Human Non-Human Relationship

Person carving a joint of meat

The image above is of meat being sliced on a cutting board by a person wearing a chef hat. They have one foot on the cutting board while balancing a knife getting ready to cut another slice of meat. If you look closely, the person doesn’t have any gender identifying characteristics. The image implies that anyone, men and women are the ones in control of what they eat. Society is not in control of what foods should be gendered. Another interpretation is that both men and women are the authority figure in the human-animal relationship.

Zoe Elsenberg’s Meat Heads: New Study Focuses on How Meat Consumption Alters Men’s Self-Perceived Levels of Masculinity talks about something as simple as eating meat equates to a man’s masculinity. She goes on to say that society has marketed meat for men and salads for women. In her article, she advises us to google “men eating” versus “women eating”, the results prove her point.

As a kid, I always watched movies where the man is in charge of handling the meat. I don’t remember a specific movie, but I’m thinking of that one stereotypical, cliche scene in every holiday movie where the man is standing at the front of the table getting ready to carve the turkey. I didn’t think much of this as a kid. I assume that the woman would prepare the food and the man carved the turkey, trying to insert some form of participation in the preparation process.

I’ve also come to know about food products marketed towards men and women. I’ve seen words like “low calorie” marketed on food products catered towards women, as if women only eat enough to stay thin. I’ve also seen pre and post workout protein bars/powders marketed towards men, this implying that men should workout to get bigger, not healthier.

Greta Gaard argues in Ecofeminism on the Wing: Perspectives on Human-Animal Relations that “to be a pet is to have all one’s life decisions controlled by someone else … if the situation were offered to humans, we’d call it slavery” (Gaard 20). She focuses on the oppression of animals with the tale of Bella and relates it to women, as “feminists and ecofeminists alike have noted the ways that animal pejoratives are used to dehumanize women, pointing to the linguistic linkage of women and animals in such derogatory terms for women” (Gaard 20). Gaard starting her paper off with Bella (meaning beautiful in Italian), a green and yellow canary in a golden cage is her essentially implying that women are put in cages to be admired, but not cared for.

While Deanne Curtin also had the same views on the human-animal relationship to Gaard, she also brought a moral perspective into it. Curtin believes in what she calls contextual moral vegetarianism, she says “there are persons who have a choice of what food they want to eat” (Curtin 8).

2 Replies to “Human Non-Human Relationship”

  1. Your mention of the movie that made you reminisce about your childhood also reminds me of a scene in an American Mafia movie, Donnie Brasco. The esteemed gangsta Left Lucciano goes into the kitchen while his wife is cooking Christmas dinner. He quickly and aggressively shoos her out of the way followed by derogatory terms. He then goes on to explain how the best cooks in the world are men, and that had a way around the kitchen that women couldn’t get. I think the juxtaposition of this statement is very telling to the whole relationship of men and women, especially of the time, the movie being set in 1970’s. Men force women toward a life of domestic duties, cooking, cleaning, raising children but still wanted to seem superior to women. By most terms of logic and reason, if throughout most of history women were predominantly cooking; would it not stand to reason that women would become better cooks than men? The statement shows how far the masculine ego reaches into aspect of life, men couldn’t believe that women who cook far more often than them are better cooks. This sort of dominant relationship is displayed in your analogy of the patriarch sitting at the head of the table carving a turkey. It gives a mentality of the man feeding his family, when especially in most modern cases, the women who cook do a lot more of the work in making the meal. Some of the male carving the turkey could come from earlier human traditions, but might not accurately display how we live today. Do you think that traditions, and these older ways of thinking are subtle ways of patriarchy culture attempting to stay “superior”?

  2. I honestly like your version of analysis on this image because it places blame on humans as a whole. Even though we live in a patriarchal society, it’s not just men who can oppress other species, it can be women as well. I honestly never thought about the carving of the turkey during the holidays. It usually is the an that does it in movies, but I noticed it happens in real life as well, at least for me. My family always makes my uncle cut the turkey for the holidays for some reason, I’m not sure why. Your reading provides multiple different aspects of sexism when it comes to the food industry. You notice the low calorie, low fat, low everything food is usually catered to women because of women’s focus on their figure. Yet men are persuaded with the questioning of their masculinity. Ads stating lines like, “the manliest meal” or “Steak, made for manly men” as if meat is the only thing that defines your masculinity. Since masculinity is a touchy subject for some men, they react to these commercials addressing their “manliness.” I like the way it provided multiple examples of sexism in the food industry, I also liked the way in which you expressed the sexism in advertisement for women as well.

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