Bearing the Vegetarian Word

On p. 105 of The Sexual Politics of Meat, Adams begins a discussion that she continues throughout the rest of the book, and that is of vegetarian writers through the ages "Bearing the Vegetarian Word." (It is a subheading on that page...105. Continuum, 1991. It's in the last few pages of Chapter 5.) Because we are virtually all raised as meat-eaters, excepting a few children of vegetarian parents, we often learn of vegetarianism from the recorded words of vegetarians, and not through in-person dialogue with vegetarians. The book contains a lot of history about a network of interconnected literary and political figures over the past few centuries who practiced vegetarianism and the way they influenced each other, including Percy and Mary Shelley; she includes an entire chapter (Chapter 6) titled "Frankenstein's Vegetarian Monster."

Since my last post was about all the opportunities to hear the vegetarian word which I passed up, I thought maybe I would talk a little about the one who finally came bearing the vegetarian word for me. (Besides, y'know, I'll use any excuse to post a pic, because I do have it that bad...)

I was 17 while I had my internship at the newspaper. I started college the next fall. It was October/November of that year, 2005, that I started listening to the Indigo Girls. You know how that is, with an artist. There's a song here or there that you like immediately, then the rest grow on you, and search out all the albums, ordering them if you can't get them in the store, and so on, and so forth. Much like Melissa, I had to learn everything about them. I had my own Internet this time around, so I read about them. Somewhere in this studying, I found out that Amy, the one with the brown hair, was a vegetarian. A vegan, to be exact. I don't remember finding out this information, I just know that I must have acquired it, somewhere between all the online articles, because I remember having the knowledge early on in my learning about them. I didn't pay it a lot of attention, just thought that it was cool that Amy did her own thing; I didn't take it personally, the way I had with Melissa. I suppose maturity can do that to a person...

Anyway, toward the end of 2006, I started to change. I was in the first semester of my second year. I was edgy all the time, and it didn't take a lot to anger or discourage me. I felt heartbroken, and I couldn't pinpoint why. The closer I got to the holidays, the worse it got. I don't remember Thanksgiving at all, but I assume it happened...? Anyway, it was nearing exam week. I was finishing up things, turning things in, and putting off things, too, to be honest. During one of these sessions of putting things off, I was browsing the section of this old Indigo fansite, lifeblood.net, which is down, now, (but it's on the Internet Archive,) called "socs" for the "stream of consciousness." It's Amy's talkings from mid-song, transcribed from bootlegs, (which alas, are not in the Internet Archive, though I did manage to snag a few while they were up.) 

Most of the "socs" are from various performances of "Chickenman." It's one of those songs that doesn't seem to make much sense until you hear it explained. Here were paragraphs and paragraphs of explanations, explaining more than just the song. There is too much to repost here, or even quote from, because I tried that, and I got a got a little copy-paste-happy with it, because there was so much good, but I shall try to summarize:

The Girls were on an early tour through the US and Canada. They were eating a lot of fast food. When it was Amy's turn to drive the vehicle, she was always surprised and saddened by how many animals she hit with the vehicle, and how many animals she saw lying around that others had hit with their vehicles. She started to see her pets, her food, and even her own mortal self in the animals killed on the road, (including the bugs). She talked about going for a run in Toronto and seeing a woman who someone had beated up; a crowd of spectators stood around her, but Amy didn't stop; she kept running. She and Emily played at a bar in Houston, and the owner let them stay the night there. Amy described it as a "brothel" where people were doing drugs. She felt pretty bad about life in general, a feeling that had been haunting her while they were on the road. The next morning, when she was driving, she found a yard sale and decided to see if she could buy something and cheer up. A very dirty man came up to her and she kept asking him how much various items costed, only to have him say each time, "Not for sale." Finally, he told her, "Nothing's for sale; this is my front yard!" She felt embarrassed, realizing that she was not entitled to the things she had assumed she was entitled to. She wondered about the individuality and life of this man, but didn't ask him any questions. She saw a sign nearby that said "Chickenman," and took this as the sign she had been looking for.

(I find it interesting after reading The Sexual Politics of Meat to revisit these passages that I read those years ago and see that, out of the events that influenced Amy to give up meat, one was running past a battered woman, and another was spending a night in a "brothel" where women had sex for drugs and money.)

I had to admit to myself, all these rich stories were compelling. I had never thought about there being a story to why Amy had become a vegetarian, (or anyone, for that matter.) It only makes sense that there would be, of course, but I had never considered it before, (the way I had not considered a lot of things.) She had to start off "just like the rest of us," a meat-eater, and go through a metamorphosis to become a vegetarian.

Since my interest was piqued, I started researching. I read plenty about it. I even watched a few videos, (yes, those "We snuck into the slaugherhouse and this is what we found!" videos.) I was not one who needed much convincing at all; the research I was doing soon became about how to go about being who I was going to be, and not so much about, "Oh yeah? Why should I?"

Things happened so quickly after that. On the Tuesday of exam week, I was in the car with my dad, and I brought the subject up with him, just to test the waters. It didn't seem so bad. On Wednesday, my mom brought KFC home. I ate a piece, even though I didn't want to. On Thursday, she made S.O.S. for supper, and I purposely made sure I was occupied deeply in doing something else, (I forget what, now,) to eat when they ate. I went in the kitchen when everyone else was gone and ate the toast without gravy on it. On Friday, I was freaking out on the way to the pizza place where we were going out to eat, and I finally worked up the courage to ask them if they could get a cheese pizza instead of pepperoni, because I wanted to not eat meat anymore. I wasn't sure how I felt about cheese yet, but I was sure how I felt about meat. 

I was really sensitive about Amy being the one who started the chain reaction of thoughts going in my mind. I was wary that there would be accusations that, "You're just doing this because she does it, and you think she's cool," so I didn't talk about her, I just said that it was something I had been thinking about for a long time, which was true. My thoughts and feelings were mine, she just turned the switch. Besides, it's always nice to have a role model who makes you feel like you're not so strange, even if the rest of the world says you are.

