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Oppressive
Liberation
Sexism in Animal Activism
Lisa Kemmerer
Oppressive Liberation
“In this latest book, Lisa Kemmerer details the entrenchment of sexism in ele-
ments of the animal advocacy movement. Drawing on survey findings and written
accounts of animal advocates, Kemmerer exposes many intra-movement problems
and challenges the movement to engage in a process of truth and reconciliation,
rightfully pointing out that the goals of anti-speciesism cannot be realized without
also addressing sexism and other forms of intersecting oppression.”
—Amy J. Fitzgerald, Professor, University of Windsor, Canada
“Important, compelling, and provocative, Oppressive Liberation is a long overdue

intervention in the problematic gender politics of the anymal rights movement. The
book is an urgent reminder that the anymal rights movement has not yet sorted out
its responsibilities to feminism or any other social justice issue. Kemmerer draws a
much-needed roadmap for moving forward in ways that reject harassment, dis-
crimination, and violence and create healthier, more secure, and more just organi-
zational cultures in the anymal rights movement.”
—Katja M. Guenther, Professor, University of California, Riverside, USA
“This powerful and provocative book is essential reading for anyone studying or
participating in social movements.”
—Emily Gaarder, author of Women and the Animal Rights Movement
Lisa Kemmerer
Oppressive Liberation
Sexism in Animal Activism
Lisa Kemmerer
Professor Emeritus, founder of Tapestry
Billings, MT, USA
ISBN 978-3-031-15362-4 ISBN 978-3-031-15363-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15363-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
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after developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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Every truth we see is ours to give the world. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton)
If you are an activist and a survivor,
this book is for you.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to all who helped bring this book to fruition, including
Glenda Martin, John Halley, Stephanie Wilson, Eric Roberts, Alka Arora,
Candace Laughinghouse, Christopher-Sebastian McJetters, Jan Kemmerer,
Ed Kemmerer, professionals who assisted with the Qualtrics survey, Amy
Invernizzi and her colleagues at Palgrave Macmillan, anonymous review-
ers of earlier drafts who provided important insights, and those who estab-
lished and maintain CANHAD.org.
Any proceeds from this book will be invested back into the cause to
work toward a world of justice, peace, and compassion.
The survey introduced in Chapter 5 remains open as the book goes to
press and can currently be found at the following two places:
• https://www.canhad.org/speak-out
• https://msubillings.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6zd
TXfxgmiltXsV
ix
Abstract
Oppressive Liberation documents sexism among anymal activists, including

resultant harms and possible directions for change, but the material is set
explicitly against a backdrop of sexism in social justice activism more gen-
erally (see Chapter 4). The book focuses on the interface of sexism and
speciesism and presents philosophies of interconnection (Chapter 2) to
support the assertion of interfacing oppressions. Oppressive Liberation
includes six essays from contributing authors (Chapters 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, and 17) that expand the scope and depth of the book, providing dif-
ferent points of view from different places in the world, and offering con-
textualized experiences with intersectional oppressions.
xi
Contents
1 Introduction: Speciesism, Sexism, and Male Privilege 1
Part I A Wide-Angle View of Interconnected Oppressions 33
2 Interconnections: Theory, Myth, and Science 35
3 Whiteness
as Norm, Intersectionality, and Interfacing
Oppressions 59
4 The “Why” of Sexism in Social Justice Movements 69
Part II Exposing Sexism and Male Privilege in the Anymal

Activist Movement 95
5 Survey
Data on Harassment and Discrimination in the
Anymal Activist Community 97
6 CANHAD:
Testimonials from the Anymal Activist
Community Revealing Internal Sexism131
7 Evidence
of Systemic Sexism and Male Privilege in
Anymal Activism Prior to #MeToo153
xiii
xiv Contents
8 The
#ARMeToo Movement: Empowered Perpetrators
Exposed at HSUS, MFA, and DxE181
Part III Harms of and Solutions to Sexism in the Anymal

Activist Movement 201
9 Harms
of Sexism and Male Privilege in the AE
Community203
10 Working
Against Sexism and Male Privilege Inside
Organizations223
11 Independent
Activists Working Against Sexism and Male
Privilege247
Part IV Critical Reflections from Anymal Activists 273
12 Meet the New Vegan World275
13 Liberation
Is Not Total If It Does Not Include Disabled
People289
14 White Supremacy and Anymal Activism297
15 Cis-Male
Dominance in Anymal Activism from a
Transgender Perspective303
16 Towards
a (Pro)Feminist Anymal Activist Movement:
Reflections from Estonia311
17 When
the Rite of Passage Is Wrong: One White Man’s
(Ongoing) Journey from Toxicity to Anymal Activism/
Social Justice319
Contents xv
Part V Conclusion 329
18 Conclusion:
Meta-Reflections on Sexism in Anymal
Activism331

Appendix 1: Kemmerer Survey on Harassment and
Discrimination in the Anymal Activist Community339
Appendix 2: Survey Demography351
Appendix 3: How to Access the Cooney Legal Documents357

Appendix 4: Vegan Outreach Discrimination and Harassment
Policy361

Appendix 5: Tofurky: Donor Organization Charitable Giving
Policy on Gender Discrimination and Harassment371

Appendix 6: Letter Addressing Complaints Against Anthony
Nocella373

Appendix 7: Email Exchange Between Rachel Perman and
Erika Brunson377
Works Cited381
Index419
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 “Anymal” 26

Fig. 2.1 Sexualized/exploitable cow-woman and woman-cow 43
Fig. 2.2 Sexualized/exploitable pig-woman 44
Fig. 5.1 Survey data from Q15, perpetrators (questions shortened) 101
Fig. 5.2 Survey data from Q14: basis of harassment/discrimination
(questions shortened) 104
Fig. 5.3 Survey data from Q13: harassment/discrimination witnessed/
experienced110
Fig. 5.4 Survey data from Q16: numbers on the receiving end 118
Fig. 5.5 Survey data from Q17: number on the receiving end 119
Fig. 5.6 Survey data from Q18: policies 122
Fig. 5.7 Survey data from Q20: initial results of interventions (Questions
shortened)126
Fig. 5.8 Survey data from Q22: further results of interventions
(Questions shortened) 127
Fig. 9.1 Survey data from Q13: Harms 204
Fig. 9.2 Survey data from Q23: Consequences 214
Fig. 9.3 Survey data from Q10: Whether or not activist is still in the
Movement216
Fig. B.1 Survey graph Q2, gender 352
Fig. B.2 Survey graph Q3, race/ethnicity 354
Fig. B.3 Survey graph Q4, sexual orientation 354
Fig. B.4 Survey graph Q5, abled 355
Fig. B.5 Survey graph Q1, age 355
Fig. B.6 Survey graph Q9, activist timeline 356
xvii
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Dualistic Worldview—Note that civilized/non-civilized has

two subsets, one of which is productive/nonproductive,
which also has a handful of subsets 37
Table 2.2 Revised from L. Kemmerer, “Sexism is Speciesism,”
Unbounded Project, https://unboundproject.org/author/
joanne/46
Table 7.1 Interconnections between ten empowered, privileged men
and key large/wealthy AE organizations and funding sources 157
Table 7.2 Male network and donor funding 2017 (“Giving Metrics”;
“Animal Advocacy and Plant Based Nutrition”; “Animal
Welfare Fund”; “Grants Database”) 162
Table 7.3 Across three years, OPP monies granted organizations
connected by the above ten men (“Grants Database”) 163
Table 7.4 Sex ratios of leaders/ranking employees/boards (according to
AE organization websites, summer 2017) in 12 prominent
AE organizations—five are run by women (indicated by
underlining/bold)166
Table 7.5 Comparison of speaker positions at AR2017 for all Gold and
one Silver sponsor organization (The Humane League), from
best represented to least represented, including the short
(five-minute) Thursday welcomes (“AR2017 Program” n.p.) 172
Table 7.6 FARM speaking engagements at AR2017 (“AR2017
Program” n.p.) 173
Table 9.1 Words from the Survey and from CANHAD testimonials
describing harassment/discrimination experienced/witnessed 205
xix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Speciesism, Sexism, and Male

Privilege
Serial killer Robert Pickton of Canada was first identified as a violent crimi-
nal by a victim/survivor who showed up in an emergency room “with
serious stab wounds and handcuffs still attached to her wrist.” She named
Pickton as the man who had “stabbed her and tried to handcuff her at his
pig farm” (Lee and Reid 47, 49), an incident from which she narrowly
escaped “naked, with a handcuff dangling from a wrist” (MacQueen n.p.).
Pickton showed up in the same emergency room on that same night and
was treated “for stab wounds received during a prolonged knife fight”
(Lee and Reid 49). “The two were treated in adjoining operating rooms,”
so medical professionals were able to acquire—from Pickton’s clothes—
the keys to the handcuffs that were on the wrist of the victim/survivor
(Lee and Reid 49).
Medical professionals turned all evidence over to the police, including
Pickton’s bloody clothing (Joyce n.p.). Despite this compelling evidence,
“police and prosecutors declined to pursue criminal charges,” resting their
decision on the well-known fact that the victim/survivor “was a sex worker
with a long history of drug abuse”—who had been using drugs that very
day (Lee and Reid 49; also Joyce n.p. and MacQueen n.p.). Perhaps
“Pickton remained above suspicion largely because of a refusal by the
senior ranks of the Vancouver Police and the RCMP to believe that women
were systematically being murdered” (MacQueen n.p.). But they were,
and though the police held the evidence in their hands, and though
“Pickton’s bloody clothing from the 1997 stabbing held the key, literally
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
L. Kemmerer, Oppressive Liberation,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15363-1_1
2 L. KEMMERER
and figuratively, to solving both past and future murders,” the items
“weren’t tested for DNA until 2004,” after he had murdered many more
women (MacQueen n.p.). When they did finally test the evidence, the
“results revealed the DNA of two women who vanished in early 1997”
(MacQueen n.p.). They had the murderer, but chose to turn him loose
because of who his victim was. Yet more evidence against Pickton emerged
a couple of years after the incident in the hospital: Visitors and neighbors
reported that “Pickton had a stash of women’s purses” and their ID cards,
and that a woman’s body was seen hanging in the slaughter barn
(MacQueen n.p., also Butts N.p.). Despite all of this evidence, Pickton’s
serial killing went unchallenged for years “because the women’s low social
status made them a lesser priority” (MacQueen n.p.).
At face value, it is remarkable that police would drop a murder case
with such strong evidence in hand, provided by medical professionals,
supported by tips from various others, simply because of the employment
and habits of the victim/survivor. But that is exactly what happened, sug-
gesting that all life is not equally protected. Even human life. If the
victim/survivor had been as privileged and empowered as the men on the
police force, would Pickton have been released back into the night, as if a
woman wearing handcuffs and riddled with stab wounds had not accused
him of attempted murder? If law enforcement were largely women (those
at risk from the hands of men like Pickton), would they have pursued the
case rather than return someone accused of such deeds back onto the
streets—and back to the pig farm?
Pickton, who was raised on a pig farm, was perpetually surrounded by
and ultimately took as his career, anymal exploitation and destruction—
impregnation, birthing, forced separation from young, slaughter, and dis-
memberment. An online photo shows Pickton smiling, working a chain
that hangs from the ceiling of a dreary barn, where we now know he simi-
larly hung the bodies of women. In the photo, Pickton’s hands are cov-
ered with blood, a dead pig hangs next to him with lower legs chopped
off—the pig’s remains eerily similar to a human body. If Pickton’s liveli-
hood had not entitled him to exploit the reproductive biology of pigs, and
stab and cut their bodies into pieces for human consumption, would
Pickton, nicknamed “The Butcher,” have transferred these practices across
species to women?
Societies tend to be hierarchical, with men privileged in comparison
with women and humans privileged in comparison with anymals
1 INTRODUCTION: SPECIESISM, SEXISM, AND MALE PRIVILEGE 3
(nonhuman animals1). As a result, Pickton was free to hone his killing on

pigs. As a result, male law enforcement failed to follow up on his crimes
against a (likely, comparatively poor) woman. And as a result of this deci-
sion to disregard the words of a victim/survivor, Pickton went on to “kill
more than 40 women” (Lee and Reid 49)—forty-nine, according to
Pickton (MacQueen n.p.), many of whom were indigenous (d’Entremont
n.p.)—and best not to forget that he also killed untold numbers of pigs.
Pickton’s family business coopted the reproductive organs and bodies
of sows for profit—for piglets and flesh. As a child, he learned that even
the pigs he befriended were profitable when dead, and therefore expend-
able (“Young Willie Pickton” n.p.). Because of speciesism and consumer
choices, as a pig farmer, he hung pigs on hooks at the ends of chains and
sliced them with knives, killing them and dismembering their bodies for a
living. In the process, it is impossible to know what other sufferings he
brought to bear on those pigs, who legally fell under his power. For years,
because of sexism, speciesism, racism, classism, and consumer choices, “a
simple-minded pig farmer” (MacQueen n.p.) raped and strangled then
bled out and gutted scores of women in his slaughterhouse before feeding
them to the pigs he owned and slaughtered to be fed to consumers (Webb
N.p.; “Pickton Described.” N.p.). Bacon is someone’s body. It appears
that he also fed his human victim’s flesh directly to people, marketed as
“pig flesh.” Apparently, human and pig flesh not only look similar, but
taste similar. Meat is always and indubitably someone’s body.
Feminism and Animal Activism

