Thursday, May 21, 2015

Revisiting the Sexual Politics of Meat

I've realized as more time passes and this Literature course progresses, I return to Carol Adams's "The Sexual Politics of Meat" as a resource for understanding, comparing, and further analyzing past circumstance equating to present pitfalls. More specifically, I began to breakdown what it means to have influence as a child, pressure from cultural practice, parental guidance, as well as social interactions with friends or others, down to reading and schoolwork. We are greatly influenced and conditioned as children to think that first meat consumption in 'natural' and secondly, that there are certain taboos and rules to be followed about the consumption of meat. Adams states in her piece, "Fairy tales initiate us at an early age into the dynamics of eating and sex roles." (Adams, 172). While it is well known that fairy tales give horribly built models for children to emulate gender wise, I had never considered or really thought about the practices surrounding food involved with children's tales. As she lists the occurrences, (Cannibalism in fairy tales usually male activity, Queen eats bread and honey while the king has blackbird pie, little miss muffet, etc.), I began to go back to my own experiences within childhood where I was either prone towards eating a food because my favorite storybook characters had it, or I would shy away from food, knowing it wasn't eaten by the characters I emulated.

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