Incidentally enough, hehe...there's a thread over on the IndigoVortex right now where some people talk about Amy onstage telling a story of putting a dead bird that she found in her freezer. (With minimal detective skills, it will be easy to deduce who I am.) Some comments include, "Don't eat ice cream at Amy's!" (as though she would have that,) "Amy off a little," and "Amy was trying to connect to the bird or something; I think she needs armchair time!" It was all I could do not to post and remind these peeps, "Um, a dead bird in the freezer is weird? Well, a lot of people are weird, then, because most people have dead birds in their freezer, right beside their ice cream, and then, they eat them. At least Amy wasn't going to eat the dead bird." I knew I'd get flamed though, so I just sat on it and sort of laughed to myself. I could already see the replies. "Yeah, but that's different!" Or "Yeah, but it's unsanitary to put a dead bird in your freezer that you found outside, when it comes sealed from the factory, that's all right!" (because Lord knows, those chickens come from the factory sanitized and sterile...that's why you'll get salmonella from them.) 

Well, this was to be the Megapost to end all Vegetarian Megaposts, but it's not. I found some of my words I saved from that time period, and because I think they're valid, and because this is my blog, I'm going to post them and comment on them in a future post. 

I'll proof this in the morning; right now I'm desperate for sleep. Later.

Vegetarian Impulses

Before I even thought about seriously becoming a vegetarian, I had vegetarian impulses. For years. I guess they began when I was 12- or 13-ish. Carol J. Adams writes about how vegetarians can trigger meat-eaters who are already struggling to accept meat eating; my trigger was a vegetarian in my immediate surroundings—my friend at school. Her mother had started learning about vegetarianism and started eating that way, feeding her daughter that way, and teaching her daughter everything that she was learning about the animals and eating more ethically. They were learning together and supporting each other. I admit, I was quite the IRL troll toward her when she started becoming vocal about being vegetarian.

"But eggs! They are babies. You are eating babies! What about milk? You are eating babies' food! What about plants? They are alive, too! You have to kill them to eat!"

I think on several occasions, she got quite frustrated with my trolling. I did my best to offer good, strong, sturdy arguments as to why, "Mitigating the amount of suffering you cause in the world: UR DOIN IT WRONG!" Inwardly, though, as she was praising vegetarianism, and I was trying to shoot it down,* I was thinking to myself that this vegetarian idea...well, it wasn't half-bad...

That same school year...7th grade?...a fly got into my bedroom. She wasn't a mere housefly, either, she was one of those big-ass flies that, fucking, will bite you if she sees fit. So, applying the typical, inordinate amount of freak-out toward "OMG bug in the house!" that people tend to do, I chased the fly into the bathroom and shut the door. I had a wad of toilet paper in my hand so that when I smashed the fucker, her dirty bug-blood wouldn't get on my fingers. She zipped so fast; I could never outsmart/outrun her; I was growing tired, bored and frustrated with the damn thing. 

I remembered shortly before that at school, when we had been outside in the grass, running around after a standardized test session, and my vegetarian friend tried to rescue a cricket that was to become the lunch of some lizard or something in one of the science teachers' rooms. The science teacher quickly shooed her away and said, "Lizards cannot be vegetarian!" Then, she gave the cricket to the lizard as my vegetarian friend watched.

So; I was in my bathroom with this fly, having already wasted a lot of time hunting her. She made me think of the cricket. That cricket had been eaten by the lizard—a lizard that lived in a cage in a science room—against the protests of my friend. This fly, though—this fly did not have to die. So, being a kid, with all of a kid's ways, I said to the fly, "Please, I don't want you in my bathroom. Not really. If you let me catch you in the toilet paper, I'll take you outside and let you free. I promise." 

The fly sat down on the mirror. I wearily lifted my hand to her. She didn't move. I cupped my palm around her, touching the glass. She didn't move. I collected her up in the toilet paper. She didn't move. I went outside and opened the toilet paper. Without wasting any time, she took off. 

I wanted to be a vegetarian.

I told my mom about the event. She said with a laugh that whenever another fly got in the house, she was going to blame me and say that it was either that fly or one of its grandchildren, and I should have killed the fly when I had the chance. I explained that I had promised the fly, and I wanted to be a woman of my word. She said that it was just a fly; who cares about keeping your word with a fly? I don't remember the exact language I used to expand on my reasoning, but she picked up enough on what I was actually saying behind the words, (which was, "Can I become a vegetarian?") to tell me, "Be careful, now. Don't let that Paul McCartney way of thinking get to you." 

So down went the impulses, back down deep. We had a King Arthur party in English class to celebrate the end of our study of King Arthur. We were going to watch the movie while snacking on foods that everyone bought/made. I baked the cake; homemade (out of the box.) My vegetarian friend had some, and while she was complimenting me on how good it was, the voice was saying in the back of my head, "You can still eat cake; you can still eat cake—it's true—you can still eat cake..."

When I was in ninth grade, about 2001-2002, I had to learn everything about Melissa Etheridge. She was the only bridge between Queers Suck, SC and happy self-acceptance for me, and I felt lucky to know (of) her and have her to look up to. Unfortunately, I did not have Internet at my house at the time, and even if I had, I still could not read about her, because Melissa was...well, there was a Prohibition of sorts against Melissa in my house at the time...so I had my best friend look her up on his computer and tell me stuff about her on the phone. One day, during such a Melissa Facts session, he informed me that she was a vegetarian.

WHAT? Oh. So Melissa, who has never let me down, who has declared it okay to love yourself even if you don't love the dick, she is...criticizing me for eating meat? She's judging me? (Mind you, now, I had heard nothing at all of her judging anyone, I just assumed, as meat-eaters do, that her vegetarianism was an automatic judgment against my meat eating.) I became a bit frustrated. I mean, I had already seen the "I'd rather go naked than wear fur" pic of her and Julie, but still. Melissa...Melissa. Oh, how could you? I want to know I'm okay. You've told me I was okay before. Tell me I'm okay again, dammit! You can see the inherent silliness in this line of thinking, especially directed at a public figure who doesn't know you exist, but that was my emotion; she thought I was doing something wrong. In all truth, I was the one who thought I was doing something wrong, but since I hadn't been thinking about it before hearing this tidbit about someone else's eating habits, then it was this knowledge about them that was upsetting me—not my own knowledge about me. It makes sense now that I've read Adams, but before that...

I'll never forget the tremendous sense of relief that came with smuggling the Live and Alone DVD into the house and watching the bonus materials and seeing her order chicken at a hotel. Chicken! It was all dirty rumors; nothing more! Melissa didn't hate meat-eaters. Fuck, she was one! And I was free to stuff all the unpleasantness back down, where it belonged...

