The Art of the Animal: Fourteen Women Artists Explore The Sexual Politics of Meat by Watson L.A. & Eddy Kathryn

Author:Watson, L.A. & Eddy, Kathryn [Watson, L.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lantern Books
Published: 2015-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

Here is a transcript from the July 8, 2012, episode of the political-issues television show The McLaughlin Group:

John McLaughlin: Let's cut to the chase here. When will the United States elect a female president? [Pause ] When?

Pat Buchanan: You want a year?

McLaughlin: Yeah. I want a year.

[ . . . ]

Buchanan: 2040 or 2050.

McLaughlin: That late?

Buchanan: [Pause ] Let's hope so. [Pause. Starts laughing .] 2

After presenting the fantasy that red meat is for men and women only stand in the way, the Men's Health magazine article moves on to affirm its pride in the United States. In its patriotic tone it reasserts America's relationship to meat, conflating American-ness with meat eating for a popular audience. Its argument about the growing safety of beef emphasizes that all but one human death from mad cow disease (the then-recent public health emergency) was in the U.K. The article even points out, “and she was British!”

Seeing these lines drawn between the U.S. and the U.K. brought me back to Henry VIII. Though Henry was said to be very attractive and athletic in his younger days, the remarkable number of wives and mistresses he had—even after he became known for cheating, having marriages annulled, and cutting off the heads of wives he was not happy with—is not fully explained by good looks or charm alone. One might cite this as an example of unchecked power forced upon those in positions of servitude. Or perhaps it can be “explained” by the simplistic and rather insulting theory cited in the Men's Health article by a Dr. Leonard Shlain for why men prefer meat and women prefer men who have access to it:

Dr. Shlain's theory goes like this: Prehistoric women craved iron-rich red meat due to the massive iron losses that result from menstruation. So a dripping haunch of wild bovine gave women exactly what their bodies craved . . . and women gave back to the men who provided it.

Never mind that this theory discounts the high iron content of many vegetable-based foods, or creates a picture of early females who are, at best, calculating, and at worst, unable to think beyond their bodily, “animalistic” cravings. This theory also reifies a view of human interactions based on the assumption that economics and self-interest drive behavior. It is an archaic account of capitalism before such a word existed, and provides a foundation for the particularly industrial form that America's meat eating has taken.

This appeal to evolution does just what other arguments about the “natural” basis of meat eating do. Adams addresses these arguments several times in The Sexual Politics of Meat , but the Men's Health article rather handily shuts itself down with the next section. The article goes on to describe what is necessary to make beef safe, including an approach that “literally puts beef through the equivalent of a car wash” (spraying it with lactic acid and tasteless protein coating), using electroshock treatments, genetically engineering disease-resistant cattle, and irradiating the meat. It seems difficult to

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