Meat Made Manifest: Complicated Consumption in My Year of Meats
John Ueno, a Japanese advertising representative, has just returned, intoxicated and clumsy, from a night at the bar. He stumbles into his apartment, mumbling incoherently and seeking his gracile, porcelain wife. By the end of the night, he has violently raped her and, consequently, performed the ultimate act of subjugation and domination. Ueno uses sexual intercourse, an act that typically symbolizes affection and passionate consummation, in order to exert his masculinity and power. This rape, an example of sexualized violence within Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, demonstrates the way in which the consumption typically associated with food may become intertwined with the idea of dehumanization, thereby causing the consumption of man. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, consumption is defined in multiple ways. It is primarily defined as “the action or fact of consuming or destroying; destruction,” and additionally defined as “the using up of material, the use of anything as food, or for the support of any process.” The emphasis placed on the destructive element of consumption reinforces the idea that when a man consumes a woman, he is metaphorically “digesting” her role as an autonomous female and recreating her new role as a soulless “meat” that may be exploited to fulfill any purpose desired by the male counterpart. In My Year of Meats, the consumption of meat is paralleled by a similar physical and moral consumption of people, thereby transforming humans into soulless pieces of meat that may be consumed without consideration and effectively blurring the animal-human boundary that is commonly accepted in society.
In My American Wife!, the TV show that John Ueno represents, it is constantly proclaimed that “Meat is the Message” (8). The show equates each week’s featured wife, presumably the focus of the show, with high-quality beef, and likens the perfect wife to a specific kind of meat: “ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest” (8). Through the equation of women and cuts of beef, Ozeki highlights the common assumption of men such as Ueno, Suzuki, and Oh that the consumption of females within society is comparable with consumption of beef, promoting the belief that consumption of female sexuality is linked with the destruction of female autonomy. The roles of a proper wife are also characterized within the description of meat: the perfect wife should be fertile and strong, yet also feminine, obedient, and graceful. The “traditional family values symbolized by red meat in rural America” are thereby transferred to Japanese women through the television show, and the women become the “meat made manifest” (8). The producers’ ability to interchange the wives featured on the show and the beef they are preparing as if one is solely the representation of the other emphasizes the way in which women are treated like beef – consumable and dehumanized.
Akiko Ueno, John’s wife, is required to watch My American Wife! and produce the meat recipes that are featured on each week’s show. Ueno forces this requirement on Akiko due to her battle with infertility – her inability to have children is attributed to the fact that “her ovaries were starved” (20), and Ueno believes that if she “put some meat on her bones” (20) she would be able to produce a baby. In addition to her sterility, Akiko also suffers from bulimia. During her struggle with this eating disorder, she vomits every time Ueno forces her to eat meat. The lifeless meat, described as “an animal alive…climb[ing] its way back up her gullet until it burst from the back of her throat” (37) is personified with the capabilities of living flesh. Additionally, her vomiting is explained by the fact that she “could not keep any life down inside her” (38). This directly corresponds to her inability to become pregnant and keep a child inside her uterus. Subsequently, her bulimia stops as soon as she begins menstruating and consequently regains her ability to maintain life inside of her. By describing the meat as a life force that is capable of wreaking havoc on Akiko’s internal organs and concurrently comparing pregnancy to ingesting meat, Ozeki compares the internal process of digestion with the creation of human life and distorts the boundary between meat and man.
Ueno supports the animalistic consumption of man through the production of his TV show, but he also demonstrates this activity in episodes of his own life. At the climax of the novel, Ueno commits the ultimate act of inhumane sexual consumption – rape. Ueno’s rape of Akiko perfectly illustrates the transformation of a human female, containing emotions and thoughts, into a piece of meat that may be consumed at one’s will. His sole objective is the creation of a child; through progeny, Ueno hopes to redeem his masculinity and restate his role as the head of the household. In the process of fulfilling his own selfish desires, he disregards the emotions and desires of his wife. Rape – an action defined by its focus on violent, carnal satisfaction – debases the act of sex, eliminates the uniquely human idea of intimacy, and focuses on the fulfillment of the body rather than the soul. When Ueno commits rape, he disregards the human qualities of his wife and essentially reduces her to the emotional value of an animal. Furthermore, immediately prior to ejaculating, he makes a reference to Akiko being “in heat” (239). Human females are not typically referred to as being in heat – this is a term used by cattle breeders in order to effectively breed livestock and produce offspring. By comparing Akiko to a cow and sex with her to a mere form of breeding, Ueno reduces Akiko to chattel whose sole purpose in life is the creation of progeny.