Feminists and anymal activists live and work as siblings from estranged
families: They know of one another (often via a long list of negatives), but
they are unlikely to choose to spend much time together, if any, so they
don’t actually know one another. On the surface it is easy to see such sib-
lings as two completely separate and independent individuals, but at a
deeper level they are inextricable interconnected by a common taproot
and at least some measure of parallel lives.
Feminists and anymal activists were more overtly connected one hun-
dred years ago than they are today. (For more on historic connections
1
The term anymal is discussed below under the subheading, Novel Referent—“Anymal.”
While not an adequate definition, for now, it will suffice to view this term as “nonhuman
animal.”
4 L. KEMMERER
between these two movements, please see Chapter 2, “Dualism Among

Anymal Activists: Misanthropy and Misogyny.”) Among contemporary
activists, it is often challenging to find someone who is well-versed and
invested in both the anymal activist and feminist movements. That said,
activists in both camps are likely to agree that a unified front—working
together and supporting one another—is stronger and more effective than
isolated, fragmented actions. But power gained through unity rests on
common cause, and herein lies the catch: Not many activists in either
camp recognize that sexism and speciesism are, at root, one cause.
Consider the Pickton case. Violence toward anymals is now a well-
documented indicator for violence toward other human beings (Robinson
and Clausen n.p.), and it is now well documented that men who torture
and kill anymals are more likely to torture and kill women and girls (Dalton
n.p.). Apparently, those “who cannot be trusted with animals often cannot
be trusted with human beings either” (Warren 51). Given this, it cannot
be surprising that “slaughterhouses have a unique and insidious effect on
the surrounding communities” manifest as “increased crime” (Fitzgerald,
Kalof, and Dietz 175). More specifically, “findings indicate that slaughter-
house employment increases total arrest rates, arrests for violent crimes,
arrests for rape, and arrests for other sex offenses in comparison with other
industries” (Fitzgerald, Kalof, and Dietz 158). Exploiting their reproduc-
tive organs before killing pigs with knives, evidence suggests, prepared
Pickton with the mindset and methods to exploit their reproductive organs
before killing women with knives (Matas n.p.).2 When human beings not
only tolerate but make it lucrative to exploit “others” (even unto death),
resultant attitudes and behaviors will inevitably, at some point and in some
ways, be turned back on and expressed against human beings.
Studies also show that men who purchase sex from women tend to lose
sight of women’s human rights. Not only are sex workers vulnerable inas-
much as they are alone with men they don’t know, but evidence indicates
that men who purchase sex from women are more likely to lose sight of
what constitutes a legally consumable body, and what types of consump-
tion are permissible for the various bodies that they have been entitled to
legally purchase and “consume” (Wolpert n.p.; Heinzmann n.p.). One
2
For more on documented connections between anymal abuse and human violence, see
articles referenced in the text as well as Amy Fitzgerald, Animal Abuse and Family Violence:
Researching the Interrelationships of Abusive Power and Frank Ascione and Randall Lockwood,
Cruelty to Animals and Interpersonal Violence.
study found that “men who buy sex are more likely to report having com-
mitted rape and other aggressive sexual acts” (Wolpert n.p.). An anti-rape
study found that “most men … viewed their interaction with prostitutes as
a business contract in which payment entitles them to treat the women any
way they like” (Heinzmann n.p.). This same study found that men believe
that female sex workers “surrender the right to say no to anything once
they accept a customer’s money,” describing prostitutes as “a product, like
cereal” and comparing the purchase of sex with a visit to the grocery store,
where you “pick the brand you want and pay for it. It’s business”
(Heinzmann n.p.). Interviews with sex workers reveal that “violent ‘bad
dates’” are “a frequent occurrence” and among interviewees, “[m]ore
than half said they had been robbed while working the streets; 39 percent
said they had been kidnapped or confined; one-third said they had sur-
vived attempts to murder them” (MacQueen n.p.). Viewing the photo of
Pickton, with chains in his bloody hands, smiling as he stands next to a
large pink body speckled with wounds and blood, it is easy to see similari-
ties between the human body and the pig body, it is possible to see how
this man moved from legally exploiting the reproductive organs of pigs
before killing them, to illegally exploiting the reproductive organs of
women before killing them.
Sexism
In 1869, John Stuart Mill described sexism and male privilege in “The
Subjection of Women” when he wrote that a boy grows up “to manhood
in the belief that without any merit or any exertion”—“by the mere fact of
being born a male”—they are “by right … superior” (176). Mill notes that
males thereby feel entitled to certain privileges (176).
Many (almost all) cultures are sexist, which is to say, women are viewed
and treated as inferior (Ferguson, “4 Common” n.p.). Humans are sexist
largely because of cultural conditioning. Sexism is “built into gender at a
very basic level” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 20) and is institutional-
ized—maintained by the legal system, the educational system, the political
system, and is reflected and maintained by language, “invisibly” demean-
ing, marginalizing, and lending to the exploitation and oppression of
women (Masequesmay n.p.). Complicating matters, women and girls
often come to feel and ultimately behave as if they truly were inferior,
thereby expressing internalized sexism/oppression. Misogyny and male
privilege, expressions of sexism, are also institutionalized. Just as
6 L. KEMMERER
individuals cannot generally tell that their culture tends toward dark cloth-
ing until they experience a culture with bright clothing, so humans are not
likely to notice sexism, including misogyny and male privilege, until they
experience a culture free of sexism—and such a culture would seem diffi-
cult to locate.
Here are some concrete examples of sexism:
• Language that demeans women in relation to men, such as referenc-

ing women as “girls” but not men as “boys.”
• Publicly assessing or commenting on women, especially women’s
bodies, as if women were rightly objects for public scrutiny.
• A generalized sense that women are more vulnerable than men.
• Men ignoring or interrupting women; men dominating
conversations.
• Males as prominent in the community and in families, filling most
positions of power.
• Inconsistency in assessing character traits across sex (such as viewing
a strong woman as bitchy, shrill, abrasive, aggressive, or pushy while
viewing a strong man as commanding, decisive, and a natural leader).
• A tendency to dismiss women and what they have to say, for exam-
ple, as “hormonal” or “irrational” (Greene n.p.).
Sexism is not a monolithic phenomenon. The experience of sexism is

rooted in other forms of oppression, such as agism, racism, classism,
ablism, and speciesism. Younger women are more likely to suffer sexual
innuendos or assault; older women are more likely to be ignored and side-
lined. Black women are likely to suffer intersectionality—racism and sex-
ism—compounding their marginalization and oppression. The most
marginalized of women (e.g., poor women of color) are more likely to
experience sexism as murder, and such murderers are more likely to remain
free to kill again, as did Pickton (MacQueen n.p.).
Male Privilege
Privileges are benefits, advantages, favors, rights, and immunities
(“Privilege” n.p.); unjust privileges are held without legitimate reason,
most often simply by virtue of belonging to a culturally favored category.
Generally speaking, the more favored categories one appears to fit, the
more abundant their privileges. For example, in sexist cultures, unearned
privileges are granted to men—especially to men who are visibly cisgen-

dered, able-bodied, monied, and in many Eurocentric communities,
white. As with sexism, male privilege is culturally normative and institu-
tionalized/systemic—maintained by a community’s legal, educational,
and medical institutions (Ferguson, “Privilege 101” n.p.). While men col-
lectively benefit from male privilege to greater and lesser degrees, some
women and girls benefit indirectly by aligning with privileged men
(through marriage, affairs, or in work partnerships)—though in limited
and often short-term ways, sometimes with miserable repercussions or
even dire consequences.
Male privilege creates a “self-affirming closed loop” (Geber n.p.),
opening doors for men because they are men to valued opportunities such
as elite schools, well-paying jobs, and positions of influence. Men are likely
to be granted more opportunities, and more highly valued opportunities,
if they are also viewed as cisgendered, able-bodied, monied, or in any
other ways inside a preferred/favored category for men. As a result, cer-
tain types of men tend to excel, providing the appearance of aptitude.
Therefore, not surprisingly, when creating a list of best-known speakers,
most skilled artists, richest people, most famous activists, or most renown
scientists, most (if not all) names on the list are likely to be those of men,
and most (if not all) are likely to be cisgendered, heterosexual, compara-
tively higher class, abled-bodied, and in racist white nations, white (Geber
n.p.). This forms a self-affirming closed loop: Privilege leads to yet more
privilege, which leads to yet more privilege.
In sexist cultures, as part of male privilege, men are envisioned and
presented as primary and standard models of and for humanity, and they
are expected to live for themselves (careers, adventures, sexual exploits).
In contrast, women are envisioned and presented as subsidiary, and are
expected to serve others (Greene n.p.), whether children, aging parents,
or men. As subsidiary citizens who are denied the many benefits of male
privilege, women are socialized to smile and be pleasant, to spend their
time, energy, and resources pleasing others (usually men), even to the
point of discomfort and damage, such as wearing high heels, choosing
breast implants, or striving for unnatural thinness.
As privileged citizens, men are granted “relative ease” and higher status
in social settings, assuring that men and boys are more likely to be heard
(De Welde 77). Men, viewed as holding the voices of authority, are
expected to speak and are likely to be respected when they do speak. Given
this, it is not surprising that men tend to speak first, longer, and with fewer
8 L. KEMMERER
interruptions, or that men have more than their fair share of community
influence, and more than their fair share of positions of power, including
public offices. Having voice and being heard favors men and male inter-
ests, while marginalizing women and girls, and the unique interests of
women and girls.
As with sexism, male privilege touches pretty much every aspect of life,
passing largely unnoticed (Geber n.p.). Here are some concrete examples:
• Conversation—Men “dominate conversations” without being criti-

cized, while women are likely to be perceived as “‘too talkative’ even
when they’re speaking less.”
• Sex—A man “can be open about enjoying sex” and others will not
assume that they are therefore entitled to have sex with him, or view
him as “a slut.”
• Violence—Men are more likely to travel alone “without worrying
about being targeted for violence.”
• Aging—Men are generally thought to become “‘finer with age’
while women are considered less desirable.”
• Media—Male writers “are more likely to be published, have their
books reviewed,” and receive other forms of public attention.
• Politics—When men lose elections, it’s not because they are men.
• Employment—Men tend to earn more than women and men are
generally paid more than women for the same tasks.
• Childhood—Boys are complimented for their abilities and girls for
their appearance; assertive boys are tolerated and even encouraged
while assertive girls are asked to behave differently.
• Religion—Mainstream religions center around men and their inter-
ests, for example teaching women to be subservient to men.
(Johnson n.p.)
Men like Pickton target women (of color) because of sexism (and racism).
Had he targeted the privileged, it seems highly unlikely that he would
have remain a murderer long enough to kill forty-nine human beings.
Speciesism and Human Privilege

John Stuart Mill may as well have been writing about speciesism and
human privilege when he wrote of those who grow up “in the belief that
without any merit or any exertion”—“by the mere fact of being born”
what they are—they are “by right… superior” and entitled to certain privi-
leges (176). Speciesism and human privilege are comparable to sexism and
male privilege. Understanding one helps greatly in understanding
the other.
Speciesism holds that human life is more valuable than anymal life, that
thousands of anymals are legitimately—even rightly—killed for the most
distant hope of possibly saving human life (anymal experimentation), and
for the sake of human fashion and comfort (fur and feathers), and for the
pleasures/habits of the human palate. Because of human privilege, human
beings feel entitled to kill based on irrational fears (e.g., garter snakes and
milk spiders). Because of human privilege, humans assert that they are at
the top of the “food chain” (even though we know that other species can
and do hunt, kill, and consume humans, including sharks, allegators, and
big cats) and that we have the largest brains in relation to body size—or
simply the largest brains (even though these would rightly be attributed to
dolphins and sperm whales). Not that most humans are likely to grant that
a larger brain entitles one human being to more of a right to life than
another—we do not exploit or kill humans who are less intelligent or who
have less weighty brains in relation to body size. Which brings to mind—
humans tend to assert that we are the “rational animal”—despite abun-
dant evidence to the contrary. Systemic speciesism fosters human speciesist
beliefs about our rightful privileges in relation to anymals.
Here are some examples of speciesism and human privilege.
• Humans reference all other species as “animals” but not human

beings, though we are animals.
• Humans commonly believe that human life is extremely important
while anymal life is expendable for even paltry human interests (like
eating habits).
• Humans establish and reestablish criteria for assessing animals that
favor humanity—tool use (generally rests on having an opposable
thumb), language use (i.e., human language), and ways of thinking
that we believe we are good at (such as reasoning).
• Humans feel entitled to use animals as we please, even destroying
their lives for such things as sexual stimulation (crush videos), fash-
ion (leather or wool), and taste preferences.
Because of speciesism, humans did not recognize or consider Robert

Pickton a serial killer until he was convicted of killing women, though he
10 L. KEMMERER
had been killing all along. Murder is defined as “the crime of deliberately
killing a person” (“Murder” n.p.). Given that anymals are persons—they
have personality, will, and intent so that many show every indication that
they prefer not to suffer, not to be destroyed—they can be murdered.
Nonetheless, human privilege leads much of humanity to believe that
there is something special about killing a human being but nothing at all
objectionable about killing anymals. Anymals are excluded from life pro-
tections by speciesist human legal systems. A serial killer is defined as “an
individual who repeatedly commits murder, typically with a distinct pat-
tern in the selection of victims, location, and method” (“Serial Killer”
n.p.). And so it was that Robert Pickton was legally entitled to hone his
knife skills on pigs before turning these same weapons on women.
Sexism and Speciesism

