Leaving a Mark: A Conversation with Carol J. Adams
TW: discussions involving rape, domestic abuse, and violence towards living beings.
This piece was originally written by Erin Red and published in the eighth issue of T.O.F.U. Magazine, which was released on February 26, 2015. The full issue can be purchased in the online store for whatever price you want to pay, including free.
When tackling the hefty topic of sexism as it relates to veganism, there’s virtually no one more certified than Carol J. Adams. An acclaimed writer, feminist, and animal advocate, Carol is a graduate of the University of Rochester, obtained her Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School, and has probably been vegan for longer than you’ve been alive. Her most well-known work, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, was released in 1989 and has since found its way into the hands of almost every single vegan I know. Provocative and relentless, the book has been hailed as a bible for feminist and progressive rights activists, and was published as a 20th Anniversary Edition in 2010. It’s safe to say that Carol and her work inspired this very issue of T.O.F.U. Magazine.
I was incredibly grateful for the opportunity to chat with Carol recently on some of the topics and ideas that have brought her so much notoriety and which continue to inspire the minds of so many. So, what happens when two feminist vegans with big mouths and bold opinions connect on a controversial topic?
How dare we.
After handling some technical difficulties preparing our discussion, Carol asked if she could share a story with me before we got started. Naturally, I obliged. Little did we know it would create a theme for the whole conversation…
CJA: Something very interesting happened yesterday on my “personal” Facebook page after I posted that Lesley Gore had died. Back in the 1980’s, Ms. Magazine did a conversation with her, and they talked about feminism and popular music. That was the first time I had really realized how much Lesley Gore was involved in feminism. Of course, she had done the song “You Don’t Own Me” — which was a great song in the 60’s. The Times headline announced, “Lesley Gore, Singer of Teenage Anthems, Dies at 68.” But when you read the obituary in the Times, it talks about her pro-choice activism, she was a lesbian, she had a partner of 33 years, and a feminist. I decided I was going to post this, and I wrote “Lesley Gore, Feminist Lesbian Pro-Choice Activist, Dead at 68 — so sorry to hear this.” Somebody local writes and says, “I’m sure there was more to Lesley than being a feminist, lesbian, and pro-choice activist. If you lived in the 60’s, you were a Lesley fan because she expressed teenage angst in a way we all understood regardless of labels.” And I thought, okay…. You know, so…. You want to do this on my Facebook page?
EG: You picked the wrong Facebook Page, my friend.
So, I began gently and I said, “That goes without saying; I was offering a counter weight to the Times headline. Everybody knows “Lesley Gore, It’s My Party”, but did you know Lesley Gore, “Feminist Pro-Choice Lesbian?” Then he writes, “Those anthems are still important to many of us, they helped define a generation!” I said, “Okay, everybody knew she was a singer/songwriter, we all know ‘It’s My Party’ and ‘Judy’s Turn to Cry’ and ‘You Don’t Own Me.’ And some of us can remember dancing to those songs at school dances in the 60’s, myself included. To flesh out the singer as a feminist, lesbian, and pro-choice activist gives her the kind of recognition she deserves; a person who lived her values, was engaged in social change, who was brave.”
…nope, he’s not done yet.
Oh, boy.
“You’ve missed my point, Carol. We loved her for what she expressed that united divergent types of folks, not what distinguished one group or mindset from another.” And I said, “Well, not everyone in the 60’s agreed with the idea of ‘You Don’t Own Me!’” Obviously, you don’t write a song “you don’t own me, don’t tell me what to do, don’t tell me what to say…” if everybody agreed that women could not be owned, if women weren’t property! The very fact that she performed the song said that we were not all united. So I said, “Ask girls who were teenagers at the time — caring about feminism is not something that should distinguish one group from another; that is something that should unite us.”
At this point, you know, people are starting to ‘like’ my comments, no one is ‘liking’ his comments, and he says “I guess I’ll choose a different pathway on this one. I will point out I have a female accountant, attorney, physician, my daughter, two cats, and oh yeah — even a few lesbian friends. But I just think of them as folks, friends, and adoring pets. I like that the Times referred to her as a humanitarian activist.” Now someone else is getting involved at this point, going back and forth. And I said, “I think the bigger question is why you want to have the last word on this.” And then I quoted her partner, “She was a wonderful human being. Caring, giving, a great feminist, a great woman, a great human being, a great humanitarian.” When she was being called a great humanitarian, in the same sentence, by her lesbian partner, she was also called a great feminist. I went to sleep, and I woke up, and all I could think about was …who’s ‘marked’ in our world, and who’s ‘unmarked’? What upset the man on Facebook is by my claiming her within this social justice context — which is how she lived — I marked her. Or at least, I marked him. He had been unmarked.
