Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

Patriarchy of Pork

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by Katie Kish · 09/06/06

While reading through my environmental ethics text book today (that will be used for a class called Philosophy and the Environment…woot!) I came across a section called “Patriarchy of Pork or Feminist Fuss” in a chapter called “Ethics and Animals”.

The section is only about a page long (a bit less, actually) but it goes on to outline a theory. The author of the book first pointed out that when asking his university classes who were vegitarians it was a majority of women that raised their hands. This isn’t an outlandish claim, and I believe that. What is wildly outlandish is his reasoning behind this.

Back-in-the-day, he says, women would cook for their family. The daughters and the mother would prepare the meal and set the table. The men would them come, and they would get the plates of food first. As they are passed around the table, all the men would take the meat, so that when it got to the women, there would be none left for them… So he argues that it is this patriarchial ritual that has made the women of today become vegitarians more so than men…

I fail to see the logic. Like, I understand how some women in these circumstances would just accept that fact they were probably not going to get any meat (oh why not just make more? or take some first? …whatever.) but as for this making people vegitarians now?…With the vegitarians I lived with last year it was a decision based on animal rights, health or the environment – not some internal pressure to release their oppressed past.

On that note of crazy feminist things, Feministing has the craziest anti-feminist quotes up, my favorite is:

I am not defending radical feminism, which I consider to be a minor mental illness…

animal rights, Animals, book, epa, ethics, Feminism, Food, health, meat, plates, skin, Theory, women

Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism

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by Katie Kish · 09/03/06

When I was in grade 12 I wrote a paper that I thought was fantastic. I hate that I can say I still have it – and got to read over it again today, it’s pretty horrible. Actually, for it being the first a) philosophy paper and b) environmental paper I ever wrote, it didn’t turn out THAT horrific, just by my standards now, it was pretty bad. I ended up getting an A on it, but I see now that my teacher was being generous. He must have really liked me.

The only reason I bring it up is because the paper was combining two very different subjects that can either have really great outcomes, or really disasterous ones. I’m talking about ecology and philosophy and for this particular post I’ll be looking at two especially horrible outcomes of these two subjects merging. The first being deep ecology and the second being ecofeminism.

I’ll start with deep ecology. In my naïve year of being a very hardcore and new environmentalist who actually cried at the thought of a tree being cut down, I could probably be pinned as a deep ecologist. However, now I see the stupidity in this, and how deep ecology is really… almost like the cult of environmentalism. Deep ecology speaks to take the boundaries down between humans and nature making everything whole.

Basically there are two core values that guide the deep ecology praxis. The first is self-realization. The environmentally conscious person in this case extends their self to include the environment and the world as a whole. It’s basically releasing ones self from a narrow, individual view to a larger view as ones self as the environment. Once a person has placed their own self to include the environment, the purpose is that it is then harder to destroy, take advantage of, or reduce the productivity of the environment.

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community, conflict, epa, ethical, Feminism, paper, Plants, reduce, religion, skin, style, Tea, trees, women

Ani DiFranco

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by Starre Vartan · 08/28/06

Ani DiFranco (one of my favorite artists ever), recently explained why feminism is tied to environmentalism. Reprieve is her new album.

Among the more important themes on “Reprieve” is the persistence of patriarchy in world politics.

“It’s the elephant in the room,” she said. “As I get older, I really understand peace to be a product of balance. And there’s a fundamental imbalance inherent in patriarchy. Unless you have a dynamic interplay between the sensibilities of the two sexes, you can never create peace. It’s impossible.

“But I feel like people are looking at me sideways these days going, ‘Shouldn’t we be talking about the war, or the Gulf Coast or racism or environmental doom?’ And I feel like saying, ‘That’s what I am talking about. We have to start at the root.’ ” From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Ani DiFranco, Feminism, Politics, white house