Failing to notice a lack of Latino and African-American representation in congress is a result of systemic oppression – racism. General indifference to the fact that white men dominate large corporations is part of the invisibility of both racism and sexism. A lack of concern about the plight of a “breeding” sow on a factory farm is also a result of normative systematic oppression – speciesism.

Oppressions are by definition linked--linked by common ideologies, by institutional forces, and by socialization that makes oppressions normative and invisible.

Through dualism, those living in patriarchies tend to view the world in terms of opposites, beginning with male and female, and extending to a plethora of other contrived divisions, such as white/other races, human/animal, culture/nature, and reason/emotion.

Ecofeminists call attention to the fact that environmentalists, feminists, and those fighting racism and poverty, are pulling on different straws in the same broom.

Ecofeminists focus on interconnections between the domination/oppression of women and the domination/oppression of nature.

In Western patriarchal culture, both women and nonhuman nature have been devalued alongside their assumed opposites--men and civilization/culture.

Women and other animals are exploited for their reproductive abilities, and both are devalued as they age and wear out – when they are no longer able to reproduce.

For most women (as for most men) links between sexism and speciesism are not readily apparent. We have been conditioned not to see exploitation. For example, men generally have no idea how patriarchy affects women—unless they go out of their way to learn. The same is true for women with regard to cows and pigs and chickens and turkeys.

Females – sows and cows and hens and women – suffer because of their sex in Western patriarchal cultures, where female bodies are exploited as sex symbols, for reproduction, for breast milk, and/or for reproductive eggs. As such, farmed animals are at the very bottom of the contemporary, Western hierarchy of beings – and this is speceisism.