The woman-meat correlation and Ueno’s obsession with fertility continues within one of Ueno’s conversations with Jane. He states, “We Japanese get weak genes through many centuries’ process of straight breeding. Like old-fashioned cows. Make weak stock. But you are good and strong and modern girl from crossbreeding. You have hybrid vigor” (43-44). The words that John selects in order to describe the fertility complications experienced by him and his wife and the way in which he perceives the apparent fertility of Jane draw very clear comparisons to meat and cattle breeding, therefore comparing women to livestock that must be properly bred with men. Ironically, the idea of “hybridity” that John apparently prefers in his choice of mate is the same concept that he detests in his selection of the wives for My American Wife! In the memo that details the guidelines for wife selection, it states that each chosen wife should be “a middle-to-upper-middle-class white American woman with two to three children…a modern role model” (13). John’s statement takes on another layer of irony considering Jane’s infertility and the fact that after several unsuccessful attempts at pregnancy, she declared herself “a ‘young mule’…[whose] mulishness went further than just stubbornness or racial metaphor…like many hybrids, it seemed…[she] was destined to be nonreproductive” (152). There is a very strong focus placed on the cattle-breeding idea that hybridity, or lack thereof, can influence a woman’s reproductive or marital success, although evidence clearly shows that with humans this is not the case.
The novel’s focus on the animalistic consumption of females is also apparent in its recurrent references to pornographic sexuality. Suzuki is described as a man with a “passion for Jack Daniel’s, Wal-Mart, and American hard-core pornography” (33). Ueno’s affection for Texan strippers, curvaceous and fertile, highlights his dissatisfaction with his wife’s “scrawny” (43) body and inability to produce children. When one of the strippers, Dawn, gives Ueno a lap dance, the act is described in terms of consumption as well, stating that she “straddled his tenderloin and offered up her round rump for his inspection” (43). The direct correlation between Dawn and a cow under inspection creates an additional comparison between women and meat. Pornography and stripping are two facets of society that revolve around the consumption of bodies as opposed to the appreciation of people. Pornographic material revolves around the mass production and consumption of sexual behavior as marketed to an audience, stripped of any kind of true intimacy or emotion, and stripping is a profession that is based completely upon the appreciation of a woman’s physical assets and disregard for her personality. Ozeki, describing the male proponents of this type of entertainment, is criticizing the mass consumption and dehumanization of sexual behavior commonly observed in animals as opposed to the private, intimate nature of intercourse that is unique to humans.
Jane furthermore explores a relationship between meat and sexual activity within her relationship with Sloan. They begin their relationship over the phone, maintaining anonymity and using phone sex as a method of sexual interaction. When they finally have their first sexual encounter, the sex is still relatively anonymous as they barely know each other, and Jane even states that she feels “rocked by the heart-pounding terror of fucking a total stranger” (54). This anonymous sex, based on nothing more than physical attraction and carnal desire, downplays the importance of love – or even emotional respect – within the sexual experience. Moreover, after one of their later sexual experiences, Jane reminisces that they “spent the weekend tangled in the polyester sheets, celebrating the mouthwatering diversity of meats” (166). She directly compares their sexual experience with the consumption of meat.
