One problem i’ve always had with the way many of us approach the world is how we seperate everything into neat little categories. You don’t have to be a well-published post-modern theorist to understand that these categories are rarely able to contain those within them. But that doesn’t seem to limit the power they have to control our actions and perceptions.

There are many examples of such categories: sex, gender, size, ability, and race are but a few categories that maintain hierarchical systems of dominance. But when we get into it we see that sex is not easily split into male and female (Kessler’s Lessons from the Intersexed is a good read for those that wish to disagree); gender had become a fun house of options long before Queer Theory entered academia; have a conversation with someone suffering from bolemia or anorexia if you want to get an idea of how size is all in the eye of the beholder; people with disabilities, like Marta Russel, have shown us that we are all temporarily able-bodied, so how can we create fine lines between one body and the next; and i know a few multiracial folks that could cut you down at the philosophical knees when it come to breaking down racial constructs. But never-the-less, we continue our lives believing these categories, these constructs to be truth… or close enough to truth so as not to be distrubed.

A St. Valentine’s post from Sour Duck reminded me of one very essential disconnect that continues to be largely ignored by those inside and out of academic halls. That is the category of Nature*. Don’t get me wrong, i believe that the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (CSC) is a great campaign and one that needs to be paid attention to (my grandma had a tumor removed from her breast that largely consisted of deoderant). Follow me for a moment as i take you along my line of logic.

While surfing the CSC’s website I noticed that they had a number of environmental organizations on their coaltion list. Looking through these environmental groups, I noticed that none of them were animal rights/liberation groups. That initially got me thinking about the disconnect between the environment and animals. Then i started to look around the site a little more.  That’s when i noticed that what this group is calling for is for more regulation from the federal government.  They then quote the FDA as saying, “The regulatory requirements governing the sale of cosmetics are not as stringent as those that apply to other FDA-regulated products.”  CSC preceeds this by listing as a travesty the fact that they cosmetic industry is allowed to introduce new products with no safety testing.

Now lets link the logic… backwards.  That last part can be faulted to myself and many others who have been working for years to end cosmetic safety tests.  Why would we do such a thing?  Because those safety tests consisted of such cruel acts as the Draize Test and the LD 50/50.  What are these?  Glad you asked.  The Draize Test goes something like this: you take a bunch of rabbits, you shove lip gloss into their eye, you prop their eye open so they can’t blink (you may or may not remove the tear ducts so they can’t wash the irritant out), and then you document what happens.  The point of such tests?  Let me know when you find out.  The LD 50/50 is more about mathematics.  Let’s keep the math simple and take 100 rabbits.  You continuously pump them full of something like eyeliner until 50% of them die.  You then figure out the amount that it took to kill off these 50 rabbits and there you have your toxicity level.  Then you kill the other 50 rabbits because they are useless to you know.  That’s a small sample of why we have fought to end these cosmetic testing.  If wearing cosmetics means that much to you, then I’d suggest volunteering for an LD 50/50 test and hope that you’re one of the lucky ones.

When the FDA says that cosmetic testing is not as stringent as other products regulated by them, they mean that they don’t require that 18 million animals be killed in addition to the 18 million that are killed each year in medical research.  More regulation from the government means more animal testing.

Which brings us to the disconnect between animals and the environment.  It always baffles me how environmentalists can seperate themselves from animal lib and vice versa.  After all, the majority of inhabitants in a forest or in a river or out in the desert are (wait for it…) animals.  Which brings us to the disconnect between animals and humyns.  Maybe everyone slept through that part of high school biology class, but humyns are animals.  Seriously, i’m not lying.  And no, i don’t just mean ‘in the sack’.  We have the same basic needs of all animals: food, water, love, sex, and social interaction.  In some cases, we share almost an identical genetic makeup.  Our hierarchical seperation is as arbitrary as that between men and wimmin.

Which brings us back to the concept of Nature.  In order to justify humyn dominance over all things non-huymyn, we had to create a dogmatic belief that humyns are seperate, higher beings than those things considered wild.  So we created the concept of Nature.  Nature is something that we admire, something we work to save, something we destroy.  But it can never be something that we, as humyns, are.  It is this seperation between Nature and Humynity that justified such acts as the Slave trades and the Holocaust (Black Africans were considered ‘dogs’, less than humyn; Jews in Nazi Germany, likewise, were considered ‘rats’).

In my humble opinion, if we are truly to have a Campaign for Safe Cosmetics then we must think outside the Humyn/Nature and Environment/Animal dichotomies.  We must ask ourselves “safe for whom”?  Surely, the millions of animals being taken from their families and forced into a life of torture don’t feel safe.  It is important in any work that we do to think about how we seperate ourselves from others.  What dogmatic beliefs do we have that don’t allow us to find a praxis of interconnectedness?

[tags]antioppression, animals, cosmetics, animal testing, environment, social constructs, post-modernism[/tags]
*I capitalize the word Nature because i capitalize all constructs (for example: White refers to the racial construct, whereas white refers to the color). And i believe that Nature is a social construct used to seperate Humyns from all that they are “deemed to dominate”.