“now that I’ve broken my six-year veg, I just want to be totally surrounded by edible dead animals. I wanna take meat baths, I wanna writhe grotesquely in bacon fat. #not sorry” my most recent fb status is generating a lot of veg analysis, some backlash, some interesting and important responses. but nobody gets the brilliance of the imagery.  see also: meat joy by carolee schneeman this is the response I haven’t posted yet. but what should I say? thoughts? analysis? someone commented on not being able to ignore the animals’ suffering, which left me feeling kind of guilty, but also fuck didactic activist shaming, and also what about insisting on the space to do things that are widely seen as unradical, because maybe they’re about another, subtler or stranger type of resistance? my fb response: “There’s just so much suffering, and I don’t know what to do with it, and I can’t always wear my politics in my body, and it’s important to think through yr relationship to food, and restriction, and sometimes it’s also important to be fucked. Like, not in major ways, but to think about the weird fetishization that I was doing with meat, the longing, the ways I’d berate myself into eating less. I also want to say that as a young person who was socialized as a woman, and trained in a lot of complicated ways to police my body and my food intake, I need to insist on the space to think through and try on a variety of relationships to food and my body. I also know that some of what I was saying sounds flippant, and it is What are we supposed to do about how much there is, to do? Disillusioned, I mean not really. Not completely. But not so certain anymore, and sometimes building a better life, a more complicated questioning intact life, can energize other forms of resistance.  I have lots of respect for vegans and vegetarians and people try, in the multitude of ways people try, to live their resistance. I just don’t always think that it’s obvious, what resistance is. And also, being flippant about meat baths is more about the way that I’m freaking out over this gross new luxury. It’s about my interest in the ways this is affecting me – the visceral longing (lust?) for gorging. I guess I’m not into being pressured to eat differently. God, diary entries on fb are radical and important. That sentence about their suffering – ugh, ugh, ugh, I know, I wasn’t thinking about it because numbing yrself, fatigue, burnout with thinking about all kinds of things and never feeling adequate as an activist or anything and just feeling really really tired and there being all these conflicting messages about how to be radical or moral or a person and you get so tired and there’s so much to be doing and you just don’t know, you just don’t know how to do yr life and your politics and anything and this is my year of other things. Because I believe in trying things. Because there’s so much suffering of course, and I don’t often talk about things like that, anymore, but also caring for ourselves and thinking through our relationships to food. There’s a relief in not restricting in certain ways. Dieting, what’s up with that? And so many of us do it and are embarrassed to talk about it, and restrictive food politics can mask disordered eating and I think that happens especially in radical communities and we don’t talk about it enough. And finding yr way to a better practice might mean being messy in lots of ways. Also cultural differences, relevant I didn’t mean this to be an in-your-face to my veg friends. It’s just something that I’m trying on, right now. Also food shaming needs to fuck off forever. Morals are so complicated. Obvs. And idk how to have a life practice, pin down this affect, only doing activism when you give a shit because otherwise deep depression can happen, too much pressure, paralyzing Forbidding myself food does sketchy disordered things to my eating.” ok obvs unedited. but what should I say?