Understanding speciesism (prejudice based on species) can help with
understanding sexism (prejudice based on sex), and vice versa. Sexism and
speciesism (like ableism, racism, trans aggression, and ageism) are sys-
temic/institutionalized prejudices (unjustified and therefore unjust pre-
judgments) that are normalized and thereby largely unnoticed, particularly
among the privileged. Generally speaking, sexism and speciesism are main-
tained less by overt maliciousness than through ignorance and indiffer-
ence powered by self-interest, though in many contemporary societies,
such ignorance and indifference are rightly viewed as willful. Failing to see
an anymal or a woman as an equal—and therefore equally entitled to free-
dom and life, for example—facilitates a lack of respect for the rights and
welfare of anymals and women. Sexism harms (and sometimes destroys)
women and girls, whether via male domination (of conversations and soci-
etal positions of importance), male entitlement (to the best jobs and to sex
with women), or in the expression/tolerance of misogyny (sexist jokes
and the use of words such as “old maid” and “bitch”). Sexism harms even
if participants and onlookers are unaware of damage done. Speciesism
harms and destroys the lives of anymals, whether via domination (sexual
exploitation and exploitation for free labor), human entitlement (eating
anymal products and imprisoning anymals for entertainment), or in the
expression/tolerance of speciesism (whether donating money to the can-
cer society or ignoring a wounded, lost, or hungry dog). Speciesism harms
even if humans are not aware of damage done.
Pickton engaged in what is generally viewed as an obvious and flagrant

expression of both sexism and speciesism intertwined—physical, sexual
exploitation and disregard for the lives of pigs and the lives of women. In
sexist societies, rapists merely enact, albeit in an illegal manner, a more
general cultural view of females as objects that men may use for their pur-
poses. Sexual assault (including rape) is particularly common in nations
rife with toxic masculinity, in communities where sex trades make it pos-
sible for privileged men to own or rent a girl or woman for the purposes
of gratifying their sexual interests. Like sows, cows, and hens, women and
girls who are purchased/owned are not free to refuse sexual encounters.
In each case, empowered individuals buy, control, and exploit females for
their reproductive abilities as if these individuals were mere commodities.
These practices are standard in anymal agriculture: Sows are treated as if
they were bacon factories, cows as if they were milk machines, and hens as
if they were designed to produce reproductive eggs to please human appe-
tites. Similarly, in anymal laboratory industries, primates, rodents, cats,
dogs, horses, birds and many other species are forced to reproduce, their
young taken from them to be sold/exploited for anymal experimentation.
Like farmed anymals and anymals exploited for “science,” women who fall
victim to trafficking are entrapped and confined, bought and sold, tor-
tured and forcibly penetrated, suffering both physically and emotionally,
and they are frequently dispatched when their bodies become exhausted
and are less profitable in comparison with new/young/fresh bodies
(“Facts” n.p.).
Even women who might be viewed as comparatively privileged, those
in relatively fortunate marriages, are likened to exploited anymals via lan-
guage and practice. Husband/Husbandry grants “access to the bodies
and reproductive services” of women and anymals, respectively (Kheel,
Nature 231). For hundreds of years, an official union has granted a hus-
band “legal license to his wife’s sexual and reproductive services”
(“Husbandry” n.p.). Similarly, “animal husbandry” grants “owners” legal
license to exploit the sexual and reproductive services of anymals
(“Husbandry” n.p.). Women and other female animals can be controlled
and exploited by and for those who are comparatively empowered, and
both are devalued as they age and wear out—when they no longer pro-
duce or “put out” and reproduce. In sexist cultures, females of many spe-
cies are reduced in the eyes of many, in various ways, to their reproductive
biology and capacities.
12 L. KEMMERER
Physical sexual exploitation (even unto death, as exemplified by Pickton)

is expressed both as sexism and as speciesism, but there are many more
subtle and commonplace forms of denigration and oppression, some of
which are best apprehended through language. For example, cows, like
women and girls, are often viewed not only as comparatively dumb, but as
so easily controlled that such control (and exploitation) are right. “Cow”
has become a derogatory term for women alongside other referents for
denigrated, exploited, and slaughtered farmed anymals, such as “bitty,”
“chick,” “sow,” and “heifer.” Female humans are referenced as foxes and
cougars. Typing “bitch” into Google and choosing “images” produces a
string of pictures of scantily clad, sexualized women rather than female
dogs. Both “livestock” and “cunt” present individuals as exploitable body
parts: “Livestock” presents a living, thinking, feeling anymal as nothing
but dead and disembodied merchandise awaiting sale on a shelf; “cunt”
presents a living, thinking, feeling, woman or girl as nothing but a disem-
bodied vagina awaiting penetration. As it is spoken, English simultane-
ously disembodies, diminishes, and disparages anymals and women in
relation to men, exposing sexism, misogyny, and male privilege. (For more
on this topic, see Animal Equality: Language and Liberation by Joan
Dunayer.)
A successful hunt is quintessentially tied to men and masculinity, and
the language of the hunt also provides interesting parallels between sexism
and speciesism. Bullets are also called “balls,” firing is referred to as “dis-
charge,” hitting a body with a bullet is called “penetration,” and firing
prematurely is called “premature discharge” (Kheel, “License” 91–92).
The language of the hunt presents the manliness of domination and kill-
ing; hunting for “sport” is “predicated on the need to harness an aggres-
sive, sexual energy and to channel [this energy] in appropriate ways,” in
order to foster “the continuation of man’s aggressive drive” (Kheel,
“License” 92, 95). Aggression against others—having your way with
someone else even unto death—remains unquestioned, and is merely
channeled into “the hunt,” fostering this “aggressive drive.” Hunters
sometimes claim that they just want “to be out in the wilderness,” that
they are not taken by bloodlust and a love of killing, but the kill—or at
least the hope and dream of the kill—is essential to hunting. So much so
that hiking, climbing, backpacking, kayaking, and the many other outdoor
activities that do not entail domination/the desire to kill cannot serve as
replacements. Importantly, the thrill of killing for sport “includes a specifi-
cally sexual component” (Luke, Brutal 107): In “patriarchal social
structures the disposition to take sexual pleasure in the domination and

destruction of other living beings is a normal part of men’s fulfillment”
(Luke, Brutal 87). But noting “the normalcy of men’s erotic enjoyment
of hunting suggests the threatening possibility that there is something
seriously wrong with normal manhood” (Luke, Brutal 87).
The kill of the hunt is so quintessentially male that it can be likened to
ejaculation in a sexual encounter. Hunters enter the forests with the hope
of killing just as they enter women with the hope of sexual release. Sex is
traditionally thought to be over when the man has an orgasm and the hunt
is never so decisively over as after a kill: “Without the pursuit of orgasm,
sex typically is thought to have no meaning or narrative structure; without
the intent to kill, the hunt, we are told, has none as well” (Kheel, “License”
91). I have heard men matter-of-factly defend hunting as “orgasmic”
(Kemmerer, Eating Earth 112). The kill is the centerpiece for hunters, the
apex, the climax; the “orgasmic” experience of killing is commonly
defended without mention of the dead—without mention of the experi-
ence the anymal has been through or their loss of life. Masculinity that
thrives on the thrill of the kill is not safe for those lower in the hierarchy.
The production and marketing of the drug, Premarin, also exposes
shared turf between feminists and anymal activists. Premarin exists because
of the archaic assumption that a woman’s body is problematic, that there
is something inherently not quite right about female biology, that women
require the care of (male) medical professionals (Ehrenreich and English
6). Premarin is on the market because of a long-term (sexist) notion that
a woman’s natural ways of aging are a sickness in need of cure. This view
is rooted in the conception of females as child-bearers, a view that paints
aged women as useless. In sexist societies, women’s assigned responsibili-
ties are rooted in their biology and their bodies—particularly their repro-
ductive biology and reproductive organs—rather than, for example, their
talents or thoughts. As a result, aging and menopause become undesirable
and problematic and Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, Inc., produces estrogen
replacement called Premarin. This drug can cause at least 17 negative side
effects (such as persistent nausea/vomiting, nervousness, severe stomach
or abdominal pain, yellow eyes and skin, increased hair growth coupled
with loss of scalp hair, and unusual vaginal bleeding (“Premarin” n.p.)).
Sexism overlaps with speciesism: Premarin is made from the urine of
pregnant horses. To create Premarin, horses are impregnated and tethered
in small stalls for four or five months out of each year. “Premarin mares”
are perpetually impregnated, are confined to small stalls for long periods
14 L. KEMMERER
of time, and are robbed of their young early on, all for the sake of a drug
that is not only completely unnecessary, but harmful to women. As for
their young—some 40,000 strong—they are shipped off at four months of
age (though they would normally nurse for a year) to be fattened and
slaughtered. Marketed “as a cure for menopause, Premarin hurts both
female horses and female humans” (jones, “Speciesism & Sexism” n.p.).
While feminists and animal advocates both struggle against enculturated
domination and exploitation, to associate women with anymals, as I have
just done, tends to unsettle anyone who is not an anymal activist. Comparing
a woman with anymals, all of whom are yet more marginalized, exploited,
and oppressed, is usually considered an insult to women, who are compara-
tively privileged in relation to anymals. Such a comparison disregards and
threatens artificial boundaries (the massive scaffold of deceit interwoven
into culture to hold oppressions in place) between the lives of individuals.
Such a comparison generally I feels like a threat to those higher on the lad-
der of hierarchy—less so those at the top. For women, it is generally consid-
ered demeaning to be associated with anymals, just as for men it is generally
viewed as demeaning to be associated with women (or anything envisioned
as feminine). Because humanity categorizes farmed animals as property,
ignorant, dependent, exploitable, and expendable, humans tend to object
to being associated or compared with farmed anymals. Consequently, such
comparisons are felt as a “substantial threat” to women (Scholtmeijer 233):
To compare or associate women and anymals is to threaten to “to pull
women down into a condition of defeat along with” anymals (Scholtmeijer
234). (For more on the interface between sexism and speciesism, see
Chapter 2, “Dualism and the Interface of Sexism and Speciesism.”)
#MeToo Movement and #ARMeToo Movement

In 2006, Tarana Burke founded a survivor-led, grassroots and digital
movement against sexual violence “with young Black women and girls
from low wealth communities,” which she called “metoo” (“History &
Vision” n.p.). She established metoo to help survivors heal and to encour-
age the disruption of “systems that allow for the global proliferation of
sexual violence” (“History & Vision” n.p.). Burke’s stated goal was
“empowerment through empathy and community-based action”
(“History & Vision” n.p.).
Metoo has thrived. The organization supports “survivors of sexual vio-
lence and their allies” through political organizing and by providing
resources, including research and a “culturally-informed curriculum to

discuss sexual violence within the Black community and in society at large”
(“History & Vision” n.p.). Metoo offers a website with a wealth of quality
information and resources for those working against sexual violence,
including a “Discussion Guide on Masculinity, Male Privilege & Consent”
and a “how-to” guide for creating an “all-gender, all bodied, inclusive and
accessible space for practicing and receiving healing” (“For Advocates”
n.p.). Metoo also provides a
comprehensive database consisting of local and national organizations dedi-

cated to providing services and safe spaces for survivors of sexual violence,
healing stories, as well as articles and a glossary of terms,…research studies
on sexual violence, a database of regional and local laws addressing sexual
violence, [and] sexual violence statistics. (“You are Not Alone” n.p.)
Metoo offers hope that perpetrators will be held accountable and that
strategies will surface “to sustain long term, systemic change” against sex-
ual violence (“History & Vision” n.p.).
Moving ahead more than a decade, to October of 2017, a New York
Times article exposed Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein of serial
sexual assaults involving scores of women across decades, including well-
known celebrities (Kantor and Twohey n.p.). Less than two weeks later,
exposing the “universality of the problem,” U.S. celebrity Alyssa Milano
used Twitter to encourage survivors to “share their stories of sexual harass-
ment and abuse” under the tag #MeToo (Nicolaou and Smith n.p.). A
“booming collective” from around the world responded, taking front
page news (Nicolaou and Smith n.p.) as millions of survivors stood in soli-
darity with one another. People shared painful injustices, from sexual
assault to normalized run-of-the-mill forms of sexism, exposing and fea-
turing the extent and severity of the problem (Nicolaou and Smith n.p.).
At the same time, these voices mitigated the sense of shame that
victims/survivors too often feel (“History & Vision” n.p.). In this
moment, #MeToo was “too loud to dismiss” (Nicolaou and Smith n.p.).
In the United States, the #MeToo explosion had been building for
decades, with Women’s marches in the wake of the U.S. election of Donald
Trump (who was captured on video expressing an exploitative, abusive,
and derogatory attitude toward women) and a string of high-profile cases
of sexual misconduct at places such as Fox News, Uber, and Amazon
Studios (Nicolaou and Smith n.p.). With the #MeToo Movement dozens
16 L. KEMMERER
more offenders surfaced, many of whom were long-term perpetrators in