(Actually, as I learned later, she had been a vegetarian, and worked with PETA, but then she got into a situation where people were playing devil's advocate with her and asking, "Yeah, but what about animal testing for cures for cancer/AIDS?" and when she agreed that this was sometimes a necessary evil, but fur was not a necessary evil, PETA got all upset and came after her, so she basically said, "Fuck it," and quit trying at all. I read about it on the Internet a couple of years ago; I can't find it now; believe me, I'd cite my sources if I could...)

I can remember one other time in high school...I guess it was eleventh grade or something? It was either tenth grade, or eleventh grade, pre-leg break. We had this program at my school to where if you GPA was yea high, you would get a goodie of marginal value during lunch one day each nine weeks. Not to pride myself too much, but I was a pretty clever kid and managed to be on the list EVERY nine weeks, (ha!) although sometimes, I was on the red list, not the gold or platinum. Hum. Anyway, this goodie was sometimes an object, like a water bottle, a foam mitten to take to the football game, etc. Sometimes it was special sandwiches from Subway or Wendy's. On one particular occasion, they happened to be burgers from Wendy's. So, I was sitting there at the lunch table with my burger. My vegetarian friend, the one from a few years back, she came into my mind. I thought that these sandwiches weren't a very good reward for a vegetarian's good grades, I mean, fuck...it was like not getting anything at all! You can't eat em. In all honestly, you'd probably wish that they didn't exist and weren't all over the cafeteria. I mentioned her to my friend, the one who looked up Melissa on the Internet for me. Then I said, "I think I want to be a vegetarian." Then, I continued eating the cow-meat like it were nothing. My Melissa-researcher friend laughed.

"You're in the middle of eating a burger, and you just said you wanted to be a vegetarian?" he asked.

I shrugged. "What better time to think about these things, than when I'm eating a piece of meat?"

In the summer following HS, I had an internship at the newspaper. My vegetarian friend's vegetarian mom worked there. One day, we were sitting at the computers together, clicking away, and she started talking about food and vegetarianism.

"Do you eat a lot of meat?" she asked.

I wanted to say no, but I couldn't. I ate meat every damned day. I decided to avoid the question with bullshit. "Um, I don't like chili; I can't eat meat that way, because I can't tell what's in it. And I don't like 'salad,' I mean, I like 'salad' as in green stuff, but i don't like potato salad, seafood salad, or macaroni salad, or anything that I can't tell what is. I like being able to see all the ingredients."

She didn't press me any further about my meat consumption; I suppose my bullshit indicated that i didn't want to talk about it. I know she didn't mistake it for a legitimate answer.

Yes, I still eat meat. No, I don't want to. I'm going to be a vegetarian. One day. It's in my future. I know it is. I want it. I'm just not there yet, okay? I like what you're doing. I want to do it, too. But I can't yet. Not yet, I wanted to tell her.

I went out to lunch with another woman who worked there on a different day later that summer. We went to a buffet-style pizza place. She had an assortment of pizza slices on her plate. I had only cheese. She leaned in close.

"Are you a vegetarian, like x?" she asked me.

"No," I admitted. "I mean...I love the animals and everything, but...I still think we need bacon."

She laughed. I had lifted that line directly from a younger version of myself; at some point during my childhood/teenage years, I had been watching the movie Babe with my mom and granny. While we were watching the opening scene, of the mom and babies in the factory farm, I said, decidedly, "They are trying to make us feel sorry for the animals. But we need bacon!" It had my mom and granny quite amused. I said it with a lighthearted tone, but all the while, I was wondering in my heart of hearts whether I really needed bacon that much...

so, that's about it, up until the part where I decided finally to try it, which I will tell; feels good to get it out there, actually, but I'm tired tonight, so...

*Yes, "shoot it down," exactly like a wild bird. Exactly.

Blocked Vegetarians

One of Carol J. Adam's central themes in the book Living Among Meat Eaters is that meat eaters are all "blocked vegetarians," or more specifically, to be fair, vegetarians should look at meat-eaters that way. They are all vegetarians who were taught to eat meat from early childhood, and at various points in their lives, have had the knowledge bubble to the forefront of their thoughts that their "food" is actually slain animals, and where "you" (the presumed vegetarian audience) examined these feelings and made the decision not to eat meat, the meat eaters have chosen to repress those thoughts and rationalize and not think about it. Then when you show up to dinner, all those conflicted feelings about how much they love meat but know it's wrong come back, and because you are the trigger, they take it out on you. The more fiercely they attack you, the more conflicted they are about their own meat-eating.

Her advice, generally, is not to troll them back, or inundate them with information, or talk bluntly about the way meat is made, or any of those things, which it will be instinctual for one to do. Instead, she suggests that you stay out of their way and let them sort through their feelings, then do your best to be there for them when they need resources.

I mean, it seems so completely simple, and makes so much sense, and yet, it seems so revolutionary for me to think about it this way. My parents think about their own meat-eating? Their resistance to my vegetarianism was in effort to stop me from being a reminder of it for them? I had been practicing vegetarianism for a few weeks toward the end of 2006/beginning of 2007* when my dad said, "I'll give you $300 if you come back over to our side." I was profoundly offended. "Am I not on your side?" was my general reaction. In a way, I figured he had just bought so far into the "we need meat to live" conspiracy that he was concerned for my wellbeing, but mostly, I figured he just wanted to control me in the same way that all parents just want to control their children. Because they can; because they said so. It never occurred to me that he was bribing me to shut up; giving me hush money. If I ate meat again, then he could see that I had been "wrong" about all this vegetarian ráiméis before, meaning he was right about it all along; meaning that he couldn't be wrong about his own meat-eating. Even though I understood that it was about him, I didn't realize that it could be about his own feelings about the meat he continued to eat.

Today, my mother and I dropped Cappy off at the animal hospital. They said it would be 4:30 before he was ready to pick up. He is not always the most trusting around humans, and puts up a fight when he feels threatened, so she decided to have him sedated before he got his shave to get rid of the pervasive mats in his fur. (His lack of trust in humans is the reason we haven't managed to keep him brushed all along.) I'm sure it made it much easier for the groomer, but I don't think my mom was concerned in the least for the groomer; she was concerned for Pappy, wanting him to have as few traumatic memories as possible. While we were on our way back home in the afternoon after getting him, she teared up in the car. 

"He has feelings. I know he's just an animal, but he still has feelings." 

