#DairyFree? #MeToo
I was raised with the idea that my body would become an object of lust which required my constant acute attention to protect myself.
On the car ride back from getting my Gardasil vaccination, my mom warned me about the dangers of men in our society and urged me to never trust them. At 12, I was hearing for the umpteenth time that men were pigs who only wanted one thing and that it was my responsibility to make sure no one would sexually harass or assault me. I didn’t believe that my mom was right in her assumption about the male species; sure boys would be boys, but I felt sorry for them being so dumb. I knew for a fact that I wasn’t ever going to put myself in a situation to be alone with a boy I didn’t trust, and there was no chance of me getting hurt because I would be prepared. Unfortunately, that’s not how sexual violence works. No matter how careful or how prepared I thought I was, I could never anticipate how someone else would act towards me.
At the end of 8th grade, I went to a supervised middle school event at a church with a few of my good girl friends to celebrate the end of the year. There was music, a dance floor, water, and tons of middle schoolers with adults roaming around keeping the crowd from getting too rowdy. My friends and I gathered in a circle as we danced to a popular song at the time, but then two hands reached from behind and landed in front of my chest.
I stopped moving and I realized that I was just groped by a boy around my age, whom I never saw the face of.
I just remember feeling confused and violated as I looked at my friends queuing with my eyes for some sort of response, but they darted their eyes away so I kept quiet. I didn’t think much of that incident, but the next year I was reminded again that boys would not hesitate to use me as a means to their end.
At 14, I was coerced into a toxic and emotionally abusive relationship in which I was sexually assaulted behind my city’s public library.
If I try hard enough, I can still feel him force his cold and dry fingers into me while I stayed pinned against him asking him to stop. If I try hard enough, I can still hear his voice on the phone as he hastily threatened to kill himself if I broke up with him. And if I try hard enough, I can make myself forget that for four years I lived in a constant state of shame, depression, anxiety, and secrecy.
It is so difficult for people who have not experienced sexual assault and sexual harassment to grasp how deeply it can cut an individual.
Even victims themselves often do not comprehend the total physical and psychological effects of their trauma. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is characterized by recurring stressful memories of a traumatic event and can result in a negative shift in one’s world view (Mayo Clinic).
Often times, PTSD is discussed in relation to war veterans and active military personnel, but it is a disorder that can onset anyone- including children- after a variety of traumatic incidents. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center published statistics about sexual violence showing that 81% of women and 35% of men report impacts such as PTSD. But these numbers don’t tell the story of countless sleepless nights replaying the incident and wondering how it could have ended differently.
I was so deeply embarrassed that a tomboy girl like me with a strong personality was taken advantage of.
I kept quiet for so many years because I was stuck in a loop of PTSD that I didn’t even realize I was in until much later, but at least I had the hope that the worst had passed. However, my negative encounters with men didn’t end there. Strangers would objectify me, comment on my body, make racial slurs, and elicit a deeply uncomfortable response full of anger and confusion.
At 17, I was in the parking lot of an Asian grocery store walking towards the entrance as a middle-aged, overweight, bald white man pulled up in his car to talk to me as he masturbated.
I felt extremely violated and in such a way that I had never felt before. Having had so many encounters with sexual harassment and sexual assault, I sometimes hesitate to tell my story because it seems unbelievable that one person could have faced more than one incidence. In reality, there are so many cases where females are subjected again and again to sexual violence as the same report finds that more than one-third of women raped before 18 years of age are raped again in adulthood (National, 2015).
I lost so much of myself in those vulnerable moments.
The guilt and shame from being a victim of sexual violence didn’t begin to leave me until five years after I was assaulted--I blamed myself for being in those situations because the way I was raised taught me that it could only happen to me if I let it. I hated myself and my body, as if it had betrayed me, so I did what I could to control it. I slipped into a vicious cycle of calorie restriction, binge eating, and self-loathing. Hours on end would be spent researching weight loss diets and effective cardio routines so I could keep getting smaller, maybe even enough to disappear.
From my deep seated insecurities about my body, I came across a diet promising vitality through eliminating all meat, seafood, and animal products including dairy and eggs.
As someone who didn’t regularly eat vegetables until high school and as a self-proclaimed ice cream connoisseur, this idea baffled me. In the end, I decided to do some research into the vegan diet because the vegan YouTubers seemed much happier and healthier than I was at the time.
