Archive for year 2011

I love cooking.  When I went vegetarian in my pre-teen years and then vegan in high school, my family didn’t really know what to do with me, so I learned pretty quickly to make my own meals.  (I remember, actually, that I had a Mickey Mouse cookbook when I was, like, seven or eight years old, and I’d make simple dishes like macaroni and cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from its pages.  I thought I was so accomplished.)  Even now, years later, one of my favorite activities is to make and share a meal with friends; there’s something cathartic about chopping vegetables, stirring pots, and making food magic from raw ingredients.

I’ve been talking with friends lately about how food is sometimes treated as “toxic” or “bad,” especially by female-identified people.  There’s such emphasis on thinness in western culture that we are taught to feel guilty about putting food into our mouths, despite the simple fact that it’s food that keeps our bodies functioning normally.  One friend of mine remarked that her female coworkers are always lamenting what they ate the night before and are endlessly resolving to go on a diet.  And, sadly, vegans are not immune to this kind of behavior, either.  Veganism has been sold as a dietary panacea, and the underlying implication (or sometimes, the straight-up message) is still “fat=bad.”  I’ve had my struggles with this in the past, and one of the things I’ve been working on for the future is eating as much food as my body needs, without feeling bad or guilty about it, and making a point to incorporate as much healthy, local, sustainably-grown foods as possible into those meals.

I keep a pretty good-sized pile of vegan cookbooks on my shelves, and I’m quite adept at Googling for recipes containing a particular ingredient, but I often bump into a few issues when I am trying to plan a cooking extravaganza.  For one, I don’t have a lot of money.  I’m not someone who can waltz into the natural foods store and drop $20 on a jar of coconut cream and then use a tablespoon of it in a recipe.  In fact, I pretty much have the same twenty (cheap) ingredients on-hand all the time and try to incorporate them into different recipes to keep things interesting.

The other problem I have, especially when finding user-created recipes on the Internet, is that sometimes the written directions aren’t very clear.  I’m a kinesthetic learner, meaning that I prefer to see and do something with my hands in order to commit it to memory, so reading words on a page (or a screen) doesn’t always translate into a delicious dinner.  However, the Internet saves the day again, because ingenious people have begun making vegan cooking videos and sharing them with the rest of us, for optimum kitchen awesomeness.  Check these out, and if you’re inspired, send me your videos.  Maybe we will start a regular L.O.V.E. featured video cooking series, which is a lot more fun and energizing than always writing about heartbreaking things.   (Though I will probably still do that as well.)

The lovely P.M.A. (aka Tara) has created a charming series of vegan cooking videos that include easy, simple gluten-free and vegan recipes for both humans and nonhumans.  Here is her delicious tofu scramble:

The folks over at Veganism Is the New Evolution (VINE) have started a video series called Cooking With Real Vegans, featuring sanctuary founders Aram and Miriam in their real kitchen making real food.  This is making me hungry:

And finally, I love Manjula’s Kitchen.  She creates simple, delicious, vegetarian Indian dishes, including this tantalizing plate of chola tikki:

I find these videos so much more instructive than looking at letters on a page.  The filmmakers and hosts are so charming, I sort of wish I was in their kitchens making these dishes with them.  As it stands, I’ll probably just haul my laptop into my tiny New York kitchen and try to find room to mince garlic on the keyboard.  That can’t be bad for your computer, can it? Well, if I never write a blog again, you’ll know what happened.

At first glance, this seems like such a fender-bender in a world that is otherwise full of overturned eighteen-wheelers.  In fact, when I first heard about it, I didn’t even think it worthy of a mention until a few days later, when I had mulled it over (actually, I couldn’t STOP thinking about it) and decided that it warranted some further analysis.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that even these seemingly insignificant, nit-picky points about the message by which we deliver our activism can have a huge impact on the world.  For one thing, if individuals and organizations continue to make these tragic missteps, the heart of the vegan argument — don’t exploit animals — is going to get completely lost amongst the outrage; in fact, I barely read any of the rest of the article in which this particular offense is contained.  Not only that, but we are going to actively lose allies if we continue to ignore the voices of those not in power: if we repeatedly perform actions or make statements that contribute to women’s exploitation; if we disregard the histories and stereotypes that contribute to the exploitation of people of color; and if we make a mockery of people’s gender identities and sexuality, they and their allies will not want to align themselves with animal activists.