I remembered Adams's theory of blocked vegetarians, and thought about what she was saying. My mother, who said once in the past, (in reference to me not eating meat anymore,) "You make me feel like I'm being judged in my own home; like I'm doing something wrong!" felt empathy for her cat; an animal. (Adams cites the "You make me feel guilty/judged" as one of the most common criticisms meat-eaters have of vegetarians.) For the past few days, she's been talking out loud to herself, "He's just a cat, [Mom], get over it. He's not a child; he's not a person." She's been thinking a lot about this the past few days.

And here she was, explicitly asserting that her cat had feelings, and she realized exactly what she was saying: one did not need to be a human in order to be a unique individual. I was turning this over in my mind, marveling at it. There were so many things I wanted to say in response, but I didn't say anything. I just stood out of the way, as Adams suggests. Just stand out of their way and let them work it out.

"But cats and dogs are a cut above chickens and cows!" she added.

Wow. And I hadn't said anything. Cows have feelings, too, just like cats. Chickens have feelings, too, just like cats. It was there, for sure. Perhaps she was picking up my vibes with her ESP. Perhaps she just assumed that I was having these thoughts and had to preemptively counter them, lest I start believing I'm really onto something. But maybe, just maybe, she had been sitting there having the thought on her own, and had to do what she could to try to convince herself...

Not only that, but she stuck an "absent referent" in there, to boot: Cats and dogs are a cut above chickens and cows. "A cut above"...the "higher up" the cow or hog toward the shoulder, the higher quality the cut of meat. Cats and dogs are more expensive "cuts" than are cows and chickens; she implicitly reminds herself that cats, for all their individuality and feelings, are still animals. Not children, [Mom]. Not people. 

I never would have believed it. I had trouble believing it when it when I read it. Now, I see evidence of it in my immediate life. Meat-eaters are blocked vegetarians. Damn.

*I would never want to mislead my fans. For this reason, I am going to (soon) include a post about my two-year detour from the vegetarian path into fish-eating, and why I did that. You're so going to want to slap me when you find out what made me do it.)

I had in my brain...

...the thought to write a post on anti-vegetarian trolls, but between contemplating writing it and actually doing it, I started reading two other books by Carol J. Adams: Living Among Meat Eaters, which is a whole book about how to deal with IRL trolls, and also The Pornography of Meat, which deals with the specific sexualized way that women's oppression and animals' oppression are linked. So I'm holding off on that post for awhile.

Also, our cat Cappy is currently at the groomer's getting him-furry-self shaved, and I will do my best to *sneak* a picture for my fans...hehe...

Big and Chunky

So, on this message board I post on sometimes, someone posted a link to the below video. I didn't post what I thought of it, because I had already gotten all fat acceptance on them earlier in the thread, and I didn't want to push my luck by letting my humorless feminism show. Instead, I posted a row of "shocked" and "laughing" smileys, and erased the question I had typed, "Is this porn?"

These are hippopotamuses, right? Well...They're walking upright like humans, and they are very humanoid. The naked buttocks look like naked buttocks to me. And...okay, I get that it's a movie about animals; if I'm not mistaken it's a movie about zoo animals who escape and make their exodus back to the jungle, is that right? Madagascar/Madagascar 2? Still...I can't help but get the feeling that, well, these aren't exactly white hippopotamuses, and that makes the sexualized humanoid quality all the more troublesome. But, in any case, this is a kid's movie, right? Call me a prude, but I don't think I could endorse this kind of entertainment for my hypothetical children.

They say...

...that when your wisdom teeth start coming in, your life is half over. I can feel my top ones tight against the inside of my skin; they haven't broken through yet. It's just a superstition, but if it be true, then I will live to be 44. A very early 44, as I've just had my birthday.

If my bottom ones decide to come in as well, I might have to get them removed. I have space for *one* tooth on each side...but I don't think I have room for *two.*

Hair and feathers

At the buffet restaurant where I worked as a cashier in 2007, (the same one where I decided not to "fat talk" anymore,) they had country, Southern food. The menu changed a little day-to-day, not unusual for a buffet restaurant, and most days, they had chicken in some form or another. On one particular day, they had barbecue chicken wings. One of the customers, an elderly white man, came up to the cash register with a bowl, heaping full of barbecue chicken wings. He slammed it down on the counter.

"There's a feather on that chicken!" he stated.

I didn't understand at first that he was yelling at me about the chicken feather. (I know, I know...I should have known this; even though I knew that a feather being on the chicken that I didn't cook and had nothing to do with at all was not in any way my fault, when you work behind a counter anywhere, you are a visible representative of the establishment that the customer has an issue with, so, symbolically, and actually in their mind, it is your fault. I was young, though, and hadn't been working there long enough to realize that.) I simply read his statement as surprise. I looked at the chicken and laughed.

"Oh, wow, there is a feather on there, that's pretty funny!" (I know, I know, let me say it again: I WAS YOUNG.) This is the train of thoughts I had: A feather; a blatantly obvious feather on a chicken wing. It's not unreasonable that a chicken feather might possibly escape intact from the chicken factory. Those things are heavily automated and mechanized; so many chickens come through that surely a feather or two is to be missed. But my coworkers in the back back there? Had they missed the feather, or just ignored it? Because a lot of days, I came in to work and didn't really give a shit about my job...hey, it happens sometimes, you know. I was amused at the thought that they had seen the feather and said "fuck it." Unless, you know, the chicken came in a bag with the sauce already on it and they heated it that way. Then, it would be entirely possible for everyone along the line in the chicken-production process to miss this feather, right from the slaughterhouse workers up to my coworkers who ultimately prepared the chicken. Once pointed out, though, that white feather was impossible not to see against the white flesh, under all that red-brown sauce. My customer just happened to be the unfortunate one to get this imperfect piece of a chicken, with a single feather still intact, but it's just one of those things that happens when you eat an animal that used to have feathers, right? You might wind up looking at one of those feathers at some point; it's life.

He became angry. "No, it ain't funny! It's disgusting! I ain't eating that!"

Offended at my callousness; at my failure to apologize profusely at my restaurant's collective failure to provide him with feather-free chicken, (and probably also at my failure to refund him his money,) he glared at me and stormed back to his table. 

