Forget homo-, bi- or even metro-: the latest prefix in sexuality is vegan-, as in “vegansexual.” In a study released in May, Annie Potts, a researcher at the University of Canterbury and a director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies, surveyed 157 vegans and vegetarians (120 of them women) on the topic of cruelty-free living. The questions ranged from attitudes about eating meat to keeping pets to wearing possum fur to, yes, “cruelty-free sex” — that is, “rejecting meat eaters as intimate partners.”More from the NYT: Vegansexuality
Where does a loosely vegan diet fit in?
3 comments:
If somebody doesn't want to have sex with non-vegans, that's their choice. But I have a problem with the arguments that I've heard on this topic.
“Nonvegetarian bodies smell different to me,” a 41-year-old Christchurch vegan woman said. “They are, after all, literally sustained through carcasses — the murdered flesh of others.”
And just what does she think that the crops she eats are made of? In the final analysis everything on this planet is part of the same cycle. We're all sustained through carcasses.
As for the term "cruelty-free", I don't think anyone has any business using it. Considering what mechanical harvesting does to rodents in the fields, nobody can legitimately claim to have a cruelty-free diet unless they grow everything they eat themselves using organic methods and harvest it by hand. The best that your average vegan can legitimately claim is that not quite as many animals died for their dinner as for mine. It's a difference of degrees, and rather small degrees in the grand scheme of things. That is unless one thinks that the life of a cow counts but the life of a rodent doesn't, which is really no different from the argument that carnivores use to justify eating cows.
We all make our impact on the planet. Some people make somewhat less than others, and to that extent I applaud them for it. But there are vanishingly few people whose life is truly cruelty-free, and none of them are part of industrialized society. Almost everyone who makes that claim is either ignorant or dishonest.
What a coincidence. I just came across this bit, from The Bunny Suicides.
Well, I tend to find that those who eat a healthy, balanced diet taste better than those who don't - vegan or otherwise.
After all, you are what you eat.
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