Sexism in tennis

Monday 20 January 2013

When it comes to sport, it seems that, rather than inheriting the athleticism of my father, a personal trainer, in playing it, I have acquired (along with bad skin and bad knees) his signature brand of cynicism and his propensity for abrupt moments of abstraction while watching it.

'Son, I was always proud … that you weren't a short man.'

Dad enjoys spectatorship as much as the next bloke, but he appears simultaneously to hold the whole enterprise in contempt: teams and clubs branding themselves with the names of cities while buying and selling players from all over the world who don't have any real connection to those communities. It's too much like supporting a corporation. I find this sentiment echoed in myself.

How does one pick a team, anyway? If it's not the team of the region where you live, and not a team you grew up supporting, what determines your choice? Is it who's winning the most? Who has the prettiest colours? The best mascot? Your favourite player? My girlfriend's dad supported the Cronulla Sharks for years until he converted to the North Queensland 'Toyota' (!) Cowboys, and then to the 'iSelect' (!) Gold Coast Titans, and now has no problem using the pronouns 'we' and 'us' to refer to 'his' team, despite residing in the Illawarra. Isn't it all rather arbitrary?

'The Isotopes are winning? To the bandwagon!'

This is less applicable, I suppose, in international sports, where teams actually comprise nationals of the countries they represent, but even here Dad and I have a shared tendency to experience moments of almost Brechtian alienation, wherein the viewing experience is transcended by a sudden and profound awareness of the insignificance and absurdity of investing ourselves in such a pointless activity, a kind of 'opiate of the masses–style' reluctance to be diverted by an exercise in corporatised nationalism, the outcome of which will ultimately have no impact on our lives.

One such moment occurred for Dad last Friday night as we watched the match between Sam Stosur and Ana Ivanovic in Rod Laver Arena. 'What are we doing here?' he asked at one point, nudging me and laughing, a common effect of the incongruous jerk out of the immediacy of the experience and into comprehension of its ludicrousness. 'Why do we care? Does it pay my mortgage if Stosur wins tonight?'

Although I generally disapprove of any form of slavish utilitarianism ('I AM A CAPITALIST DRONE; EVERY ACTIVITY IN WHICH I ENGAGE MUST PROVIDE ME WITH SOME DIRECT, CONCRETE, PREFERABLY MONETARY BENEFIT'), and I harbour a vague inclination that sport fulfills some subtle but important purpose* in our society, I still find these to be compelling questions. Why do we care so much whether one entity beats another entity in an otherwise entirely useless endeavour?

'Oh my God, Marge. A penalty shot with only four seconds left. It's your child versus mine! The winner will be showered with praise; the loser will be taunted and booed until my throat is sore!'

*I know, I know, it's about an outlet for primal aggression, social rituals and cohesion, blah blah.

In this instance, however, I couldn't fully share in Dad's characteristic momentary bewilderment. For reasons not entirely clear to me, tennis exempts itself from my usual spectatorial reticence, especially once a year for the term of the Australian Open when, time permitting, I become a rabid tennis fan. A were-fan, if you will. I look up rankings, download apps, text friends about matches, and follow every game I can.

I'm aware that, if anything, the 'pointlessness' of sport is exaggerated in tennis, where the match is confined to 260 square metres and the task can essentially be decocted to 'get the ball over the net and within the lines', but perhaps it's that there's something more honest about it as an individual pursuit that allows it to evade my cynicism. These aren't footballers professing some kind of loyalty to their team before scarpering off to the highest bidder the moment their contract is up, particular personalities subsumed into the larger team identity. They're individuals playing for themselves whose characters are on display to earn your support or opposition.

When I examine my list of favourite players and try to determine why I like them, however, it's still decidedly arbitrary, just slightly less so. With hundreds of individuals to choose from, you end up being quite superficial – one bad impression can be enough to turn you off someone. For me it seems to come down to a complex subconscious calibration of a player's skill, grace, manner, sense of humour, eloquence, nationality and, as I'm becoming increasingly aware when it comes to women (to my dismay), appearance. Which is my tortuous, Simpsons-like way of getting to the point that I've been thinking about how we pick which players to support in tennis, and who gets attention for what, and particularly how the criteria differ for men and women. 

Even as perhaps one of the women's sports deemed most 'watchable' by men, the tennis court is a fraught field for gender issues, dominated for years by 'pin-ups' like Kournikova, Sharapova and Ivanovic and throwing up perennial debates over prize money, air time and the comparative quality and entertainment value of the men's and women's games. What brought the issue of player popularity to mind for me, however, was watching the match between Australian Casey Dellacqua and rising Canadian star Eugenie Bouchard last night. 

Whether it's the men's or women's game, one truth universally acknowledged in tennis is the vapidity of the commentary. Tennis commentators seem to struggle to find anything much of value to add. One example from last night's match was Sam Smith's observation that Dellacqua had been eating a bread roll before the match, from which she extrapolated two things: one, that Casey hadn't had much dinner, and two, that she was nervous. Compelling stuff.

