Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals (review)

In this lucid, analytical, and courageously provocative book, philosopher Brian Luke lays out his theory that the underlying source of much animal abuse and exploitation lies in culturally prescribed notions of manhood. Because they cannot participate in the natural life-giving processes of gestation and birth, Luke argues, men have sought to establish institutional practices that purport to be comparably life giving. Such patrilineal practices enable men to claim identities as coprogenitors because they are seen to ensure the well-being/survival of the human community; they also, however, require the systematic killing and exploitation of nonhuman animals. Among the practices of this type that Luke examines are hunting, religious sacrifice, meat production, and medical experimentation on live animals—vivisection. Luke therefore sees feminism, with its critique of masculine roles, and animal liberation as integrally linked, suggesting indeed that the normative masculine role identity is premised on an ability and willingness to exploit animals. "In this sense," Luke writes, "the struggle for animal liberation is also a struggle against manhood defined by sexism" (p. 23).

In building his case, Luke devotes two chapters to the refutation of "naturalistic" arguments, which hold that it is "natural" for humans to exploit other species and particularly that there is something innate or "natural" in human males that makes them predatory. Luke argues to the contrary that our natural or innate tendency is to care and sympathize with animals rather than to harm them and that we feel guilty when we do so, noting the numerous expiatory rituals that attend hunting that function as "mechanisms for mediating the guilt that such exploitations engenders" (p. 47).

In fact, Luke argues, men hunt not because it is natural but because such activity supports the image of "predatory heterosexuality prominent in Western patriarchal society" (p. 82), which relies on an erotics of power and domination. Citing numerous hunters' effusions about the erotic charge they get from hunting, Luke concludes, "Hunting and heterosexuality are both structured as institutions of men's sexualized dominance" (p. 99).

In an interesting chapter on sacrifice, Luke identifies medical vivisection with religious sacrifice. Both are carried out by a specially trained patrilineal corps that conducts sacrifice purportedly to ensure the survival and well-being of the human community. To those who would argue that the efficacy of religious sacrifice is questionable where that of medical experimentation has been proven empirically, Luke replies that there is in fact little evidence that significant clinical benefits have resulted from the latter. "Even today the official justification for vivisection is often accepted as much on faith as on evidence. Cancer research on animals . . . continues unabated despite its failure to significantly improve survival rates . . . over several decades" (p. 140).

One of Luke's most important past contributions to the field of animal ethics has been his discussion of how humans' natural sympathy and compassion for animals are blocked by cultural ideologies and propaganda promulgated by powerful interest groups. A lengthy section of this book (pp. 172-92) details the denial mechanisms and rationales that are used to forestall sympathy and legitimize animal abuse. Sympathy, for example, is derided as feminine and weak, which makes it difficult for men to express it without compromising their manhood. Luke maintains that the "institutions of animal exploitation" must routinely deploy these rationales to avoid "a crisis of legitimacy" (p. 171) brought on by people's natural revulsion against such practices as slaughterhouses and vivisection.

Brutal is a bold, hard-hitting, polemical book that offers a serious theoretical challenge to those who would defend these practices. In the interest of full disclosure, earlier incarnations of two short portions of this book appeared in Beyond Animal Rights (1996; expanded ed., The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, 2007) and Animals and Women (1995), which I coedited.