I was deeply puzzled. Disgusting? You're willing to chomp down on the dead muscles of a slain animal, an animal which did have feathers during its short lifetime, but you're disgusted at the sight of a feather? Okay, well, then...One chicken wing has a feather. One chicken wing out of your bowl of...twenty chicken wings? I'm not sure I ever was that kind of chicken-eater. Had the same thing happened to me when I was a chicken-eater, I would have simply discarded the flawed chicken wing and reached for the next one in the bowl. Or, more likely, I would pull out the feather and keep eating that chicken wing. Why waste perfectly good chicken because of a feather? It's not like there's any germs in the feather; it's been cooked.

Since I wasn't a chicken-eater at the time, it angered me somewhat that someone would be so put off by a feather, which chickens naturally have, being included with their piece of slain chicken. In my mind, I found it perfectly understandable that a feather might be on a piece of chicken, because chicken comes from chickens, and I knew how chicken is manufactured. It wasn't gross, indecent, careless, unhygienic, or "disgusting"...unless the very eating of chicken is any or all of those things, and since people who eat chicken don't think of it that way, what's the problem with a feather?

Carol J. Adams writes in The Sexual Politics of Meat:

"Through butchering, animals become absent referents. Animals in name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist. Animals' lives precede and enable the existence of meat. If animals are alive, then they cannot be meat. Thus a dead body replaces the live animal. Without animals there would be no meat eating, yet they are absent from the act of eating meat because they have been transformed into food, (40)"

Living chickens are supposed to have feathers. Dead chickens are not. It's not simply that feathers aren't tasty and delectable, it's that a feather on a dead chicken reminds the chicken-eater that what they are eating, in fact, is a dead chicken, which used to be a live chicken. Why is this such a revelation to chicken-eaters? And such a "disgusting" revelation, at that?

I don't think it's so much that the man found the feather disgusting, as that the "absent referent," the very chicken whose body produced the tissue that he was aiming to eat, became present, right before him. That's not what people want—to be sitting there, trying to enjoy their meal, and have the animals that they are eating come to the front of their minds as animals, although that does happen from time to time. It calls to mind the process of meat-making, and everything that entails. Even though most people are not intimately aware of the process, they are vaguely aware of it. Who really wants to think about that while they are eating? Of course, it's disgusting. An animal's showing up unwelcome at a dinner can happen spontaneously, that is sure enough, but a remnant feather from that animal increases the probability that the meat eater will think about the animal.

Because Adams' purpose in the book is to show the parallels between meat and women, and the consumption of both, a few pages later, she provides this criticism (both literary and literal) to a sentence from Marabel Morgan's Total Joy. (God bless her, and Andrea Dworkin, and all the other braver women who have dared to wade through writings by Marabel Morgan, and other anti-woman bullshit, and interpret it for me, so that I don't have to wade through it myself.) Anyway, here's the quote:

In Total Joy, Marabel Morgan unites women and animals through the use of the metaphor of hamburger. Morgan fosters her own Shmoo syndrome in advising women to consider themselves like hamburger in serving their husbands needs: "but like hamburger you may have to prepare yourself in a variety of ways now and then."⁵⁰ Her sentence structure—"like hamburger you may"—implies that hamburger prepares itself in a variety of ways, and so must you. But hamburger, long before arriving in the kitchen of the total woman, has been denied all agency and can do no preparing. "You," woman/wife, refers to and stands in for hamburger. Women stand in relationship to the "total woman" as they do to "hamburger," as something that is objectified, without agency, that must be prepared, reshaped, acculturated to be made consumable in a patriarchal world. Though the referent is absent, women cannot escape recognizing themselves in it. And just as animals do not desire to be eaten, Morgan's sentence structure subverts her attempt to convince women that they do, (55)."

Emphasis mine, and the bolded parts indicate what I underlined in my copy of the book. This passage really got to me. I knew already that women exist as objects in our society, and that the easier it is for society to objectify an individual woman, the better society will "like" that woman. I also knew that "women" as our society conceives of them are not the way "women" actually are. I knew that society mandates, or at the very least, encourages, women to alter themselves from their natural appearance. This includes styling your hair, putting on makeup, removing your body hair, losing weight, deodorizing your vagina, wearing perfume, etc. I knew that society expects these things of women, but what I didn't understand was why.

In order to be consumed, women, like dead animals, must be "transformed." It's not just that women are expected to have one sort of appearance, and men are expected to have another. It's not as though women apply makeup one way to reflect their womanhood, and men apply makeup in a different way to reflect their manhood; it's that women wear makeup, and men don't at all. It's not that women remove their body hair in a certain way to indicate that they are female, and men remove their body hair in another way to indicate that they are male; it's that women remove their body hair and men don't at all.* It's that men typically exist the way they naturally are, and women typically don't, or can't. Human beings biologically exist with full body hair, and no makeup. Men socially exist with full body hair and no makeup. Women don't. 

A common reaction to a makeup-less woman is that she looks masculine, or manly, not that she looks like a woman without makeup. She has failed at presenting herself as a woman. A common reaction to a woman with full body hair is, much like the buffet customer's reaction to that feather, "disgusting!" If a human being must be transformed into a "woman" so that others can consume and objectify her, and if an animal must be transformed into "meat" so that others can consume and objectify her,** then the sight of body hair on a woman causes the same reaction in woman-consumers as the chicken feather caused in the chicken-eater. It disrupts their happy eating time. It reminds them that, really, women/chickens are not for their consumption, and they should not be consuming them. When men see hairy women without makeup, they see themselves in the women. When women see hairy women without makeup, they see men in the women. It really has nothing to do with beauty. Men are human animals. And so are women. Feminists recognize women as fully human beings, and don't have a problem with women who choose to keep their body hair and ditch the makeup; even feminists that choose to engage in these traditional behaviors object to it being a requirement for women. Some people are feminists, but I'm afeared that most aren't. 

So, this is it—all the "beautification" rituals that society expects us to go to through, and gets downright indignant most of the time when we don't—it's all for the comfort and reassurance of those who objectify us; a little salt, a little pepper, a marinade bath, an hour of cooking, a complicated and painstaking slaughter and dissembly process—so that by the time they consume us, they don't see any pesky reminders of the animals that we used to be before the "transformation."

*Facial hair doesn't count. "But men shave their faces!" is another version of, "But women rape men, too!"

**When Adams doesn't know the sex of an animal, she uses "she" as the indefinite.

Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat. The Continuum Publishing Company. New York City, NY. 1991. 

