Thoughts on blood, meat, society, womenhood, etc. Same old jazz.
My brain pooed this out this morning. I haven’t been getting much sleep, staying up until 3-5 am ish for the last couple days, drawing.
I’ve been thinking this morning about the link between meat, savageness, society today, and womanhood (including abortion and menstrual periods). Everything today, all aspects our animal nature, seem to be sanitized, packaged, removed from us. The visceral world of blood, death, devouring, pain, ecstasy, instinct, seems to have been taken away from us by an efficient and removed system of healthcare and dead-people removal (dying in hospital wards far away, ambulances taking away the dead body as soon as possible), as well as the many other various means of human sanitization. No wonder there’s obsessions with horror movies, serial killers, graphic/taboo/violent sex, gruesome car accidents, shows about murder and crime investigation. This type of graphic, meaty, bodily happenings is part of humans as animals, and it has been taken away, sanitized and hidden from us, so that we may continue to pretend we are not animals. I suppose it’s part of the Judeo-Christian heritage, to deny the body and all animal ness- I guess in fact that it’s been the role of many religions to make people aspire to be higher than the animals, to move above their animalistic natures and urges and instincts in order to become… what? Principled, non-‘savage’, seekers of ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ and the classical Greek ideals of order and symmetry?
I even think of the tampons that are sold in the store, in fresh scents and clean white boxes with flowers in crisp graphics on them. It seems women have to be ashamed and hushed about the realities of what they biologically do: bleed between the legs every month. Why is this so terribly gross and taboo? It’s blood, just the same as the blood that sprays from the ‘bad guy’s’ in video games, as boys (and many girls) try to reconnect with the violent/bodily/visceral/instinctual natures in themselves. And without this blood, how would childbirth occur?
And the meat that people eat, in its clean pre-packaged Styrofoam portions. We like to keep the meat as far away in our vision and minds, from its origin: a living creature, and breathing animal with ‘cute eyes’ and skin and blood. It’s easier to just think of the meat as hunk of origin-less foodstuff. No wonder that so many people are emotionally/ethically appealed towards vegetarianism; it’s so hard for people today to see animals as food. The only animals which urban dwellers are exposed to on a regular basis are their pets. And pets have been fully personified into people, the boundary blurred. So isn’t eating a poor little cow just like eating your beloved dog Muffin, people think?
It’s very fascinating to me. Mankind has struggled to pull himself towards an abstract, moralized, quantified, philosophical, sanitary existence, (bring on the air fresheners, counter sanitizers, tampons, hidden away old folks homes and intensive care wards!) which is turning away from it’s animal nature. And now the ANIMALS, the binary ‘opposite’ from ‘MAN’… the animals are seen as pets, taken into our homes, and raised/treated as another human child (one that never grows past it’s childhood and dependency, mind you.) The animals are raised to the status of MAN, with the same abstracted ‘morals’ and ‘rights’ as humans. So now animals, taken into the same category as humans, are also, in the minds of many, therefore taken from the original life-cycles of death, dying, hunting, suffering, blood, pain, messy birthing, etc. Just as humans are (attempting to be) removed from them.
There’s something very disturbing and confusing about these things. All this confusion and about what’s animal and what’s human and what’s clean and unclean. Unsettling, the need to push it all away, forget the blood….
I can’t really finish that this, because I went away and came back to it, and now my brain is not at all in that mode. But I’m posting it anyway, just throw those thoughts out there to the world. This is by no means my absolute treatise on life, just some of the themes that have been mulling through my brain. I'm not exactly sure how the entire womanhood and abortion thing configures into this, but I know there's a key link. Gotta let my brain marinate some more.
Btw. I don’t have a problem with vegetarians. But I don’t like being told I’m bad for eating meat.