Is it any surprise then that we find traces of sexism in the inanities spouted by commentators in their furious verbal attempts to justify their relevance? Not conscious sexism, but the more insidious kind that infects the way even decent people think on a basic level. It's like what I was discussing in my last post (a thousand years ago) regarding Tony Abbott and his 'sex appeal' blunder: when the mind casts around for something to latch onto, something to say, the things it finds can be revealing, a window into a person's way of seeing the world and, therefore, the otherwise invisible ideology that shapes their worldview. It's problematic as it is that female commentators are never assigned a men's match while at least one man is always present in the commentary box for a women's match, but watching last night I became aware that the idle chatter of the commentators differs greatly depending on the gender of the players and the way they look.

As I type I'm watching Smith interview Dominika Cibulkova. Despite having just achieved the considerable feat of vanquishing world number three Maria Sharapova, the Slovak is being quizzed about her relationship status, how long she's been engaged, and her engagement ring. WHAT IS THIS?

It's astounding how much time is spent discussing looks in the women's game, even if it's obliquely, euphemistically. At one point, as I pointed out on Twitter, it was stated that Dellacqua was 'more girl-next-door than the girl next door', which can be translated to mean she is homely and unglamourous. This was underscored by Smith's statement only moments later that Dellacqua's opponent Bouchard is 'the heir to Sharapova in marketing terms', a euphemism for 'she's the hottest, blondest, whitest young player on the circuit.'

Bouchard (left) and Dellacqua (right).

Later Smith's obligatory male 'supervisor' (whose name I'm unsure of) joked that most of Bouchard's supporters, referred to by her as the 'Eugenie Army', seemed to be young men. After Bouchard had won, Renae Stubbs momentarily puzzled her in her post-match interview by saying she was sure her supporters were all about ready to propose to her.

And discussing the match Bouchard's win had set up for her with Ivanovic, the male commentator referred to Ivanovic as one of the 'all time great poster girls', as if she were a model rather than a tennis player, notable for her beauty rather than her skill. In response Smith asked 'How are you going to market it? The beauty of Belgrade versus the princess of Quebec?' and remarked that the pair were two very 'marketable' young girls.

Contrast this with the commentary on a comparable male player, Vasek Pospisil, who defeated Australia's Matt Ebden last Wednesday night. Pospisil and Bouchard are both attractive, white, blonde, young (23 and 19 respectively) Canadians with similar singles rankings (30 and 28) who triumphed over Australians. Yet not once did the appearance of Bouchard's countryman attract any commentary: no mention even of his adoring female fans, no talk of the impending match up between the 'Canadian catch' Pospisil and 'Swiss stud' Wawrinka.

Canadian heartthrob Vasek Pospisil.

Again, it's not that these commentators are bad people, it's that they've been conditioned by the prevailing ideology of the day to automatically view and assess women in terms of their appearance more than they do with men. The only way to wake people out of this ideology is to call it out when we see it, and we see it everywhere.

When the vacuous woman sitting next to me at the Stosur–Ivanovic match breezed into the arena four games into the first set, her first question to her companion was 'Who's that'?

'Ana Ivanovic', he answered.

'Ooh, she's really pretty', she cooed.

Moments later when Stosur appeared on the screen she laughed that the world number 17 looked 'like a man'. Former world number one Amélie Mauresmo was the target of similar criticism. In a habit that I'm sure would chasten her if I brought it up now, my best friend in high school would periodically proclaim with some vehemence her 'hatred' for Mauresmo. The reason? 'She looks like a man!' 

Stosur (left) and Mauresmo (right)

As well as being too muscular or masculine, female tennis players can be too fat. When Dellacqua made her return to the Australian Open in 2009, she drew criticism from, among others, Roger Rasheed for being out of shape, a claim she and her trainers strongly repudiated. But that incident pales in comparison to the disgusting public reaction to Marion Bartoli's 2013 Wimbledon win, best summarised by the tweets collected in an article by Amanda Chatel.

Bartoli (left) and Dellacqua (right)

It's not enough, it seems, for a woman to be among the best tennis players in the world. She must also be born buxom and beautiful and maintain a slim, feminine figure.

It's not even safe in the sidelines. Lleyton Hewitt's wife Bec (nee Cartwright) was recently the target of an article by the ever-atrocious Daily Mail and others asking whether she'd 'overdone it on the tan'.

I'd say she looks completely fine …

On the other hand, 'Aussie Ana' Ivanovic (a Serb) has been claimed for Australia by Todd Woodbridge, and every commentator to have taken up the moniker since 2008 when she won the Australian Open, due to her overwhelming popularity in Australia. In a poll yesterday asking who was expected to win the tournament after Williams' departure that Sam Smith joked could've been rephrased as 'Who is your favourite female player?', popular Chinese player Li Na, number three seed Sharapova and the defending champion Azarenka each received circa 20% of the vote, while Ivanovic was assigned double that at approximately 40%. But what can Ivanovic possibly have done to earn this popularity, other than being young and beautiful? Can anyone honestly contend she has twice the personality of Li Na, twice the skill of Azarenka?