And those who benefit from the status quo want to keep themselves unmarked. By recognizing the fullness of Lesley Gore’s life, I was now saying something about his experience of the 60’s.
And how dare you adjust his view.
Right. And you see, this is vegan feminism.
In spades.
This is what we’re doing. We’re entering the world in which the status quo does not want to be called attention to. This is why when Nell Painter did her book The History of Whiteness it was like, oh.. you can have a history of whiteness? We were the unmarked people, and you get to live unmarked because of privilege. And privilege does not want to know that its privilege has come from a political structure that can be changed. Privilege does not want to be exposed. Creating a movie called Fifty Shades of Grey, and then creating a cookbook called Fifty Shades of Chicken — that is all part of maintaining a status quo of dominance over non-dominant beings.
Then, someone on Facebook posted a wonderful thing. “You Don’t Own Me is just so brilliant. It just occurred to me that it could really be about the way we treat animals.”
Absolutely, it could be a chicken’s theme song.
Right! The question is, who gets to be owner, and who is the property? When you look, for instance, at the Constitution of the United States, the only people who were protected at first were propertied white men. And when we look at an issue in the twenty-first century, it’s directly related to the way society was constructed, the way philosophy was constructed. I talk about this in Neither Man nor Beast (1994), the way philosophy constructed itself in the image of propertied white middle and upper class men of Europe; they defined what philosophy was so it became rational instead of compassionate and emphasized the mind over the body. Out of this story of Lesley Gore comes the whole framework for looking at how we’ve structured a world in which dominance disappears, becomes privilege, and privilege is privatized as pleasure.
All of this coming out of one man’s view, one man’s image of Lesley Gore. How dare you come along and change his reality, change the way he sees, hears her?!
That’s right, but here’s the thing – this is the question we’re always asked. How dare you? How dare you challenge me? How dare you decide that you can be pregnant, or not pregnant? That you can go get an abortion? “How Dare You” is the question that is thrown at feminist vegans so often – how dare you decide what I can eat at your dinner party? Hosts of parties always decide what you can eat. It’s the nature of hospitality. Because I’m cooking dinner, that’s how I dare.
I was married years ago, and my wedding was of course entirely vegan. Naturally the majority of my family was up in arms about it, and that’s exactly how it came back to me – how dare you impose your choices on all of us? I said, when you get married you can feed your guests whatever you choose, just like everyone else. This is my wedding.
Right – it’s my party, and I’ll be vegan if I want to.
Exactly!
The theme here is that people benefitting from the status quo don’t want that disturbed. And I just thought the Lesley Gore anecdote was such a great example of the kinds of ways we interact with the status quo, and a great way to get into these questions.
What do the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ mean as they relate to veganism?
We need to back up and say, what do the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ mean as they relate to meat-eating? Our world ended up being structured dualistically. We now know that there are more than two sexes, we know that identity isn’t fixed. We know that some women on a continuum would be seen as being forthright and strong and aggressive, which are terms labelled masculine, and that some men would be seen as being quiet or gentle or into embroidery, qualities associated with femininity. Again, we don’t come into the world unmarked. I mean, it’s not even “coming in” at this point — now we have “reveal parties” announcing the sex of the fetus, where they have either a pink cake or a blue cake. You know, in the 1990’s, Lego discovered that they “needed” to make pink Legos and it was such a setback for girls. Girls were handling Legos all the time, they didn’t need something that was pink and prettified. The whole masculine/feminine framework of our world pre-exists even our own identities and we move into that world marked from the beginning. Studies have shown that when they’re babies, boys are playfully thrown up in the air more than girls. One of the first articles, a short story, in Ms. Magazine in 1972 was about giving birth to a baby and never identifying the baby’s sex, never having any marker that allowed you to define the baby’s sex, and how that threw everybody off.
