STK Open Call: Exploring Species-Gender Intersections in DC Steakhouse

A new steakhouse  has opened in Washington, DC that relies heavily on sexualized women to glamorize animal flesh as sexy, trendy, edgy, and available.  Many of the photographs used to promote the restaurant utilize thin, young, and mostly white female models.  This is done to create a sense of pleasurable consumption. As Carol Adams has argued--sex and animal foods are often overlapped to give an impression to the privileged consumer that the products of oppression are given freely and happily. Just as patriarchy convinces us that women really want it (sex, rape, violence, humiliation, etc.), it also convinces us that other feminized bodies really want this violation, too. Indeed, this fetishization becomes marketable.

Unfortunately, what this means for women and animals is that the violence enacted against them is sexualized, romanticized, and normalized. Notice the disembodied woman in high heels with a meat cleaver--extreme violence is being associated with sexual desire. Given the epidemic levels of violence against women, this should be serious cause for concern. As for Nonhuman Animals, like the woman in this image, they are fragmented and only made visible in consumable pieces of chopped up flesh.  These images want us to stay focused on meat; they don't want us thinking about the woman or cow they were attached to. That isn't sexy--that makes us think, and thinking interferes with sales.

Customers can come to STK to get their meat served up pretty. The website is careful to frequently juxtapose human meat with nonhuman meat. Human and nonhuman bodies are presented as interchangeable, fragmented, and completely and utterly objectified.

Models hired to promote the restaurant are literally branded with the store logo, marked as STK property as cows are in the feedlots of STK suppliers.  Again, this logo is quite indicative of the close association between the oppression of women and other animals. With a pouty lipsticked kiss, the mass murder of Nonhuman Animals and the objectification of women is made flirty and sexy.

Sexualized women routinely show up in STK adverts as well, even when they have nothing to do whatsoever with the product. Notice there are not even any pictures of food or drinks in the Apple Pie Day advertisement. In the happy hour advert, it is suggested that female customers at STK drink booze in positions of sexual availability (the mixing of alcohol with the sexual availability of women, incidentally, is the symboblic language of rape culture).  Women are used as signifiers:  Enact your privilege here.

A sexualized woman is even used to sell dead animal parts for charity. Ironically, the charity, UNICEF, is concerned with childhood hunger...and the Western animal-based diet that STK satiates is one reason why this hunger exists. Third world nations are often left unable to provide food for their own inhabitants, as much of the food they grow is used as feed for those Nonhuman Animals destined for Western consumption.  The violence enacted on these colonized peoples, like that which is enacted on women and Nonhuman Animals, remains largely invisible behind the glamour of youth, beauty, sex, and money whipped up in STK campaigning.

The vegan-feminist critique featured in this essay is based on the work of Carol Adams.  Thanks to Ivy Collier for bringing this steakhouse ad campaign to my attention.

Water and Watermelon for Dying Pigs

In the United States, the laws on transporting animals to slaughter are extremely lax.  The government suggests that transporters ideally keep trips under 8 hours, but at the very least give the animals a break from the truck once every 24 hours.  Animals are often deprived of food and water for hours or days because it will be wasted on a body that is about to be killed. Many drivers simply don't care or can't be bothered to let the animals out for a break. On the long transit to their death, these "food" animals are exposed to all elements, be it searing hot or so cold that the animals begin to freeze to each other and to the truck.  The journey is so brutal, an estimated 1 million pigs die in transit each year.

In this moment, these victims on route to the slaughterhouse are probably receiving the only bit of compassion they will ever know from humans, their last (maybe only) glimpse of sunlight, and certainly their only taste of watermelon. The ones trapped in the middle of the countless overheated, filthy bodies receive nothing. 

Photo by Anita Krajnc

As this image circulates across Facebook and advocacy networks, the response from viewers speaks to the power of emotion in narratives and photography.  Photographer Anita Krajnc writes:  "[ . . . ] if you haven't yet made the connection between the pleasure of your bacon and the misery of these animals' lives and death, may this image cause a change of heart."

Breaching the false divide between human and nonhuman/consumer and product, these women don't just ease the suffering of these pigs, they restore their personhood.  No longer faceless, nameless commodities, the pigs become individuals.  This image asks us to reconsider our relationship with so-called "food" animals.  Commodities or neighbors?  Friends or food?  Things or persons?  Rights-bearers or property?

Daisy enjoys some watermelon under happier circumstances.
Pigs Peace Sanctuary in Stanwood, WA.

Marketing Meat

These vintage advertisements for meat all come from the American Meat Institute (via Buzzfeed). The first one is fascinating because of its headline: "This is Life."

It's not, really. It's death. (To be technical about it, it's a piece of a rib of a dead cow.)

Sure, children need amino acids to grow, just as the ad says (that's where the "life" from the ad comes in). But what the ad doesn't say is that children can get same those amino acids from a variety of plant foods, and don't need meat to get them. Meat really isn't life, and to construct it as such is almost Orwellian in its use of doublespeak.

But the ad also has some interesting bits in the small print. Here you can see the clear link, demonstrated by Carol Adams, between meat and masculinity: it's not just "a symbol of man's desire," but when a woman cooks it, she can be proud of her meal.

The second ad also does two things. First, it suggests that America is literally "calling for more and more meat," as if the aforementioned American Meat Institute was not itself responsible for encouraging the public to eat meat. The AMI, founded in 1906, is America's oldest trade association, helping America's meat industry sell more meat; in the 1940s, they began advertising directly to the public via the ads that you see on this page. Today they do so via websites like MeatFuelsAmerica.com and MeatMythCrushers.com.

Second, the ad uses the term "crop" to refer to a greater-than-usual supply of pork available that year, as if pork--the flesh of pigs--is cultivated like wheat. While everyone knows that pigs are animals, and not plants, using language like this is a nifty way of covering up the fact that animals do have to be raised, not grown, and killed, before they can end up in the frying pan.

As we've learned from watching Mad Men, the best advertisers know how to use a combination of language and imagery to sell desire, and to encourage the public to buy products that we don't really need. You might even say, as in the case of these meat ads, that advertising sells lies, which the public buys as truth. Meat is Life. Pork is Wheat. No One Dies.

Horse Power and Horse Meat

In recent weeks, much of Western Europe has been embroiled in a scandal about horse meat being hidden in, or disguised, as beef, or cow meat. Because the English and Irish (but not the French) feel that eating the meat of cows is acceptable, but eating the meat of horses is not, the British in particular were outraged to find out that they have unwittingly been consuming horse meat, thanks to the fraudulent practices of some food suppliers.

Recently, the makers of the Mini Cooper, the British Motor Corporation, took advantage of the scandal in their latest ad, which reads "Beef. With a lot of horses hidden in it."

The ad plays on the well-used convention by which car companies use the term "horsepower" to refer to how much power a car engine has; the more horse power, the stronger the motor. After all, prior to the development of the automobile, horses were humans' primary mode of transportation. It also plays on the idea of "beefed up," to refer to something that has been made bigger, better or more powerful. Both animal metaphors here are used to show that the new Mini Cooper is more powerful than previous versions.

But they also refer, quite explicitly, to the uncomfortable mixing of horse meat and cow meat in the Englishman's roast beef.

Finally, only one animal is actually explicitly named in the ad, or, for that matter, in any of the coverage related to the scandal. The horse, as an animal, is mentioned both in the ad, and in every single story related to the scandal. But cows, on the other hand, are never mentioned. Instead, beef is the term that is used. Cows are already accepted as meat, while horses are not, so horses can still be referred to in their animal form, while cows have lost that most basic privilege. No wonder there's no outrage.