How Feminism and Veganism Go Hand in Hand

"Why do you care about animals more than people?" Anybody who is vegan or vegetarian, or has ever worked/advocated for animal rights and animal ethics is probably familiar with that - seemingly innocent - question. The answer is simple: I don't. I care about animals as well as people, and I believe that all kinds of exploitation, oppression, and violence and inextricably linked. If we are to be effective advocates, we should strive for a world without -isms, may they be sexism, racism, ageism, classism, or speciesism. I firmly believe that we cannot eradicate one without, at the same time, eradicating the other. If we fail to do that, the same evil will keep coming back in ever new disguises and forms - as its has done many, many times over the course of human history.

We all can - and should - be able to care about more than one thing, to oppose violence and exploitation in every form, without imposing some sort of ranking, and attacking those who we feel do not tackle the "most important" or "worst" oppression. Many of the -isms we are faced with today are deeply interconnected. Just as I pointed out earlier that violence against women and sexual assault are caused by the same underlying structure - misogyny - as objectification and subtle sexism, and are thus expressions of the same phenomenon, differing mainly in intensity, so are all the other -isms basically manifestations of the same spirit of oppression.

Whenever we degrade, humiliate, violate and subjugate other humans, we treat them "like animals", implying that it is okay to treat animals that way. From there, it is only a small step down the slippery slope. We can treat animals the way we treat them because they are not "like us", and we can treat a certain sub-group of humanity "like animals", because they are not "like us", either. Once you've created a criterion which determines whether one deserves to be treated with respect, it is easy to further narrow down the in-group, and exclude more and more beings based on more and more trivial grounds. They are not "as smart as we are". They "do not recognize their reflection in the mirror". They are "too emotional". They are "not civilized like us". They are --- you get the picture. The only way we can truly stop this vicious cycle is to recognize the intrinsic value of each and every being (and, just in case you were wondering, I am not talking about "potential beings", I have always wondered how people can be so concerned about "potential" life while being so unconcerned with the suffering of so many of those already in this world!).

By treating animals as products, rather than sentient beings, we de-sensitize ourselves to the suffering of others. We teach ourselves and our children that, even though this other being may look and sound and behave as if they were in pain, they really aren't. And if they are, it's not like "our" pain, because they are different in some way. We do not see all the things we have in common, the desire to live, to love and be loved, to experience joy, but rather focus on what divides us. And we do the same with other humans, based on gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation or one of the many other ways we've been able to establish as divisions.

For me, veganism - like feminism - is about respect and fairness, about recognizing another being as a whole person, and treating them the way we wish to be treated. Nothing more, and nothing less.

About "Stubbed Toes" and "Train Wrecks" ("Puffy Face Moments IV")

So ... on to tweet number two. It went something like this: "We live in a world where women and girls are being murdered for being female - how can you make a big deal out of comments about appearances?" In other words: why bother with something so small, when there are more important things to worry about?

For me, this comment exemplifies a fundamental misunderstanding. It's not that we have to choose between caring about school girls in Afghanistan being poisoned for wanting an education or the objectification of Ashley Judd, and that's because these two instances are examples of the same underlying system: different expressions of a deeply misogynistic mindset, in which women are somehow less than, and it is therefore okay to treat them as things. Things that can be ridiculed, humiliated, and (ab)used. If I was somehow limited to only caring about, only paying attention to, one single issue, if I had to rank poisoning and a discussion about someone's face according to magnitude or extremism of misogyny, I would choose to address the former. But luckily I can care about more than one thing, and I am aware of the way misogyny works.

By separating the two things, by somehow claiming that they are unrelated, we are ignoring the fact that they are simply expressions of the same thing. People that murder, rape, or physically assault women simply for being women are not sick or out of control, they simply feel that they have the right to act that way. It's an expression of entitlement, of power, and of dominance. We are contributing to the propagation of this system by trivializing other acts of misogyny. 