Jesse Jackson on Sesame Street

LOVE THIS.

(from Sociological Images.)

WAR ON WOMEN!!!!

I can't think clearly enough to write a coherent post about Jane Velez-Mitchell, and the way she makes my brain cry tears of sorrow...

So I'll just list out a bunch of quotes/paraphrases from her that are floating around in my brain. They'll all have quotes around them...but just to contain each and set it off. So get over it, if it bothers you that paraphrases will be in quotes...

"I'm against rape! But you know what I'm equally against? False rape reports!" (emphasis mine, and yes...she said "equally.") "You know what's sad? People like her who make false police reports make it SO MUCH HARDER for REAL victims!" (alkdlajd lkfjlkrtoirj lkmfdlkamlf'.....*sigh*)

"PETA took down the billboard after backlash against it, but let's face it, OBESITY KILLS!!! AND MEAT IS MAKING PEOPLE OBESE!!!!" (uh, yeah, which is precisely why 2/3 of the population that are not obese are all vegetarians, and obese vegetarians don't exist.)

"This is about the WAR ON WOMEN!" (Which, um, Jane Velez-Mitchell couldn't possibly be part of, huh?)

"We need a new wave of feminism to address this war on women!" (Just...just...I have no words...)

"Violence against women is an epidemic!" (Actually, J V-M, if you want to medicalize a social problem, which is a bad idea anyway, but if you're hell-bent on doing it, the correct way to do it would be to say that violence against women is endemic, because it's not an outbreak of something new, y'know...)

"This is another example of something that's been going on since the dawn of time, and that's the subjugation of women!" (Oh, and you was around back then, at the dawn of time, and knew how it was, huh? And...huh? you say violence against women has been around? Like I said...endemic...?)

"Swine flu is the result of factory farming!" (Just...no. Even if true, even if true...oh fuck it, that's a separate post...)

"They're letting rapists and murderers go free! It's the WAR ON WOMEN! It makes me want to pull my hair out in tufts!" (I know the feeling, J V-M...)

"If only someone would have helped Philip Garrido with his LSD addiction in high school, then we wouldn't be having this conversation now! He wouldn't have become a rapist and murderer!" (Causation fail) "Because addiction is bad and leads to every social evil! You should read my book, iWant, and learn about it!"

"...Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!" (ableist, and probably infringing on copyright.)

"Mackenzie Phillips...who has a BEST SELLER right now!" [face contorted in disgust] "....poor man isn't here to defend himself!!! She's a druggie and druggies lie! I used to be one, so I know! Read my book..." (War on women!)

"Octomom...!" (War on women!)

"...my new book, iWant..." (DO NOT WANT)

"How dare the Malawian government not just graciously hand over the children of their country to Our Lord and Savior, Madonna!? She can give them a better life than they ever can!!!" (War on non-white people!)

"The women in this country are forced to wear a PSYCHOLOGICAL BURKHA everyday! Women can't go outside at night!" (War on non-white/-Christian people!)

"I've been sober 14 years!" (Good for you. I'd give you a cookie, but, hehe, they're special cookies, and I wouldn't want to be interfering with your long-lived sobriety.)

I'll add more to this post later if I happen to remember more things...

NEW: "This woman has lost her most precious possession!" (In reference to the woman's child, who someone murdered and likely raped. Yep...pretty sure the view of children as "possessions" is one of the problems leading to violence against them...)

NEW: "Richard Heene is devastatingly handsome!"

NEW: (In reference to the bouncer and bar owner who won't allow people of color into the bar under the guise of "no saggy pants") "These students are doing everything they need to, and filing everything they can...but I think the big issue here is that it is the individuals, the bouncer and the owner, who are the problem. Someone has to have really low self-esteem to try to put themselves above someone else in this way." (That was where I started my eye-rolling.) "Racism is a mental illness!!!" (And THAT's where I had to leave the room. But before I could get sufficiently out of earshot of the tv, I heard her add,) "I am APPALLED that in this day in age, there's this kind of blatant racism!"

Fat Talk

Fat talk is all over the feminists blogs today. (Here's the official site for Fat Talk Free Week.) I think our collective social habit of openly criticizing our bodies is a damaging one, and this is a good idea, to take a week and examine the habit of "fat talk."

I try not to engage in "fat talk," but even I (yes, adoring fans, I know you are shocked to learn) fall into the old habit now and then. I've been aware since 2007 that the way women speak negatively of their bodies only perpetuates women's unhappiness with our bodies. At the time I was working as a cashier in a buffet restaurant, and another cashier/waiter was telling a group of us gathered in a corner behind the bar, "My butt is big. I need to lose some weight." I sort of scoffed at her and said, "Your butt is big? If anyone's butt is too big, it's mine." It just came out. Just the same way someone would say, "How are you?" and you would reply, "Fine, thanks. And you?" I'd done it. I'd taken the bait.* Not that she was trying to lay a trap* for the rest of us standing there with her. She just said it as naturally as she would say, "I'm about ready to get out of here. This night is long!" And like a comment such as that one, it got a chorus of, "Yes, indeed!" which is to be expected when you make a comment like that. But I felt it was wrong, immediately after I had chimed in. I heard what I said. I've tried to make an effort since then not to speak in "fat talk." I don't think it was bad to try to reassure my coworker, in fact, as Rachel pointed out in the comments on her blog, sometimes women are looking to be reassured that their bodies are okay when they assert that they are not, but there's no reason that this reassurance should come at the expense of the person doing the reassuring and her own body.

Even though that conversation made me start paying attention to what I say in response to other women's fat talk...things get a little sticky when you are in a same-sex relationship with another woman who likes to fat talk. Sometimes they can be more successful at getting you to engage in fat talk than mere acquaintances.

(At this point, I was about to present to you all a string of personal anecdotes, but between deciding that they got too tangential, and the nagging voice in my brain that says, "She will find this blog...oooooooooooo-ooooooohh! And be madder at you than she already is!!!" I think I will keep those anecdotes to myself, even though the post ending is not going to be abrupt and choppy, and instead just make this general statement:)

When you're a queer woman, you can wind up with a relationship that is a hybrid of "the boyfriend/husband** who doesn't find your female body sufficiently pornorific" archetype, and the "best friend who wants reassurance about her own female body archetype." That's some depressing shit when you do, too...