I think a part of the vision of feminism is to refuse the cultural determination about who we can be and who we are. We come into this world with a hyper-vigilance and fetishization of masculinity and femininity. Masculinity has been attached to meat-eating for many years and even though there are new iterations of it, some of it stays the same: that men are supposed to eat meat, that meat gives protein and strength, that meat is associated with virility, and that men who don’t eat meat are therefore not virile, are not masculine. It’s assumed that men who are vegan are homosexual; this was the case into the twenty first century. There’s a lot of hostility to veganism as saying something about sexuality and gender that the status quo doesn’t want said. But one of the things that’s happened recently is that now there’s this regressive re-articulation of the sexual politics of meat – in 1990 I was observing that there was this supposition that men are supposed to eat meat, but now what we’ve got is “Man Up”, “renew your man card.” It’s saying men have to constantly be doing it. Well, I don’t have to renew my library card every year... why does a ‘man card’ have to be renewed? But what that is showing is that masculinity is so unstable that not to practice it daily through meat eating destabilizes both.
One of the things I look at is a beer ad for Red Lion. “Putting together a barbecue: +374 Man- points. Cooking tofu on it: -470.” The act of putting together a barbecue, screwing all those screws and following directions, that gives you 374 points. But simply putting a piece of tofu onto it completely eradicates all that you did. Now, I know it’s a joke... but what it’s showing, again, is the instability of masculinity. And I love that.
When it comes to veganism, the question is to vegans: Are we going to interact with the cultural anxiety about defining masculinity and femininity according to ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’, or are we going to let veganism be what it really is — a radical critique of patriarchal assumptions?
Why accept the terms of the sexual politics of meat? Why can’t we say veganism is the radical acknowledgement that we can live with compassion with all beings? And that compassion, especially in this world, is something that requires a strength of character? I mean, if we need to use the word “strong”, let’s use it around compassion.
And just ignore the masculine and feminine situation entirely.
That’s right. Because we live with people like the man on Facebook, constantly trying to return the conversation to the status quo. Some vegans want to accommodate that. “Oh, no, you’re not going to lose your maleness, you’re not going to lose your masculinity, you’re not going to lose your virility — in fact, real men eat plants!” Then we had He-Gans, a term some vegan men coined. Or that you’re ‘plant-strong’. Why accept the terms of the sexual politics of meat? Why can’t we say veganism is the radical acknowledgement that we can live with compassion with all beings? And that compassion, especially in this world, is something that requires a strength of character? I mean, if we need to use the word “strong”, let’s use it around compassion. The people from HSUS and PETA and MFA who go undercover to record over and over and over again the terrible, punishing, violent acts against cows and chickens and pigs… they are strong.
If veganism wants to begin that conversation, let’s situate it within a vegan frame of mind. Why are we trying to accommodate veganism to a dominant world in which that dominance includes oppressing other animals? It’s irreconcilable.
I think the question constantly is, what’s the headline? What’s the headline, and what do we want? We have to remember that we’ve already stepped so far out that people are anxious. But we do not need to accommodate their anxiety by reassuring them, “you don’t have to change how you look at women, you don’t have to change your belief that you need to be masculine, or that ‘masculine = xyz’ — you can be all of those things, and be a vegan!” No. I want to destabilize the whole thing. And I love that we apparently can destabilize it so easily.
It’s a fragile, fragile thing evidently…
That’s right, apparently. Let’s get more tofu out there! Tofu becomes the symbol of veganism. And then everybody thinks of it as bland! Instead of looking at tofu as the palate on which we paint our vegan cuisine…
…right, this incredibly versatile plant-based protein deliciousness…
…right, it’s just judged. This was in front of a restaurant in Dublin: “I wish this were made from tofu, said no one ever.” One image I show in my slideshow is “No one high-fives after eating tofu.” What’s hidden there is the athleticism. The athlete would be the one high-fiving. The message is that an athlete would not eat tofu. Then there’s an ad for Taco Bell asserting if you eat three times the steak, you can compete with the best athletes. It shows a white man, probably 5’6”. He’s watching four tall men, probably 6’4”, playing basketball. Three of the four are Black. And he eats this huge sandwich, it’s a triple-meat-something-or-other, and he goes onto the court and he says, “Okay girls, let me show you how it’s done.” In other words, in this ad’s premise eating meat will make you as “natural” a basketball player as African Americans are “born” to be. Interconnected oppressions!
There are so many things wrong with that entire scenario I don’t even know where to begin.
That’s the world we’re entering. We’re at a different stage of the sexual politics of meat in which it’s constantly having to recuperate itself, and that shows our strength! And we should sit back and say, hey — yeah, there’s some terrible racism and misogyny here and now they’re having to work at a whole different level to recuperate the dominant worldview.