Why would a society spend days talking about the face of an actress, or the "scrunchy" of a secretary of state? Which message are we trying to send to the women we are publicly scrutinizing, ridiculing, and putting down? And which message are we sending to other women? These debates suggest that it is somehow okay to judge these women not for what they say or do, for what they have contributed and accomplished (and both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ashley Judd are amazing women that have worked hard for years to make this world a better place not just for women, but for all of us), but for how they look. It suggests that it is okay to treat them not as persons, but rather as bodies, or body parts. And it suggests that these bodies or body parts are public property. We don't talk to them, we talk about them. They are not allowed to be subjects in the stories we tell, they are objects to be regarded, judged, and dissembled.

The character Miranda Hobbes in the HBO series "Sex and the City" says at one point: "The only two choices for women: sexy kitten and witch", and even though she is supposedly talking about the choice of Halloween costumes, these words convey something fundamental: we, as a society, will only tolerate women who are "pleasing to the eye", according to patriarchy's unattainable standards - but these women have to accept being treated as nothing more than decoration for others to enjoy. Once we, as women, fail to meet these standards, we will either become invisible, or we will be ridiculed, humiliated, and disrespected.

How is this in any way related to poisoning Afghan school girls? It is part of a continuum that stretches from subtle sexism all the way to violent and deadly acts of misogyny, but the root is and remains the same. If we accept sexism in its less open form, if we ignore it or trivialize it, we help open the doors to more aggressive and more violent acts of misogyny. 

The Roman poet Ovid coined the phrase "principiis obsta", which means something like "resist the beginnings", which warns us of the dangers of being quiet too long. The longer we remain silent in the face of seemingly "harmless" and "innocent" acts of sexism, the harder it will become to change things. If we let the "stubbed toes" pass without complaint, we won't have the power to do anything about the "train wrecks" that will be following in their wake.

From Objectification to "Boys will be Boys" - The many faces of misogyny ("Puffy Face Moments III")

This is the first time comments on Twitter has prompted me to write. I guess there's a first time for everything. Even though I shouldn't be writing this - in fact I should be working on grad school-related research papers - it is just bothering me too much, and thus has to be expressed in some way, shape or form before I can move on with my life.

One of the tweets that caused this post had to do with the topic of prostitution. Basically, the author claimed that women who work in the sex industry freely chose to do so, and that nobody was forcing them to participate. This is, of course, incorrect on many levels. A huge amount of sex workers, mainly women and children, are victims of sexual slavery and human sex trafficking. They are forced into this situation by sheer violence, through deception, and sometimes due to abject poverty and a lack of alternatives. They are lured from their home countries with promises of jobs, only to have their passports taken away and find themselves forced into prostitution. They are abducted. They are sometimes even sold by their own families. 

Looking beyond sexual slavery and human trafficking, we can see that a large number of women working in the sex industry share a history of sexual abuse and/or drug addiction, aided by a toxic culture of objectification and misogyny. Most of them are very young. Many of them experience violence and coercion multiple times throughout their lives. The truth is that very few grown, confident, secure women, with a strong sense of self-worth and accomplishment, choose this so-called "oldest profession" (or any profession related to it). 

Apart from the question of whether it's a good idea to make prostitution a crime (I actually think the "customer" and the pimp/trafficker etc - and not the women (and men) working as prostitutes - should be the one treated as committing a crime, just for the record), this actually reminded me of a conversation I had with a (male) friend a few months ago. One of his students had complained to him about a professor's remark regarding the alleged the difference between having daughters and having sons, something to the effect of: Girls need to be treated differently, because they have to be protected more. The student told my friend she thought that this had been a deeply problematic remark, because it implied and propagated the image of women as weak, passive, and dependent.  Though he did not tell her that, my friend later mentioned that he disagreed, that it is in fact that case that daughters need more protecting and guarding. When I asked him why he thought so, he mentioned the fact that women are at a greater risk of being assaulted, abused, or raped. True. But: a) the people most likely to do that are family members, intimate partners, friends or acquaintances and b) did he really think that the solution to this problem was locking up women, "protecting" them by allowing them fewer liberties and trusting them less than their brothers? Shouldn't we instead focus on changing society, changing a system in which it seems ok to attack, assault, and rape? Shouldn't we focus on the ones committing these acts instead of punishing those affected by them? 

