Adam's slideshow perpetrated some insidious stereotypes

I went to Carol Adams' slide show The Sexual Politics of Meat expecting to see a rational examination of objectification in our culture. What I got was a dangerous and misguided piece of propaganda that, while it may have had good intentions towards women, only served to perpetrate some of the most insidious stereotypes about femininity.

Adams' primary thesis is that animals and women are linked in many ways by the dominant culture- treated as objects for consumption, either literally (in the case of meat) or metaphorically (via pornographic images of women). Although she presented convincing surface similarities between the media's portrayal of animals and its depiction of women (the woman with her legs spread and the cut of beef with an inviting, juicy slice removed were effectively juxtaposed), this analysis falls apart at any level below the surface.

To accept Adams' argument, we must first assume that pornography is inherently bad. We must believe that it reduces women to helpless creatures, defiled by the hands and leering eyes of male sex fiends. We must believe that the sight of a beautiful woman displaying her sexuality is something that should be kept hidden. This negative, anti-sex stereotype reinforces all the destructive myths about women that I can think of- for one, that a woman's body is something unclean and shameful, to be kept in a dark room. Instead of trying to place limits on the sexuality of others, we should be celebrating the fact that our erotic potential can take so many forms, including Playboy magazine and what Ms. Adams calls, with obvious distaste, the "rear-entry position".

The anti-porn movement denies choice and agency to women, through its assumption that women who choose to be sexual are simply being exploited, collaborating unwittingly with their oppressors. If we found any of the porn slides arousing, it was because pornography is repetitive; it's our patriarchal conditioning. And the women who posed for the porn shots were being objectified, poor things. For those who think that allowing someone to jerk off to your picture is an automatic, uncontrollable objectification, I have this to say: choosing to make yourself a sexual object (for that moment, in that photograph) is still a choice.

Assuming that women are helpless victims of pornography gives too much power to patriarchy. Women's bodies are sometimes controlled by men, due to circumstances of place, socioeconomic oppression, or race, but the anti-porn movement would have it that men control women's bodies by definition, due to biology. Men are the evil oppressors who violate women with their eyes and their penises, and women can do nothing but lie there and take it. By definition. Not only is this view heterosexist in its failure to acknowledge the possibility of erotic attraction within one's own gender, it is also one of the most fundamentally anti-woman and anti-man viewpoints I have come across. It denies women agency; it denies men positive emotion and self-control.

The other half of Adams' agenda is animal rights/vegetarianism. She has a lot to say about the mistreatment of animals; if she had stuck to a simple presentation on their (in my view, unnecessary) use as food, I would have agreed completely with her. We do treat animals horribly, especially meat-industry animals; we have taken complete control over their lives and deaths. Veal calves are kept in tiny pens, and killed before they're two months old, for humans' gastronomic pleasure. This is unconscionable in its own right; no living being should be subjected to such treatment. But I resent Adams' attempt to equate this treatment with the oppression that women face. The famous Hustler cover of a woman being fed into a meat grinder would seem to make the comparison explicit, but that cover is not emblematic of everyday societal oppression of women. Larry Flynt admitted that it was an attempt to piss off feminists! There are vast differences between a shoulder of pork and the shoulder of a woman, and any attempt to equate the two that doesn't take those differences into account is doomed to fail.

In Adams' paradigm, women and animals are defined (by the patriarchy) as the Other; Not-Man and Not-Human, lumped together on the lesser side of the equation. This is a gross oversimplification. Animals do not have the ability to reason. They're just not as smart as women, or men. This does not mean we have the right to do whatever we want to with animals. I feel that we, as the dominant species, have a responsibility to care for domesticated animals to the best of our ability; since we made them dependent on us, we must now attempt to give them the happiest lives possible. We must do this because animals cannot think rationally about their own fates, make choices, or speak for themselves. Women can.

This is the point that differentiates humans from all other animals, and Adams' failure to mention it is an insult to women. It's an insult that takes away from our power and self-determination in the most insidious ways. Women have the ability to choose whether or not we want to be in pornography. We have the ability to make informed, rational decisions. We are not fragile flowers who will die if we're looked at the "wrong" way; we have power to fight back. We have the intelligence, and the voice, to fight against our own objectification.

Women are oppressed in many ways- when we are denied jobs because of our sex, when we can't walk down a dark street at night without fearing for our safety, when we are considered somehow "less than" because we are not men. But women can speak out against our oppression. And if, like Adams, you don't like the way women are portrayed in the media, you can make your opinions known and attempt to change things.

Animals don't have this option. They can't speak, they can't be in positions of control. They don't get to make decisions about their sexuality. In her equation of women with animals, Adams overlooks these important points, implicitly denying women agency and the power to make choices. This is a central part of our humanity. Ironically, she is making women look weak and helpless; it's a more negative view than anything the porn industry could ever produce.

-Ellen Vinz