Colonizing the Womb: From Feminism to Animal Rights

The day after Trump was inaugurated, I stood in solidarity with millions of people world wide for the Women’s March. I was incensed that a country could elect a man who had bragged about sexually assaulting and degrading women. Several months prior, I joined with countless others to use a hashtag and two words to draw attention to rampant sexual abuse and harassment in our culture.

Many others are much better versed in feminist ideology than I am. However a few basic concepts strike me as quite simple. It should go without saying that women have the right to decide what we do with our bodies. It should go without saying that women have the right to determine our own boundaries when it comes to sex. That we are not commodities to make babies or boost the egos of men. It should go without saying that we do not exist to provide gratification for others as sexual objects. It should go without saying, but it doesn’t, and that is why feminism exists and recent movements like #MeToo and Time’s Up are relevant.

When women and men advocate for reproductive rights and freedoms, for a woman’s right to choose whether or not to have a family, or to deny sexual advances and not suffer professional or personal retribution, we are assuming a few basic things about women’s rights. That women have the right to self determination and to not be objectified or exploited for the benefit of others. It has taken generations for this concept to sound obvious to most people, and still we face an ongoing struggle to maintain policies hard won supporting these basic beliefs.

It is hard for me and many other liberal Americans to imagine a time when the mainstream attitude toward women was that we exist as a commodity to provide status, children, and that our value was determined by our sexual organs and reproductive abilities. Hard to imagine, unless we shift the lens just slightly.

We maintain these same attitudes, considered barbaric, outdated, misogynistic, and vile, when it comes to the exploitation of the reproductive systems of other animals. Cows, for example.

A powerful lobby has ensured our indoctrination into the myth that milk is an essential food throughout the lifespan. In reality, milk is designed by nature to ensure that a mother has a nutrient rich food to feed her babies in infancy to ensure rapid growth. No other mammal breastfeeds past infancy. No other mammal breastfeeds from another mammal.

We are so disconnected from this truth that we also forget how milk is produced. Lactation is a byproduct of pregnancy which requires sex, fertilization, and birth. In order for milk to be redirected for human consumption, baby cows must be deprived of their mother’s milk and in many cases disposed of for the veal industry.

Even then, we may cocoon ourselves in comforting thoughts of a quaint landscape with green pastures and smiling cows. But pregnancy requires sex. An industry that is designed to produce milk and dairy for billions of humans to consume must also create the conditions for constant lactation of cows.

Shift the lens back to humans, and we would call this process by different names. Rape. Sex Trafficking, Prostitution. We would call it abhorrent if humans were being commodified and exploited especially if this involved sexual exploitation, and it is indeed abhorrent. But when this process targets Cows for milk, or other animals for breeding, we call it business as usual.

Most of us don’t see how our attitudes toward controlling and exploiting the reproductive organs of nonhuman animals are the same attitudes feminists have been challenging for generations. Even those who are awakening to the Handmaid’s Tale-esque dystopian reality of Trump’s America are often blind to the same storyline playing out in the farming industry.

Even the justifications are the same. From ‘but its in the Bible’ to ‘we know what is best for them’ we have given ourselves permission to dominate, colonize and objectify another being.

Before I knew about the horrors of animal agriculture industry, including the falsely presumed benign egg and dairy industry, I thought I could never live without cheese and yogurt. I thought my appetite for certain food was enough of a reason to ignore unpleasant truths.

Looking back now, and as I marched this past weekend not with women and men taking a stand against the Trump administration, but with women and men taking the streets to be a voice for animal rights, I thought of the many parallels between the agenda of feminism and the agenda of Animal Rights.

And I wonder if mainstream America will ever think of our appetites for dairy justifying the colonization of cows’ reproductive organs as being just as absurd as the president using his appetite to dominate women to justify grabbing pussy.

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