I myself am not immune to Ivanovic's charms, nor to subtle sexism. There's no doubt she's attractive; she's actually pretty much exactly my type. But that's separate to her skill as a tennis player. It doesn't have to be her defining attribute. It shouldn't be mentioned by commentators every time she's on court. And players who don't have her looks shouldn't suffer in popularity, or worse, be lambasted for it. A cursory consideration of the list of my other favourite female players doesn't seem to reveal that I favoured them especially for their looks: Elena Dementieva, Justine Henin, Li Na, Ai Sugiyama. In fact, if anything, I hold a strange contempt for the bevy of attractive young interchangeable, quadrisyllabically named female players who've come to my attention over the last couple years: Caroline Wozniacki, Danielá Hantuchova, Vera Zvonareva, Victoria Azarenka.

Female favourites (left to right): Dementieva, Henin, Li, Sugiyama.

Un-favourites (left to right): Wozniacki, Hantuchova, Zvonareva, Azarenka.

But then, on closer consideration, I think sexism might come into it at some level. Is my dismissal of this second group just another form of sexism? Do I think they're too pretty to be good players, to be memorable, to have personality? And even though my favourites aren't women I find especially attractive, they are all undoubtedly beautiful women, slender and graceful. There's no women among my favourites who are unattractive. Why is that?

And what about who's missing from my list? Notably absent is Serena Williams, though I can safely assign her exclusion to other factors than her looks. I do admire her skill in the game, but her ineloquence, her obnoxious, particularly American fervent Christianity, forever thanking God for her wins in her stumbling, graceless acceptance speeches, as though he has specifically chosen her, puts me off. But why not Clijsters? Why not Bartoli? If their slightly rounder features and thicker bodies were swapped for the slight frames of Dementieva and Henin, can I really pretend my preferences would be the same? 

Lately I'm becoming increasingly alarmed about our society's attitudes towards physical appearances. We may try to hide it by using terms like 'marketable', but that only puts the problem at one further remove; what is marketable is determined by what people want, and what people want is to see attractive people and to judge ugly people, people they can safely designate 'uglier than me'. Ugliness now is treated like a fault, like something we have any power over. And deviating from the standard body form long ago became a crime worthy of opprobrium. 

Recently I've had a number of windows into the world of acting and theatre, and have been disappointed to learn that even respectable institutions are primarily concerned with the 'marketability' of their auditionees, that it's 'unheard of' for people of certain looks and body shapes to be given places, regardless of acting talent. Meanwhile, inexperienced eighteen-year-olds who happen to have been born with 'the look' are raised up out of the masses clamouring for a place without any need to distinguish themselves theatrically.

And it's not just women. My sisters recently informed me that all their male friends are on steroids or growth hormones of some form or another. Normal, healthy-looking sixteen-year-olds dosing themselves with drugs to turn themselves into miniature 'Zyzz' effigies in under six months, the better to worship at the altar of the self in the temple of the gym.

I always knew we lived in a superficial world, but somehow I still believed that everyone knew that it was wrong. I thought everyone had learned in their childhood from fairy tales and cartoons that it was what was on the inside that counts, and not to judge a book by its cover and that, even if they still did so, they knew somewhere that it wasn't the right thing to do. But all I've seen lately is unabashed superficiality. It's why reality TV is still so popular – it's cheap hour after hour of unadulterated judgement, and we love to sit in judgement of one another. 'What is she wearing?' 'She's too ugly to be the next top model.' 'Why would he pick that song?' 'He looks gay in that.' 'How can they be so stupid?' 'I hope he gets voted out, he's annoying.'

If there's one cause for hope for me in the tennis world, it's Li Na. I was there for the 2013 women's final when Li faced Azarenka. From my friends who watched at home I've heard it was considered a boring match, but for those in the arena it was electric. Fresh from the controversy of the previous round where it was speculated Azarenka had taken a medical timeout purely to throw her winning opponent Sloane Stephens off rhythm, the crowd was entirely behind Li Na, to the point that Azarenka's winners were met with mere polite applause while her unforced errors, usually awkward to applaud, were met with impassioned cheers, and Li's two on-court collapses elicited immediate heart-wrenching sympathy. The fact that an Asian woman who speaks only broken English can through her charm, sense of humour and fighting spirit win over a public as racist as Australia's gives me hope where little else does.

Thanks for reading,

LPL

What's wrong with 'sex appeal'

Wednesday 14 August 2013

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott instigated a Twitterstorm yesterday when he listed 'sex appeal' as one of the assets shared by Fiona Scott and Jackie Kelly, the current and former Liberal candidates for the seat of Lindsay. Predictably, commenters and commentators of the Right, such as my own personal bête noir Miranda Devine, have since responded to the criticisms with lamentations about 'political correctness gone mad'* and 'confected outrage' and, of course, the usual deluge of abhorrent eructations from Andrew Bolt fans:

Comments from Bolt's readers, as tweeted by the good people at @BoltComments.

*I've previously discussed (and mounted a small defense of) political correctness here.