He then -  and this is where this story starts to relate to my earlier remarks - stated that this is not possible. Men are genetically programmed to always want sex, and to use force when encountering resistance - "boys will be boys", basically. Though I had heard this argument before, I was still shocked, especially since I had only read about people making it, but hd never encountered someone who actually did so, in a discussion with me. This is just wrong on so many levels. First of all, sexual assault and rape are not sex. They are a demonstration of power and control. These two things should never be confused - and yet they frequently are. Secondly, if I were a man, I would be deeply offended by this suggestion that, simply by virtue of being male, I lacked even the met basic amount of self-control and respect for others and their bodily integrity. None of the men present were offended, even after I pointed this out. In fact, they argued, this is why prostitution is necessary for society to function. In other words: Men need to direct their sexualized aggression somewhere, and if we don't provide them with acceptable targets, they will "prey" on each and every woman.

So many patriarchic themes are tied into this thought, I am not even sure where to begin! First, as I said, it tries to connect violence with sex. Feminists have long pointed out that rape, abuse, and assault have nothing to do with sex, and everything with power and control, with domination. By propagating this myth of rape as an expression of uncontrollable desire, we find excuses for it. "He couldn't help it." "He lost control." And from there, it is only a small step to: "She provoked him". "She shouldn't have done this or that." "She drank too much." "Had she not been dressed like this ..." and so on. Let me be frank here: there is nothing anybody can do that makes it ok to violate them, to hurt and humiliate them, or to rape them. I could be walking around with no clothes on, and it would still not be okay. I does not matter how many times someone might have consented to sex with you in the past, or how many sexual partners they might have had (enter: "slut-shaming"), there is nothing, I repeat: nothing, that justifies or excuses this kind of behavior. That is what we have to teach men and women, girls and boys, if we want to change things in this world.

Secondly, we dis-empower women in multiple ways, by separating them into two groups, those that we classify as targets, as objects to be used by men, in order to "protect" the other group of women, the "good" and "pure" ones. We tell women two things: a) if you are attacked/abused/raped/assaulted, it is because you have somehow created a situation in which a man had no choice but to lose control; and b) if you are a "good" and "decent" girl, this will not happen to you - because "it" only happens to women who "deserve it": "sluts" and "whores", according to patriarchy. Just like it took us way too long to acknowledge that there is in fact such as thing as marital rape (yes, it is in fact that case that simply because someone is married to you does not give you the right to use their body whenever you feel like it), it took us way too long to acknowledge that prostitutes can in fact be raped. I did juxtapose these two things intentionally, because in both cases we had (and still have) this notion ingrained in our, in society's, mind that someone's body is actually not their own, but is yours to use as you see fit, for one reason or another, either because they have taken some sort of vow, or because they are a "certain kind" of woman. We need to eradicate this idea from our collective mind once and for all, if we want things to change. Nothing will ever give someone a right to another one's body. This same idea, this assumption that someone's body is our property, is public property, starts with objectification, and it end with physical violence, rape, and murder. They are all expressions of the same, underlying ideology - patriarchy. This is how this relates to the conversation started by Ashley Judd in her recent article and this is also where it connects to the second tweet that prompted me to write this - but since this is already pretty long, it will be addressed separately, in my next post!