We hear a lot about the idea that sexism and racism and speciesism are all the same thing. Can we talk about intersectionality and issues like this that overlap? Do you think that shared oppression is an instrument for change?
I think that it’s the only instrument for change. We’re not going to achieve one freedom without all the freedoms. But I just want to back up and say that I don’t think racism and sexism and speciesism are the same. I think they are operating within a dominant paradigm that uses particularity of oppression (race/sex/gender/ species), and intensifies the particularity through association and intersectional oppression. For instance, misogyny is expressed through racism or speciesism. Let me be specific to help illustrate that — we’ve got feminists saying, “feminism is the radical notion that women are human”. But what’s human? Human has already been defined as rational, male-defined, above other species. I want to destabilize ‘human’. Liberal feminists will protest misogyny, but not the way that misogyny is strengthened by speciesism.
Misogyny intensifies through speciesism. For instance, on a continuum, this limited notion of ‘human’ we have is like that evolutionary chart we all grew up with. First we were on all fours, then we had our hands to help us walk, and then we evolved into this white middle-class man that we see represented on the charts. But we know that 99 percent of our DNA is the same as a chimp’s. If we think of human-non-human animal relationships as a hierarchy, we ignore the similarities, and we don’t recognize that we’re all connected. One way racism is strengthened is by viewing African Americans as animal-like. Beasts, or brutes. Or looking at women as animal-like. The oppression of other animals becomes the basis by which sexism or racism is intensified. My goal isn’t to make sure that women are always on the side of being human and leaving other animals on the other side of that. I want to remove the attitude and demarcation point that creates the hierarchy.
The structure of the ‘absent referent’ as I conceptualized it is acting first upon animals. They disappear literally when we kill them and they become meat. They disappear conceptually when we say “chicken wings” instead of “a chicken’s wing”.
When we begin to advocate for interconnectedness, we look at issues differently. The U.S.A. Government guarantees to milk producers a certain price on milk, and buys it up so that it never goes below that price – what do they do with that milk? Over many years, they dumped it into the Women and Infant Children program, and into elementary schools. Who got fed at these elementary schools for breakfast and lunch? Often it was poor, African American kids. And most African Americans, along with the majority of the world, have lactose intolerance. In fact, not being lactose intolerant is the unusual thing. You’ve got a poor child who comes into school, is given milk on his cereal for breakfast, is given a cheese sandwich for lunch, and at about 2:00 starts acting out. Then sometime in the second half of the twentieth century, we start hearing about African American boys having “behaviour problems” in elementary schools, and no one looked at the fact that it could have been what we were feeding them. It becomes a behavioural thing linked to race rather than an expression of what happens when we stuff kids full of the wrong kind of food. That’s an interconnected oppression.
Patricia Hill-Collins, an African American feminist theorist argues that pornography as we know it now evolved from the display of African American female bodies during slavery. Theirs were the first bodies on display and being sold, because they were seen as closer to animals. Earlier in the century, there was a debate about the missing link (between primates and humans, again assuming the hierarchical notion of evolution) and the assumption was that it would be found somewhere among African people. The teleological notion of evolution gets acted out through slavery, because Africans are “lesser evolved” according to this schema.
The structure of the ‘absent referent’ as I conceptualized it is acting first upon animals. They disappear literally when we kill them and they become meat. They disappear conceptually when we say “chicken wings” instead of “a chicken’s wing”. We take possession away; we take the whole conceptual notion that this was an entire animal (and when they DO cook the whole body, say a pig roast, it’s usually laden with misogyny and sexism to deal with the body). The animals disappear metaphorically when their oppression is lifted and applied to describe the experiences of another group. At the centre of interconnected oppressions is the absent referent. And it’s because of this structure that these overlap. When women are shown on all fours, they’re often being represented as animals (the woman wants to be treated like an animal). If an animal is shown as a sexy being with high heels, and breasts covered in a bikini, the woman is the absent referent (the animal wants to be consumed like a woman). Consumability of the oppressed group is intensified or legitimized for the dominant culture by these associations.
Talk to me a little bit about being a feminist and a vegan in the 70’s and 80’s as compared to what’s going on now.