The point of this post isn't to condemn Tony Abbott, as condemnable as I think he is. Aside from his history of misogyny and his lack of expressed compunction I actually don't believe what he said is that personally reprehensible, just inappropriate and symptomatic of a larger issue. What I want to try and do is explain to those people inclined to agree with Devine, Bolt and company, why the Left finds the comment so objectionable. 

But first I want to address what's not wrong with the remark. Firstly, no one's claiming there was any malice in it. I think there's a common misconception that the lack of intention to offend excuses someone from having done so, as indicated by Opposition assistant treasury spokesman Mathias Corman's explanation that '[i]t was just a light-hearted comment, which I'm sure was not meant with any offence' (news.com.au). But this is an oversimplification. What this kind of thing reveals is not the speaker's unkindness or immorality, but rather their ignorance, often of how words, acts and omissions can reinforce cultural attitudes that privilege some and disadvantage others. 

Think of that disgusting 'Trayvoning' trend that's taken off recently, to much obloquy. Realistically, I'm sure most of the boys posing in those pictures are otherwise reasonably good people, who'd probably respond to criticism by saying it was all just a joke and they didn't mean any offence. Their wrongdoing is not a deliberate intent to mock a murder victim, but rather an unthinking insensitivity to a tragic and politicised issue and a grieving family, a selfish, immature transformation of a tragedy into a source of entertainment, posted thoughtlessly online.

To return to my personal holy text, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (or rather, the Twyker–Wachowski film adaptation), it puts me in mind of the casual, unintentional sexism spouted by smarmy would-be architect of a nuclear disaster Lloyd Hooks, as portrayed by Hugh Grant, to Halle Berry's Luisa Rey:

This kind of talk belongs in the '70s.

Secondly, I don't have an issue with the fact that Tony Abbott or anyone else has appraised Fiona Scott as possessing 'sex appeal', that anybody finds her attractive. Human beings are always going to find other human beings attractive, but there's a difference between thinking someone is attractive and saying it, and that distinction takes us to the heart of the issue.

As I said above, I find Abbott's comment inappropriate. Not deplorable, not opprobrious, not disgraceful, just inappropriate. Whatever Abbott thinks of Scott's and Kelly's physical appearances, it should not have been brought into the discussion of their merits as candidates. What business does anybody's attractiveness have in a list of their qualifications to represent an electorate? 

Abbott's comment doesn't show us that he's a cruel person who consciously believes women are inferior to men. What it does give us is a direct window into his worldview, a worldview he may not necessarily have that much control over (how much do any of us really decide our worldview?), but one that he nevertheless holds and must be judged by if he wants to be the leader of the country. It shows, unsurprisingly for a conservative of his generation, that at a fundamental and unconscious level, Abbott cannot see women in the same way he sees men. This attitude I am able to overlook in people of a certain age who grew up in a different era, the way we forgive our 'racist grandparents', but not in the leader of our country.

If you still disagree, just think about what it means that, when called upon to list some of the similarities of his female colleagues, which he must necessarily accept as an opportunity to list their assets, the first things that come to mind are their youth, 'feistiness' and sexual appeal. He's struggling in that video. As we all know from his comments about scripted and unscripted commitments, his conspicuous absence from interviews and television programs like Q&A (despite an open invitation) over the past few months, the 'suppository of wisdom' contretemps, and that 'bizarre 28 seconds of silence', Abbott isn't the best with impromptu speaking. You can tell he's grasping for positive adjectives in that video, buying time with a string of ums and ahs, and in the top three he comes out with is 'sex appeal', something that would never occur to him had he been speaking of men. Abbott himself knows this, as you can tell if you listen to him stressing the words 'smart' and 'hardworking' (proper qualities) when he's asked about it later, after he's had some time to think.

'Sex appeal' is the descriptor getting all the attention, but I'd argue the others weren't that flattering, either. 'Young', I'm sure, is supposed to connote enthusiasm and energy, but it's a dubious distinction if that's the primary positive similarity you share with your predecessor.

Then there's 'feisty', the suspect implications of which Elizabeth Reid Boyd has already discussed (I agree the word is condescending, with the suggestion that women have to be feisty in the big, rough boy's game of politics, but I completely reject the notion that its long-forgotten etymology has any impact on its meaning today).

Then comes 'sex appeal'. It's as though what Abbott wanted to say when the interviewer asked about the comparability of the two candidates was, 'Well, the similarity is obvious: they're both women ...' Would you ever say 'They're both men' in that situation? No, because maleness is the standard state of being, while muliebrity is a distinguishing condition to be remarked upon.

Even Abbott's final and most relevant compliment, that the two women are 'connected to the local area' reflects very little agency grammatically. They aren't active, agentive leaders in the community, prepared to make the tough calls and fight on behalf of the electorate. They're just passively 'connected' to the local area ...