"Puffy Face Moments" II - Self-Reflections (Still Inspired by Ashley Judd)

Okay, it's barely past noon, and I am exhausted. Why is that, you might ask? Well, I decided, after writing my post yesterday about the conversation regarding the objectification of women and our own complicity in perpetuating it, to watch myself closely. I decided to find out just how much I - unconsciously, and certainly unintentionally - participate  - still! - in this pervasive and destructive system. I vowed to monitor my thoughts and call myself out every time I participate. I wanted to consciously take not of every time I objectify, disassemble and judge myself (or other women) based on physical appearance over the course of a regular day. And I decided today would be the day to do it.

6:30 - The Mirror

The first time I caught myself doing it was when I first looked in the mirror. I had just forcibly removed myself from bed and made it to the bathroom, and I caught my reflection in the mirror. My first thought was something like: "God, I look especially bad this morning!" The next time I looked in the mirror, after showering, to apply my make-up, I caught myself disapproving of my nose and spending some time wondering about potential first signs of wrinkles around my mouth. 

7:30 - Breakfast

I actually did waste time and thoughts on the calorie content of potential breakfast items. Not more than a few seconds, but those seconds are lost forever, and I could and should have spent them more productively.

9:25 - On the Bus

It took real effort to keep myself from comparing myself to every woman getting on the bus. "She's skinnier than I am". "I am skinnier than her".

9:50 - Walking

On my walk to campus, the same thing happened. There's this trend among female college students to wear leggings, so I noticed how much attention I was paying specifically to the legs of these other women.

As you can see, I was wasting a lot of time on these things. I spent this time thinking about entirely irrelevant stuff, instead of concerning myself with worthwhile thoughts instead. And not only could these things be classified as a complete and utter waste of my time, they are also destructive, negative actions. What good could possibly come from focusing on or thinking about the relative attractiveness of myself and other women? All it is doing is tearing somebody down, creating this competition and divisions, contributing to the fact that women see other women as opponents too often - because that is what we are taught to do. We reduce this person to a body - a collection of body parts, to be more specific - and after having compartmentalized, mentally disassembled them, we move on to passing judgement on this object we have just created. And by doing so, we open ourselves up to being treated the same way. This is the insidious brilliance of patriarchy: by suggesting that individual women can gain something - approval, attention, worth - by being better than other women, it attempts to give us the impression that we can be successful, liked and loved in this system, all we have to do is show that we are not "like them". And so we do.

I consider myself a feminist. I have read many books and articles, and taken classes, dealing with sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy. I am aware of how these things work. I make a conscious effort, every day, not to say mean, ugly, and destructive things about others, about other women based on physical attributes, not to attack them as women or because they are women, I refrain from using gendered slurs and insults. And yet, within only a short period of time, on a single, fairly average day, I have caught myself participating in, contributing to, the objectification of women, the reduction of persons to bodily attributes, and a spirit of competition. The next  -  and equally difficult step - for me was to try and figure out why I was doing this.

So far, I have reached the following conclusions, though I don't claim to have found the ultimate answer. I think that I, like so many of us, am still struggling to "un-learn" a lesson I have been taught all my life: that a woman's ultimate goal is to attract a man's attention and make him interested enough to stick around, and that the only way to reach this goal is through physical beauty, and sex. Face it, even today, the only real success a woman can have is getting married. No matter how much she achieves in her profession, how talented, successful and skilled she might be at what she does, how much good she brings to the world, if she's over 35 and unmarried, she's considered a failure. I know that this mindset is certainly pervasive enough to have imprinted itself deeply within me. I know I disagree with it. I know I am opposed to everything it stands for, everything it tries to teach me about myself, my worth and my role in life. And yet I still find myself worrying about it. My grandfather passed away when I was ten years old, and I do not have a ton of memories of him. But the one thing that has been burned into my soul is one of his preferred "jokes" (notice how these things are always packaged as jokes, in order to portray those expressing their disagreement as a bunch of humorless, over-sensitive "chicks"): "What do women and tin cans have in common? Once they've been opened, they both become worthless". So much about the way women are valued, are taught to value themselves, is encapsulated in this one line. Attractiveness and "purity". We are taught to dress in alluring, sexually revealing ways to get men interested, but not to engage in actual sexual activity, because once we do, we lose what little value we might have had.

