The
New Zealand Press reports on a new sexual phenomenon: Vegansexuality. Here are some extracts from the article:
Vegansexuals are people who do not eat any meat or animal products, and who choose not to be sexually intimate with non-vegan partners whose bodies, they say, are made up of dead animals...
Many female respondents described being attracted to people who ate meat, but said they did not want to have sex with meat-eaters because their bodies were made up of animal carcasses...
Christchurch vegan Nichola Kriek has been married to her vegan husband, Hans, for nine years. She would not describe herself as vegansexual, but said it would definitely be a preference... "When you are vegan or vegetarian, you are very aware that when people eat a meaty diet, they are kind of a graveyard for animals," she said.
Wow. I never thought of myself as a graveyard for animals, but when you put it that way, I guess it is technically true.
I think what's going on here is what anthropologists call the law of sympathetic magic: Once in contact, always in contact. That is, if an offensive object touches a neutral object, the neutral object becomes permanently tainted (in the eyes of the observer) by the contact. It's a totally irrational impulse, but powerful nonetheless.
I write about an experiment in
Elephants on Acid in which an experimenter briefly dipped a dried, sterilized cockroach into a glass of apple juice and then asked people if they would be willing to drink the juice. Most people didn't want to, even though the juice was in no way contaminated. It's the same principle as vegansexuality. If something really grosses us out, that sense of disgust will spread to anything touched by the offensive object.
Comments
No way am I having sex with composty vegans.
So that makes them a graveyard again.
So doing it with a vaga is even worse. It
I'm compost? wonderfull 😜
"lips that touch wine will never touch mine"?
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004771.html
One note is that the article Alex cites somewhat increases the apparent prevalence of this oddity of thought. Still, someone ought to teach these guys some basic biology.
What I've never understood about veganism (the radical flavor that says all meat-eaters are murderers) is why they don't think plants deserve the same respect they want to give to all animals.
Is being a plant graveyard better than being an animal graveyard, and if so, why?
When you smell bacon or burgers or steak you're inhailing bits of that meat.
Do they hold their breath?
Breath through a mask?
I also think that vegans have such an aversion to being with non-vegans because the food we eat nourishes us, makes us grow, thus we (as meat eaters) are "made up of animals". Therefore I don't think it's simply a case of having contact with the meat, it goes further than that. I'm sure I'm just being pedantic with this point though.
Um. In the first place, since when was instinct or social conditioning 'rational'? 'Irrational' does not mean nonsensical or stupid, it means 'not rational'. A gut response is irrational by definition - even if (as is not the case here) rational analysis supports the get response.
As to instincts to avoid vectors of disease: many insects - including locusts, which iirc are not that distantly related to cockroaches - form a normal part of the human diet in many parts of the world, so I doubt that our repulsion is genetic.
You're far more at risk of infection from eating other mammals than from eating insects, anyway - just look at tapeworms (readily contracted from pork or beef) for example; or HIV, which likely originated with the consumption of infected bushmeat. 'Instinct' does not protect us from these sources of danger. 😊
Social conditioning I'll grant you, but as I've said - that's as irrational as it gets.
Finally, the 'made of dead animals' bit makes no real sense - meat is broken down in digestion into needed amino acids and other nutrients just as plants are. And those nutrients are not just chemically identicall to those obtained from plants - they were in plants just a lifecycle or so earlier. Just as the nutrients in plants were likely in animals a lifecycle or two before that. What goes around, comes around. 😊
You won't last aweek around here 😊