I've seen Bolt commenters and others saying they've heard male politicians being referred to as sexy without any such backlash, but we rightfully hold our leaders to higher standards. Was it by a private citizen or media personality, or was it by someone holding high public office? Can you imagine Julia Gillard endorsing a local candidate in comparison to a predecessor by saying, 'They're both young, scrappy, and strappingly handsome'? I can't see it. What about Rebecca Shaw's example:

'It is unequivocally true that if Abbott had been asked a similar question about a male candidate, he would never say: “Well, um, well, Andrew Laming is young, feisty, has great hair and a very nice jawline”. If you are saying something about a female candidate that you would never say about a male candidate, you are treading on dangerous ground in the scary swamp of sexism.' (Shaw 2013)

We live in a society that consistently judges women by different standards to men (speaking of Julia Gillard), especially in terms of their appearance, a fact the Right fights against remedying at the worst of times and seems blind to at the best. The very fact that large segments of our society are held in the grip of an ideology that teaches them it is normal and natural to behave this way prevents their being able to see it. What the Left objects to about this incident is that it violates the principle that women in this day and age should be able to be enter the political sphere subject only to the same amount of attention to their physical appearance, whether positive or negative, as men are (i.e near none). The rules shouldn't suddenly change when it's a woman politician, so that it becomes a matter of public importance how she dresses, what she looks like, whether she's married or anything else. It's not so much what Abbott said, it's what his comment shows about him: that he is incapable of seeing the world in this way.

Thanks for reading

LPL
L Phillip Lucas (Facebook page)
@LPhillipLucas (Twitter profile)

References

The Australian Brodcasting Corporation's image.

Screenshot of Bolt Comments' (@BoltComments) twitter feed.

Amalgalmation of Simon Chillingworth's image and Warner Bros. Pictures' image.

News.com.au's 5:38pm AEST 14 August 2013 article 'Abbott cites exuberance in latest gaffe'.

Rebecca Shaw's 9:49am AEST 14 August 2013 The Guardian article 'Sexygate: how Tony Abbott should have complimented Fiona Scott'.

Tom Twyker, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski's 2012 film Cloud Atlas.

'Naturalness', semantic decay and veg(etari)anism (part two of three)

Tuesday 22 November 2011

Note

In part one I deconstructed the arguments against vegetarianism and vegetarian Michael Kirby made by Miranda Devine in her article 'Everybody hurts but we've all got to eat'; part two responds to this article with my own ideas about eating meat.

I'm a newcomer to the whole veg(etari)an discourse, and the more I read into it, the clearer it becomes that I have little original to add to the discussion. But I made a decision a while ago that whenever I came to a point of indecision between speaking my mind and remaining silent, I would take the path of expressing myself, out of a belief that it is always better to say something than nothing, to act rather than not. That, and it can't hurt to restate sound arguments often made but rarely heard, to add your voice to a growing chorus. And so I persevere in the face of superfluity ...

The problem of 'naturalness'

The most common argument I hear justifying flesh-eating is that it's natural, an argument that I think can be split in two. The first of these holds that we have evolved to need meat, we are designed to eat it, and therefore we must continue to do so if our bodies are to function properly, the same way a lion cannot choose to give up eating meat because its body simply would not support a diet of any other kind. I believe this argument is factually untrue. Perhaps for the first time in our history, our technological and dietary knowledge is at a level where we can quite healthily live without eating meat (and it's looking better for the future, as well; the concept of laboratory-grown meat incites a kneejerk rejection and a shudder from hippie organic-enthusiasts and hearty meat-eaters alike, but I look forward to the guilt-free meal as long as scientists can convince me there's no harmful side-effects). Of course, meat is a very efficient way of gaining certain things that our bodies need, but it is not the only way. Is efficiency really a good enough reason for taking an animal's life? As for our being designed to eat meat, the physical similarities between humans and herbivores, along with the physical differences between humans and carnivores, have been well-documented. The evidence indicates that we were herbivores who opportunistically became omnivores, not carnivores who became omnivores. And our meat consumption today far exceeds anything we would have eaten in our evolutionary past. Meat would've been a rare addition to our diet, nowhere near the staple it is for many people today (Colleen Patrick-Goudreau).

The second argument under the 'naturalness' umbrella is not practical but moral: we evolved to eat meat, therefore it's okay – an irretriveably mixed-up bit of reasoning, to adapt a phrase from Rohinton Mistry. When does 'naturalness' ever guarantee that something is moral? People can and do justify all sorts of ridiculous positions with the argument that 'it's unnatural' (ahem, opposition to gay marriage), but even if not eating meat is unnatural, this is still a thoroughly flawed argument. So is everything we do in contemporary society. Medicine? Birth control? Abstinence? Monogamy? Technology? Supermarkets? Yep, all totally unnatural. I think vegetarian comedian Wil Anderson said it best in his show at Splendour in the Grass this year, when he posed his response to the argument, 'It's unnatural not to eat meat; even animals eat other animals – look at lions'. I paraphrase:

      Do you get all your ethical opinions from lions? What else do you
      do like lions? Do you sleep twenty hours a day like lions? Do you
      have a spiky, barbed penis like a lion? Do you sell Paddle Pops for
      a living like lions? Do you live in a wardrobe with a witch like
      lions?