high-profile positions. Some were accused of sexually assaulting girls and
boys, such as the U.S. gymnastics team doctor and the celebrity Kevin
Spacey, most were exposed for sexually assaulting women. On January 1,
2018, more than 300 women founded Time’s Up to provide funding so
that women could legally challenge perpetrators, commenting that
“women all over the world need support and funding … to fight injustice”
and “the revolution we want and need cannot happen without” funding
for legal fees (“Our Founding Members” n.p.).
The power of the #MeToo Movement was worldwide, bringing “an
avalanche of global resignations and oustings” (Stone and Vogelstein
n.p.), including business executives, politicians, and celebrities (Nicolaou
and Smith n.p.), effecting discourse and bringing tangible changes. An
article in The Atlantic (summer, 2018) reported that the #MeToo
Movement had ended twenty-five U.S. political campaigns on both sides
of the isle. A U.S. crisis consulting firm reported that, in just 18 months,
“417 high-profile executives and employees” had been “outed” by the
#MeToo Movement (Nicolaou and Smith n.p.). Causalities included the
Israeli prime minister, the British defense secretary, and nine U.S. con-
gressmen. Just months after the first wave of #MeToo reports and
responses, new codes of conduct were adopted at parliaments in the
U.K. and Australia; the U.N. Secretary-General took belated measures “to
ramp up institutional responses to abuse” (Stone and Vogelstein n.p.).
Wheels were set in motion for the International Labour Organization to
adopt (in June of 2019) the “Violence and Harassment Convention”
(“C190” n.p.). In Spain (spring of 2018), nationwide protests responded
to “the light sentencing of rapists” and the Spanish government agreed to
changes that would “make rape convictions easier” (Stone and Vogelstein
n.p.). After a “series of high-profile assaults that went viral” in the throes
of the #MeToo Movement, citizens of Morocco achieved “comprehensive
new legislation on violence against women that criminalized sexual harass-
ment” along with forced marriage and domestic violence (Stone and
Vogelstein n.p.). In the summer of 2018, China began working on its first
legislation banning sexual harassment in the workplace, even requiring
employers to take preventative measures (Stone and Vogelstein n.p.).
Japan took similar groundbreaking steps (Stone and Vogelstein n.p.). In
response to women coming forward publicly, the minister for gender
equality in France “wrote a comprehensive bill on sexual harassment,”
extending “the statute of limitations for sex crimes” and creating fines and
other “new sanctions for cyberstalking, street harassment, and “upskirt-

ing” (photographing under a woman’s skirt without consent) (Stone and
Vogelstein n.p.).
By autumn of 2018, one year after the initial #MeToo posting, women
of India had brought down “several high-profile cultural figures, includ-
ing a senior editor at the Hindustan Times, partners at a major Bollywood
production house [called] Phantom Films, and the founders of the popu-
lar comedy troupe All India Bakchod” (Stone and Vogelstein n.p.).
Criminals were still being exposed in the United States, where upwards of
400 women at the University of Southern California sued the campus
gynecologist for sexual assault; Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and eBay
ended forced arbitration in sexual harassment claims—a practice that
allowed perpetrators to conceal past misconduct. At the same time, 20
million people listened while Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified against
U.S. Supreme Court Justice candidate, Brett Kavanaugh, accused of sex-
ual assault. In December of 2018, the U.S. Congress passed legislation
forcing congress people accused of sexual misconduct to pay any resultant
settlement fees, removed obstacles for accusers, and extended protections
to interns and fellows (Nicolaou and Smith n.p.).
In Pakistan, at the start of 2019, in a case with surprise twists and turns
extending across three years and with more than 2 million supporters
using the hashtag #JusticeforKhadija, the supreme court ruled in Khadija
Siddiqui’s favor. The win landed her legally well-connected assailant, who
was convicted of stabbing her dozens of times for “jilting” him, back in
prison to serve out his term (Khan n.p.; “SC Rejected Plea” n.p.). In
Egypt in early 2019, the legal case of Rania Fahmy, which had started in
2017 and had also taken many unexpected twists and turns, culminated in
conviction—one of the first successful sexual harassment cases in Egypt,
helping to establish a legal precedent on behalf of women. Fahmy’s coura-
geous stance inspired a regional conversation on sexual harassment (Stone
and Vogelstein n.p.; Al-Youm n.p.). In South Korea, a former senior pros-
ecutor was sentenced to two years in prison for “banishing a junior pros-
ecutor to an obscure posting after she tried to expose his sexual misconduct”
(Sang-Hun n.p.). Seo Ji-hyeon, the banished junior prosecutor, “remained
silent for years before finally gathering enough courage to speak out”—
inspired by the #MeToo Movement. When she raised her voice, she found
“a wave of public support” that forced an investigation and brought “a
victory for #MeToo campaigners in South Korea” (Sang-Hun n.p.).
18 L. KEMMERER
Anymal activists also came forward in the #MeToo wave, inspiring the
#ARMeToo Movement, which gave voice to victims/survivors in the any-
mal activist community, which brought to light “(predominantly) female
activists suffering harassment at the hands of employers, colleagues, and
donors,” including empowered men in “some of the most well-known
and most respected advocacy organizations” (Bhumitra and Thurston
n.p.). Both the survey and the testimonials examined in Part II of this
book were posted in July of 2017; both collected data during the initial
force of the #MeToo Movement.
Word Choice as Activism

A popular introduction to linguistics includes a cartoon with two cave
people facing one another with clubs in hand. One says to the other, “f w
wnt to tlk rlly gd, w’ll hv t nvnt vwls” (Cameron, 1). This comic reminds
that we do not just use language; we create language. In communicating,
we shape and reshape language. We produce language, we give it meaning,
and we affirm or challenge words through acceptance or rejection of
speech conventions. Fifty years ago, “internet,” “megabyte,” or “airplane
mode,” as well as “quark” and “black hole,” had not yet been added. We
need not be stymied by a lack of words, we simply create what we need to
express ourselves. A couple of centuries ago, “whither,” “nigh,” and
“thee” were common in the English language, but are now rarely used.
Language is important to our understanding of the world. Reshaping
language is therefore critical to reshaping our understanding of the world
(Fairclough, Critical 7). This book uses word activism.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, an influential Austrian philosopher (who died in
1951), considered communication a “speech act”—“not simply a mirror
of life [but] the doing of life itself” (Gergen 35)—a critical “activity, or a
form of life” (Wittgenstein 23). Wittgenstein called attention to concep-
tual confusions that arise when we use language carelessly, without reflec-
tion, noting the “deep disquietudes” that result and our “battle against
the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Wittgenstein
111, 109). He recognized words as a moral choice. In so doing, he exposed
the power of language and called attention to any speaker’s active partici-
pation in the creation of this powerful force and the vital importance of
this process.
Because language is a moral force that helps to shape our worldview, it
is an effective form of social control (Fairclough, Language 2–3),
supporting and contributing to cultural hierarchies, domination, and mar-

ginalization. For example, calling women “girls” conveys the idea that
females never grow up, that they are ill-suited to autonomy and indepen-
dence, that they are less authoritative than men and ill-equipped for lead-
ership. Calling a serial killer “a predator” or “an animal,” villainizes
predators and anymals, reinforcing human contempt and hostility for any-
mals who compete with humans (hunters and those who profit from any-
mal agriculture) for “prey” and helping to legitimize their marginalization
and destruction. Normative conversations carry more than mere surface
meanings—they stem from and perpetuate the status quo: Those who
“learn the language of the oppressor” also inherit and perpetuate an
oppressive worldview (Ko and Ko, Aphro-ism, 88).
On the flip side, skillful use of words can help to liberate those who are
marginalized and oppressed. At least some schoolbooks for children no
longer restrict characters to sexist norms. As more people recognize and
rebel against sexism, labels like “girl” are more likely to provoke confron-
tation. Language activism now trends away from binary pronouns
altogether.
For public speakers and authors, the moral importance of language is
amplified—they are in a position to provoke readers/listeners to pause, to
ponder, to reconsider. When confronted with a new term, or noticeably dif-
ferent word choice, people naturally ponder not only the change, but the
reason for change—and are afterwards forced to decide whether to use or
reject the novel referent. Word activism calls “traditional usage into ques-
tion,” thereby forcing people “to declare a position” when they speak
(Cameron 119). For example, a speaker can refer to the leader as the “chair”
to convey their alignment with more progressive attitudes, or “chairman” to
“convey a more conservative attitude”—but a speaker cannot use either of
these words without conveying “more than ‘a certain woman holds a par-
ticular office’” (Cameron 119). Word activism, in presenting new options,
removes “the option of political neutrality” (Cameron 119). Novel words
call attention to language, raise awareness, and bring listeners/readers to
question and rethink their own word choice and deeper meanings conveyed.
It is therefore important for activists to intentionally alter how we write/
speak and thereby open opportunities to explain why we have done so.
The success of novel word choice (both omissions and replacements) is
not measured by frequency of use, but by the ability of such words to raise
awareness and challenge conventions, values, and prejudices. Because
words are equally a tool for oppression and a resource for liberation, word
20 L. KEMMERER
choice is activism. Toward this end, as a matter of word activism, this book
avoids certain words and employs alternative options, as presented below.
(Additional words avoided in this book are presented and discussed in
Chapter 11 under “Changing What We Say.” Apologies in advance for
oversights—language awareness, like all forms of awareness, is an ongoing
process.)
Definitions
Word activism requires choosing words carefully and providing at least a
working definition of novel words. “Working” because it is almost impos-
sible to adequately define even the simplest of words so as to include all
that a word rightly entails while excluding all that a word does not entail.
For example, how might one define “chair” so as to include dining room
chairs, globe chairs, office chairs, ergonomic kneeling chairs, and beanbag
chairs while excluding curbs, sofas, beach logs, and beds—all of which
serve as (but are not) chairs? Bearing this in mind, this section offers a
working understanding of concepts important to this book. Please keep in
mind that some of these terms are likely to seem very basic to one group
of readers (“male privilege” for feminists, “speciesism” for anymal activ-
ists) while providing vital clarity to others (perhaps “speciesism” for femi-
nists or “male privilege” for anymal activists).
Words Rejected/Replaced
Karen Davis and Barbara Stagno express the importance of word activism
for anymal activism: “As anymal advocates, we cannot allow animal exploit-
ers to define the conversation for us [or] lull us into false rhetoric” (4–5).
With this sentiment in mind, this book rejects certain common words and
phrases in favor of anymal-friendly alternatives.
First, this book avoids describing anymals via methods of exploitation,
such as “farm animal,” “veal calf,” “broiler hen,” “dairy cow,” “seafood,”
“zoo animal,” and “lab animal.” Perhaps only human beings, who have
spent considerable time farming down through history, might reasonably
be referred to as “farm animals” (i.e., animals who farm). Turkeys and pigs
are exploited by humans on farms—they are, in fact, “farmed anymals.”
Similarly, there are no “lab animals,” “zoo animals,” or “circus animals,”
only anymals imprisoned and exploited by humans in labs, zoos, and cir-
cuses. And while calves are slaughtered to create veal, chicken bodies are
broiled and eaten, mother cows are exploited for their nursing milk, and
sea life is cooked and consumed, it is inappropriate, insensitive, and inac-
curate to refer to these living, breathing individuals via ways they are
exploited and killed (i.e., as “veal calves,” “broiler hens,” “dairy cows,” or
“seafood”).
As for “wild” anymals, the term “wildlife” juxtaposes “wild” against
tamed/conquered anymals, normalizing domestication (Kheel, Nature
Ethics 112, 226, 231). The term is also misleading with regard to the
many anymals who are referred to as wild but who are thoroughly acclima-
tized to (even dependent on) humans, such as waterfowl, ungulates, and
songbirds who feed from the hands of humans, off pastures, and at bird
feeders. It is also inappropriate (and frankly, offensive) to refer to lions,
tigers, and elephants who are exploited in circuses and zoos as “wild.”
Such terminology seems a thinly disguised attempt to make exploiters
such as circus trainers appear brave and daring while concealing the cruel
nature of these institutions, and the comparative helplessness of anymals
imprisoned and exploited therein. For all of these reasons (and quite a few
more), this book uses “free-ranging” or “free-roaming” rather than “wild-
life” or “wild animal.”
Language that denies individuality and sexuality also objectifies; such
language is avoided in this book. When referencing an anymal whom we
do not know, it is customary to choose “it” or a “generic he” (Baron n.p.;
“Why is it Common?” n.p.; )—anymals are expected to be referenced “as
‘it’ unless the relationship is personal” (Sobieck n.p.). Consistency “has
sometimes been called the hallmark of ethics” (“Consistency” n.p.):
Inasmuch as we do not use “it” (or the “generic he”) in reference to
human beings whose gender we do not know, we ought not to do so when
referencing individuals of other species. Importantly, because “it” or “he”
are default norms for referring to anymals, choosing “they” draws atten-
tion, and can provide an opportunity to discuss topics such as the indi-
viduality of anymals, the “generic he” as sexist, or the animality of human
beings. Conversely, choosing “it” for human beings who use “it” for any-
mals can also create worthwhile conversations.
Important with regard to consistency, it is widely understood that
altered human reproductive capacities does not change the sex of an indi-
vidual. If a man has a vasectomy or goes through castration, he does not
become “it”; if a woman has a hysterectomy, she also does not become
“it.” Therefore, as a matter of consistency, a cow, pig, dog, or cat whose
reproductive capacity has been altered also does not become “it.”
22 L. KEMMERER
Conventional English tends to present anymals as inanimate objects,

particularly in referencing anymals as “that.” For example, someone might
say, “The rabbit that was hit by a car was injured” or “The dog that was
abandoned was lonely.” But the same speaker would be likely to say, “The
girl who was hit by the car was injured” and “The boy who was abandoned
was lonely.” Rabbits and dogs are no less “who”—living beings, persons
(individuals with personalities) than are human beings.
Additionally, this book avoids language that is likely to further margin-
alize or denigrate anymals, such as using “predator” to reference men who
perpetrate crimes against women (which, as noted, villainizes predators).
Violent and lawless humans are not rightly likened to foxes or hawks.
Moreover, doing so tarnishes both predators themselves and the word that
we use to reference these anymals—so much so that some anymal activists
avoid using “predator” in its rightful place, to reference carnivores and
omnivores (Nature Ethics 61 n. 42.). Oppressive Liberation employs “per-
petrator” (rather than “predator”), and the term is used broadly, indicat-
ing one who commits, produces, brings about, performs, or executes
something, usually with a negative connotation (“Perpetrate,” n.p.). In
this book, perpetrators perpetrate—not just sexual assault, but sexism
more generally. “Perpetrators” may be physically pushy to the point of
assault or they may tell sexist jokes in the workplace, or they may hire only
men in positions of power, or they may accept/expect women to serve as
unpaid labor for others (preparing food, cleaning up, listening quietly). In
this book, “perpetrators” are also those who fail to address sexist acts,
thereby perpetuating the problem and maintaining male privilege.
“Perpetrator” is used literally and therefore includes any acts that perpetu-
ate sexism, from thoughtlessly making choices that maintain the (sexist)
status quo to physical sexual assault.
Survey responses demonstrated that some people object to applying
“male” and “female” to human beings. One survey respondent wrote:
“My sex is an adult human female, therefore I am a woman” (Survey #37
Q2). But these terms are almost universally accepted as referents for any-
mals—demonstrating yet another problematic inconsistency. This book
employs “male” and “female” for all animals. (Dichotomies are dis-
cussed below.)
Outside of anymal activism, those who have suffered from harassment
and assault (including rape) are most frequently referred to as “victims” or
“survivors.” The former seems to suggest that those who have been
harassed/assaulted might be expected to be forever changed by the
experience; the latter seems to honor the energy and strength of resistance
required to move forward after harassment/assault. Both are important,
so this book uses the two terms simultaneously (victims/survivors).
Finally, Oppressive Liberation avoids terms that are insulting or deni-
grating to marginalized peoples, such as those with disabilities (like using
“lame” or “blind” in a negative context), those who are older (such as
referring to age in negative tones), those who are younger (e.g., being
dismissive of younger people), different body shapes (fat shaming), and
people of color (like using “dark” and “black” as negative terms). This
book also avoids the use of familiar and common words that in any way
carry an assumption of male-as-norm (Berger n.p.), especially the use of
male referents for mixed company, which serves to further marginalize
females. In contrast, the southern contraction “y’all” provides a gender
neutral, mixed-company referent in this book.
Novel Referent: “Anymal”