My grandmother (and I do not hold these things against her, as she is over 80 years old, and grew up in a totally different world, where the things she was taught were even more extreme and containing than they are today) asks me, every time she sees me, whether I have "found someone". She is extremely unsettled by the fact that her 29-year-old granddaughter is single. At my age, she (and she's not the only one!) tells me, I should be married and have kids, because soon I will be too old to ever be able to make a man permanently interested in me. My worth is negatively correlated with my age, and I am, or so I am told, rapidly approaching a point at which it will decrease with increasing speed. I know that these things are cultural norms with which I don't agree, and I know that I wouldn't want to spend my life with a  man who only values me for my looks. But I still catch myself thinking about these things. A few months ago, I had a conversation with my grandmother about my relationship status. I told her that I would rather remain single, and be happy, than spend my life with a man who makes me unhappy, and that, therefore, I will remain on my own until I find someone I truly want to be with. She looked at me, thought for a moment, and replied: "You know, you are probably right!". That really made my day, because it means a lot for her to be able to see the world this way.

I have never been physically abused or assaulted - sadly, that is not the norm for women around the world, or even in this country. What I have done, though, is consented to sexual activity out of fear of being rejected or abandoned otherwise. I recall numerous occasions, in my past relationships, where, though I had no desire whatsoever and was not in "the mood", I consciously made the decision that I couldn't say no, because, by saying no too many times, I risked my current boyfriend losing interest in me. Though I am confident that I would not make these choices again today, I shudder at the thought of what that says about my self-image, my perception of my relationship, and my impression of why exactly this guy was spending time with me, why he remained interested. I might have been unfair to him - I never felt comfortable talking to him about this, and this perception of not being able to share the things I worried about, out of a fear of making myself vulnerable and giving him something to use against me, is probably part of the reason why it did not work out for us after all. But this behavior does exemplify something about me, and about the lessons I have internalized, and that I, even after years of trying to "un-learn" them, have still not been able to remove entirely.

I hate gossip. I try not to pay attention to it, and I try not to participate in it. I think it creates unnecessary negativity in this world, and this negative energy will create nothing but bad consequences for the one gossiping, and the one being gossiped about. And believe me, it is not the case that only women gossip. Nonetheless, I have participated. I have been party to conversations about someone else's physical appearance - usually the subject of these conversations are women, and more often than not they are famous women - politicians, actresses, models, singers. I believe that we focus on these women to teach other women a lesson. The lesson we are meant to take away from mean-spirited comments about the bodies of powerful women is: Be careful, if you go too far, you will have to pay a price! We might be taught that power makes men attractive, but that surely is not the message we receive about powerful women. The other message is this: Even when we build you up, when we applaud you for your attractiveness, when you are one of the women who actually comes close to this standard of beauty we have set up, we can tear you down, and we will, as soon as you do the unforgivable: age, even slightly! We learn that we need to be attractive and non-threatening, and that, to be attractive, somebody else has to be painted as unattractive. There might be some truth to the fact that "ordinary" women participate so willingly in the tearing-down of "famous" women because they view these women as representing the standard of beauty they will never attain, and are thus glad to find flaws, and to see them fall of this pedestal, because they are viewed as symbols of all most women will never be. But just as we are all perpetrators in this, we are also all victims - and ridiculing actresses for "puffy faces" just helps to upholds the standards, the system that is at the hear of all of this.

I have been thinking about these things a lot over the last week or so, and I do think that I have grown, that I have become more aware of the ways patriarchy works within us and through us - and awareness, consciousness, is our most powerful weapon in this fight. I am extremely grateful to humanitarian advocate/activist and actress Ashley Judd for having the courage to start this conversation, for choosing to fight back instead of letting herself be silenced, shamed and humiliated by this attempt to objectify her and "put her in her place". I have certainly gained new admiration for her.