I'll come back to the issue of naturalness in the next section, but first, if there's any proof that I'm not some closed-minded bastard who has set opinions on every issue and will never change, as I was discussing in ''... So openminded that our brains drop out'', it's my attitude on this issue. I used to be a devoted carnivore and in actions, I still am. I love meat. I absolutely love it. I'm obsessed with food, and meat is one of my favourite kinds. So until very recently, whenever the issue of vegetarianism would come up, I'd scoff. I'd look at my vegetarian friends and family in bemusement. How could they possibly forgo the original carnal pleasure? I thought the idea was absurd. Even animals eat animals, me and my other carnivorous friends would say to one another. We're designed to eat meat. Animals are dumb. Anything to justify my love of meat and dismiss the points raised by vegetarianism. This, my friends, is the working of ideology. If you ask why something is okay and the best answer you can come up with is that it's natural or normal, that's probably a good indicator that ideology is at work. 'Ideologies try to hide the contingent nature of thoughts and activities within a culture' say Tony Schirato and Susan Yell. '[T]hey try to convince their audiences that certain values, ideas and activities are more or less natural, and that things have always been this way, or should remain this way.'

It takes a lot of thinking to undo ideological indoctrination, to challenge what people not only enjoy doing, but also what they have always been told is normal and natural, and what they see everyone else doing all the time. Perhaps this explains why, if you ask people why they do or don't eat meat, the don'ts seem generally to have more well-thought-out answers, because the only way they became don'ts in the first place is by observing and formulating reasons not to eat meat. The dos, conversely, tend to eat meat because they always have, and their answer is likely to reflect this reason. '[I]t's okay because we're the top of the food chain' is one answer I got when I asked my friends. In other words, it's okay to eat meat because we can. Or because we do. Contrast this with an answer from another friend, Matt Wheeler:

     I don't eat meat because it is a huge contributor to climate change;
     because it makes grain and other staples more expensive for the
     poor; because it takes huge amounts of water for a single serving
     of meat; because there isn't enough farming land to go around
     and meat takes 16 times as much land as vegetables to grow; 
     because factory farming is disgusting; because pigs are one of 
     the top ten most intelligent animals in the world; because 
     vegetarian food is easy and delicious; because vegetarians live 2 
     years longer on average than those on a typical western diet; 
     because I think 'stewardship' means 'look after' not 'take 
     advantage of'; and because I think it is always better to have 
     more empathy than to close one's eyes to the pain of others.

Desensitisation and semantic decay

What started us eating meat was, I assume, need. We haven't always been able to be selective about what we eat, and we couldn't deprive ourselves of such a rich source of nutrients. Nowadays I think it's less to do with desperation and more to do with desensitisation. Eating meat seems acceptable because we eat meat already, because everyone does it. This is what I call 'semantic decay': repetition eventually saps the meaning out of any practice. It's what causes the meanings of words and phrases to drift away completely from their original meanings without our notice as we get used to them. It's what makes religion such a poor conductor of morality. Once-moral instructions can eventually become mere empty rituals, self-enforced upon pain of eternal damnation, devoid of any personal emotion or conviction. Under religion, it is entirely possible for someone to feel guilty about saying 'Oh my God', but not about being complicit in a system that slaughters billions of animals a year, usually after they've led awful lives.

We can observe a kind of trend in semantic decay. The older the religion, the culture, or cultural institution and, therefore, the more repetition that has occurred, the more divorced meaning is from action. Perhaps this explains Miranda Devine's inability to comprehend Michael Kirby's point of view. I can't think of a culture in which there is more evidence of rampant semantic decay in the area of attitudes towards a kind of animal than Japan's, where Devine grew up. 'Fish died in abundance for the Japanese diet', she says in her article, and they had to. Japan's mountainous terrain being unsuitable for agriculture, it had to turn to the sea. If it hadn't, its people would have starved long ago. But it doesn't make it any easier for the non-desensitised to watch.

Everything I am about to say, I fully acknowledge, is a generalisation, but generalisations can be useful. To the Japanese, anything that lives in the ocean is just food. There's the whaling, of course, but then there's also the annual Taiji dolphin drive hunt, where dolphins are driven into a netted cove and slaughtered en masse, literally turning the sea red with blood.

From the documentary The Cove.

I've seen a Japanese vendor chase an octopus in a netted bag across a cement market floor as it tried to escape. I've seen Japanese chefs in a production line tearing out the eyes of live fugu (pufferfish), chopping off their tails and fins, shucking their elastic skin off over their heads like jumpers and tossing the mutilated fish, blind, bloody and gasping, into an industrial-sized bin of their already-expired companions. I've seen a Japanese diner pick a fish out of a fake, in-restaurant pond, then light up with glee when that same fish is brought out on a plate as sashimi, its uncooked flesh flayed out in a fan of wafer-thin slices, its body wrenched at an unnatural angle, its mouth sucking for air and its body twitching as its flesh is torn with chopsticks from its body.

'Give it to us raw, and wriggling.'

