Meaty Metaphor In Butcher's Sex
Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday March 24, 1993
Karin Herrmann, a third-year apprentice butcher, is aware that she is a rarity - a woman in a male-dominated trade.
But she is stunned by a study which says that butchery is a metaphor for the meat market and that the butcher's shop is a very sexualised place.
According to the Macquarie University study, women are staying away from the butchery trade in droves, but it has little to do with a lack of strength for lifting heavy carcasses.
Associate Professor Rosemary Pringle, from the School of Behavioural Sciences, said that, while conducting a study of why women were not becoming surgeons, she wondered why women were not becoming butchers.
Associate Professor Pringle said women wanting to be butchers were facing the same types of opposition which confronted women in medicine in the 19th century.
She spoke to male and female butchers as well as TAFE teachers found that although the work had become lighter, there was no evidence of women fighting to get into the profession.
This led to her thinking of social taboos about women handling meat and drawing blood. Last century there were separate anatomy classes for female medical students as it was seen to be demeaning for women to handle bodies.
"The threat of a woman wielding a knife, perhaps it stirs up men's castration anxieties," Professor Pringle said.
Associate Professor Pringle and her assistant, honours student Ms Susan Collings, discovered butchery was a metaphor for the meat market and the butcher's shop was a very sexualised place.
"A lot of women will tell you they flirt with the butcher.
"I think it is mutual, I think the butcher is the sort of good-hearted flirtatious buffoon."
But a lot of what happens in the butchery and in the minds of butchers and their customers was repressed.
"Behind the fascination with the subject, is a fascination of cannibalism,"she said.
Ms Herrmann said she had never thought of butchery, women and sex in the way depicted in the study.
Associate Professor Pringle's next study will be of the funeral profession
© 1993 Sydney Morning Herald