(*This is what Carol J. Adams calls the "absent referent"...when you make an implicit comparison between the treatment of animals and your own experience. Someday, hopefully soon, I'm going to finally finish The Sexual Politics of Meat, and when I do I will write some of my thoughts about it. Be patient with me, my fans.)

(**Not everyone who exemplifies this archetype is a man, and likewise, not everyone who exemplifies the other archetype is female; I acknowledge that.)

Birthday Post

Ok, so Wednesday, 14 October was my birthday. I am 22. Happy Birthday to me! Here are a few pictures. 

This is the food that we ate...I chopped up a big old salad and wanted to use a separate plate for each thing and take up the whole table, so I did! They had steaks and I had mushrooms. Also baked potatoes, but I think they were still in the oven. Don't know why I didn't think to turn the light on over the bar, but I didn't, so it's dark.

This is the big cookie that my mom bought me for my birthday. It was a choice between this one, or a white one that had yellow icing roses on it that were so pretty...but this one had plastic shiny leaves and acorns that I could take off as a souvenir, and they would be pretty forever, so the yellow roses lost.

And of course, I've been planning on posting some picture of my growing babies to show how big they are now. Even though it was rainy and overcast and the ground was soggy, I went out to take at least a few pictures. (More later when it gets sunny again.) These are the collards:

Baby turnip and mustard greens. These are actually infant plants. They've only been germinated a few days.

This is a red cabbage.

So, after I had snapped a few pictures, I headed back to the house. When I was just at the porch, I slipped on the muddy damned ground, twisted my ankle, and landed on my knees. I was pretty sure my ankle wasn't broken, because the time five years ago when the other ankle was broken, I was in shock and felt almost no pain. The other night, I felt lots of pain. I just stayed there on the ground for a minute, sort of laughing at the unpredictability of life (but not too hard,) and just chanting, "Fuck. Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!" Then I got my camera off the ground and slowly pulled myself to my feet and hobbled into the house....but no worries, because I'm mostly back to normal now. Just a little sore. I let myself have that glass of sherry that I wanted for my birthday, though, that night. I filled the glass on up further than usual and it tasted delicious. Then I slept.

Oh, and this isn't really a birthday picture, but here is some vegan gravy that I made on 13 October. I found this recipe on the Internet, for portabellas and gravy, but I thought the gravy sounded a lot like the gravy that my mom used to make for S.O.S., so I wanted to cut up some Smart Deli meat slices in it and see how closely I could approximate it, because it is one of the dishes that I miss. I think that unsweetened soymilk might go better, because regular added a good bit of sweetness, but overall. It was great. And aside from being a little thick, (the flour looked like it was disappearing into the oil, so I kept adding more until I *thought* it was enough, then poured the soymilk in there and it expanded,) I was pleased that it came out so smooth with so few lumps! So, I took a picture... 

And turning 22 reminded me of this poem I love, so I wanted to include it in the birthday post:

One-and-Twenty
AE Housman

When I was one-and-twenty,
I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away, and rubies
But keep your fancy free."
But I was one-and-twenty;
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty,
I heard him say again,
"The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue."
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.

Also...

Yesterday was my birthday, and I had planned on writing a post about it tonight, but the pictures are on the other computer; I had to mess with them and shrink them and everything, and then never got around to actually writing about it, so...tomorrow...

Indigo Guys

So, I really wanted to hear "Chickenman" by the Indigo Girls before I went to bed, and I remembered that there was a clip from a video of "Chickenman" on the Watershed DVD. (I know; I link to Amazon a lot, what of it?) So, I pulled up YouTube and did a search for "Chickenman Indigo" to see if it would come up in the results. I didn't find it, but I found this, the first result. It is a cover of "Chickenman" by the Indigo Guys. I think it's pretty cool.

I didn't have to watch many seconds of it to figure out that they are doing this mostly in jest, and the genre in the side panel is "comedy," which confirmed that, but the joke is for other fans; if you haven't listened to "Chickenman" hundreds of times, you don't get it, but if you have, then it is hilarious, and also pretty impressive that they paid attention to every sound in the whole song. They have other songs on their channel.

Fried Green Tomatoes

(Now, I realize they are not fried. But bear with me peeps; the only pics I have of green tomatoes are ones that are still on the vine.)

While I was emailing with a friend yesterday, (hi, if you're reading!) we started talking about the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, which of course was made after the book Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe by Fannie Flagg. We were discussing how the movie glossed over the fact that Ruth and Idgie are a lesbian couple to the point that it is very easy to view the movie and not pick up on it at all, or to interpret it differently.

It made me remember once when I was a little girl, well, not terribly little, about elevenish, and was in the Walmart with my mom. We were looking at DVDs, and this random woman was standing there, looking at them, too. She and my mom started talking, and they were discussing how much they loved movies, and which movies they really liked, and so on. My mom said that she liked Fried Green Tomatoes. At this point, the woman had to stop agreeing with her about the wonderfulness of her movie choices and inform her, "Oh, you know, I liked that movie, too, until I found out they were lezbians!" My mom expressed her lack of knowledge about the characters' sexual identities, although she didn't contort her face in horror the way the other woman did. "Yeah!" the woman continued. "I saw that movie and just thought they were good friends, you know. I didn't have any idea that there was anything dirty in that movie! But I'll tell you one cute little movie; it has nothing dirty in it and it is just a sweet little movie, and that is Hope Floats."

I had remembered watching Fried Green Tomatoes when I was younger, but I didn't remember much about it. I remembered that I worried a lot about that woman hitting that VW Beetle and then not going to jail. I thought that was wrong; I thought when you hit someone's car on purpose you should go to jail, and it worried me that the cops didn't take her to jail. That was all I remembered about it. Anyway, now that I heard that there were lesbians in the movie, I was curious about seeing it again. Obviously there wasn't going to be any sex, but that wasn't the point. I wanted to see lesbians. 

Awhile after that, I noticed that it was going to be coming on tv, so I watched it in my room, by myself. I couldn't really figure out what was so dirty about the movie; the only remotely romantic thing that it showed between Ruth and Idgie was drunk Ruth kissing drunk Idgie's cheek. It seemed like if anyone had any objection to the sexual content of the movie, it had to be the simple fact that they were lesbians. Sure enough, the movie contained domestic abuse, racism, murder...but the woman at the Walmart hadn't been objected to any of those things, just the lezbians.