Now fish are not highly intelligent creatures, but that right there on your plate is a living organism with the capacity to feel pain, and it is suffering for no good reason. It's just sick. My personal aversion to seafood is mostly mental, a relic from my childhood that I know I could probably rid myself of if I wanted to. And for a while I did. It's socially debilitating to be picky, and it's looked upon as immature, so I planned to make myself get over it, but now I never will. What we're doing to the oceans is too terrible, and the world doesn't need one more fish-eater. Even caught and prepared in the usual way – by trawlers at sea, dead and cooked – a fish has to suffer too much to get to my plate. There's no quick way to kill fish caught en masse.

'As we become increasingly alienated from the sources of our food,' says Devine in her article, 'childish squeamishness is in the ascendancy'. In other words, those of us who don't want to eat meat are squeamish children. Thanks, your bitchiness (how do you like it?).

But aside from deploying Devine's own stunning rhetorical tactics against her, I really think she's got it the wrong way around. It's not that we're gaining childish squeamishness; it's that we're losing our heartless desensitisation. In the past we've needed to be desensitised to animal suffering in order to survive, and today people who make a living in the meat industry still need this desensitisation, but the rest of us, 'alienated from the sources of our food', are beginning to bring our attitudes towards animal welfare into line with our modern moral outlook. Predictably, being the enemy of the heart and mind that she is, the conservative Devine instinctively rejects this impulse, this change in the status quo. But I believe we should embrace it, as difficult as it is.

Returning to the issue of 'naturalness', those who justify their continued consumption of meat with that argument must consider this impulse. If it is natural for us to eat meat, then it is equally natural for us to feel squeamish about doing so, and the evidence is in our actions. Yes, our mouths water at the smell of sizzling bacon or roasting beef, but even Devine admits 'most people feel sadness at the death of animals'; we flinch when we see it actually happen. Just look at the rituals of penance and reverence codified into early cultures, which insisted on prayer after the killing of an animal, thanking it for giving its life – an attempt to absolve guilt if ever there was one. Kirby points to the packaging of meat, which allows us to think of it as the 'impersonal products of sterile, clean supermarkets' and of eating it as 'hygienic and somehow depersonalised. Or de-animalised.' Even the English language and our codes of etiquette enshrine this guilty discomfort: it's considered impolite to discuss the animal you're eating at any given time, or to talk about any graphic part of its preparation. There's something in the way we are so easily put off eating by talk of blood or guts that belies the supposed naturalness of our eating meat. In 'Consider the Lobster', David Foster Wallace points out that 'most mammals seem to require euphemisms like "beef" and "pork" that help us separate the meat from the living creature the meat once was'; we've craftily stolen words from the French to ease our guilt. Who among us can say when they watch a predator of Africa chasing down its prey, that it is not the hunted that they hope for, rather than the hunter? We know, in our logical minds, that it's unfair to favour the gazelle over the lion; the latter has the right to live as much as the former, but we know that if the lion doesn't get its way it will only go hungry; if the gazelle doesn't, it will die a terrifying death. If you can watch a zebra being brought down by a cackle of hyenas who, unlike lions, do not kill their prey before they begin eating it, without desperately wishing they would just end the zebra's suffering, there's something wrong with you.

The fact is, though, that almost everything we do, we do in spite of nature and the cruel ferocity of the natural order, not because of it. Evolution, when understood properly, is fascinating; both a beautiful and a terrible system, elegantly simplistic in its mindless, ruthless march onwards, propelled by death at every turn. And while evolution will continue to work in different ways on humanity, we have transcended it in many ways. Society operates to a large extent outside of evolution and against it; in so many ways it is cooperative, not competitive. Babies are not left on hillsides to die if they are deemed weak. The mentally ill, the physically disabled, the sick, the poor, the injured, the different, are not dispatched as they might be if nature took its course. We can, and should, seek to resist evolution, which is everything our morality is not. This doesn't mean we stand up and decry the hyena as immoral, and start going out and killing hyenas to protect zebras. It's true that there is a natural order* but it's also true that we are the only species on Earth capable of making a choice not to adhere to it. As Kirby says:

     If the human brain historically expanded because humans

     became carnivores, consuming cooked meat around the

     camp fire that encouraged social life among our forebears,

     why should we turn our backs on these existential

     developments of our species that made us who and what

     we are? The answer to that perfectly reasonable question

     is this. The ingestion of so much protein and the expansion

     of our human brain has produced a creature with a

     heightened capacity for moral reasoning.

*Incidentally, a hole in the arguments of those who try to marry the existence of a creator God with the process of evolution, who do not here have their usual recourse to 'free will'. As Paula Kirby (no relation of Michael Kirby's) asks in 'Evolution threatens Christianity', how could an omnibenevolent God ever set in motion such a monstrous process?

