Interconnected oppressions

Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The "absent referent" is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our "meat" separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep something from being seen as having been someone.

Once we recognize how the absent referent functions, we can immediately see two things – women are made absent referents in our culture, too. And, our culture links oppressions and intensifies them, too. Theory is important because it helps us understand the way oppressions become interconnected.

In The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Porngraphy of Meat, I show how animals are consumed literally and how women are consumed visually and through sexual access to our bodies. The same process of objectification and fragmentation is at work. But advertisements make this process appear innocent. No one seems harmed. The double entendres, the puns, the visual substitutions—they are humor by the dominant culture about women and the other animals who are made consumable, made into objects. Sexual and species inequality has been made funny—to those who benefit from dominance. In images, gender assumptions are used to uphold speciesism. And specisism is used to uphold gender oppression. Species oppression is expressed through gender and gender oppression is expressed through speciesism.