{"id":1053,"date":"2008-08-15T08:49:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-15T13:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=1053"},"modified":"2008-08-15T08:49:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-15T13:49:00","slug":"guest-post-vegetarianism-served-up-with-a-side-dish-of-feminism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2008\/08\/15\/guest-post-vegetarianism-served-up-with-a-side-dish-of-feminism\/","title":{"rendered":"GUEST POST: Vegetarianism Served up with a Side Dish of Feminism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Jessica Zalph is a student at Hunter College High School in Manhattan and will be in ninth grade this coming fall. She is a member of Writopia Lab <\/a>and has won various awards in the Scholastic writing contests. As an author, Jessica usually writes short stories and poetry, but she decided to break out of character to write this \u00e2\u20ac\u0153coming out\u00e2\u20ac\u009d piece about vegetarianism. With a dash o\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 feminism mixed in. Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Jessica! -GWP<\/span><\/p>\n

October is Vegetarian Awareness Month. If only people knew about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Among men [vegetarianism is] regarded as, if not a girl thing, then at least a girlie thing \u00e2\u20ac\u201d an anemic regimen for sensitive souls subsisting on rabbit food and tofurkey,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Holly Brubach in her recent New York Times article \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Real Men Eat Meat.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/a> If the male gender sees vegetarianism as a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153girl thing,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d then that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s got to be our hardest obstacle to overcome. Whenever compassion and eating \u00e2\u20ac\u0153rabbit food\u00e2\u20ac\u009d became a girl thing, it became taboo for boys, because sexism is rooted so deeply in our society that girls are seen as weaker overall. But maybe making a harder decision wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be weak at all. Maybe it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be more macho, if that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re after, to overcome the stereotypes. Overcoming the expectations society has of you could be \u00e2\u20ac\u0153manly,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d no?<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been a vegetarian for the fourteen years of my existence \u00e2\u20ac\u201c my parents stopped eating meat four years before I was born. They were told by a number of smug acquaintances that, just wait, I would become all \u00e2\u20ac\u0153teenager-y\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and start eating meat once I became obsessed with fitting in and defying my parents out of spite. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re still waiting.<\/p>\n

Probably the reason I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve stuck with vegetarianism and animal rights is because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just an arbitrary ritual I inherited, but is based on the unfortunate reality that the thing on the plate is the same as the cute little thing on the farm. I know I must have adopted this concept at an early age, because I recall feeling appalled fury at a boy in my preschool class who took the unsuspecting snails out of their tank and stepped on them.<\/p>\n

Most of the attitudes I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve encountered haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seemed to change much over time.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Vegetarians are stupid\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is the bluntest of the accusations I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve received \u00e2\u20ac\u201c this one coming just recently in our eighth grade hallway from a guy flaunting an anti-Wendy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s flyer, sparking the debate that flares up every now and again at school. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s only in hindsight that I realize that these heated I-wish-they-were-discussions-not-shouting-matches are generally divided by gender. Girls my age tend to be considerably more tolerant, even if they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t adopt the practice of not eating meat themselves, because boys, in general, have macho stereotypes driven into their heads from babyhood.<\/p>\n

The anti-Wendy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s flyer is waved tauntingly. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Meat is good,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d comes the challenge, which lingers in the air. Whatever futile hope has caused me to take this bait all these years rises in me again. And so it begins. Detailed description \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the cruelty the animals face, the fact that they can feel emotions and pain, even if they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have your intellect, thank-you-very-much. Wild rebuttal \u00e2\u20ac\u201c ending with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Vegetarians are stupid,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and exasperated disappointment from me. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not worth it.<\/p>\n

And yet, in a grasping-at-straws way, it is. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a success any time that you can make someone confront the cruelty involved in butchering animals, because getting people to face the truth is the hardest thing you can make someone do, and possibly the first step toward creating a change.<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure when vegetarianism became seen as a sign of weakness. Maybe it always has been. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s human nature to eat meat. The food chain and all that,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says my friend. And maybe it is human nature to eat meat, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also human nature to use violence to get and keep political power, and yet many countries have incorporated democracy to overcome this problem. If we can overcome our natural tendency to physically fight for power, surely this October we can overcome the meat-eating part of our omnivore selves as well.<\/p>\n

Chew on that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jessica Zalph is a student at Hunter College High School in Manhattan and will be in ninth grade this coming fall. She is a member of Writopia Lab and has won various awards in the Scholastic writing contests. As an author, Jessica usually writes short stories and poetry, but she decided to break out of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1901,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[21395],"class_list":["post-1053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-girls"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}