I gotta tell you, the soy milk… it smelled so beany. When I’d go to somebody’s house, what they had for me were these dried packages of burgers, and unless I could get involved to help cook it, they would be the blandest, driest things ever. I’d say, “let’s add mushrooms into the mix” because I knew the meal would be representing vegetarianism to them. When I became a vegetarian, I barely knew how to cook. When people say at this point, after 40 years, “oh, Carol, I could be vegan if you’d just cook for me,” I say “learn to cook!” It’s not hard.
I think in terms of feminism... oh my goodness, what a wonderful time it was to be a feminist. To be a feminist during the early 1970’s meant buying every feminist book in hardcover! You were so anxious to know. Kate Millett comes out with Sexual Politics; in ’75, Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will; Women and Madness in 1973 I think, Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father, Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born 1976, Angela Davis’ book Women, Race & Class (1981)... there was something new every day to think about. Then there were the ‘zines; we didn’t call them zines back then, but they were – The Spare Rib, The Second Wave in Boston, Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation - it was just amazing. And I lived in Cambridge, which was filled with feminists. I’ve always said that living in Cambridge in the early 70’s was like living in France when Gertrude Stein was there. There was so much excitement. That’s where the ideas for The Sexual Politics of Meat came to me, and were nurtured by other feminists and other vegetarians. And I learned to cook! In fact the first person I became friends with wanted to know about women’s history, and I wanted to know how to cook vegetarian, so we taught each other.
I can’t talk about the 1980’s without talking about how hard it was for me that I hadn’t finished my book. Because I was living with the consciousness that there was a connection, I wanted to talk about the connection, and I did not know how. Recently, I was listening to This American Life, and Ira Glass said, “the thing for new artists to realize is that their conception of what they want to do, and what they actually do, begins by being very far away. And by working and working you close that gap.” It took me fourteen and a half years to close that gap. The draft I did in 1976 was so inadequate I thought, “I only have one chance at this, I want to do this right.” Then I became a grassroots activist. In terms of my consciousness of feminist and animal issues, the hardest thing for me was working with domestic violence advocates in New York State. I was on the Governor’s Commission on Domestic Violence; I was meeting all the top, wonderful activists as we evolved what we now know as the DV Movement…. And most of them were eating hamburgers during our meals. It made me very upset.
But another reason it was such an exciting time is that there were all these new cookbooks coming out… I have to admit that I have a collection of probably 500 vegetarian and now vegan cookbooks and I’m still learning from them! I’ll take them to bed at night and read them, and think, “oh, so that’s how she does her cashew cream.” I could cook a new recipe every day for the next thirty years and not even touch all the wonderful recipes that exist. During those years, the late 1970s, the 1980s, I’m learning, I’m excited as a grassroots activist to be able to be working against racism and domestic violence and sexism and poverty… and I’m constantly thrown back by how much resistance there is. I read everything I could. I read about racism, I read about slavery, I read about the Underground Railroad, I read about reconstruction. I read about the Civil Rights movement. I wanted to know why racism continued to be so pervasive in the 1980’s, and look at it now in the twenty-first century! But those years equipped me to write The Sexual Politics of Meat. I encountered the connection between racism and sexism, between domestic violence and harm to animals. I sometimes refer to the 1980s as my wilderness years, because I felt so lost in terms of finishing my book, but those were the years that taught me how to articulate an oppositional viewpoint and how to live with the intense reactions that are elicited. Rush Limbaugh talking against The Sexual Politics of Meat? That didn’t bother me at all; he didn’t know where I lived!
By the end of the 1980s, I was finishing The Sexual Politics of Meat. The turning point was when I realized that animals were absent referents – I went to bed one night after reading Margaret Homans’ Bearing the Word talking about women writers of the nineteenth century and she talked about the concept of absent referent in literature, and I remember putting the book down and thinking... “that’s what animals are.” And I woke up in the morning and I thought... “that’s what women are, too.” Once I had that idea in 1987, I was able to finish the book, and in working on the book realized I had to be vegan. By that point, we had much better tasting soy milk.
I remember thinking as a vegetarian, “Well I like cheese pizza, but if I look at pizza and realize the suffering of the cow that caused this pizza to exist, then when I look at pizza, what I’m seeing here is the blood of the cow.” That did it. And that’s restoring the absent referent. That’s being able to conceptualize, to give the absent referent back something, so that I could recognize her suffering.
Now, it’s just incredible how many vegan options exist from plant milks to nut cheeses to seitan-based foods to vegan restaurants.
Yeah, it’s hard for me to take anyone who complains about the challenges of veganism seriously these days.