English speakers habitually use “animal” incorrectly, referencing all ani-
mals except human beings. To avoid contributing to and furthering this
misrepresentation, anymal activists sometimes choose to use “nonhuman
animals,” “other animals,” or “other-than-human animals,” terms that are
not only cumbersome, but which also “other”—treat or view as “intrinsi-
cally different from and alien to oneself” (“othering” n.p.).
For these reasons, this book employs “anymal” (pronounced as “any”
and “mal”) in preference to cumbersome, “othering” alternatives.
“Anymal” avoids false distancing, both acknowledging and reminding
that humans are animals. “Anymal” references all species excluding the
species of the speaker/writer/signer. (For example, if a parrot says “any-
mal,” the parrot refers to all species except parrots; if a chimpanzee signs
“anymal,” the chimpanzee refers to every species except chimpanzees.)
(See Fig. 1.1)
It might be argued that “anymal” carries the negative outcome of sepa-
rating humans from other species. This would be true if “animal” were
used correctly—as a referent for human beings and anymals—but that is
not the case. As it is, “anymal” is a concise term that calls attention to the
misuse of “animal” and avoids the perpetuation of exclusionary (and
incorrect) language, and it frequently sparks (activist) conversations.
24 L. KEMMERER
Fig. 1.1 “Anymal”
Word Clarification—Referencing the Anymal Activist Movement

A movement is “a collection of organizations and somewhat likeminded
individuals acting somewhat in concert” (Colb and Dorf 123); move-
ments tend to be “diverse and dynamic,” with vague boundaries (Colb
and Dorf 123). Choosing a referent for the anymal activist community is
a weighty endeavor (and serves as a concrete example of word activism in
action). Broadly speaking, anymal activists work to make life better for
anymals, but the Movement is most often envisioned as separated into two
broad categories—activists focused on anymal welfare and activists focused
on anymal liberation.
Welfarists make concessions, bargaining with exploiters and abusers in
the hopes of achieving incremental changes (such as larger cages and more
humane methods of slaughter). Pretty much all anymal activists and orga-
nizations are welfarist in one way or another, a position that tends to be
more broadly appealing, and which therefore attracts more members and
greater funding (Colb and Dorf 126). As a result, welfarist organizations
tend to be larger, wealthier, and comparatively visible/influential.
Examples include The Humane Society, American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and those focused on improving the
lives of horses and donkeys, cats and dogs, or any other “pets.” (These
organizations also have a long-term tendency to focus only on “pets”
while ignoring the trillions of anymals exploited for food or in laborato-

ries, aquariums, and zoos.)
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and Animal
Liberation (Australia) are worthy examples of groups that overtly (and
largely) stand for anymal liberation. Liberationist organizations seek total
liberation for all anymals—not less harmful forms of marginalization and
exploitation for some species, but no marginalization or exploitation of
any species. Liberationists sometimes make welfarist compromises, or they
may advocate for only one species (such as United Poultry Concerns and
Fish Feel), but they are clear in their messaging that their end goal is total
liberation for all living beings—zero human marginalization or exploita-
tion of any/all anymals.
That said, the welfarists/liberationists distinction is more philosophical
than actual. Employees in a welfarist organization may be liberationists
both at heart and in their free time (Colb and Dorf 126). Women, in par-
ticular, frequently walk both paths (Gaarder 114). Welfarists and libera-
tionists are both core to the Movement and attempting to draw a line
between the two generally feels wrongheaded. Any viable referent for the
Movement needs to encompass both, embracing diverse forms of activism
and the full scope of activists.
What referents are available and how do they stack up? “Animal rights”
has been and remains the most common referent in the United States (the
nation where I live and work). But this term suggests that activists are
working to protect the rights of anymals (e.g., freedom from exploitation
and the right to bodily integrity), which is a liberationist goal, while most
organizations and activists are welfarist. Most organizations are best
described as utilitarian in nature, not rights-based, with few clear excep-
tions, as noted above.
Philosophers are more likely to be liberationist than organizations or
boots-on-the-ground activists. The rightful role of philosophers is to chal-
lenge, to push the envelope, and philosophers (who are not normally
engaged in outreach or lobbying, and who do not depend on the public
for funding) can better afford to be no-compromise liberationists.
Philosopher Tom Regan is one such example. Outside of the world of
philosophers, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an
excellent example of a liberationist organization that affirms and defends
the rights of all anymals (though they, too, make compromises). For
example, PETA sued on behalf of a macaque, Naruto, to hold the copy-
right of a selfie she had taken (“Animals ‘in Person’” 2). PETA also filed a
26 L. KEMMERER
lawsuit on behalf of the right to freedom and autonomy of five orcas,

caught from the wild, sold, and then “forced to perform at SeaWorld”
(“PETA” n.p.). PETA argued that the whales were “being held as slaves in
violation of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution” (“PETA”
n.p.). Such rights-based stances are rare, which makes this referent ill-
suited for the broader Movement.
Some refer to “the vegan movement,” but this excludes many anymal
activists, such as those who advocate for companion anymals and iconic
free-ranging anymals (e.g., primates, elephants, whales, and big cats,
often while eating farmed anymals and fishes). Of course, one could pose
a viable argument that, in order to legitimately be considered an anymal
activist, those who can access vegan foods must be vegan, and if they are
not vegan, they do not qualify as anymal activists, but only as, for exam-
ple, cat and dog activists, or activists on behalf of free-ranging anymals.
But excluding the many people who work only for specific species fails to
allow for the breadth of anymal activism.
There are two other attractive options, “Anymal Justice” (AJ) and
“Anymal Ethics” (AE), both of which remind that anyone who brings
changes for anymals—no matter what type of change, no matter which
species benefits—is necessarily acting to further human ethics and univer-
sal justice (fairness/equitableness). Ethics are envisioned as shaping behav-
iors, often with an eye to justice: Ideally, ethics stand in relation to justice
as rain to wetness—one entails the other. Indeed, all anymal activists seek
at least some measure of improved justice for at least some anymals, but a
distinction must be drawn between seeking greater justice and categori-
cally seeking justice/fairness/equitableness. As with “rights,” “justice” is
too strong a claim in light of the Movement’s predominantly welfarist
leanings. To be clear, lobbying for less painful forms of killing, more
humane transport, and larger battery cages is not the same as lobbying for
justice/fairness/equitableness for anymals, which would require no bat-
tery cages, no transport, and no killing—liberation.
In contrast, ethics always has been and remains the compass for anymal
activism. Lobbying for smaller cages, less suffering in transport, and larger
battery cages are all guided by commonly accepted moral principles—by
an accepted ethic of compassion and a recognized need to expand the
moral circle. Therefore, “Anymal Ethics” is inclusive of and accurately
describes the entirety of the Movement. That said, referring to “anymal
ethics activists,” “the Anymal Ethics Movement,” and “anymal ethics
organizations” is cumbersome. Fortunately, an acronym will work: AE
Movement. One problem with this referent is that the ethics questioned
by anymal activists are human ethics—human ethics with regard to any-
mals. Anymal ethics implies that the ethics of concern are those of any-
mals, and anymals most certainly do have codes of ethics (Bekoff and
Pierce, entire book; Kemmerer, In Search of Consistency, 85.)
The “Black Liberation Movement” and the “Women’s Movement”
suggest a simple and direct solution to this problem: “anymal organiza-
tion,” “Anymals Movement,” and “anymal activist.” But using “anymal”
in this way would indicate that the Movement, organizations, communi-
ties, and activists are composed of or run by anymals. And if we revert back
to using “animal,” we again use the term incorrectly (as if humans were
not animals) because anymal activists do not work on behalf of human
beings. This problem can be solved by adding “activist” or “advocacy,”
putting the emphasis and focus where it belongs—anymal activist, anymal
advocacy. But here again, the referent is cumbersome, again pointing to
the possibility of an acronym: AA Movement. The options of “AE
Movement” and “AA Movement,” because they raise the question of
whether to use “animal” or “anymal,” highlight a crucial point: Anymal
activists, if they are to bring any measure of change, must also work
with humans.
Referents ought to guard against any tendency to view anymals as wards
of humanity or inherently dependent on human protection: Humans are
the problem and the rightful focus of change. (For example, in my first book
I used “protectionism,” but it now seems that any referent for the
Movement ought to include “anymals” (the subjects of marginalization
and exploitation), and if possible, also convey the truth that human beings
are the source of the problem.)
Despite having discovered no term that conveys all that is necessary
while avoiding anything that might mislead, this book must some way
refer to the movement on which it is focused. Because human ethics lie at
the core of the problem and the core of any solution posed, the anymal
activist’s Movement/organizations and the community/advocates/activ-
ists are referred to herein as the AE (anymal ethics) Movement, AE orga-
nizations, AE community, and AE advocates/activists. (Although, more
often than not, I simply write out anymal activists and abreviate to
“Movement.”) Importantly, anyone who identifies as an anymal activist,
whether tending toward anymal welfare or anymal liberation, whether
working to help anymals exploited for science or homeless cats, is consid-
ered part of the AE Movement/community.
28 L. KEMMERER
Novel Referent: Intersectionality, Appropriation,

and “Interfacing Oppressions”
As outlined and discussed in the next chapter, this book uses “intersec-
tionality” and “intersectional” only in their original context (the intersec-
tion of race and sex), using the term “interfacing oppressions” for all other
overlapping and interconnected oppressions. That said, oppressions are
not distinct and separate categories—and therefore cannot “overlap” or
“interconnect.” Oppressions are part of civilization just as language is part
of society—they are created and maintained by people and communities,
they are sometimes noticed, altered, even rejected. Language and oppres-
sions both feed into civilization and emerge from civilization; neither lan-
guages nor oppressions exist apart from a given civilization. As part of the
fabric of history and culture, oppressions are neither separate nor distinct
from one another or from any other aspects of a given community—all
exist in relation to one another. To use a Zen Buddhist term, they inter-be
or inter-are. All of that aside, some term must be chosen to avoid appro-
priation of “intersectional oppressions” and this book uses “interfacing
oppressions.”
Talking About Binaries

In sexist cultures, that which is envisioned as male tends to be taken as the
standard for humanity. For example, someone might assert that “people
are violent,” but research indicates that physical aggression falls “pretty
predictably along gender lines” (“Accounting for Ourselves” 35). That
said, gender norms are culturally determined so that any tendencies for
male violence is not equally true for all cultures.
Of course, women can be violent, and women are sometimes convicted
as rapists and batterers, and many (if not most) men are generally nonvio-
lent. Still, neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky writes: “We males
account for less than 50 percent of the population, yet we generate a huge
proportion of the violence” (22). And the “vast majority of victims of
sexual violence are female and most perpetrators are male” (“Sexual
Violence” 6). The greater truth seems to be that men have a tendency to
be violent in comparison with and relation to women.
Binaries have the inherent problem of total separation and opposition,
of channeling diversity into two narrow and exclusive categories. Sex bina-
ries are foundational in cultures that harbor institutionalized, systemic
sexism and male privilege, and while problematic, they are critical for ana-
lyzing and better understanding sexism and male privilege. Binaries can-
not be ignored when researching and writing on the subject of sexism, and
so this book works within the framework of sex binaries, with “female,”
“male,” “women,” and “men” referencing those who identify as such
respectively. It is important to note that only by ultimately rejecting bina-
ries, allowing individuals to be and become whomever they are or prefer
to be, will humanity extricate sexism and establish the possibility for real-
izing justice and total liberation.
About This Book

