Alecia & the politics of meat

Alecia Simmonds writes columns for the Sydney Morning Herald. A recent one was called "The sexual politics of meat". Alecia is a vegetarian and so wants to prove that a principled feminist would never eat meat. I'm not so much interested here in the debate about vegetarianism, but about the kinds of arguments Alecia makes.

Her five reasons are as follows:

1. Eating meat is associated with male power in its most vile and repugnant forms. In a logic that sounds positively mystical, real men, we are told, should be physically strong and virile, which means killing and eating strong animals. In rejecting meat, feminists – both women and men – are rejecting a potent symbol of patriarchal power.
 

In a healthy society, the women would actively want their men to be powerful, physically strong and virile. It's a sign of how wayward our thinking has become that a woman would want to take down the men of her own society.

2. The ill treatment of animals makes the abuse of women tolerable. Following on from my first point, if men get to eat the meat, then women, alas, are consigned to the less savoury role of being the meat.
 

Alecia has managed to conjure up an image of women being eaten by men like meat. It's that dreary, borderline depressive mentality which, once again, is extraordinarily wayward: young men and women ought to find joy in relating to the opposite sex.

3. Vegetarians, like feminists, care about language. Violence is made possible through euphemistic or derogatory words that distance us from the feelings of the victim.
 

And women, we are to understand, fill the role of victim and men of victimisers. Difficult to find a joy in relationships based on that outlook.

4. Feminists and vegetarians share a common project of ending discrimination based on arbitrary distinctions. We are all, at our base, animals.
 

That's an interesting one. Liberals typically argue that qualities that we don't get to choose, such as our sex and ethnicity, are merely "arbitrary" and therefore should be made not to matter. They extend this argument even to issues such as women serving in combat positions; the idea that men are more suited to such roles doesn't seem to be "arbitrary" but liberals still treat it as such.

Anyway, Alecia wants to extend the liberal argument to the idea that it is arbitrary to distinguish between humans and animals and that equality means treating humans and animals the same.

We can safely say, at any rate, that Alecia does not have a very exalted view of human beings.

5. Feminists and vegetarians believe that the personal is political. Just as we tell male partners that the minutia of who unpacks the dishwasher each night really matters, so too do we need to remind ourselves that what goes into our mouths also matters.
 

That reminded me of a post I wrote some time ago. It was about some research on why traditional marriages were more durable than the modern version. The researchers found that modern-type marriages were too focused on "account keeping" whereas the traditional ones were based on an "enchanted" cultural logic of gift exchange.

Alecia is an account keeper. In her house "the minutia of who unpacks the dishwasher each night really matters". A tip for Alecia: this is not a great strategy to draw out male investment in a relationship.
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