Well, when people say, “it’s hard”, I think what they mean is that they don’t want to think about changing. This is what I realized with Living Among Meat Eaters (2001): change might be hard, but not changing is even harder. They’re working so hard to not change. They’re spending so much time sabotaging and hurting other people. All that negative energy!
In Living Among Meat Eaters, you explore our culture’s unwillingness to honour grief and sadness, nor allow it to be properly expressed, indicating that feelings equal lack of control, vulnerability. How does this affect our food choices?
We now know that there are so many different kinds of intelligences, and that our public school system emphasizes three or four of them, but one intelligence that’s not very well developed is emotional intelligence. We have a tendency to say, “grief, I’m gonna put you over there. I don’t want to access you.” And as a result, when someone else is feeling grief, people don’t know what to say. We don’t have an emotional intelligence about grief and sadness; they make us uncomfortable. Often what people will say to me is, “don’t tell me, I don’t want to know”, which says to me they already do know. What we need to do is help them to learn to be comfortable with this painful knowledge. I think people are afraid that the grief will kill them. But anyone who’s grieved — a mother, a father, a sibling, a cousin, a good friend, a mentor — grief is probably the most powerful emotion we have, but grief is a deeply strengthening emotion. As we move our way through grief we learn so much about who we are. When people fear feeling grief about what animals experience and refuse to know, it means they prefer ignorance about animal suffering to honesty, and that to protect their feelings and their palates they’re willing to continue to consume the flesh of wretched animals. What I try to do is show people that grief doesn’t kill you, and that the other side of grief isn’t ignorance… it’s joy. It’s like that quote from Kafka, “Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you anymore.” Now we can meet the animals, now we can do something about their plight, because we’re not frightened by the feeling their plight might arise in us. People also fear that’s all they’re going to feel. No — it’s like any kind of grief: there’s a very intense time, and then you learn that yes, there’s a hole in your heart. But you don’t want the hole in your heart to go away because the hole is telling you that you have compassion. The hole tells you have made a place for the other animals.
What I love about vegan cooking is that there’s joy there, which acts as counterbalance to the grief.
In the food.
That’s right. I was just reading today about the treatment of these sows, who, in order to get them to move, one of the workers was putting an implement up her anus. I mean, she was being anally raped. And it makes me so mad. But I also need to walk away and assure myself, in my activism and my writing, I’m working on that. By being vegan, I’m working on that. By educating people, I’m working on that. I need to balance this knowledge and anger with some joy. And the joy for me is taking care of rescued dogs, and cooking great vegan food, and talking about vegan food, and feeling that each day as we do this balancing act, we move forward.
Yes, people think grief and sadness are about vulnerability, but I think we mistake openness for vulnerability in a sense. If we could just see that the gift of being open to the lives of other animals is the gift of being able to transform the world away from oppressing them. That doesn’t make me vulnerable.
It makes me powerful.
Right. But I do think it goes back to emotional intelligence and the fear of grief. We all live with grief, and this is a world we should be grieving. To not grieve is to not face reality.
Again in Living Among Meat Eaters, you mention we should approach omnivores as “blocked vegans”. What does this mean and why is it so important to look at them this way?
I had so much fun with that book!
I think as vegans we are so susceptible to believe that if we just had the right answer, they’re going to change. And we think that we know the right answer. I mean, I could probably argue “Why Vegan” for an hour. I could win debate awards. But I’m not going to win that omnivore. The image I have is every argument we offer them is helping them build a picket fence, because what’s blocking them is inside of them. By my talking to them, I’m going to be seen as argumentative, as unkind, because omnivores want to take their discomfort about eating dead animals out of the picture. They’re looking to us to perform in a certain way to let them release their complex of emotions that they don’t know how to handle. We as vegans come along and we say, “oh, well, let me tell you”, and then they want to argue with us. They want to be angry with us, to avoid getting angry with themselves for not changing.
But if we looked at them as blocked vegans, we would realize that our goal is not to solve their problem, our goal is to get out of their way. As unblocked vegans, it isn’t our issue — we’ve already solved it! The best way we can help an omnivore is to be a relaxed and happy vegan. Because they look at us in these situations with omnivores and they think, “God… every dinner I’ve been to with Carol, she’s been arguing with everyone”. Instead of understanding the argument, they’re thinking, “I don’t want to spend my life arguing, and at least I get a hamburger.” I think the point of seeing meat eaters as “blocked vegans” is that we need to step out of the belief that we need to solve it all for them.