A decade ago, when I edited Sister Species and Speaking Up for Animals, I
featured women because most anymal activists are women. As I wrote, I
pondered what provides these women with whatever it takes to face—day
after day—the shocking cruelty and raw suffering of anymals, and the per-
vasive indifference of humanity. As I gathered materials, I came to see that
the options for these women were limited: They could either turn away
despite what they knew or “walk straight into that pervasive misery and work
for change” (L. Kemmerer, “Introduction,” Sister Species 24). What I
learned is that, “where unconscionable violence and pervasive injustices
are the norm,” these women “come to see activism as the lesser of two
miseries.”
A decade has passed since the publication of Sister Species and Speaking
Up for Animals, and anymal activists are still 80%3 female (Gaarder 11;
Jasper and Poulsen 502; Adams and Gruen 7–19). I find myself writing
Oppressive Liberation for these women, but it is also written for other
social justice activists who have experienced sexism inside their particular
movement. As this book indicates, forces that undergird sexism and male
privilege are particularly likely in social justice activism. (For more on this,
see Chapter 4).
This book carries the hope of total liberation and is envisioned as one
of the many millions of steps necessary to realize this hoped-for goal.
Toward this end, Oppressive Liberation
• explores the idea of interconnected oppressions from various angles,
3
Estimates are at 70–80%; this book employs the 80% figure.
30 L. KEMMERER
• clarifies the causes of sexism and male privilege in social jus-

tice activism,
• provides and analyzes data evidencing sexism and male privilege in
anymal activism,
• exposes and discusses harms caused by sexism and male privilege, and
• suggests possible paths forward to help resolve these problems.
Part I introduces the problem around which the book revolves. The
first chapter (this chapter) introduces key terms and explores foundational
ideas, particularly with regard to the interface of speciesism and sexism.
Because this book is written for a broad group of readers (feminists, any-
mal activists, scholars and students of women’s studies, scholars and stu-
dents of animal studies, and social justice students and scholars more
generally), the book explores terms that are likely familiar to some while
not necessarily familiar to others. Chapter 2 examines the interconnected
nature of sexism and speciesism, providing wide-ranging evidence (using
ecofeminist theory, ancient philosophies and religions, and science) to
support the assertion that oppressions are interconnected—a corner-
stone of this book. Next, in light of the interconnected nature of oppres-
sions, Chapter 3 explores intersectionality and whiteness as norm to
examine and address the problems/concerns of a white woman, who does
not experience intersectional (race and sex) oppressions, writing about
sexism. Chapter 4 outlines causes for sexism in social justice activism,
introducing concepts that are essential for critically analyzing sexism
among anymal activists in Part II.
Reflecting back on information provided in Part I, particularly Chapter
4, Part II provides evidence of sexism and male privilege in the Anymal
Activist Movement, highlighting likely causes, using
• an (international) online survey,

• twenty-eight testimonials,
• a critical analysis of key Movement institutions, and
• news articles and social posts that expose sexism in the Movement.
Part III outlines the harms of sexism and male privilege, including psy-
chological harms to individuals, harms to activist organizations, and harms
to the Movement. The next two chapters in Part III explore possible ave-
nues for working against sexism in the Movement, dividing the topic
between strategies to employ inside organizations, and strategies for inde-

pendent activists.
Part IV holds the voices of a variety of anymal activists, expanding what
the book is able to offer and contextualizing oppressions suffered among
anymal activists. This portion of the book includes an author who cri-
tiques the contemporary Movement’s mainstream tendencies, an author
who describes anymal activism informed by feminism, a white male who
recalls his toxic past and describes his journey into more just ways of being,
and a handful of authors who provide contextualized experiences of the
compounding of oppressions—a Belgium activist who identifies as dis-
abled, a US activist who identifies as a person of color, and an activist from
India who identifies as a trans woman.
End Goals
This book is about sexism and male privilege in social justice activism, with
a focus on anymal activism. As noted, the end goal is total liberation—an
end to all forms of privilege and marginalization (racism, ageism, hetero-
sexism, ableism, trans aggression, nationalism, classism, speciesism, and so
on). The hope of this book is that this change can and will be brought
about through a shift in how we see ourselves in relation to the world
around us, recognizing that we live in an interconnected universe (where
oppressions are interconnected).
A worldview rooted in an understanding of interconnections is funda-
mental and vital to this end goal. In a world of interconnected oppres-
sions, it makes no sense to work for one cause while contributing to
another: It makes no sense to engage against climate change while foster-
ing heterosexism, or to engage against racism while fostering speciesism.
Working in any one social justice cause can be exhausting and all-
consuming, but in light of the interconnected nature of oppressions, activ-
ists working for change in one area must at least avoid contributing to
other forms of oppression. In a world of interconnected oppressions,
working for one cause while fostering another is self-defeating.
32 L. KEMMERER
This book joins a growing body of work documenting interconnections

between sexism and speciesism,4 causing an upsurge in the number of
activists working across movements while recognizing that many feminists
still overtly disassociate from anymal activism and most anymal activists
remain ignorant of feminism. (For more on this, see Chapter 2 , “Estranged
Siblings.”) If feminists and anymal activists work together, as an abun-
dance of scholarship indicates they must of they are to succeed in their
missions, anymal activists need to understand sexism, feminists need to
understand speciesism, and both need to understand the interconnected
nature of marginalization and oppression. With this in mind, the next
chapter works toward a wide-ranging, deep-rooted understanding of
interconnections.
4
See, for example, “The Link Between Animal Cruelty and Human Violence” by Charlie
Robinson and Victoria Clausen (Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI at https://leb.fbi.gov/
articles/featured-articles/the-link-between-animal-cruelty-and-human-violence); “Animal
Liberation Is a Feminist Issue” (The New Catalyst Quarterly 10, Winter 1988: 8–9), “The
Killing Game: An Ecofeminist Critique of Hunting” (Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 23,
no. 1, May 1996: 30–44), “If Women and Animals Were Heard” (Feminists for Animal
Rights Semiannual Publication 5 (Summer/Fall 1990: 1, 10) by Marti Kheel, founder of
Feminists for Animal Rights; Women and the Animal Rights Movement (Rutgers University
Press, 2011) by Emily Gaarder; Animal Abuse and Family Violence: Researching the
Interrelationships of Abusive Power (Mellen Press, 2005) by Amy Fitzgerald; “Tied
Oppressions: An analysis of how Sexist Imagery Reinforces Speciesist Sentiment” (The Brock
Review 12 (1), 51–68) and “Rational Emotions: Animal Rights Theory, Feminist Critiques
and Activist Insights” (The Psychology of the Human-Animal Bond, 307–319) by Carol
Glasser; The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Continuum,
1990) and The Pornography of Meat (Bloomsbury Academic, 2004) by Carol Adams;
Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Duke University Press, 1995) by
Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan; Animaladies: Gender, Animals, and Madness
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) by Lori Gruen; and Sister Species (University of Illinois Press,
2011) by Lisa Kemmerer.
Another random document with
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performance, is as a whole only the intensification of this being-
human. Henceforward all that resists our sensations is not mere
resistance or thing or impression, as it is for animals and for children
also, but an expression as well. Not merely are things actually
contained in the world-around but also they possess meaning, as
phenomena in the world-view. Originally they possessed only a
relationship to men, but now there is also a relationship of men to
them. They have become emblems of his existence. And thus the
essence of every genuine—unconscious and inwardly necessary—
symbolism proceeds from the knowledge of death in which the
secret of space reveals itself. All symbolism implies a defensive; it is
the expression of a deep Scheu in the old double sense of the word,
[179]
and its form-language tells at once of hostility and of reverence.
Every thing-become is mortal. Not only peoples, languages, races
and Cultures are transient. In a few centuries from now there will no
more be a Western Culture, no more be German, English or French
than there were Romans in the time of Justinian. Not that the
sequence of human generations failed; it was the inner form of a
people, which had put together a number of these generations as a
single gesture, that was no longer there. The Civis Romanus, one of
the most powerful symbols of Classical being, had nevertheless, as
a form, only a duration of some centuries. But the primitive
phenomenon of the great Culture will itself have disappeared some
day, and with it the drama of world-history; aye, and man himself,
and beyond man the phenomenon of plant and animal existence on
the earth’s surface, the earth, the sun, the whole world of sun-
systems. All art is mortal, not merely the individual artifacts but the
arts themselves. One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last
bar of Mozart will have ceased to be—though possibly a coloured
canvas and a sheet of notes may remain—because the last eye and
the last ear accessible to their message will have gone. Every
thought, faith and science dies as soon as the spirits in whose
worlds their “eternal truths” were true and necessary are
extinguished. Dead, even, are the star-worlds which “appeared,” a
proper world to the proper eye, to the astronomers of the Nile and
the Euphrates, for our eye is different from theirs; and our eye in its
turn is mortal. All this we know. The beast does not know, and what
he does not know does not exist in his experienced world-around.
But if the image of the past vanishes, the longing to give a deeper
meaning to the passing vanishes also. And so it is with reference to
the purely human macrocosm that we apply the oft-quoted line,
which shall serve as motto for all that follows: Alles Vergängliche ist
nur ein Gleichnis.
From this we are led, without our noticing it, back to the space-
problem, though now it takes on a fresh and surprising form. Indeed,
it is as a corollary to these ideas that it appears for the first time as
capable of solution—or, to speak more modestly, of enunciation—
just as the time-problem was made more comprehensible by way of
the Destiny-idea. From the moment of our awakening, the fateful and
directed life appears in the phenomenal life as an experienced
depth. Everything extends itself, but it is not yet “space,” not
something established in itself but a self-extension continued from
the moving here to the moving there. World-experience is bound up
with the essence of depth (i.e., far-ness or distance). In the abstract
system of mathematics, “depth” is taken along with “length” and
“breadth” as a “third” dimension; but this trinity of elements of like
order is misleading from the outset, for in our impression of the
spatial world these elements are unquestionably not equivalents, let
alone homogeneous. Length and breadth are no doubt,
experientially, a unit and not a mere sum, but they are (the phrase is
used deliberately) simply a form of reception; they represent the
purely sensuous impression. But depth is a representation of
expression, of Nature, and with it begins the “world.”
This discrimination between the “third” and the other two
dimensions, so called, which needless to say is wholly alien to
mathematics, is inherent also in the opposition of the notions of
sensation and contemplation. Extension into depth converts the
former into the latter; in fact, depth is the first and genuine dimension
in the literal sense of the word.[180] In it the waking consciousness is
active, whereas in the others it is strictly passive. It is the symbolic
content of a particular order as understood by one particular Culture
that is expressed by this original fundamental and unanalysable
element. The experiencing of depth (this is a premiss upon which all
that follows is dependent) is an act, as entirely involuntary and
necessary as it is creative, whereby the ego keeps its world, so to
say, in subordination (zudiktiert erhält). Out of the rain of impressions
the ego fashions a formal unit, a cinematic picture, which as soon as
it is mastered by the understanding is subjected to law and the
causality principle; and therefore, as the projection of an individual
spirit it is transient and mortal.
There is no doubt, however reason may contest it, that this
extension is capable of infinite variety, and that it operates differently
not merely as between child and man, or nature-man and townsman,
or Chinese and Romans, but as between individual and individual
according as they experience their worlds contemplatively or alertly,
actively or placidly. Every artist has rendered “Nature” by line and by
tone, every physicist—Greek, Arabian or German—has dissected
“Nature” into ultimate elements, and how is it that they have not all
discovered the same? Because every one of them has had his own
Nature, though—with a naïveté that was really the salvation of his
world-idea and of his own self—every one believed that he had it in
common with all the rest. Nature is a possession which is saturated
through and through with the most personal connotations. Nature is
a function of the particular Culture.
III
Kant believed that he had decided the great question of whether

