During a speech delivered at the 2000 World Vegetarian Congress in Toronto, Carol J. Adams remarked that there should be a word for the sexually explicit ways humans contort animals to sell and consume. Immediately, her friend Amie Hamlin called out, “anthropornography.” Adams would later describe anthropornography in an interview with Annie Potts for Antennae magazine, saying it means “animals are presented as sexually consumable, in a way that upholds the sexual exploitation of women.” Hamlin’s label captured the essence of a complex set of issues, all of which can be traced back to the human exploitation of animals for consumption and capitalism. The human drive to hunt and herd, once a means of survival, has morphed into a conquest of speciesism. Looking closer, the male subjugation of women is mirrored in the human subjugation of animals. “Women are animalized and animals are sexualized and feminized,” says Adams in her interview for Antennae. Let’s take a look at some of the visual examples Adams provides in her signature slideshow, Sexual Politics of Meat.

The image above depicts a limited-edition KFC sandwich, which famously swapped bread for fried chicken. I remember when this sandwich was released. The marketing clearly depicted lumberjack-style men with fistfuls of meat, flashes of red, black, and white, and a thick block font reminiscent of Uncle Sam posters during wartime. As seen above, the ads would describe the item as “the world’s manliest sandwich,” giving the impression that manly men would enjoy it. Or perhaps it would make a man manlier? That particular interpretation is up to the viewer, apparently. One thing is clear: the messaging conveys that is good to be masculine, it’s worth being proud of, and one should seek to increase his manliness through manly acts, like eating a sandwich comprised almost entirely of fried chicken.

The next image is a marquee outside of a strip club, stating they employ “free range grass fed strippers.” This marketing takes real verbiage from ads for animal products, like eggs and chicken, and applies it to a subset of women. There is no subtlety to this language; it clearly assigns a consumable label to the female employees. It lends the impression that the women are housed in a barn, let out to graze, and exist to provide a consumable service to humans. That’s another thing about this type of marketing: it always puts the subject in a feminine category. We didn’t need to know this marquee referred to female strippers; it was implied by the oppressive imagery. “In meat eating, all animals become symbolically female,” Adams says, and as the images in her slideshow tick on, we see more overlap between the sexualization of animals and the oppression of women.

The last image is probably the most shocking, and literal. It takes a raw piece of meat, still hanging on a butcher hook, dressed in a tube top and mini skirt. Text at the bottom states “It’s not acceptable to treat a woman like one. Most men agree, but few speak out. Please, be heard. A man’s voice is an effective way to change demeaning societal attitudes towards women.” Upon first glance, one might think this is a reasonable plea to treat women respectfully. Zooming in, we can see that it upholds an unfortunate hierarchical attitude that humans have projected onto animals: they are inferior, and thus worthy of poorer treatment. The image acknowledges that to be a “piece of meat” is a negative, unwanted thing, and it pleads for men not to treat women like animals. It is, at its core, “propaganda for speciesism,” as Carol J. Adams has said. The underlying message is that humans deserve better treatment than animals, and it’s up to men to save us all.

This last image is one that I found on my own. It’s a vintage Campbell’s Soup advertisement for their beef soup. The language in the add is masculine — “BEEF is Big News,” “deep-flavored,” “hefty pieces,” “thick” — and the tagline is even more oppressive: “FOR MEN ONLY.” The tagline is on a cartoon sign surrounded by cartoon women, looking shocked and impressed at the beefy soup. The subheading reads, “‘He-Man’ is the word for these Hearty Soups! But, Ladies, you’ll like ’em, too!” The overall message here is that this beefy, meaty product is for men, and it impresses women with how masculine it is. Plus, a bonus: women may try the soup with permission from male advertising executives.
Each of these images has one central theme: men, above all, exist to consume and annihilate. Women, despite being part of the same species, are oppressed and subjugated to a similar degree as nonhuman animals. Still, women subjugate and oppress nonhuman animals by participating in the consumption of meat themselves, despite being treated and viewed as sexual objects. Are most women aware of this hypocrisy? “A cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption links butchering and sexual violence in our culture,” writes Adams. Men objectify women on stage, in magazines, through media, they fragment them in conversation (“I’m more of a butt man, myself”), and some consume them through acts of sexual violence. The butcher, in his white shift, raises animals on hooks and completes the same process, ending in consumption in the name of agriculture. And we are too disconnected from our compassion, as Adams would say, to recognize the destructive parallels.
Works Cited:
Adams, Carol J. (2010) The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. London and New York: Continuum.
Aloi, G., Arends, B., Shrumm, R., & Brink, E. E. (2009) Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. Issue 14. pp. 12-24