Not all vegans have been blessed with big mouths and bold opinions (as we clearly have) — how else aside from speaking up can we affect change?
I truly believe that vegan meals make a big difference. Meat-eaters are perfectly happy eating vegan meals as long as they don’t know this is what they’re doing. We need to stop presuming our big mouths are going to solve everything. Sometimes it’s the non-verbal. And just like I said in The Sexual Politics of Meat, veganism is a non-verbal way to reject patriarchy – let’s develop non-verbal ways of maintaining this activism. If all of us had ‘Vegan Propaganda Meals’ and constructed it recognizing how unhappy these blocked vegans are; where you’re not talking about what you prepared, where you never use the ‘T-Word’ (tofu), where you just create a relaxed atmosphere... they go home and they incubate it. And they think, “that was a really great meal.” And then they think, “that was a really great meal and it was vegan!”
I also think writing letters to newspapers and magazines is very effective. Karen Davis of United Poultry Concerns has made this an art. The more letters the better. Also, teach vegan cooking classes at recreation centres. Sharing the joy of vegan living, helping people learn about animal suffering - but at their pace. You know, I’m lucky enough I can also say, “read my book!”
I cannot get over how many people have written to me saying they became vegan by reading The Sexual Politics of Meat. I only know the book from the inside out, and when people tell me that, they’re giving me a gift, and it’s a beautiful gift. But it’s such a deep and wonderful thing to think my book changed someone’s life and I don’t know quite how to receive the information, and usually what I’ll say when people tweet it to me or email me or come up after a talk is, “Thank you. Now be sure to take your vitamin B12!” I don’t want the responsibility of somebody becoming vegan and not getting their B12!
There’s been a pervasive trend of vegans and vegan organizations using sexism to promote the movement, to ‘sell’ veganism - we see this with a lot of PETA’s advertising, book titles like “Meat is for Pussies”, and so on - why do you think this is acceptable within the community? What’s going on here?
First, there is no ‘Vegan Community’. There are a variety of people who are identifying as vegan, and some of them aren’t even vegan! But I think you’re talking about people who do self-identify as vegans, are active in veganism... why do they not get it? And the easy answer would be to say because of the function of the absent referent – they’ve seen the absent referent of the animal, but they haven’t recognized that racism and sexism also construct people as absent referents.
Sex sells. PETA is looking to sell the message, “Don’t Eat Animals”. They’re not looking to sell any other message. If you complain to them about their sexism, you’ll get a letter saying that they’re headed by a woman and so they’re feminist. But A does not equal B, here. Phyllis Schlafley, this great anti-feminist of the 1980s, travelled the country telling people that women should not travel the country – you can be an anti-feminist and be in the vegan movement.
I talk a little bit about this in Neither Man nor Beast when I discuss racism and the politics of solidarity. I think some people are willing to deal with their privilege over other animals, but not deal with their privilege over women or people of colour. They don’t want to examine that privilege. Leave that status quo alone. It’s like my Facebook argument—the other person was saying, “don’t disturb how I think of myself!” PETA is trying to assure consumers you don’t have to change yourself, just stop eating animals, but you can keep using pornography, you can keep situating yourself in a hierarchy vis a vis other humans.
Here’s a way to illustrate the problem with this approach: If PETA came and tried to help remove an animal who’s in a situation where they were being harmed by a batterer. But if part of the control of the batterer over the human victim is to threaten animals, removing the animal doesn’t help any other animal, or the human victim, because the batterer will acquire another animal. Until you get to the heart of the matter, which is someone deciding to control another with violence, we’re going to have one animal at risk after another. The failure to see the interconnected oppressions creates inadequate activism.
When I debated Ingrid [Newkirk, President of PETA] on this back in the early 90’s, she said “you go have your theories, we’re too busy being activists.” The thing was, each of us can work until the day we die, and we will not have completely changed everything through activism alone. Clearly, a feminist-vegan critical theory recognizes that we’ve got to connect theory and practice. It’s not one or the other. The vegan movement exists within the larger dualistic world, an either-or world, but it’s not actually an either-or world. When I hear people say, (which is on the other end of the continuum of PETA, but still reflects the same mindset), “we have to solve human problems first,” I think, it’s not either-or! I started a hotline for battered women in my home for heaven’s sakes, and I was a vegetarian. I didn’t have to choice between these. Vegans are involved in lots of other social justice movements as well as working against the treatment of animals. The only people who think it’s impossible to do it all are those who don’t want to give up eating dead animals. And of course the other thing this “human problem first” ignores are all the human-related problems related to the animal agriculture industry. Climate change, environmental issues, health issues, starvation, worker safety... all of that. One of the problems with selling veganism with sex is that we haven’t sold it for what it is – a transformative social justice movement that unites a variety of oppressions, and has a realistic solution to many of them.
