Cleaning the gerbil cage of progressive thought, weekly.
It’s a pressing question: Why are three out of four American vegans women? Well, women are more verbal than men, and vegans won’t shut up about being vegan … or is it just that men really are smarter?
I kid! I kid, because I love! And because I’m having a hard time taking seriously this Alternet article, “Here's Why Our Food Systems Are a Central Feminist Issue.” In it, Melissa Kravitz (who, for the record, likes steak just fine) explores the intersection of veganism and feminism.
That intersection exists and is rather heavily trafficked -- imagine lots of Priuses and Subarus with “Coexist” and “Dog Mom” stickers, some really smug bicyclists; there’s a store selling crystals and “self-care” products on one corner …”
“For some feminists, especially those who might identify as ecofeminists, veganism is inextricably linked to feminism,” explains Deborah Cohan, associate professor of sociology at University of South Carolina-Beaufort. “From this perspective, the oppression of women is tied to other forms of oppression, particularly the abuse of the environment and non-human animals.”
The seminal thinking in this area was done by Carol Adams in her “landmark” 1990 book, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (“A real page-turner.” -- Ann Smith, author of The Fun Feminist. “I laughed, I cried, I felt like a man again” -- Renée Richards.)
In that thrill-a-minute magnum opus, “Adams makes the case that eating an animal for food involves first seeing the animal as an object” Cohen says. “ … akin to how women are also objectified, sexualized, animalized, degraded, hurt and sometimes killed.”
So “Feminists who are vegan generally regard their decisions around food to be a certain kind of protest and resistance to all forms of violence and cruelty.” Which is why they’re famous for their devil-may-care breeziness.
So feminism is related to animal rights. But more than that -- feminism extends to animals. Oh, I don’t mean that cows are braiding their armpit hair and demanding taxpayer-funded contraceptives. I mean that some of the women who do those things see animals through their feminist lens. “In a food system so detached from its origins—very few Americans raise or slaughter their own meat—it’s easy to forget these gender disparities in the way that we have been trained to prefer eating female animals over males,” Kravitz writes.
Cows and other female livestock provide milk and red meat; female chickens lay eggs and are typically sold by parts in American supermarkets; sows (female pigs) are commonly turned into bacon [mmmm, bacon] and pork chops, while males, boars, are used for breeding. Bull meat, rooster meat and flesh of other male animals are rarely seen on Western menus, making the argument that our food system treats female and male animals unequally, letting the males lives to continue their lineage while the female are killed, split apart and sold to consume.
Of course, that’s because in most cases, the females make the best eatin’. And who’s doing the eatin’? Dudes. Of course.
“American men eat 57 percent more meat than American women,” Kravitz notes. Why? Cuz ‘Merica. And also because a study “published in the journal Appetite, showed that vegetarian men are thought to be 35 percent less masculine than their meat-eating peers.” (Bet there was federal funding behind that research -- only the government would spend money to verify that when people imagine vegetarian men, they see Pajama Boy.)
But of course, that won’t hold true for long. Kravitz tells us that “Millennials are adapting plant-based diets at a faster pace than other generations, and more millennials identify as feminists than in any other generation, so the two movements continue to grow as people adopt more conscientious ideologies and lifestyles.”
Freakin’ millennials.
And now, more intellectual pellets.
Quick Take: If this is what it takes to be “woke,” pass the ambien. “Black, Queer, and ‘Super-Size’ BBWs Challenge What Society Sees as ‘Acceptably Fat’” -- From Motherboard
No good deed … A band called Imagine Dragons (when did bands start naming themselves after Playmobile sets or PBS cartoons?) put on a music festival called LoveLoud in Salt Lake City. It raised a bunch of money for gay groups, “but a number of transgender attendees claim they received discriminatory treatment at the daylong event,” reports the Huffington Post.
Huh? The gay concert discriminated? We don’t have to imagine dragons -- here they be in all their binary bigotry:
Bobbee Trans Mooremon told The Salt Lake Tribune that she was told to use a restroom that didn’t align with her gender identity at the Salt Lake City event on Saturday. Mooremon, who identifies as trans and was volunteering for the nonprofit QueerMeals, said she had been told that all of the facilities at the University of Utah’s Rice-Eccles Stadium would be LGBTQ inclusive.
“I felt very frustrated and very unsafe,” she said. “It was a big event for LGBTQ people, and this concert was supposed to be addressing things like that and making it better for us.”
Right. So you live in Utah, under the name Bobbee Trans Mooremon. Sounds like you’re walking around with a chip on your (broad, manly) shoulder to being with. You felt “unsafe” in a restroom full of gay men. Is there an epidemic of gays beating up trannies in bathrooms? Or of straight guys infiltrating gay events to beat up trannies in bathrooms? Or is this a cool way to see “Bobbee Trans Mooremon” in the newspaper?
But in fairness, Bobbee wasn’t alone. “Provo Pride’s Brianna Cluck … told Fox 13 that organizers ‘assured us that all of the bathrooms were going to be gender inclusive’ at the festival.” The Provo Pride gang was “disappointed” and “dismayed,” and said so on Facebook.
“Because of this and other concerns, we took down our table early.”
Just like that. Took their toys and went home. LoveLoud grovelled as best it could after the fact, protesting it has a “zero-tolerance policy” against discrimination. But hell hath no fury like a trannie forced to use a urinal. “‘A couple of organizations took it seriously and were not going to stand for transphobia in LGBTQ spaces, which was great,’ Mooremon said. Her organization, QueerMeals, has announced it will not be accepting donations from LoveLoud this year.”
One of these days, we’re going to hit the bottom of this cultural rabbit hole. Until then, take that Imagine Dragons! Your money’s no good with The Imagine Women.
Et tu, Brutalism? Resolved: Donald Trump’s aesthetic sensibility combines the subtlety of a 1970s porn impresario with the dignity of a 1980s mafia don. That still does not make brutalist architecture anything other than butt-ugly.
Apparently, Trump (and everyone else but #resistance addicts) hates the FBI building on Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C. As well he should. Besides the dreadful Watergate complex, the FBI building is eclipsed in D.C. ugliness only by the Smithsonian’s African American and Modern Art museums -- and those are some real eyesores.
But Slate, because the Donald hates it, loves it some soulless concrete:
In the public imagination, capital-B Brutalism—the postwar fad named for béton brut, French for raw concrete, and defined by its heavy, cast-concrete forms—tends to be lumped in with both the shoddy, underfunded modernism of public housing projects and the space-age experiments that followed.
“Underfunded modernism” is code for cheap, awful, collectivist garbage -- the failure of progressive social engineering. More money would just make Brutalist buildings bigger, uglier and less inhabitable. Brutalism is dehumanizing. It is impersonal, in a way that classically-inspired buildings never are -- the classical invites the individual to join or at least experience something higher. Brutalism is statist and authoritarian, if not totalitarian.
Want a description of brutalist buildings, read 1984. Check out the photos in this Museum of Modern Art show: “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980.” Yep. It’s every bit as ghastly as it sounds. Like Chernobyl, but without the cheeriness.
Slate notes that “Brutalism is now cool again.” Sadly, so is socialism -- the perfect environment in which to create soul-killing piles of concrete.