Concluding remarks

All that's left is to say a little about my own diet. I'm still eating meat, and a lot of it. You might see that as hypocritical, but I don't. This post has been more about convincing people to admit or recognise that eating animals is wrong rather than that they should give up doing so (although the two are obviously connected), and I don't judge anyone who continues eating meat. A lifetime of delicious meat-based meals and indoctrination doesn't vanish in a day. But I think it's important to be able to use moral reasoning independent of your actions, to recognise that you're doing something wrong even if you're still doing it, rather than just rationalising and justifying your current behaviours. In some ways, I've been thoroughly desensitised. When I look at a piece of meat, even a skin-covered chicken wing or a slab of beef with bones in it, I simply do not see an animal, I see food, and this is the biggest problem for me. But I'm making progress. The other night I was eating a bowl of Tilly's mum's caesar salad and I had a breakthrough (which should not reflect poorly on the quality of the salad; it's delicious). Getting to the bottom of the bowl after all the lettuce leaves had gone, I was left with a wet, stringy conglomerate of pale white chicken meat and bright pink bacon, and as I was shovelling it into my mouth, I was acutely aware that it was animal flesh that I was eating. The sensation was replaced immediately once it reached my mouth, of course, but nevertheless, that was a big step for me, and those moments are happening increasingly. I'm on my way to re-sensitisation.

For now, my plan has been to stop eating meat automatically. Usually when I'm out for lunch or whatever, I'll just grab a chicken sandwich or something, because that's just what I eat, not because I really want it. Now, unless I actively want a meat dish, I'll get the vegetarian option. As I've said before, I'm not sure I'll ever be able to give up meat entirely. I have almost no self-control, and I'm convinced those vegetarians who say, 'Oh that's what I used to say, but I was surprised by how easy it was' just never enjoyed meat as much as I do, or else we're different blood types or something. But strategies like making meat my special option rather than my general one, and another thing I'm trying called 'Meatless Monday', will and in the former case already have made a big difference to how much meat I eat, which has to have a gradual effect on how many animals I cause to die for my selfish enjoyment of their flesh.

Often in discussion of vegetarianism and related issues, commentators talk about how our treatment of animals might be looked upon by future generations, an interesting idea to entertain. In his reasoned, ever self-questioning way, Wallace says, in reference to the Maine Lobster Festival (MLF):

     if you, the Festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters
     can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on
     aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-
     fest. Does that comparison seem a bit much? If so, exactly why?
     Or what about this one: Is it not possible that future generations
     will regard our own present agribusiness and eating practices in
     much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or
     Aztec sacrifices? My own immediate reaction is that such a
     comparison is hysterical, extreme—and yet the reason it seems
     extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less
     important than human beings; and when it comes to defending
     such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I
     have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat
     certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it,
     and (b) I have not succeeded in working out any sort of
     personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible
     instead of just selfishly convenient.

I for one can certainly imagine a more enlightened populace looking back on us as we do our own forebears. It's hard not to see the trend developing over the last hundred years, of extending rights to ever smaller segments of the population, starting with the largest demographic, women, and moving through oppressed races, nations, and ethnic groups; then, in recent years, disabled and gay people. Not to undermine the valiant efforts of today's animal rights activists and campaigners, who are seemingly ahead of their time, but might not we, as a society, turn our full attention to animals when we run out of human minorities? Might not the next mainstream social movement be for animal rights?

Part three looks at anthropocentrism and hierarchising life.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to read this gargantuan post (almost 4000 words) and to my friends for their enthusiastic response to part one, which gave me the motivation to power through and finally finish this. Thanks to Wil Anderson and Lisa Dempster for retweeting it and exposing it to the wider veg(etari)an community, and to everyone else who's retweeted it since. Thanks Sam Glass for directing me to the David Foster Wallace article, and to Alissa for telling me about Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's podcasts. Thanks finally to Matt Wheeler, whose account of why he is a vegetarian was too cogent to resist including; you should all go and check out his amazing, custom, whittled artworks!

References

Wil Anderson's live comedy panel, Wil Does Parky, at Splendour in the Grass, Woodford, Queensland, Australia. Sunday 31 July 2011.

Miranda Devine's opinion piece, 'Everybody hurts, but we've all got to eat', in The Sunday Telegraph, Wednesday 5 October 2011.

Peter Jackson's film, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, by New Line Cinema, 5 December 2002.

Michael Kirby's opinion piece, 'Animals deserve our protection', in The Australian, Saturday 1 October 2011.

Michael Kirby's opinion piece, 'Sense and sensibility about our fellow sentient creatures', in The Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 6 August 2010.

Paula Kirby's blog post, 'Evolution threatens Christianity', on The Washington Post's On Faith forum, 3:26pm 24 August 2011.

Rohinton Mistry's short story, 'Condolence Visit', in his short-story cycle Tales from Firozsha Baag, published by Faber & Faber in 2006.

Colleen Patrick-Godreau's podcast, 'Humans are meant to eat meat. Just look at these incisors in my mouth', from her podcast series Vegetarian Food for Thought: Inspiring a Joyful, Sustainable, Compassionate Diet.

Louis Psihoy's documentary, The Cove.

Charles Rangley-Wilson's documentary, Fish! A Japanese Obsession, by KEO Films, 23 March 2009.

Tony Schirato and Susan Yell's 'Ideology', in Communication and Cultural Literacy: An Introduction, published by Allen & Unwin in 2000.

Taiji dolphin drive photograph.

David Foster Wallace's essay, 'Consider the Lobster', in Gourmet Magazine in August 2004.

Matt Wheeler's private correspondence via Facebook, 10:27pm Tuesday 11 October 2011.