HEY hey hey!! I just ate a fortune cookie, and my fortune stated "People find it difficult to resist your persuasive manner." I thought, "rock on!" Then I ate another one (becuase I'm a fortune cookie PIG), and the asshole told me "Birds are entangled by their feet and men by their tongues." Aw crap. I guess it's a good thing I'm not a man! hehehehe
I’ve been thinking this morning about the link between meat, savageness, society today, and womanhood (including abortion and menstrual periods). Everything today, all aspects our animal nature, seem to be sanitized, packaged, removed from us. The visceral world of blood, death, devouring, pain, ecstasy, instinct, seems to have been taken away from us by an efficient and removed system of healthcare and dead-people removal (dying in hospital wards far away, ambulances taking away the dead body as soon as possible), as well as the many other various means of human sanitization. No wonder there’s obsessions with horror movies, serial killers, graphic/taboo/violent sex, gruesome car accidents, shows about murder and crime investigation. This type of graphic, meaty, bodily happenings is part of humans as animals, and it has been taken away, sanitized and hidden from us, so that we may continue to pretend we are not animals. I suppose it’s part of the Judeo-Christian heritage, to deny the body and all animal ness- I guess in fact that it’s been the role of many religions to make people aspire to be higher than the animals, to move above their animalistic natures and urges and instincts in order to become… what? Principled, non-‘savage’, seekers of ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ and the classical Greek ideals of order and symmetry?
I even think of the tampons that are sold in the store, in fresh scents and clean white boxes with flowers in crisp graphics on them. It seems women have to be ashamed and hushed about the realities of what they biologically do: bleed between the legs every month. Why is this so terribly gross and taboo? It’s blood, just the same as the blood that sprays from the ‘bad guy’s’ in video games, as boys (and many girls) try to reconnect with the violent/bodily/visceral/instinctual natures in themselves. And without this blood, how would childbirth occur?
And the meat that people eat, in its clean pre-packaged Styrofoam portions. We like to keep the meat as far away in our vision and minds, from its origin: a living creature, and breathing animal with ‘cute eyes’ and skin and blood. It’s easier to just think of the meat as hunk of origin-less foodstuff. No wonder that so many people are emotionally/ethically appealed towards vegetarianism; it’s so hard for people today to see animals as food. The only animals which urban dwellers are exposed to on a regular basis are their pets. And pets have been fully personified into people, the boundary blurred. So isn’t eating a poor little cow just like eating your beloved dog Muffin, people think?
It’s very fascinating to me. Mankind has struggled to pull himself towards an abstract, moralized, quantified, philosophical, sanitary existence, (bring on the air fresheners, counter sanitizers, tampons, hidden away old folks homes and intensive care wards!) which is turning away from it’s animal nature. And now the ANIMALS, the binary ‘opposite’ from ‘MAN’… the animals are seen as pets, taken into our homes, and raised/treated as another human child (one that never grows past it’s childhood and dependency, mind you.) The animals are raised to the status of MAN, with the same abstracted ‘morals’ and ‘rights’ as humans. So now animals, taken into the same category as humans, are also, in the minds of many, therefore taken from the original life-cycles of death, dying, hunting, suffering, blood, pain, messy birthing, etc. Just as humans are (attempting to be) removed from them.
There’s something very disturbing and confusing about these things. All this confusion and about what’s animal and what’s human and what’s clean and unclean. Unsettling, the need to push it all away, forget the blood….
I can’t really finish that this, because I went away and came back to it, and now my brain is not at all in that mode. But I’m posting it anyway, just throw those thoughts out there to the world. This is by no means my absolute treatise on life, just some of the themes that have been mulling through my brain. I'm not exactly sure how the entire womanhood and abortion thing configures into this, but I know there's a key link. Gotta let my brain marinate some more.
Btw. I don’t have a problem with vegetarians. But I don’t like being told I’m bad for eating meat.
HEY hey hey!! I just ate a fortune cookie, and my fortune stated "People find it difficult to resist your persuasive manner." I thought, "rock on!" Then I ate another one (becuase I'm a fortune cookie PIG), and the asshole told me "Birds are entangled by their feet and men by their tongues." Aw crap. I guess it's a good thing I'm not a man! hehehehe
posted by Sarah at
5:43 PM
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