Then some time after that, a couple years, I guess, I caught Hope Floats on tv. I only watched the opening of it; I didn't finish. It struck me as quite boring. But I did watch enough of it to be equally as puzzled as to why the Walmart woman had found this movie to be clean and sweet and Fried Green Tomatoes to be dirty. Hope Floats started off with a man taking his wife on a talk show to reveal that he was having an affair on her with another woman. I was confused. Wasn't opposite-sex fornication just as bad as lesbianism? Wasn't this overtly sexual content? I mean, I didn't take Hope Floats to be a porno or anything; even though I was young, I had seen worse. But since the bar for "dirty" was so low for the Walmart woman, I was surprised she heaped such praise on Hope Floats. Not to mention, there was some Ugly Hate going on with that little girl. And didn't the grandma have slain animal skins hanging in the house? And didn't it seem like she blamed her daughter for getting dumped? Eh...no, it's not really a sweet, clean little movie. But it's 100% heterosexual, I reckon...and that's what counts.

Photo from Radio Times.

Women's "Natural State"

On Feministe, there's a post about how some anti-choice, anti-birth control, anti-woman, anti-gay, (etc, etc,) woman has her panties in a wad because women eating BC pills makes them choose male partners who eat quiche rather than beat the hell out of them. Clearly, she's not cooking with a full bag of noodles, and that was the point of the post.

But what interested me was the comments. Several people wanted to say it is women's "natural state" to be pregnant and/or lactating all the time, not menstruating, and therefor being on birth control more closely matches women's "natural state." I guess the theory is that, when women lived in the wild, they didn't have any birth control, didn't have abortions, were being fucked senseless by a man or men at every turn, whether they liked it or not, and therefor got pregnant at every turn. Huh...sounds a lot like the way women live in captivity...

Anyway, after reading the thread, I decided to write a post that's been tumbling in my head for quite some time, and that's a post about how things were for the Cavewomen.

Now, you'll see a lot of anti-women peddling ideas about how rape is the result of an evolutionary desire to spread your seed to women whether they want it or not, how men need more than one sex partner and women don't, how women are instinctively drawn to pink, how men are sexy till they die of old age, but women have an expiration date of about 40, because they can't provide a baby for a man's DNA anymore, but a man of any age can still provide his DNA...blah blah blah...but the thing is, most of these theories hinge on the "fact" that the perpetuation of the species, and most especially, passing on one's own genes, is the Most Important Thing in the life of any organism.

Just think about it: we have sex in order to reproduce. (Unless you're queer, or sterile, or past menopause, or only have heterosexual outercourse, or only have sex by yourself—which doesn't count anyway—or any other reason that would cause sex never to result in procreation.) And sex feels good (unless for some reason, it is uncomfortable or painful, which never happens, right?) because it's evolution's (or God's) way of enticing us to do it, or else we wouldn't, and then that all-important procreation wouldn't happen, and the species might not go on. And that would really, really be a huge tragedy to each of us as individuals after we're dead and long gone...

And I just got to wonder, you know, why we assume there were no queer cavepeople. True enough, queer as an identity didn't exist, or at the least, wasn't given any acknowledgement, till the past several decades, but surely there were queer cavewomen who had sex with other cavewomen, and couldn't care less about cavemen, and the obvious result is that she never made any cavebabies. And surely there were queer cavemen, who had sex with other cavemen, and couldn't care less about cavewomen, and therefor never passed on their DNA. 

The existence of the queer cavepeople is not the only problem for this procreation-is-the-most-important-thing-in-life theory of the way things wuz and iz. Another big consideration is birth control. Throughout recorded history, people have devised ways to have heterosexual PIV intercourse without that intercourse resulting in unwanted babies. They've also devised ways of terminating unwanted pregnancies. It has only been through government abolition of these grievances against the all-important procreation, and/or the barring of access to resources, that people came to be unable to avoid unwanted procreation. Back in cavepeople days, government was small. I mean, it was really small. It was probably the closest thing to true anarchy (no laws, therefor no legal oppression) and true libertarianism (all the cavepeople had it, not just the rich white ones) as any humans have ever experienced. People were probably too concerned about working together to get food on the metaphorical table, (since actual tables probably hadn't been invented yet, and would've been a bitch* pain to travel nomadically with,) and staying vigilant for predators, to worry that you were a queer cavewoman who rejected the cavedick, and even if they did kick you out their tribe for it, you could go off in the woods by yourself and live alone and pick your own damn berries and say "fuck 'em!" So, nothing could be better for reproductive rights than the small government that I'm imagining they had.

But even if I go ahead and assume that procreation was of the utmost importance to the cavepeople, it still doesn't make any sense to me why it would be better to have 8-10 cavekids as opposed to 1-3. Surely, with limited resources, it would be better to raise a few healthy, strong cavekids than a dozen weaklings. None of the dozen weaklings might make it, while all of the strong cavekids might, and wouldn't this be a better way of ensuring the future of the species? It's also worth noting the ban on birth control by the governments of recorded history have worked to make the poor spread their limited resources out thinner over more offspring. This accomplishes two things: it dilutes the already limited resources even further, and it compromises the health of each individual poor person, and thus the collective health of the poor as a socioeconomic class. Therefor if these cavepeople were smart, and I don't doubt that they were considerably smarter than most modern people think, they would have planned their families well, with their individual wellbeing and the wellbeing of their tribe in mind. If someone didn't have children, rather than being a useless a burden to the cavesociety, she might've been valued for being able to spend more time doing non-reproductive work, or being able to spend more time helping out with others' kids; after all, it takes a cavevillage to raise a cavechild. 

And I'm not even going to entertain the notion that cavepeople didn't understand how you get pregnant, because that is a little bit too far-fetched. I mean, perhaps they didn't have science, but they had experience, and it doesn't take much intricate experimentation to deduce that the correlation between heterosexual intercourse and pregnancy is, in fact, a cause-effect relationship. 

But seriously, if the reason why we're all here is to reproduce, then...what is the point, you know? We have kids so they can reproduce and then their kids can reproduce and then their kids can reproduce? How and why is this so important if no one accomplishes anything else outside of reproduction? The idea that we're all here to pass on our genes and nothing more invalidates the reality of a lot of people, and I can't figure out why we assume cavepeople were so different than we are now; they were people, too. And why do we assume that birth control is not a part of nature? It seems to me like the suppression of birth control is the thing that's not "natural."

*Even though I wasn't using it to refer to a person, I should fix it...