Feel No Pain

The other day, I was reading this post about street harassment and the ways in which Black women experience street harassment differently.

I was particularly struck by the interviewee, Feminista Jones' discussion of the historical view that Black women did not experience pain in the same way as White women:

There is a historical perspective for this idea that black women are able to endure more pain and suffering. Part of that is that people need us to be that way—they need for us to not feel as much pain, so that they can make use of us. For example, black women were experimented on gynecologically. That's how gynecology came about. The father of gynecology, [Marion Sims,] experimented on one particular slave more than 30 times without anesthesia, the slave Anarcha, and he justified it by saying that black enslaved women don't experience the same kind of pain as white women.

 Jones goes on to add:

We also see examples of it with black women who have been domestics: They can work 16 or 18 hours a day for other people, they can leave their children behind, they're used to it, this is what they do.

While most people would now see these perceptions of Black women as absurd, we continue to develop myths about nonhumans that allow us to impose pain and suffering on them. The idea that nonhumans do not experience pain, or at least not the way that we do, is common. This assumption is used as a justification for forcing animals to endure a variety of painful procedures without pain reliever, including:  branding, circumsizing, tail-docking, removing the ends of hens' beaks, and more. But the truth is that these procedures are incredibly painful and in many cases continue to cause pain throughout the animals' (unnaturally short) lives. The idea that fish and other sea animals do not experience pain is particularly common, but recent studies have shown that is simply not the case. Throwing a live lobster into a pot of boiling water is, in fact, painful.

Similarly, baby animals are removed from their mothers almost immediately despite the pain that this causes for both babies and mothers. We cannot have cows' milk without forcibly impregnating cows and then removing their calves shortly after birth. Despite the fact that mother cows grieve so loudly and forcefully that it disturbs nearby neighbors, we cling to the idea that we are not harming anyone when we eat our cheese.

We create stories about the individuals that we are mistreating that allow us to continue to mistreat them without addressing the reality of our actions. As I discuss in length in my law review article, Combatting Reproductive Oppression: Why Reproductive Justice Cannot Stop at the Species Border, these myths harm nonhumans and marginalized humans and allow their oppression to continue unnoticed and unaddressed. Just like racism allows the pain endured by Black women to be ignored, speciesism allows the pain endured by nonhumans to be ignored and discounted.

Only by combatting these myths and addressing the reality experienced by every individual will we be able to create a just society for all.