minimizing what the animals are actually going through.13
Ross highlights the dangers of making comparisons that focus on similarities at the expense of exploring differences among diverse forms of violence. In the next section I turn to some of the other comparisons that have been made in arguments in favour of veganism — those that cite historical examples of mass racism and genocide — and the problems they raise.
“Dreaded comparisons”14
Comparisons have a long and controversial history in the movements for animal welfare and rights. For over two hundred years, animal advocates in the West have relied on comparisons between the maltreatment of animals and oppression of certain groups of human beings. In nineteenth-century Britain and the U.S. some slavery abolitionists made links between the abuse of animals and human slavery, and animal advocates in turn took lessons from the campaign to end slavery.15 Later in the nineteenth century some female anti-vivisectionists noted similarities in the methods used in live experimentation on dogs and other animals, and those employed in the gynaecological examinations of poor women. If women as a whole were considered less rational and therefore more like animals than men, literature published at the time sometimes portrayed working-class women as wild animals who needed to be brought under the control of male doctors.16 A hundred years later, in his landmark philosophical and political treatise Animal Liberation, Peter Singer proposed that animal liberation was a natural extension of the Black civil rights and women’s liberation movements, advocating the use of the term “speciesism” as an equivalent to racism and sexism.17 Singer was proposing, in effect, that the exploitation of animals was comparable to the oppression of women and African Americans. While these are very different kinds of comparisons, they demonstrate that violence against people has, historically, sometimes been justified on the grounds that those people are no more than “animals,” and that different movements against the mistreatment of animals have drawn analogies with violence against people.
In the early twenty-first century it is not uncommon to find animal advocates comparing animal abuse to histories of racial violence and genocide. Most notoriously perhaps, the campaigns of the largest animal rights non-governmental organisation in the U.S., People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA, founded in 1980), have drawn analogies between the fate of farm animals and the historical enslavement of African Americans. Other activists have compared animal slaughter to the murder of Jews and other prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. These comparisons have often received harsh criticism from people who argue that they trivialise the historical experiences of human victims of racism and genocide and reinforce racist stereotypes associating Blacks, Jews and other racialised groups with animals.18 These comparisons and criticisms have been given so much air time that it might seem redundant to revisit them here. However, in the course of researching this book I became aware that slavery and Holocaust analogies have taken on new life in the age of social media, circulating far and fast.19 I am also aware that some vegan activists believe that such comparisons, when made carefully, can be useful guides for understanding how different forms of power and violence relate to and reinforce one another. For these reasons, I think it is worth considering briefly how these different kinds of comparisons work and why they continue to cause controversy.
The Black vegan writer Christopher-Sebastian McJetters provides an example of what I would call a useful comparison. He argues that the “mindset” that allowed for the justification and continuation of chattel slavery for several centuries in the United States and elsewhere is comparable in some ways to that which enables the widespread justification today of the raising, slaughter and consumption of animals. Note that McJetters is not comparing human slaves to animals; he is comparing the ways certain kinds of oppressive attitudes and systems are formed and become the norm.20 In a similar vein, the vegan writer and activist A. Breeze Harper approaches comparisons between human slavery
