thrill of the chase: make their day

The premise that links sport hunting to sexism, to predation on women and linking it to animals is essentially not off base, although the implications are much broader, encompassing a more comprehensive portrait of eroticism as weaponry and deeper fetishes on the logic of domination given the proportionate obsession with guns.

The nature of sport hunting itself is questionable as basic premise; a contradiction in that hunting originally had more practical considerations; it is almost a Thorstein Veblen scenario in which status and distinction can be based on the often conspicuous waste of sport hunting and the myriad gear and expenditure required to participate, all eventually stratified by where you hunt. From local grounds to flying to exclusive lodges. So, in a sense hunting is a commodity not much different than golfing or antique and art collecting. That feminists attach male patriarchy to the activity is not erroneous however:

( see link at end) …the chase is critical to the thrill of hunting and is enhanced by stalking, watching, and waiting for prey. …analogies drawn between the eroticization of the pursuit of desirable animals and the pursuit of desirable women…

…distressing representations of hunting as a sexually charged activity are resilient popular culture images, … Contemporary feminist theory often connects hunting with sex and women with animals. … clear evidence of the juxtaposition of hunting, sex, women, and animals in the photographs, narratives, and advertisements of a random sampling of Traditional Bowhunter magazines (1992-2003). Particularly prominent
in the magazines’ hunting discourse is the sexualization of animals, women, and weapons, as if the three are interchangeable sexual bodies in narratives of traditional masculinity. … concludes that moral outrage at the degradation of women might be targeted best at widely read newsstand periodicals that serve as popular culture precursors to videos that celebrate hunting naked women….

But hunting is also a means of projecting aggression into more socially acceptable forms; in something of the same way that pornography may pacify undercurrents of sexual violence to women, prostitutes, hunting serves as a deflection mechanism. Part of the obsession is that hunted animals are not white, which may be a transference that acts of killing or lynching people of color are acted out in legalized hunting. Into this mix can include Muslims and other “others”.But the overall key role, predation, as Veblen remarked, is indicative of a consumer society in general, part of an overall engagement with non-essential activities, albeit the blurred sexual frontiers and latent eroticism is more literal than say, under the auspices of profit, employment, and “shareholder value” we have activist investors take over what are considered, “weaker, underperforming companies,” making Carl Icahn and William Ackman “hunters” higher up on the food chain., not to mention the financial manipulators involved in Greek and Spanish debt where nations are hunted down under the rubric of “austerity.”

…In the U.S. cultural landscape, the language of hunting is a discourse of patriarchy. Hunters’ attitudes and actions toward social and natural objects (weapons or hunted prey) are constructed by a combination of experiences and absorbed cultural messages that validate and exacerbate white male dominance and power (Strychacz, 1993). Further, the cultural construction of hunting as rooted in a symbolic system that values predation and dominance conjoins hunting and sex with women and animals….

…Of course, our experiences as gender (and gendered) scholars may have brought the imagery to our attention. But we offer another argument first proposed by Adams : Violence against animals and women is linked by a theory of “overlapping but absent referents” that institutionalizes patriarchal values. According to Adams , animals often are the absent referents in actions and phrases that actually are about women—and women often are the absent referents for animals. The murder of a family dog is common in domestic violence; in such cases, the absent referent is the abused woman . In the staged Bambi Hunts, animals were

absent referents. In our reading of the contemporary hunting discourse, women often were the absent referents. Explicating the parallel objectifications of women and animals makes the absent referents more visible….Read More:http://asi.emailhandlers.net/assets/library/539_s1233.pdf