We cannot afford to lose anyone.

Anyway, the story.  An article called “5 Reasons to Thaw Your Frosty Relationship With Winter” was recently posted on Vegan Chic, a fashion and lifestyle blog for (primarily women) vegans.  It was written by self-described “Ethical Man” Dan Mims, who also posted the article at his blog.  So why did this particular piece ice me up instead of thawing me out?  There’s a teeny, tiny line in the section of the article devoted to snuggling that caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end.  “In the early stages of a dating relationship, gauging each others’ interest isn’t so easy,” writes the Ethical Man.  “Boundaries have to be respected, but they also have to be pushed.”

Insert sound of scratching record here.

In a paragraph about presumably consensual contact with a romantic partner, Ethical Man Dan Mims suggests to his (predominately male) audience that it is ok to push boundaries.  Not only that, but they HAVE to be pushed.  Can we talk for a second about why people have boundaries in romantic and sexual relationships?  How about the fact that one in six women has survived a sexual assault (a statistic, by the way, that does not account for women who were repeatedly assaulted)?  Or the global cultural narrative that women’s bodies are for consumption and men are the ones who do the consuming at will?  The less-privileged groups in this equation (women, gay men, trans- and gender non-conforming individuals) have been forced to establish boundaries for themselves because otherwise, we get attacked.  We get assaulted.  We get killed.

It is the opposite of ethical to suggest that those boundaries be pushed.

And this is why we have to be so careful with our words.  I am not saying that Dan Mims is encouraging his audience to assault women (just as feminists have been arguing that we don’t detest rape jokes because we think the people telling them or laughing at them are or will become rapists).  What I am saying here is that this inattentiveness to the lived experiences of disempowered groups is not only detrimental to the cause of animal activism and indeed all social justice, but it is also straight-up dangerous.  In my activism — and in my vision of a vegan world — people listen to one another.  We consider whether our words will inadvertently trigger or cause discomfort to the people to whom we are speaking.  And if we are called out on our mistakes, we apologize, we educate ourselves, and we fix it.

No one is free when others are oppressed.

[[ Trigger warnings for discussion of rape and exploitation. ]]

I’ve had a really hard time getting out of bed this week.  At first, I assumed it was because it’s the middle of winter — an especially brutal winter here on the east coast, I might add — and the urge to hibernate is downright overpowering.  In a city where my method of transportation is primarily to put on my earth boots and walk from point a to point b, when there are 4′ tall snowbanks and 12″ deep puddles on every corner, it just makes more sense to stay under the covers with the cats.

But then I realized that the snow is nothing compared to feeling like it’s open season on my body every time I walk out the front door.

It’s been kind of a brutal month for female-identified people and their allies here in the United States.  Following the November elections, a whole new set of leaders have been ushered into our government, some of whom (both Democrat and Republican alike, let’s make no mistake about that) have made it their priority to take away the rights of women to have control over their own bodies, reproductive choice, and health care.  The “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” (H.R. 3) — followed closely behind by the “Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act” (H.R. 217) and the “Sanctity of Human Life Act” (H.R. 212) –  was introduced into the House of Representatives and deemed “a top priority” by the new Republican-controlled congress.  There is much more to be read at those links, but in a nutshell, these acts are undeniable attacks on women’s health and bodily autonomy.  They target poor women, women of color, young women, and trans-identified people by removing funding and support for the medical procedures they may need as a result of rape, incest, abuse, coercion, prophylactic failure, health, or any of the myriad reasons why women would seek to terminate a pregnancy.  These acts also seek to redefine “rape” as something that happens forcibly — and never not ever in any other situations — completely invalidating the experiences of millions of women whose rapes and abuse might not have come at gunpoint.   This is an epic failure on the part of a government whose purpose is to protect its citizens.  While plenty of people are raising their voices and fighting back, we need many more to be doing the same thing.  And frankly, it’s exhausting: not only the fighting itself, but also the fact that we have to do all this fighting in the first place.

