Chopped bodies / Violated boundaries

Meat eating, pornography, 'gender affirming' surgery, and transhumanism

Carol J Adams, in the Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), shows how the oppression of women and the oppression of farm animals are linked. Each are objectified (turned into objects), and then fragmented (body chopped), before being consumed (literally in the case of farm animals, metaphorically in the case of women).

In a later book, The Pornography of Meat (extended edition 2020), Adams has assembled images, many of them adverts, which reveal how often pornography is used to link the oppression of animals to the oppression of women - portraying women as animals awaiting dissection, or portraying animals as seductive women asking for it.

In order to eat farm animals, we have to kill them (or, nowadays, get someone else to kill them for us). As humans, we distance ourselves from the live animals by erasing them, consuming them not as animals but as ‘meat’. As men, we erase women, particularly with pornographic sex, by relating to inert body parts, not whole living beings.

Frankenstein

Just over two centuries ago, Mary Shelley dreamt of a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who sought to improve on the human body by bringing life to dead body parts.  Her novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, drew attention to the myth of a human who stole fire from the gods, enabling humans to develop technology, but also to create food from the roasting of the chopped bodies of dead animals. The Creature that Frankenstein constructed seeks revenge for the fact that it is not accepted as human - a  warning of the unintended consequences of man’s attempts to meddle with nature, believing that this will improve it (and perhaps, also, a warning of the rage that ensues when someone acquires a synthetic identity and then finds that this is not recognised as valid).

As Adams notes, Shelley’s novel is also a critique of the everyday cutting up of animals for human consumption. The Creature has been constructed from raw materials sourced from “the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse.”  Abandoned and living alone in the woods, it rejects the “offals that the travellers had left (which) had been roasted”, and it later explains that its food preferences show more respect for life and bodily integrity than those of its creator: “My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.”

‘Gender affirming’ surgery and surrogacy

Under patriarchy, female bodies are cut in order to reinforce male dominance and female subordination. Different cultures do this differently. Some inflict genital mutilation on girls, using extreme pain to ensure male control of female sexuality (FGM). Others encourage women to ‘choose’ cosmetic surgery, to make themselves more attractive to men.

This century, medical experimentation that renders young people infertile, and which is often motivated by prejudice against same sex attraction, is widespread. Girls are encouraged by the emerging gender identity industry to be dissatisfied with their developing bodies, to believe that they have a ‘gender’ that is different to their sex, and to embark on a medical process that affirms that ‘gender’. Frankenstein’s dystopian vision is being re-interpreted. Not by bringing life to inanimate  body parts, but in gender clinics, manipulating living tissue and re-arranging body parts to create something that resembles the body of the opposite sex.

“Mary Shelley displayed prophetic insight when she wrote Frankenstein, foretelling the technological fathers’ fusion of male mother-miming and necrophilia in a boundary violation that ultimately points toward the total elimination of women … Today the Frankenstein phenomenon is omnipresent in phallocentric technology… This necrophilic invasion/elimination takes a variety of forms. Transsexualism is an example of male surgical siring which invades the female world with substitutes.”

(Mary Daly. Gyn/Ecology, 1978)

Just as we have to dissociate from living animals in order to consume parts of them as meat, people ‘treated’ in gender clinics have to dissociate from their sexed bodies in order to submit to manipulation of their body parts. They are persuaded that they are the consumers, choosing the bodies they will feel more comfortable with. In reality, though, they are being consumed by the corporations who profit from the procedures. As Jennifer Bilek observes,  Big Pharma and Big Tech are turning our bodies into commodities to be consumed -  “We are being reduced to our parts - no longer men and women - but breasts, penises, vaginas, wombs, eggs, and sperm that can be bought by either sex, for either sex.”

Women are increasingly being  coerced into becoming what are euphemistically called ‘surrogate mothers’, or even ’gestational carriers’. As with farm animals, the language masks the cruel reality - that they are women whose wombs are colonised to bring life to someone else’s genetic material. Many infertile couples now feel entitled to use surrogate mothers to produce ‘their’ children,  and even to produce ‘designer babies’ who will incorporate their preferred characteristics.  Growing numbers of ‘trans’ adults who are infertile as a result of synthetic sex identity procedures, and who have absorbed the belief that bodies are there to be manipulated, are already boosting this demand , and this oppression.

Transhumanism

It does not end there. As Bilek’s research has uncovered, ‘transgender’ technology and ideology are being promoted and funded by billionaires, many of whom are males who have assumed a synthetic feminine identity. These billionaires see transgenderism as the next step in completing the patriarchal colonisation of nature. They are consumers who want to genetically and physically modify their human bodies in order to extend and transcend their human lives, incorporating the characteristics that they deem desirable, and eliminating the ones they want to discard.

Their investment in the modifications they want for themselves will enable their corporate associates to profit from selling these modifications to anyone else who can afford them, and to use them to more effectively control us. Our body parts are the raw material that they exploit, to create new bodies that conform to their designs.  It is our embodied selves that are being consumed, and which will be erased completely if we allow this dissociation process to continue.

Martine Rothblatt, a ‘transgender’ billionaire who promotes  transhumanism, heads a biotech company, United Therapeutics. This company is directly involved in technological advances that, Rothblatt believes, would make transhumanism possible. United Therapeutics runs a pig farm, not to sell meat, but for organ transplant surgery, ostensibly to circumvent a shortage of organ donors.

Pigs have long been prime targets in the patriarchal war on farm animals and nature. The cruelty of pig farming is extreme, as is the pollution created by its waste. Now the genetic integrity of these intelligent and playful creatures is under threat. Pigs have already been genetically engineered to boost farm productivity and produce tastier pork. Many suspect that the ultimate aim of Rothblatt’s pig “pharm” (his spelling) could be to modify the pigs’ organs in order to ‘improve’  the human genome and extend human life, perhaps preparing the ground for creating transgenic humans.

Not content with normalising the modification of sexed human bodies, Rothblatt sees no problem with violating the boundaries between humans and other species.  Using the tools of gene editing, cryogenics and reproductive technology, he aims to create a new type of human, capable of living indefinitely. Ultimately, his fantasy anticipates transcending biological reality altogether:

“People of flesh will upload into software the contents and processes of their minds…Once we have thus digitally cloned our minds, new digital people can be produced by combining some of our mindware with some of our partner’s mindware. Voila, there are fertile offspring and the species persona creatus is alive.”                                                                  (Martine Rothblatt, From transgender to transhuman, 2011).

Victor Frankenstein would have been impressed.

It sounds dystopian. But every step on this dissociation journey has been dystopian. And it’s about erasing human rights, especially women’s and children’s rights, not extending them.

“The jig is up on this purported ‘human rights movement.’ If we want to hold fast to our humanity, there is no time to waste. We are in the eleventh hour and must end this tech-driven, hubristic flight from flesh, mortality and nature,”                                                          (Jennifer Bilek, Martine Rothblatt a founding father of the transgender empire,  jbilek.substack.com 9 Oct 2022)

My next posts will assess the contrasting responses of two male writers - Robert Bly and John Stoltenberg - to the challenge of feminism.