I quickly realized that there were deep rooted issues in animal agriculture that mirrored social justice issues in our society with the most striking similarities being the exploitation of females in the dairy industry and the violence women in our society have faced for centuries.
The entire dairy industry thrives off of the pain and suffering of females.
Only pregnant females in any species is able to produce milk, and cows are no exception. Not only are these cows used for their breastmilk, but their babies are stolen from them shortly after birth and female calves are raised to be subjugated again while males are slaughtered for veal. Don’t be fooled by the happy cows playing in the grass on milk cartons- that milk is the cruel product from 9.4 million females, starting at 15 months old, trapped in rape racks (Newkey-Burden, 2017; Sexual Abuse, 2018; U.S. Dairy, 2017). I was beyond shocked when I heard about rape racks; surely it wasn’t as bad as it sounded? But it was worse.
Just as I was pinned down against my will, these cows were chained and confined to racks.
Just as I had a male force himself into me in the most taboo area, these cows had male workers systematically penetrate arms deep into them to artificially inseminate them. Just as I cried silently in pain and sadness, these cows cried and screamed with no caring soul around. And just as I wrongly thought I had escaped sexual violence, these cows are all still being continuously raped every day around the world even at this very minute. There has been an uproar of feminism in recent years, but the failure to recognize the pain and suffering people ritualistically participate in on a daily basis undermines the feminist movement.
We are all currently in the midst of a cultural shift where people are becoming more aware of such issues while also starting to speak up and participate in multiple movements to challenge or preserve the status quo. In recent movements such as the #MeToo phenomenon, great changes in awareness have been made, but women are still somehow at the mercy of everyone else.
Victims of systematic sexual abuse can not speak up for themselves and are the ones that demand the most attention, but don’t get it.
Females in every industry are being neglected, abused, mistreated, undervalued, and exploited. The sexual torture present in animal agriculture expands outside of the dairy industry as well, as any meat product comes from the forced procreation of that animal. Rape is proven to be the most underreported crime and is defined as a crime against humanity in the United Nations (United, 2019). Whether they are human victims of rape, or non-human victims of rape, sexual violence should never be permitted and deemed acceptable.
When fighting for a cause that is rooted in a value, individuals need to vet their lifestyle behaviors to ensure syncrocrocity and prevent cognitive dissonance. We are what we eat because food is energy. Whether people understand that energy as a caloric or spiritual sense, it can not be denied that what we nourish ourselves with, inevitably affect us.
So why is it that something with so much pain and suffering behind it is part of our daily diets?
Why is it that humans are the only species that consumes milk after being weaned off our mothers? Why is it that we drink cow's milk and not dog or monkey milk? To think that continuously consuming products of violence and suffering will not somehow manifest into our own pain is insane.
Females across all species are being exploited for their bodies, and we as a society can not expect sexual violence to end when so much discrimination within it exists. It can not be ignored that the females facing some of the most vile, repulsive, and inhumane conduct are those without a human face.
I believe empathy is what keeps our humanity intact. It is our ability to feel someone else’s pain and to act ethically that gives humans the ability to coexist with one another.
We must understand that any living being’s weakness is a result of a dominating force that has coerced them into subjugation. As consumers, we have the opportunity to support the dominating force or to aid the underdog with the power of money. Each dollar we spend is an economic vote for the continuation of that product and industry. I strongly urge everyone to choose compassion and put their values over their taste buds--stop consuming dairy. If people who understand sexual violence can make the connection with the dairy industry like I did, that is a significant change with a profound social impact.
Works Cited
Newkey-Burden, Chas. “Dairy Is Scary. The Public Are Waking up to the Darkest Part of
Farming | Chas Newkey-Burden.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 30 Mar. 2017, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/dairy-scary-public-farming-calves-pens-alternatives.
“Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).” Mayo Clinic, Mayo Clinic. 06 July, 2019.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/post-traumatic-stress-disorder/
“Sexual Abuse of Pigs and Other Farm Animals Is Nothing New.” PETA UK, PETA UK, 16 Jan.
2018, www.peta.org.uk/blog/sexual-abuse-of-pigs-and-other-farm-animals-is-nothing-new/.
“Statistics About Sexual Violence.” National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 2015,
“U.S. Dairy: Number of Milk Cows, 2017 | Statistic.” Statista, Statista, 2019,
www.statista.com/statistics/194934/number-of-milk-cows-in-the-us-since-1999/.
“United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect.” United
Nations, United Nations, 2019, www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/crimes-against-humanity.html.