Simile is not Causality

I find posters tacked up around the department today. "Carol Adams draws the parallels between women and animals, sexism and meat in The Sexual Politics of Meat Slideshow," sponsored by, among others, the Campus Women's Center and the Hindu Student's Council. The underexposed illustrations are of a cow showing the cuts of meat and a naked woman similarly outlined.

Pretending that metaphors are reality appears to be Adams' stock-in trade.

That pornography often objectifies the object of desire to be a mere body with automatic stereotypical reactions is clear, and bad; and that our arts and culture are being "pornographied" as porn becomes mainstream is also clear, and bad. But an sexually objectified body isn't meat, but skin and meat and reactions. A hamburger will just lie there; a pork chop never says "Do it again!" Even simple nude pictures have an implicit narrative of welcome.

I say nothing about comparisons with S/M and torture pornography, partly because I know little about it, but mostly because it doesn't form the majority of the market. You can't honestly take an extreme as typical.

So is her claim dishonesty or self-deception? I appeal to common experience: the constellation of feelings in erotic desire don't map into the sensations of desire for a chili-dog. To be self-deceived about something so obvious demands that she be horribly emotionally crippled. I think she's dishonest.

I think the Hindu sponsorship is telling. The claim that animals are equivalent to people is not supported by science--it is essentially a religious claim. If science could make any such statement (it can't) it would be more along the lines of "life forms are not all equivalent to each other."