this a priori element was pre-existent or obtained by experience, by
his celebrated formula that Space is the form of perception which
underlies all world impressions. But the “world” of the careless child
and the dreamer undeniably possess this form in an insecure and
hesitant way,[181] and it is only the tense, practical, technical
treatment of the world-around—imposed on the free-moving being
which, unlike the lilies of the fields, must care for its life—that lets
sensuous self-extension stiffen into rational tridimensionality. And it
is only the city-man of matured Cultures that really lives in this
glaring wakefulness, and only for his thought that there is a Space
wholly divorced from sensuous life, “absolute,” dead and alien to
Time; and it exists not as a form of the intuitively-perceived but as a
form of the rationally-comprehended. There is no manner of doubt
that the “space” which Kant saw all around him with such
unconditional certainty when he was thinking out his theory, did not
exist in anything like so rigorous a form for his Carolingian ancestors.
Kant’s greatness consists in his having created the idea of a "form a
priori," but not in the application that he gave it. We have already
seen that Time is not a “form of perception” nor for that matter a form
at all—forms exist only in the extended—and that there is no
possibility of defining it except as a counter-concept to Space. But
there is the further question—does this word “space” exactly cover
the formal content of the intuitively-perceived? And beyond all this
there is the plain fact that the “form of perception” alters with
distance. Every distant mountain range is “perceived” as a scenic
plane. No one will pretend that he sees the moon as a body; for the
eye it is a pure plane and it is only by the aid of the telescope—i.e.
when the distance is artificially reduced—that it progressively obtains
a spatial form. Obviously, then, the “form of perception” is a function
of distance. Moreover, when we reflect upon anything, we do not
exactly remember the impressions that we received at the time, but
“represent to ourselves” the picture of a space abstracted from them.
But this representation may and does deceive us regarding the living
actuality. Kant let himself be misled; he should certainly not have
permitted himself to distinguish between forms of perception and
forms of ratiocination, for his notion of Space in principle embraced
both.[182]
Just as Kant marred the Time-problem by bringing it into relation
with an essentially misunderstood arithmetic and—on that basis—
dealing with a phantom sort of time that lacks the life-quality of
direction and is therefore a mere spatial scheme, so also he marred
the Space-problem by relating it to a common-place geometry.
It befell that a few years after the completion of Kant’s main work
Gauss discovered the first of the Non-Euclidean geometries. These,
irreproachably demonstrated as regards their own internal validity,
enable it to be proved that there are several strictly mathematical
kinds of three-dimensional extension, all of which are a priori certain,
and none of which can be singled out to rank as the genuine “form of
perception.”
It was a grave, and in a contemporary of Euler and Lagrange an
unpardonable, error to postulate that the Classical school-geometry
(for it was that which Kant always had in mind) was to be found
reproduced in the forms of Nature around us. In moments of
attentive observation at very short range, and in cases in which the
relations considered are sufficiently small, the living impressions and
the rules of customary geometry are certainly in approximate
agreement. But the exact conformity asserted by philosophy can be
demonstrated neither by the eye nor by measuring-instruments. Both
these must always stop short at a certain limit of accuracy which is
very far indeed below that which would be necessary, say, for
determining which of the Non-Euclidean geometries is the geometry
of “empirical” Space.[183] On the large scales and for great distances,
where the experience of depth completely dominates the perception-
picture (for example, looking on a broad landscape as against a
drawing) the form of perception is in fundamental contradiction with
mathematics. A glance down any avenue shows us that parallels
meet at the horizon. Western perspective and the otherwise quite
different perspective of Chinese painting are both alike based on this
fact, and the connexion of these perspectives with the root-problems
of their respective mathematics is unmistakable.
Experiential Depth, in the infinite variety of its modes, eludes every
sort of numerical definition. The whole of lyric poetry and music, the
entire painting of Egypt, China and the West by hypothesis deny any
strictly mathematical structure in space as felt and seen, and it is
only because all modern philosophers have been destitute of the
smallest understanding of painting that they have failed to note the
contradiction. The “horizon” in and by which every visual image
gradually passes into a definitive plane, is incapable of any
mathematical treatment. Every stroke of a landscape painter’s brush
refutes the assertions of conventional epistemology.
As mathematical magnitudes abstract from life, the “three
dimensions” have no natural limits. But when this proposition
becomes entangled with the surface-and-depth of experienced
impression, the original epistemological error leads to another, viz.,
that apprehended extension is also without limits, although in fact
our vision only comprises the illuminated portion of space and stops
at the light-limit of the particular moment, which may be the star-
heavens or merely the bright atmosphere. The “visual” world is the
totality of light-resistances, since vision depends on the presence of
radiated or reflected light. The Greeks took their stand on this and
stayed there. It is the Western world-feeling that has produced the
idea of a limitless universe of space—a space of infinite star-systems
and distances that far transcends all optical possibilities—and this
was a creation of the inner vision, incapable of all actualization
through the eye, and, even as an idea, alien to and unachievable by
the men of a differently-disposed Culture.
IV
The outcome, then, of Gauss’s discovery, which completely altered

the course of modern mathematics,[184] was the statement that there
are severally equally valid structures of three-dimensional extension.
That it should even be asked which of them corresponds to actual
perception shows that the problem was not in the least
comprehended. Mathematics, whether or not it employs visible
images and representations as working conveniences, concerns
itself with systems that are entirely emancipated from life, time and
distance, with form-worlds of pure numbers whose validity—not fact-
foundation—is timeless and like everything else that is “known” is
known by causal logic and not experienced.
With this, the difference between the living intuition-way and the
mathematical form-language became manifest and the secret of
spatial becoming opened out.
As becoming is the foundation of the become, continuous living
history that of fulfilled dead nature, the organic that of the
mechanical, destiny that of causal law and the causally-settled, so
too direction is the origin of extension. The secret of Life
accomplishing itself which is touched upon by the word Time forms
the foundation of that which, as accomplished, is understood by (or
rather indicated to an inner feeling in us by) the word Space. Every
extension that is actual has first been accomplished in and with an
experience of depth, and what is primarily indicated by the word
Time is just this process of extending, first sensuously (in the main,
visually) and only later intellectually, into depth and distance, i.e., the
step from the planar semi-impression to the macrocosmically
ordered world-picture with its mysterious-manifest kinesis. We feel—
and the feeling is what constitutes the state of all-round awareness
in us—that we are in an extension that encircles us; and it is only
necessary to follow out this original impression that we have of the
worldly to see that in reality there is only one true “dimension” of
space, which is direction from one’s self outwards into the distance,
the “there” and the future, and that the abstract system of three
dimensions is a mechanical representation and not a fact of life. By
the depth-experience sensation is expanded into the world. We have
seen already that the directedness that is in life wears the badge of
irreversibility, and there is something of this same hall-mark of Time
in our instinctive tendency to feel the depth that is in the world uni-
directionally also—viz., from ourselves outwards, and never from the
horizon inwards. The bodily mobility of man and beast is disposed in
this sense. We move forward—towards the Future, nearing with
every step not merely our aim but our old age—and we feel every
backward look as a glance at something that is past, that has
already become history.[185]
If we can describe the basic form of the understood, viz., causality,
as destiny become rigid, we may similarly speak of spatial depth as
a time become rigid. That which not only man but even the beast
feels operative around him as destiny, he perceives by touching,
looking, listening, scenting as movement, and under his intense
scrutiny it stiffens and becomes causal. We feel that it is drawing
towards spring and we feel in advance how the spring landscape
expands around us; but we know that the earth as it moves in space
revolves and that the duration of spring consists of ninety such
revolutions of the earth, or days. Time gives birth to Space, but
Space gives death to Time.
Had Kant been more precise, he would, instead of speaking of the
“two forms of perception,” have called time the form of perception
and space the form of the perceived, and then the connexion of the
two would probably have revealed itself to him. The logician,
mathematician, or scientist in his moments of intense thought, knows
only the Become—which has been detached from the singular event
by the very act of meditating upon it—and true systematic space—in
which everything possesses the property of a mathematically-
expressible “duration.” But it is just this that indicates to us how
space is continuously “becoming.” While we gaze into the distance
with our senses, it floats around us, but when we are startled, the
alert eye sees a tense and rigid space. This space is; the principle of
its existing at all is that it is, outside time and detached from it and
from life. In it duration, a piece of perished time, resides as a known
property of things. And, as we know ourselves too as being in this
space, we know that we also have a duration and a limit, of which
the moving finger of our clock ceaselessly warns us. But the rigid
Space itself is transient too—at the first relaxation of our intellectual
tension it vanishes from the many-coloured spread of our world-
around—and so it is a sign and symbol of the most elemental and
powerful symbol, of life itself.
For the involuntary and unqualified realization of depth, which
dominates the consciousness with the force of an elemental event
(simultaneously with the awakening of the inner life), marks the
frontier between child and ... Man. The symbolic experience of depth
is what is lacking in the child, who grasps at the moon and knows as
yet no meaning in the outer world but, like the soul of primitive man,
dawns in a dreamlike continuum of sensations (in traumhafter
Verbundenheit mit allem Empfindungshaften hindämmert). Of course
the child is not without experience of the extended, of a very simple
kind, but there is no world-perception; distance is felt, but it does not
yet speak to the soul. And with the soul’s awakening, direction, too,
first reaches living expression—Classical expression in steady
adherence to the near-present and exclusion of the distant and
future; Faustian in direction-energy which has an eye only for the
most distant horizons; Chinese, in free hither-and-thither wandering
that nevertheless goes to the goal; Egyptian in resolute march down
the path once entered. Thus the Destiny-idea manifests itself in
every line of a life. With it alone do we become members of a
particular Culture, whose members are connected by a common
world-feeling and a common world-form derived from it. A deep
identity unites the awakening of the soul, its birth into clear existence
in the name of a Culture, with the sudden realization of distance and
time, the birth of its outer world through the symbol of extension; and
thenceforth this symbol is and remains the prime symbol of that life,
imparting to it its specific style and the historical form in which it
progressively actualizes its inward possibilities. From the specific
directedness is derived the specific prime-symbol of extension,
namely, for the Classical world-view the near, strictly limited, self-
contained Body, for the Western infinitely wide and infinitely profound
three-dimensional Space, for the Arabian the world as a Cavern. And
therewith an old philosophical problem dissolves into nothing: this
prime form of the world is innate in so far as it is an original
possession of the soul of that Culture which is expressed by our life
as a whole, and acquired in so far that every individual soul re-
enacts for itself that creative act and unfolds in early childhood the
symbol of depth to which its existence is predestined, as the
emerging butterfly unfolds its wings. The first comprehension of
depth is an act of birth—the spiritual complement of the bodily.[186] In
it the Culture is born out of its mother-landscape, and the act is
repeated by every one of its individual souls throughout its life-
course. This is what Plato—connecting it with an early Hellenic belief
—called anamnesis. The definiteness of the world-form, which for
each dawning soul suddenly is, derives meaning from Becoming.
Kant the systematic, however, with his conception of the form a
priori, would approach the interpretation of this very riddle from a
dead result instead of along a living way.
From now on, we shall consider the kind of extension as the prime
symbol of a Culture. From it we are to deduce the entire form-
language of its actuality, its physiognomy as contrasted with the
physiognomy of every other Culture and still more with the almost
entire lack of physiognomy in primitive man’s world-around. For now
the interpretation of depth rises to acts, to formative expression in
works, to the trans-forming of actuality, not now merely in order to
subserve necessities of life (as in the case of the animals) but above
all to create a picture out of extensional elements of all sorts
(material, line, colour, tone, motion)—a picture, often, that re-
emerges with power to charm after lost centuries in the world-picture
of another Culture and tells new men of the way in which its authors
understood the world.
But the prime symbol does not actualize itself; it is operative
through the form-sense of every man, every community, age and
epoch and dictates the style of every life-expression. It is inherent in
the form of the state, the religious myths and cults, the ethical ideals,
the forms of painting and music and poetry, the fundamental notions
of each science—but it is not presented by these. Consequently, it is
not presentable by words, for language and words are themselves
derived symbols. Every individual symbol tells of it, but only to the
inner feelings, not to the understanding. And when we say, as
henceforth we shall say, that the prime-symbol of the Classical soul
is the material and individual body, that of the Western pure infinite
space, it must always be with the reservation that concepts cannot
represent the inconceivable, and thus at the most a significative
feeling may be evoked by the sound of words.
Infinite space is the ideal that the Western soul has always striven
to find, and to see immediately actualized, in its world-around; and
hence it is that the countless space-theories of the last centuries
possess—over and above all ostensible “results”—a deep import as
symptoms of a world-feeling. In how far does unlimited extension
underlie all objective things? There is hardly a single problem that
has been more earnestly pondered than this; it would almost seem
as if every other world-question was dependent upon the one
problem of the nature of space. And is it not in fact so—for us? And
how, then, has it escaped notice that the whole Classical world never
expended one word on it, and indeed did not even possess a
word[187] by which the problem could be exactly outlined? Why had
the great pre-Socratics nothing to say on it? Did they overlook in
their world just that which appears to us the problem of all problems?
Ought we not, in fact, to have seen long ago that the answer is in the
very fact of their silence? How is it that according to our deepest
feeling the “world” is nothing but that world-of-space which is the true
offspring of our depth-experience, and whose grand emptiness is
corroborated by the star-systems lost in it? Could a “world” of this
sense have been made even comprehensible to a Classical thinker?
In short, we suddenly discover that the “eternal problem” that Kant,
in the name of humanity, tackled with a passion that itself is
symbolic, is a purely Western problem that simply does not arise in
the intellects of other Cultures.
What then was it that Classical man, whose insight into his own
world-around was certainly not less piercing than ours, regarded as
the prime problem of all being? It was the problem of ἀρχή, the
material origin and foundation of all sensuously-perceptible things. If
we grasp this we shall get close to the significance of the fact—not
the fact of space, but the fact that made it a necessity of destiny for
the space-problem to become the problem of the Western, and only
the Western, soul.[188] This very spatiality (Räumlichkeit) that is the
truest and sublimest element in the aspect of our universe, that
absorbs into itself and begets out of itself the substantiality of all
things, Classical humanity (which knows no word for, and therefore
has no idea of, space) with one accord cuts out as the nonent, τὸ μὴ
ὄν, that which is not. The pathos of this denial can scarcely be
exaggerated. The whole passion of the Classical soul is in this act of
excluding by symbolic negation that which it would not feel as actual,
that in which its own existence could not be expressed. A world of
other colour suddenly confronts us here. The Classical statue in its
splendid bodiliness—all structure and expressive surfaces and no
incorporeal arrière-pensée whatsoever—contains without remainder
all that Actuality is for the Classical eye. The material, the optically
definite, the comprehensible, the immediately present—this list
exhausts the characteristics of this kind of extension. The Classical
universe, the Cosmos or well-ordered aggregate of all near and
completely viewable things, is concluded by the corporeal vault of
heaven. More there is not. The need that is in us to think of “space”
as being behind as well as before this shell was wholly absent from
the Classical world-feeling. The Stoics went so far as to treat even
properties and relations of things as “bodies.” For Chrysippus, the
Divine Pneuma is a “body,” for Democritus seeing consists in our
being penetrated by material particles of the things seen. The State
is a body which is made up of all the bodies of its citizens, the law
knows only corporeal persons and material things. And the feeling
finds its last and noblest expression in the stone body of the
Classical temple. The windowless interior is carefully concealed by
the array of columns; but outside there is not one truly straight line to
be found. Every flight of steps has a slight sweep outward, every
step relatively to the next. The pediment, the roof-ridge, the sides are
all curved. Every column has a slight swell and none stand truly
vertical or truly equidistant from one another. But swell and
inclination and distance vary from the corners to the centres of the
sides in a carefully toned-off ratio, and so the whole corpus is given
a something that swings mysterious about a centre. The curvatures
are so fine that to a certain extent they are invisible to the eye and
only to be “sensed.” But it is just by these means that direction in
depth is eliminated. While the Gothic style soars, the Ionic swings.
The interior of the cathedral pulls up with primeval force, but the
temple is laid down in majestic rest. All this is equally true as relating
to the Faustian and Apollinian Deity, and likewise of the fundamental
ideas of the respective physics. To the principles of position, material
and form we have opposed those of straining movement, force and
mass, and we have defined the last-named as a constant ratio
between force and acceleration, nay, finally volatilized both in the
purely spatial elements of capacity and intensity. It was an obligatory
consequence also of this way of conceiving actuality that the
instrumental music of the great 18th-Century masters should emerge
as a master-art—for it is the only one of the arts whose form-world is
inwardly related to the contemplative vision of pure space. In it, as
opposed to the statues of Classical temple and forum, we have
bodiless realms of tone, tone-intervals, tone-seas. The orchestra
swells, breaks, and ebbs, it depicts distances, lights, shadows,
storms, driving clouds, lightning flashes, colours etherealized and
transcendent—think of the instrumentation of Gluck and Beethoven.
“Contemporary,” in our sense, with the Canon of Polycletus, the
treatise in which the great sculptor laid down the strict rules of
human body-build which remained authoritative till beyond Lysippus,
we find the strict canon (completed by Stamitz about 1740) of the
sonata-movement of four elements which begins to relax in late-
Beethoven quartets and symphonies and, finally, in the lonely, utterly
infinitesimal tone-world of the “Tristan” music, frees itself from all
earthly comprehensibleness. This prime feeling of a loosing,
Erlösung, solution, of the Soul in the Infinite, of a liberation from all
material heaviness which the highest moments of our music always
awaken, sets free also the energy of depth that is in the Faustian
soul: whereas the effect of the Classical art-work is to bind and to
bound, and the body-feeling secures, brings back the eye from
distance to a Near and Still that is saturated with beauty.
V
Each of the great Cultures, then, has arrived at a secret language
of world-feeling that is only fully comprehensible by him whose soul
belongs to that Culture. We must not deceive ourselves. Perhaps we
can read a little way into the Classical soul, because its form-
language is almost the exact inversion of the Western; how far we
have succeeded or can ever succeed is a question which
necessarily forms the starting-point of all criticism of the
Renaissance, and it is a very difficult one. But when we are told that
probably (it is at best a doubtful venture to meditate upon so alien an
expression of Being) the Indians conceived numbers which
according to our ideas possessed neither value nor magnitude nor
relativity, and which only became positive and negative, great or
small units in virtue of position, we have to admit that it is impossible
for us exactly to re-experience what spiritually underlies this kind of
number. For us, 3 is always something, be it positive or negative; for
the Greeks it was unconditionally a positive magnitude, +3; but for
the Indian it indicates a possibility without existence, to which the
word “something” is not yet applicable, outside both existence and
non-existence which are properties to be introduced into it. +3, -3, ⅓,
are thus emanating actualities of subordinate rank which reside in
the mysterious substance (3) in some way that is entirely hidden
from us. It takes a Brahmanic soul to perceive these numbers as
self-evident, as ideal emblems of a self-complete world-form; to us
they are as unintelligible as is the Brahman Nirvana, for which, as
lying beyond life and death, sleep and waking, passion, compassion
and dispassion and yet somehow actual, words entirely fail us. Only
this spirituality could originate the grand conception of nothingness
as a true number, zero, and even then this zero is the Indian zero for
which existent and non-existent are equally external designations.[189]
Arabian thinkers of the ripest period—and they included minds of
the very first order like Alfarabi and Alkabi—in controverting the
ontology of Aristotle, proved that the body as such did not
necessarily assume space for existence, and deduced the essence
of this space—the Arabian kind of extension, that is—from the
characteristic of “one’s being in a position.”
But this does not prove that as against Aristotle and Kant they
were in error or that their thinking was muddled (as we so readily say
of what our own brains cannot take in). It shows that the Arabian
spirit possessed other world-categories than our own. They could
have rebutted Kant, or Kant them, with the same subtlety of proof—
and both disputants would have remained convinced of the
correctness of their respective standpoints.
When we talk of space to-day, we are all thinking more or less in
the same style, just as we are all using the same languages and
word-signs, whether we are considering mathematical space or
physical space or the space of painting or that of actuality, although
all philosophizing that insists (as it must) upon putting an identity of
understanding in the place of such kinship of significance-feeling
must remain somewhat questionable. But no Hellene or Egyptian or
Chinaman could re-experience any part of those feelings of ours,
and no artwork or thought-system could possibly convey to him
unequivocally what “space” means for us. Again, the prime
conceptions originated in the quite differently constituted soul of the
Greek, like ἀρχή, ὕλη, μορφἠ, comprise the whole content of his
world. But this world is differently constituted from ours. It is, for us,
alien and remote. We may take these words of Greek and translate
them by words of our own like “origin,” “matter” and “form,” but it is
mere imitation, a feeble effort to penetrate into a world of feeling in
which the finest and deepest elements, in spite of all we can do,
remain dumb; it is as though one tried to set the Parthenon
sculptures for a string quartet, or cast Voltaire’s God in bronze. The
master-traits of thought, life and world-consciousness are as
manifold and different as the features of individual men; in those
respects as in others there are distinctions of “races” and “peoples,”
and men are as unconscious of these distinctions as they are
ignorant of whether “red” and “yellow” do or do not mean the same
for others as for themselves. It is particularly the common symbolic
of language that nourishes the illusion of a homogeneous
constitution of human inner-life and an identical world-form; in this
respect the great thinkers of one and another Culture resemble the
colour-blind in that each is unaware of his own condition and smiles
at the errors of the rest.
And now I draw the conclusions. There is a plurality of prime
symbols. It is the depth-experience through which the world
becomes, through which perception extends itself to world. Its
signification is for the soul to which it belongs and only for that soul,
and it is different in waking and dreaming, acceptance and scrutiny,
as between young and old, townsmen and peasant, man and
woman. It actualizes for every high Culture the possibility of form
upon which that Culture’s existence rests and it does so of deep
necessity. All fundamentals words like our mass, substance,
material, thing, body, extension (and multitudes of words of the like
order in other culture-tongues) are emblems, obligatory and
determined by destiny, that out of the infinite abundance of world-
possibilities evoke in the name of the individual Culture those
possibilities that alone are significant and therefore necessary for it.
None of them is exactly transferable just as it is into the experiential
living and knowing of another Culture. And none of these prime
words ever recurs. The choice of prime symbol in the moment of the
Culture-soul’s awakening into self-consciousness on its own soil—a
moment that for one who can read world-history thus contains
something catastrophic—decides all.
Culture, as the soul’s total expression “become” and perceptible in
gestures and works, as its mortal transient body, obnoxious
to law, number and causality:
As the historical drama, a picture in the whole picture of world-
history:
As the sum of grand emblems of life, feeling and
understanding:
—this is the language through which alone a soul can tell of what it
undergoes.
The macrocosm, too, is a property of the individual soul; we can
never know how it stands with the soul of another. That which is
implied by “infinite space,” the space that “passeth all
understanding,” which is the creative interpretation of depth-
experience proper and peculiar to us men of the West—the kind of
extension that is nothingness to the Greeks, the Universe to us—
dyes our world in a colour that the Classical, the Indian and the
Egyptian souls had not on their palettes. One soul listens to the
world-experience in A flat major, another in F minor; one apprehends
it in the Euclidean spirit, another in the contrapuntal, a third in the
Magian spirit. From the purest analytical Space and from Nirvana to
the most somatic reality of Athens, there is a series of prime symbols
each of which is capable of forming a complete world out of itself.
And, as the idea of the Babylonian or that of the Indian world was
remote, strange and elusive for the men of the five or six Cultures
that followed, so also the Western world will be incomprehensible to
the men of Cultures yet unborn.
CHAPTER VI
MAKROKOSMOS
II
APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN AND MAGIAN SOUL