"Puffy Face Moments" - Inspired by Ashley Judd

Picture: Reuters

About a week ago, humanitarian advocate/activist and actress Ashley Judd published an article in The Daily Beast, calling out sexism, misogyny and internalized norms of patriarchy rampant in our society - and frequently expressed public through "body-shaming" women. Apparently, and to my delight, this seems to have caused something akin to a movement, at least as far as the blogoshpere and social media such as Facebook, and especially Twitter, are concerned. 

This, in my opinion, is a truly exciting development.  The fact that attacks on a public figure  - a female public figure, to be precise - have led her not only to deny the so-called charges, but to turn them around, to use the situation in order to draw attention to a much deeper problem, and to reframe the situation is a brilliant, admirable, even courageous thing to do. Things could have taken a very different turn. One can easily imagine how taking a stand like this opens one up for further attacks and ridicule. Luckily for all of us, Ashley Judd was not deterred by this. Because of this, we can now observe first-hand the chord this is striking with women (and men) of all walks of life. The deep contempt with which we treat women's bodies as soon as they refuse to conform to some unattainable ideal of perfection, the deep-seated ageism leveled specifically at women, the assumption that women's bodies are ours to deconstruct, to criticize and objectify have all been brought to light. 

All of that, by itself, would be enough to applaud Ashley Judd for her words. But she didn't stop there, she in fact stated a lesser-known characteristic of patriarchy, and drew attention to the very essence of this particular, well-situated system of oppression: our own complicity. Knowingly or unknowingly, almost every single one of us, men and women, have internalized the values and norms of the omnipresent ideology. We apply it to other women, when we judge them, when we compare them to this unattainable ideal, but we also apply it to ourselves, and in this, we may be our own worst enemies. Almost every woman knows the feeling of looking at herself in the mirror and feeling shame about not meeting this internalized standard of perfection. We criticize our faces, our bodies. We may think our legs are too short, our butts are too big, our breasts are too small. We fret over wrinkles, pimples, and grey hair and spend enormous amounts of money on beauty products. If you've ever watched television shows geared towards female audiences and been foolish enough to watch the commercials, you will most likely have noticed that the overwhelming majority of products advertised are cosmetics, diet products or lingerie. Ashley Judd has pointed that out, and has been honest and courageous enough to admit to having participated herself. This awareness is crucial for understanding and changing how patriarchy affects women (and men) every single minute of every single day. It is not only "them", it's "us", and we might not even be aware -  or we might not want to be aware. Denial is a powerful human skill, and becoming aware of our own denials is the most crucial first step to changing the way this world works for women. Feminism has long tried to further this awareness through consciousness-raising, through the promotion of woman-to-woman bonding through which we all can (and have to) learn not to see other women as competitors, but as allies and friends. Patriarchy co-opts us by suggesting that we can elevate our own status, increase our worth in the eyes of society and men, by showing that we are not "like other women", that we are actually better than they are, and that we, too, have nothing but contempt for their imperfections. This, of course, is nothing but a big lie which has worked wonderfully against women's own interests, much like the old roman saying "divide et impera" (divide and conquer/rule) suggests.

If it's ok to ridicule, shame and humiliate Ashley Judd for her "puffy face", it is ok to do that to every woman. If it's ok to express contempt for Madonna because of her age, we pass the same judgement on every woman. If it's ok to call Hillary Rodham Clinton "emasculating" or a "bitch" (or any variety of the underlying concepts), we teach every woman that, if they show ambition and strive for powerful positions, they will have to suffer dire consequences - and, judging by the lack of women willing to run for office, many seem to have learned the lesson well. If it's ok to attack Sarah Palin not for her issue positions and policy stances, but as a woman, by sexualizing and objectifying her, it becomes ok to use this tactic against each and every woman we are uncomfortable with for whatever reason.

So, for all these reasons, we have to be grateful to Ashley Judd.