The Sexual Politics of Meat: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Carol J. Adams

How come I waited 20 years to read this book was my first thought when I put down this book. I would really liked to have read this instead of some postmodern communication theory written by some women who did not understand Habermas when I took my feminist communication course around the time Carol Adams book was first published. An attempt to create a coherent narrative for feminism and animal rights should not be something we see often, but it is not.

I have seen this book now and then but never got around to start reading it. It actually starts quite bad and I don’t think the first two chapters are not particularly well written or interesting. They resembles a lot of simplistic feminist literature with vulgar imprecise generalizations about how worthless men are along the lines “When asked about their sexual fantasies many men describe ‘pornographic scenes of disembodied, faceless, impersonal body parts: breasts, legs, vaginas and buttocks-“ (an actually quote in the book).

But the longer you get into the book you realize that it weaves a story where animal rights and feminism are brought together in different ways. It does so against a broader backdrop of social change and the possibility for humanity to “evolve” ethically, and it does so in a coherent, but still not rigid way.

To read a book with a narrative that is so strong that it is possible to both explore it in depth and follow trajectories far out and will return is not happening very often. Let alone with theme that is one of the most important for the human race.

Please ignore the self-congratulatory parts of the introduction. I think they are written to allow insecure people in the US that read the kind of self-help books that usually have that kind of self-celebration on the cover (or else Adams just feels that she needs to tell someone that she actually touches people).

But these things are not very important and the message in the book is so important and should be required reading for the “cultural elite” as well as all policy makers and business leaders.

This is not a book to be missed and 100 years from now this is a book that we might look back as a classic that was ahead of its time in so many ways.

Take time to visit Adams webpage: http://www.caroljadams.com/spom.html