Eco-Feminist Protests Male Meat Culture

Meat-eating promotes the slaughter of animals and encourages male dominance, according to a feminist author and vegetarian advocate who spoke in Quincy House last night.

“As a male you’re not supposed to care, you’re supposed to be strong and virile,” Carol J. Adams said to about 150 students who gathered in the Quincy dining hall. “Our meat-eating culture teaches men to be macho.”

Adams presented a 75-minute slide show of advertisements and photographs that she said demonstrate how women are regarded as meat and how animals are sexualized by society.

“Animals are feminized and women are animalized. Inequality has been made sexy. Pornography shows that women are animals and want it like animals,” she said.

At one point during the talk, Adams asked for a volunteer to pose like a Versace model.

Audience members laughingly shouted out instructions.

“The reason we laughed was because of the idea of a man swimming in women’s waters. All women live in sexual objectification the way fish live in water and so do animals,” she said.

Adams stated that humans are taught from an early age to forget that meat was ever alive.

The average American consumes 984 chickens, 37 turkeys, 29 pigs, 12 cows, 2 lambs and one calf in a lifetime, Adams told the crowd.

“We aren’t made to recognize this,” she said.

Quincy House co-master Jayne Loader invited Adams to speak as part of the house’s “Masters’ Nights” series.

According to the Quincy House website, the events feature talks by faculty members and others on topics of general interest.

“I think she’s the most provocative and interesting theorist working in the animal rights field. She is the only theorist who makes the connection between the oppression of people and animals,” Loader said.

Loader added that this was the first time the one-year-old Masters’ Nights series had featured a speaker from outside of Harvard.

Prior to the talk, Adams talked to students in the Quincy House Master’s Residence.

The reception featured an all-vegan menu, including hummus and non-dairy brownies.

“What if the Harvard community who eats here asked what happens to these animals? How would that change the complacency of meat-eating?” Adams said in an interview.

Lakshmi Sridharan ’06 said she came to see Adams was because she was interested in animal rights.

“I’m vegan...I’ve never read her stuff but I came to see what she’s promoting. I know she’s making an argument for veganism through feminism,” she said.

Adams is best known for her 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory, in which she stated that meat eating exacerbates a culture of male dominance.

According to Adams’ website, the controversial book drew the ire of radio host Rush Limbaugh and columnist John Leo.

Adams has taught a course on Sexual and Domestic Violence at Southern Methodist University.

Her 2003 book The Pornography of Meat was inspired by the slide show.

In the book, Adams argues that advertisers degrade women and “nonhumans,” her term for animals.

Adams has presented the show at colleges across the country.

This year she has spoken at Trinity University in Dublin and at several vegetarian festivals.

Adams will be speaking at Harvard Law School today at 1 p.m.