CHAPTER VI
MAKROKOSMOS
II
APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN AND MAGIAN SOUL
Henceforth we shall designate the soul of the Classical Culture,

which chose the sensuously-present individual body as the ideal
type of the extended, by the name (familiarized by Nietzsche) of the
Apollinian. In opposition to it we have the Faustian soul, whose
prime-symbol is pure and limitless space, and whose “body” is the
Western Culture that blossomed forth with the birth of the
Romanesque style in the 10th century in the Northern plain between
the Elbe and the Tagus. The nude statue is Apollinian, the art of the
fugue Faustian. Apollinian are: mechanical statics, the sensuous cult
of the Olympian gods, the politically individual city-states of Greece,
the doom of Œdipus and the phallus-symbol. Faustian are: Galileian
dynamics, Catholic and Protestant dogmatics, the great dynasties of
the Baroque with their cabinet diplomacy, the destiny of Lear and the
Madonna-ideal from Dante’s Beatrice to the last line of Faust II. The
painting that defines the individual body by contours is Apollinian,
that which forms space by means of light and shade is Faustian—
this is the difference between the fresco of Polygnotus and the oil
painting of Rembrandt. The Apollinian existence is that of the Greek
who describes his ego as soma and who lacks all idea of an inner
development and therefore all real history, inward and outward; the
Faustian is an existence which is led with a deep consciousness and
introspection of the ego, and a resolutely personal culture evidenced
in memoirs, reflections, retrospects and prospects and conscience.
And in the time of Augustus, in the countries between Nile and Tigris,
Black Sea and South Arabia, there appears—aloof but able to speak
to us through forms borrowed, adopted and inherited—the Magian
soul of the Arabian Culture with its algebra, astrology and alchemy,
its mosaics and arabesques, its caliphates and mosques, and the

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Oppressive Liberation Sexism in Animal Activism Lisa Kemmerer Full Chapter

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Oppressive Liberation: Sexism in

Animal Activism Lisa Kemmerer

“Important, compelling, and provocative, Oppressive Liberation is a long overdue

ISBN 978-3-031-15362-4 ISBN 978-3-031-15363-1 (eBook)

Cover credit line: Duc Giap / Alamy Stock Photo

Oppressive Liberation documents sexism among anymal activists, including

1 Introduction: Speciesism, Sexism, and Male Privilege 1

Part I A Wide-Angle View of Interconnected Oppressions 33

2 Interconnections: Theory, Myth, and Science 35

4 The “Why” of Sexism in Social Justice Movements 69

Part II Exposing Sexism and Male Privilege in the Anymal

Part III Harms of and Solutions to Sexism in the Anymal

Part IV Critical Reflections from Anymal Activists 273

12 Meet the New Vegan World275

14 White Supremacy and Anymal Activism297

Appendix 2: Survey Demography351

Appendix 3: How to Access the Cooney Legal Documents357

Fig. 1.1 “Anymal” 26

Table 2.1 Dualistic Worldview—Note that civilized/non-civilized has

Introduction: Speciesism, Sexism, and Male

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

(nonhuman animals1). As a result, Pickton was free to hone his killing on

Feminism and Animal Activism

between these two movements, please see Chapter 2, “Dualism Among

• Language that demeans women in relation to men, such as referenc-

Sexism is not a monolithic phenomenon. The experience of sexism is

privileges are granted to men—especially to men who are visibly cisgen-

• Conversation—Men “dominate conversations” without being criti-

Speciesism and Human Privilege

• Humans reference all other species as “animals” but not human

Because of speciesism, humans did not recognize or consider Robert

Sexism and Speciesism

Pickton engaged in what is generally viewed as an obvious and flagrant

Physical sexual exploitation (even unto death, as exemplified by Pickton)

structures the disposition to take sexual pleasure in the domination and

#MeToo Movement and #ARMeToo Movement

resources, including research and a “culturally-informed curriculum to

comprehensive database consisting of local and national organizations dedi-

more offenders surfaced, many of whom were long-term perpetrators in

other “new sanctions for cyberstalking, street harassment, and “upskirt-

Word Choice as Activism

supporting and contributing to cultural hierarchies, domination, and mar-

Conventional English tends to present anymals as inanimate objects,

Novel Referent: “Anymal”

Fig. 1.1 “Anymal”

Word Clarification—Referencing the Anymal Activist Movement

while ignoring the trillions of anymals exploited for food or in laborato-

lawsuit on behalf of the right to freedom and autonomy of five orcas,

Novel Referent: Intersectionality, Appropriation,

Talking About Binaries

About This Book

• explores the idea of interconnected oppressions from various angles,

• clarifies the causes of sexism and male privilege in social jus-

• an (international) online survey,

between strategies to employ inside organizations, and strategies for inde-

This book joins a growing body of work documenting interconnections

Kant believed that he had decided the great question of whether

The outcome, then, of Gauss’s discovery, which completely altered

APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN AND MAGIAN SOUL

Henceforth we shall designate the soul of the Classical Culture,

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1 Introduction: Speciesism, Sexism, and Male Privilege 1

Part I A Wide-Angle View of Interconnected Oppressions 33

2 Interconnections: Theory, Myth, and Science 35

4 The “Why” of Sexism in Social Justice Movements 69

Part II Exposing Sexism and Male Privilege in the Anymal

Part III Harms of and Solutions to Sexism in the Anymal

Part IV Critical Reflections from Anymal Activists 273

12 Meet the New Vegan World275

14 White Supremacy and Anymal Activism297

Appendix 2: Survey Demography351

Appendix 3: How to Access the Cooney Legal Documents357

Fig. 1.1 “Anymal” 26