Oh, and there’s this other thing.  Compared to the links above, it’s relatively minor, but it’s been destroying me a little bit, so I’m going to write about it!  Backstory: I used to consider myself a gamer.  When I was younger, I played video games and tabletop games like it was my job.  It was common to find me planted in front of the PlayStation after school or at a (male) friends’ house playing Magic: The Gathering or some other equally-nerdy and wonderful tabletop game.  I still love games, actually, and am so happy to spend an afternoon in the company of friends playing board games or cards, but as I got older and more aware of feminism and veganism and power and privilege, I felt myself pulling away from the gaming community.  It became unsafe for me.  The gaming world is a man’s world, no doubt about that, and I started realizing that beyond the failure of most gaming companies to include strong female characters and strong storylines for them, many were actively creating weak or degrading female characters and storylines.  When I played multiplayer games, especially those from behind the anonymity of the internet, I encountered a lot of hostility toward women: rape jokes, objectification, stalking, harassment.  I might have considered attending a convention at the height of my gamerocity, but many women who dared to set foot in that male-dominated arena found themselves attacked by leering, commenting, harassing male gamers.  It was becoming clear that this was not a place for me.

So, recently, this by-gamers-for-gamers webcomic, Penny Arcade, of which I used to be a huge fan, made a rape joke.  It was offensive, and they got called out on it, and yet instead of saying, “Oh, shit, we’re sorry fanbase (and world at large), we made a mistake.  We apologize.  We’re learning from our mistakes and hope sincerely that we don’t make a similar one in the future,” NO, INSTEAD they decided to defend themselves with snarky comments, follow-up unapologetic comics, dismissal of the concerns and accusations, MERCHANDISE BASED ON THE OFFENDING COMIC, and all-around assbaddery.  You can read a timeline of the whole thing here, but beware, I have been following this for weeks and it has just sapped the life right out of me.  To see the way in which people staunchly defend their right to disrespect and disregard other people — and worse, to hear about the real, genuine, scary threats and hate speech that the (mostly female) folks on the “opposition” have been receiving — is just exhausting and disheartening.

And then, there’s PETA.  I am so tired of writing about PETA, y’all.  Seriously.  If I could just skip this part, I would, but they’ve gone and done something that made even my cynical, jaded jaw hit the floor, and so it definitely merits a mention in the context of this post.  This video is straight-up pornography.  It is two minutes of nearly-naked women performing sex acts with inanimate objects and each other, while a disembodied male voice gives them commands from off-camera.  It is exploitation and rape culture at its worst — when women’s bodies are offered for consumption, when women are paid to be attractive and sexual for the male gaze — and it is being done by an organization that purports to be working on behalf of animals.  No, no, no.  NO.  This is a wheelbarrow full of no, people.  You know, PETA and its supporters often claim that they are adopting the tactics of the mainstream in order to get the mainstream to get up and notice, but WHAT, exactly, will the mainstream notice in this video?  I noticed, for example, humiliation and degradation and the beauty myth and subservience and sexualiza– oh, wait, this is about going vegetarian?  No.  This is PETA employing sexism and misogyny to make money and draw attention to itself.  It is not helping anyone: not women, not people, and certainly not animals.

Ok, so, bring it back for me, Jenna: what does the rape culture have to do with veganism?

Here’s the thing: right now, as I write this, as you read this, billions of female nonhumans are being exploited for their reproductive capacities.  They have been reduced to that terrifying spectre that those of us fighting against H.R. 3 and Dickwolves and all the other shit we have to slog through on a daily basis just to get some respect are SO WORRIED ABOUT: they are enslaved, exploited, and murdered so that someone, somewhere (in fact many people) can profit off of their bodies and the products of their reproduction.  Chickens live on farms and in cages and are murdered so that we can eat their eggs or so that they can produce more chickens to live in cages and be murdered.  Cows live on farms and in cages and are murdered so that we can drink their milk (hell, the equipment used to impregnate them is referred to by industry as “the rape rack;” IT DOESN’T GET MORE EXPLICIT THAN THAT, FOLKS) or eat the flesh of their children or make more children to make us more milk.  Mice live in laboratories so that their reproductive organs can be filled with cancer or cleaning products or trans fats and we can figure out a lot of what we already know about preventing cancer and not using toxic chemicals in our homes or on our food.  They have been reduced to living, breathing incubators.  Human females on this planet fear that as their rights are eroded by legislation and the media and society, that this will someday be their fate.  For billions of nonhuman females, it already is.

I’m daring to suggest that if we don’t get angry and get active and stand up against the fact that these ladies are being used for their bodies by the billions — as long as the privileged, powerful groups are profiting off of their reproductive organs, removing their consent from the equation and enslaving them in the most horrifying unfunny definition of what a “life” could be — we are next.

And that is enough to get me out of bed.