In an interview with Joshua Katcher of The Discerning Brute and Brave Gentle Man, you said, “the best way to assist the devil is to pretend he’s not there”. What does this mean to you?
Tell me what it means to you.
Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away.
This is exactly what the man on Facebook wanted to do. He wants to pretend there was nothing there but Lesley Gore uniting all these angst-y teens of the 60’s. There was always something more there. To assist the devil is to pretend he’s not there... and I think this goes back to the absent referent. Invisibility. To name and locate oppression is a radical act. But it’s a liberating act. And what it does is it dethrones the evil that has been accepted without acknowledgement. There’s a wonderful book that came out in the early 90’s, Trauma and Recovery, and it was the first book that identified how post-traumatic stress disorder affects rape victims, sexual abuse victims, and domestic violence victims. It was an immensely important, wonderful intervention into understanding the nature of trauma. And the author, Judith Herman, begins by saying, “It’s very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.” With my quote, the devil doesn’t want action or remembrance or to be acknowledged. The devil wants to be free to be out there. The devil is the perpetrator. And the thing about eating animals and animal products is that there are no bystanders. To not take a stand against violence is not to be neutral! It is to side with the perpetrator. Everybody who eats dairy or meat, dead flesh, is providing the financial backing, is investing in violence.
That’s why I think the anger of blocked vegans is so fascinating — it’s telling me they know something’s wrong. They just want us to take care of it. I don’t want to take care of their discomfort; I want them to be uncomfortable.
I think the reach of the dollar that invests in a hamburger, or buys a piece of cheese pizza, is the slaughterhouse and animal agriculture. We can’t disassociate. Again, it’s back to the Lesley Gore issue on my Facebook page — “no, don’t disturb my notion of what she was all about.” This is why we as vegans have to be at peace because we are the recipients of so much of this anxiety about guilt and wrong-doing. They don’t want to know they are implicated. They want to believe there is a neutral place.
When I did surveys of new vegans, about 200 of them, for Living Among Meat Eaters, the stories I got were that the people who actively sabotaged were often the ones who became vegans because they spent so much time learning about veganism in order to sabotage it! To put that much energy into sabotaging someone else’s veganism could be a positive thing — let’s just say that some energy is better than no energy! That’s why I think the anger of blocked vegans is so fascinating — it’s telling me they know something’s wrong. They just want us to take care of it. I don’t want to take care of their discomfort; I want them to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is telling us something. Guilt tells us something. Grief tells us something. Let’s teach people how to learn from that, so that we’re not assisting the devil.
What advice do you have for the future of eco-feminism, the future of vegan advocates and animal activists heeding your message?
Don’t work all the time. Seriously, we’re in this for the long haul. Don’t exhaust yourself. You don’t need to look at any more of those very depressing films, we already know it. Create as much positive energy as you can in your life. You deserve it. Share vegan food. Learn how to live and work with equality. Find joy every day in something, to work as a counterweight to the things we learn through our activism. Don’t measure success by anything other than the fact that you have been an activist. We will win some and lose some, and what winning is and what losing is is very hard to determine in this world when things are so fungible. Don’t stake everything you’re doing on achieving some goal that is external. Vaclav Havel said that we need to do this work, we need to be activists, not for the outcomes but because it’s the right thing to do. To know that you have been successful as an activist because x or y or z has happened, it creates an unattainable marker while neglecting what you’re doing every day. And this is where eco-feminism comes in. The process is equally important. How we do it. That we’re doing it. We can’t be product oriented, because that’s the old model: objectification, fragmentation, consumption. Consuming the success of our advocacy. We have to be in it for the process, that the ends never justify the means, which is what causes confusion for people who are arguing and accepting the patriarchal structure for veganism - that’s when the ends justify the means. No – the means are the ends. Make sure the means that you’re living by can sustain you.
Editor’s Note: To find out more about Carol and her work, please visit:
