Heather Brunskell-Evans from FiLiA in conversation with Carol J. Adams 

 Heather: My name is Heather from FiLiA. Today I'm interviewing Carol Adams who is going to come to the FiLiA conference and is a keynote speaker on Saturday morning 20th October. The title of Carol's talk is Take out Misogyny. So welcome Carol.

Carol: Thank you so much. And it's quite an honour to be participating in this conference later this month.

Heather: Carol, it's an honour for me to talk to you because I read your book some years ago now, about five or six years ago now on the pornography of meat. And it really affected me and struck home because I'm a feminist and I'm a vegan and I had never, ever connected the eating of meat, this sort of cultural consumption of meat with patriarchy before.

So when I first delighted upon your book, I felt that something was explained to me that had never been explained to me before, or an idea had been given to me that I'd never had before. 

 I wonder whether you can explain how you came to some of your ideas about it. 

Carol:  Well, thank you. I worked on the Sexual Politics of Meat throughout the 1980s and was trying to figure out how I would show or demonstrate this deep insight that meat eating and masculinity are sort of co-constructed in a patriarchal society and that women and animals are situated in ways in which their oppressions are interconnected. And so I worked very hard to try to elucidate that because for many feminists that seems like, well, why are you taking away attention from what's going on right now with women?

And I needed to be careful and respectful to try to show this is one of the reasons what's going on with women is going on with women because of attitudes towards animals. 

That's what my talk will be at FiLiA called Takeout Misogyny, where I try to show that if we're only looking at human relationships, in our discussion of feminist concerns, we are missing a huge sort of the submerged part of an iceberg in which there's a lot of misogyny being expressed often openly towards the other animals, that then has repercussions for human females. 

And I just want to make the case that we can't separate these things out. A patriarchal culture has made them interconnected and we need to sort of see it in order to resist it. 

Heather: I was sort of aware of images in pornography where women are portrayed as meat and talked about as things to be consumed and so on and so forth, but you take it beyond the issue of imagery. Your argument is beyond that. Isn't it?

Carol:  Correct. The imagery is simply telling us about the attitudes. So the attitudes precede the advertisements of the images that proliferate. One of the things that happened after the publication of the Sexual Politics of Meat is that people, uninvited, just started sending me images from all around the world that said, yes, look at this. Now you've helped me understand this. 

 For the FiLiA conference, I've been collecting all the ones from England. And I am sorry to say that everything I observe about images in the United States are also true and appearing in England.

A lot of it is not just representation of women as being animal-like, but there's a lot of racialising that's going on. And so the Sexual Politics of Meat is a way that white male supremacy is encoding itself. And the way it encodes itself in a culture that's heavily invested in images is to use images.

 Heather: I think you’ve written further books on the Sexual Politics of Meat on the same theme. 

Carol: Well, developing the theme or trying to explore other aspects of it. So for instance, the Pornography of Meat, which was published in 2005, it took the images I'd been sent and then I had gathered together for what’s called the Sexual Politics of Meat slideshow.

So the sexual politics of each slideshow tried to use images to illustrate the ideas of the sexual politics of meat, but also develop even more clearly what's going on when animalising language that reduces humans to be less than animal that this animalising language is used against people of colour.

Women of colour in a certain way, men of colour in another way. It's looking at also regressive sexual view, sexualised abuse of animals and women that are expressed through animal rights organisations. So that was 2005. 

Recently, I did a book that came out earlier this year, called Burger. That's looking at the cultural history of this iconic food, the hamburger, and tries to tell the dissenting story of its rise.

And in that I look at a chapter of how hamburger advertising and images express hostility towards women in the way women are shown eating these huge amounts of hamburger. I mean just forcing it into their mouth and there's a lot of degradation going on there. 

And finally a booklet will be available at FiLiA will be Protest Kitchen, which just came out October 1st and looks at the progressive case for veganism and how that has to do with climate change, food justice, xenophobia, racism and misogyny, and the chapter on misogyny is the title of my talk, Take Out Misogyny, which has that sort of double entendre, take out misogyny, which is what people are being sold through the way meat is represented and let's take out misogyny, let's get rid of it. 

Heather: Excellent. As you're talking, I'm thinking that you're in double jeopardy here because it's very difficult to get people to listen about patriarchy. It’s also very difficult to get people to listen about veganism, because in both instances, it's as if you're trying to make the other guilty for practices. For myself I know that if I'm a vegan, often people feel quite guilty about what they're eating.

I think if you talk to men about patriarchy, they feel guilty about their own patriarchal attitudes, so full of admiration that you've managed to get together, and that you're still alive here at the end of it. 

Carol: Well, I started in Washington, DC, CBS News interviewed me this weekend about Protest Kitchen and especially this misogyny and the way that women are represented in these ads as sexually available and desirous of consumption and the way the animals are sort of sexualised and feminised. So that right in front of us, I mean, walking down the street, you're going to see what I consider to be hate speech about women.

And it's using the fact that we can do anything to animals we want and they're killed. Then it's implied they wanted to be killed to be consumed.

 And anyway, I had this conversation with a very doubting reporter and I got his email off of my website where this person says ‘I just heard your interview with CBS radio and I sincerely ask you to go seek professional help. I honestly believe you to be a possible threat to others and possibly yourself’. 

And I think, you know, the person who wrote that is so set in their ways that they don't even know how to invite a dissenting viewpoint. Somebody else posted in response to an interview that said, ‘first you take away by rights then you take away my meat’.

 What rights are they talking about? They're talking about the rights to look at women as objects. They’re talking about the rights to believe beings exist for someone else's pleasure. And I think that’s what guilt does. Guilt is a very positive thing if we respond to it, but people kind of like to be chronically guilty. They don't want to change, but they can't get rid of the feeling. Chronic guilt isn't healthy. Guilt is a prick to the conscience to say something is terribly wrong here. What are you going to do about it? And their response is? You know, they're not conscious they're doing this, but their response is ‘ I don't want to do anything. I don’t want to give up eating meat, I don't want to examine my male privilege. 

It's like white fragility as it's defined, you know, where whites suddenly become aware that we live in a racialised world and that we've been pillowed with privilege and their response is ‘So I don't want to look at that’. And so they suddenly act very wounded to have this awareness, but consciousness, as we know, as feminist, consciousness is the beginning point of revolutionary insight into oppression. Consciousness is a gift. 

Heather: Absolutely. Absolutely., I think we probably discussed enough about this. I hope that this is tempting people to come and listen to your talk because it will be absolutely fascinating. I certainly will be there. It is amazing to me that I'm going to listen to the person, see you in flesh, the very person who had such an effect in connecting patriarchy, misogyny and meat eating. 

So thank you very much for this conversation.