In 18th century philosophy the idea of the “sublime” emerged out of the investigation of the objective qualities of the beautiful and bifurcated out of it. It is a quality utmost of nature experienced as great or vast, terrifying beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or immitation. Kant distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime, the former is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, while the latter refers to boundlessness and power to destroy. He also attributed gender characteristics to those two concepts, relating sublime to mascularity and the beautiful to femininity, attributing superiority to the sublime. His ideas on art was a both part of and strenghtened the dominant discourse of this era. Discourses of the imperialism shaped visualization of Europe as the rational and powerful the masculine figure while the East was depicted picturesque as velied or unbribed sexuality of a woman who is minor, not capable of managing itself, irrational, and weak.
[ad#Google Adsense intext]
These more familiar examples -of using body politics of a deep lying paradigm of male dominance over women- makes it more clear how woman body, nature and East are juxtaposed on each other. Nature (as a homogenized category composed of animals, rocks and plants alike) have traditionally been visualized as female: the mother earth. As early as Aristotle’s in “Nicomachean Ethics” women were likened animals and both were excluded from moral life. The Enlightenment thought consolidates a more rigid dichotomy by imposing a mathematical model on reality and turning nature in to something that can be looked upon and understood, “not true sympathy, of course, but by virtue of the very object-ivity of it.”[1] Horkheimer and Adorno argue that this reflects a psychology of domination, rooted in material conditions. Human consciousness was seen distinct from that of other species as linear and dichotomized. Dealing with irrational creatures was seen as a weakness and was left to women who were themselves irrational and emotional.
Carol Adams in her book “The Sexual Politics of Meat” reveals the parallels between the treatments toward woment and animals. She likens the ways a moral agent is turned into meat and how women is reduced to sexual objects.[2] Early feminits of 19th century claimed what was directed at them as an insult. They held that enemy of the world was the rational materialism and heartless science. Opposing the atomistic individual ideal of liberalism, feminists of later periods tried to envisage an organic concept of life and collectivity of man and nature. According to ecofeminist vegetarians pain and suffering must be prevented irrespective of race, sex, or species. Emprically women have predominance in animal rights activisim. This is explained by the arguement that women’s experiences with structural oppression and domination draws them closer to environmental egalitarianism. Due to the way women are socialized they ophine more relationally, can feel emphaty with animals.
[ad#Google Adsense intext]
Adams assert that when an animal is killed for consumption it is made invisible. People don’t think of eating a dead animal which is victimized through instrumentalizing in a means-ends reasoning. I concur to her claim that consuming the animal flesh is analogous to broken women body which is fragile to beating, raping, 
prostitution and pornography. In both cases there is the gist of aggressive masculin attitude. Also in “The Pornography of Meat” she indicates that popular culture creates a humiliating and antagonistic feeling againts women and animals and that other species gradually comes to convey a female identity that can be raped. Meat eating does convey ideas related to maculinity, which can be accepted or denied by the male of society, yet symbolically, manhood is constructed through eating meat and dominating other bodies.[3] A striking example of the hegemony of this discourse is again from a primary school textbook that I remember very clearly: “Those nations who does not eat meat are prone to be dominated by those who do!” As the nature is female, the state is male. State mold and manipulate nature, or other states which are as much female. Meat eating has largely been identified with power. And it is intensely political!
[1] Susan Bordo, The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought, Signs:Journal of Woman in Culture and Society, Vol 11 no3 (Spring 1986) 451
[2] Carol Adams, “The Sexual Politics of Meat:A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory”, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.
[3] Carol Adams, The Pornography of Meat, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004
