All animal products originate from sexual violence.
Take farmed cows, for example. A male cow is violated with a livestock masturbator. Then, a young female cow is forcibly artificially inseminated. She gives birth 9 months later, but her child is taken from her shortly after birth. Cows don't make milk because they are cows, they make milk because they are mothers. The milk that was intended for her infant is siphoned from her, highly processed, and sold as dairy. The cycle of artificial insemination and child theft repeats until she is about 5 years old, a fraction of her natural lifespan, but the average age a dairy cow gets before she is considered "spent" and her exhausted body is slaughtered for cheap beef. If her child is a boy, he will be slaughtered for veal. If her child is a girl, she will be put through the same cycle her mother endured.
Meat and dairy are the products of an abused female reproductive system.
Take eggs, for example. Egg-laying hens are not the same breed as "broiler" (meat) chickens, so male chicks are considered a waste product as it is not economically viable to keep them alive. In the industry, male chicks are murdered a few days after birth via an industrial blender (called a "macerator") where they are ground up alive, or they are suffocated to death. The living female chick immediately has part of her beak sliced off to limit pecking. She is then overfed and injected with hormones to force her body to ovulate hundreds of times a year, until her body is too frail to be exploited any longer and she is slaughtered.
Eggs are the products of an abused female reproductive system.
Feminism means advocating for women's rights on the basis of sexual equality. Feminism should always be intersectional and inclusive of women who are most oppressed by the systems of privilege, power, and difference in our society. Capitalism and speciesism causes people to view some women as commodities rather than sentient, autonomous beings who deserve respect, rights, and protection from exploitation. Nonhuman women such as dairy cows and egg-laying hens are forced to live a lifetime of imprisonment to the appetite of humans, and their only crime was something they could not control: being born in the wrong species. Bodily autonomy, a cause all feminists fight for, is regularly stripped away from farmed animals. It is morally inconsistent for feminists to willingly and eagerly subject other women to such immense and violent systematic oppression. And yet, many feminists continue to indulge in the products of femicide and sexual violence.
My call to action for my fellow feminists is this: please, stop objectifying and commodifying these women who subjected to a lifetime of sexual slavery. Please include all oppressed women in your activism.
Fight speciesism. Fight misogyny. Fight injustice. Go vegan.