Although Ozeki draws a clear comparison between men and beef through her multiple comparisons of the two entities, she also stresses the connection through certain passages where humans are deliberately compared to animals that are not considered red meat. When Akiko doesn’t care about sex, Ueno describes her as a “cold, dead fish” (195). Her disinterest in the consumptive activity of sex removes her cattle-like characterization and instead classifies her as a cold-blooded fish. Within the context of My American Wife!, the TV show that Ueno uses to express his belief about what constitutes the “perfect” family, only beef may be consumed by the acceptable women. Along with pork and lamb, fish is an inappropriate food and therefore intolerable within society. By depicting Akiko as a fish, and thereby rendering her unfit for consumption, Ueno is emphasizing the fact that her lack of interest in sexual activity makes her an undesirable, imperfect wife.
In addition to Akiko, paraplegic Christina is portrayed in terms of non-red-meat food when she is described as “more or less a vegetable, uncomprehending, incapable of speech” (132). When Christina is removed from the sphere of red meat, a description that classifies women as objects of consumption, she is placed on a higher plane of existence and becomes practically ethereal. According to the Mayor, her transformation into a vegetable caused her to be “on another plane…above us somehow, but not really here” (139). This otherworldly quality that Christina possesses places her above the base acts of carnal consumption and instead endows her with a wraithlike, beautiful quality. Her physical attributes support this image, and she is described in the following manner:
Christina Bukowsky was beautiful. Not beautiful in any ordinary, earthbound, Midwestern sense of the word, but transgressively so…her skin had grown so clear that you could see life moving below the surface of her cheeks…when she opened [her eyes] again, her new blue was pellucid, the eyes of an angel that had rested for a while on Another’s countenance…Christina was simply and heartbreakingly radiant (137).
Suzuki and Oh, previously characterized by their obsession with pornography and tendency to “use [magazine cutout] girls for target practice, shooting out their tits and crotches with air guns they’d bought at Wal-Mart” (34), fell in love with Christina and became captivated by her delicate beauty. She had such a profound effect on them that she transformed their fixation on the sexual appeal of women into a feeling of love and affection, evident in their appalled reactions when the flight attendant jokingly asks if they believe Christina “still can, you know…[have sex]” (138). After Suzuki and Oh meet Christina, Jane notices that the two of them “stopped shooting out the crotches of blond girls in their motel room… [the] visit to Hope had changed them” (139). By meeting a woman who rose above the “meat-like” sexual appeal of normal women, the two men overcame their obsession with the sexual, cattle-like aspects of females and chose love over sexuality.
Furthermore, Christina does not menstruate – a complication that effectively renders her incapable of fulfilling the role of fertility that is typical of her sex. Not only is she not “red meat,” but she is not even capable of producing children This apparently moves her to a superior plane of existence, eliminates her categorization as an item of consumption, and equates the menstrual process, which allows women to bear children, with the image of being more meat-like and therefore worthier of being consumed. By inviting this comparison, Ozeki is addressing the societal idea that sterile women are inappropriate wives since they cannot be mothers – a belief that instigates a one-dimensional view of appropriate femininity and brings into question what allows a person who fulfills the female sex role to additionally fulfill the feminine gender role. If infertility precludes femininity, then nothing technically separates barren females from being considered men, and they therefore cannot be the targets of female sexual consumption. This could be an explanation for Christina’s removal from her sex’s role as objects for sexual consumption, her placement into a higher level of existence in which she encapsulates aspects of both manhood and womanhood, her resulting function as a paradigm for a “gender role” that rises above the weaknesses of each gender’s stereotype, and her final characterization as a Christ-like figure, angelic and ethereal, that seems to transcend corporeal existence altogether.
Within My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki draws numerous comparisons between humans (specifically females) and meat. By linking the consumption of female sexuality to the consumption of red meat, specifically emphasizing the connections forged with fertility, pornography, and debasement, Ozeki calls attention to the blatant objectification of women in today’s society and the ways in which women are valued solely for their roles as sexual objects. In a world that is defined by the overabundance of strip joints, pornography, dirty magazines, and advertisements that blatantly objectify women, it is important to analyze the way in which this chauvinistic attitude is both created and perpetuated. Ozeki’s semi-cannibalistic claim that the basis of a prevalent focus on objectification is the desire for animal-like consumption of the female body can offer an explanation, and possibly a mechanism for change, for the blatant accentuation of the female sexual role in modern society.
