Seaspiracy: A Vital Message Sinks in a Sea of Misogyny

As an Associated Press story broke last weekend about four gray whales washing up dead in Northern California, I knew I could no longer put off writing about Seaspiracy. It is one of the most important films of our time.

Having loved Kip Andersen's previous work I had awaited it eagerly for months. I abandoned it a third of the way through in frustration, unable to listen to one more male hero or expert, and see one more befuddled and villainized woman.

Because women don't have it as bad as fish, one could argue that we should overlook the film's inherent misogyny in order to help combat the greater evil. But women, overall, are far better than men on animal issues and that means that overlooking misogyny and propping up the current patriarchal power structure hurts animals. It is no trivial matter.

Wondering if it could be as bad as it had seemed to me at first, last weekend I went through and tallied up the Seaspiracy screen time given to male heroes and experts vs. villains, and then did the same for females. The numbers are shocking. But before I share them I wish to give the film its due credit.

Over a trillion fish are killed every year, as compared to about 70 billion land animals. While many of us were brought up to believe that fish are not truly sentient, that has now been proven a fallacy. Not only is their suffering, on such a scale, unimaginable, but their widespread loss means that marine birds and mammals are dying en masse of starvation.

Seaspiracy makes those points beautifully. The film reels in the non-vegan viewer with more palatable talk of dying oceans before it first tackles fishing and then annihilates the possibility of fish farming as a reasonable alternative.

Here is how it sums up the very idea of sustainable fishing and hunting:

"I finally understood sustainability; it just meant that something could continue on and on forever regardless of how much suffering it caused."

What’s not to love?

Well, in the first half hour we hear men expound on the horrors of the fishing industry, with approximately 2 minutes of women doing the same. There is also a minute in which a man who oversees the problematic "dolphin safe" tuna labels is challenged, and there's almost a minute of Asian villains and victims of both sexes. Then we are introduced to the women who run the plastic pollution coalition.

I know that organization's extraordinary work. One of their lectures, over a decade ago, got me off single-use plastic. I remember going to vegan events where the very real positive environmental impact of veganism was preached to people who had been served water in plastic bottles. Because of the Plastic Pollution Coalition's work I saw the sad irony. The female founded group is responsible for the plastic bag ban in Los Angeles, one of the world's largest coastal cities and the home of the entertainment industry. The positive impact of their work is profound.

For almost three minutes we see Jackie Nunez and Dianna Cohen entrapped and grilled and their work excoriated. An article in Vox has since led me to a beautifully researched article from "Our World in Data" (https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution ) that sets the record straight. Despite the impression given by Seaspiracy, with its specific focus on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, most of the plastic waste in the ocean does not come from fishing nets. Plenty does, and it's important that somebody draw attention to that. But it is a reasonable choice for the Plastic Pollution Coalition to avoid that third rail in order to get the funding they need for their vital work in raising awareness with regard to the majority of the plastic products destroying the ocean. One person can do anything - no person can do everything. That goes for small nonprofits as well.

For the record, the Plastic Pollution Coalition's relationship with the Earth Island Institute, which unfortunately also oversees the "dolphin safe" tuna labels, is not nefarious. Earth Island Institute incubates and fiscally sponsors over seventy-five smaller nonprofits, including two founded by fantastic women in our movement, Project Coyote and the Youth Empowerment Action Camp. I know from personal experience how hard it is for a woman to get funding for a nonprofit and it breaks my heart to see men from our movement make it harder.

A quarter of an hour later we meet Maria Jose Cornex from Oceana and see a similarly disheartening scenario.

The film is not entirely without female heroes and experts. Thirty-six minutes in we are introduced to the captivating Sylvia Earl, who the narrator, Ali Tabrizi, refers to as one of his heroes. Her screen time total is 3:20. That's two minutes less than Guardian columnist George Monbiot.

Other laudable women get a combined total of two minutes. A black professor, Christina Hicks, the only black woman in the film, gets fourteen seconds about which she later tweeted, "Unnerving to discover your cameo in a film slamming an industry you love and have committed your career to."

Did the filmmakers really have to misrepresent the stance of a black woman in order to include her? If they'd reached out to Gwenna Hunter of Vegans of LA, a group with over 90,000 mostly black female Facebook followers, I have no doubt she would have led them to somebody who could have spoken eloquently on the oceans without being taken out of context.

Finally, after a gruesome scene covering the Faroe islands whale hunt, or the "Grind," as it is known, Ali interviews one of the whalers so I know I am about to see a significant scene with a man shown in a staunchly negative light.

Nope. The Danish whaler makes one of the most important points of the film:

"So I don't feel like I'm a bad person. If somebody wants to say, yeah, you're a bad person for killing a whale, I would rather kill one whale than 2,000 chickens. That's about the same amount of meat so if the world wants to take 2,000 lives and we are taking one, you're welcome. And at that point I feel like I'm a better person than many other people that are thinking, yeah, we had salmon for dinner last night - four people, salmon, that means two or three salmons killed. Do you really feel good about yourself killing two salmons for eating dinner? I can follow the thoughts that people are saying: if you want to eat, don't kill anything, like just eating vegetables and fruits and stuff like that. I can go along with that, but I really can't go along with people that are saying you must not kill Grind and then they are killing or eating other animals. For me, a fish, a chicken, a whale - exactly the same value. It has one life. And some say it doesn't need to be taken for getting food but that's what we're doing."

That is one of the many great points made by the film, and it puts the speaker in the category of expert. I am amazed that the filmmakers found a Danish whaler to speak so eloquently on behalf of animals yet had so little luck finding women.

Why was it so hard? I immediately thought of Mary Finelli, who founded the first organization to advocate exclusively for fish, "Fish Feel." Her expertise is such that I turned to her to fact-check my chapter on food in "Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals." Upon reaching out to her I learned that she had indeed been interviewed for Seaspiracy but the filmmakers had not used the footage.

Given such wonderful interviews with Sylvia Earl and Jonathan Balcombe on the same topic, fish sentience, Mary was not concerned about having been discarded. She seeks no acclaim for herself, which is, traditionally, the womanly way. But I am concerned. I assume her organization needs funding and that just fifteen seconds in the film might have helped raise her profile enough to get her more. And it would have raised the positive profile of women overall. That fifteen seconds wouldn't have had to come from Sylvia Earl or from Jonathan Balcombe, another great activist who is superb in the film. I find myself wondering if George Monbiot could have lost part of one of his many minutes so that Mary Finelli could have been included, or if some seconds could have been taken from some of the lesser known white males whose contributions were deemed essential.

The film does include a couple of wonderful women from Sea Shepherd, giving them a little over a minute combined. A few terrific men from the organization share a little over two minutes total, plus Captain Paul Watson gets a minute and a half, which nobody could complain about given his history and given that he is one of the most articulate people alive.

Noting her absence, I reached out to my friend Shannon Mann who was with Sea Shepherd for twelve years, in positions that ranged from deckhand to crewing master to communications director. She was featured on Seasons One, Two, Three and Five of Whale Wars. She is passionate and beautifully spoken. I learned that she was not approached for Seaspiracy.

I acknowledge that because Shannon is no longer with Sea Shepherd, though she parted on great terms, she may not have been the most obvious choice for airspace. But when you have a movie in which the screen time ratio of positively presented white males as compared to positively presented white females is twelve to one, and you are representing the animal advocacy movement in that film, and looking for support from within it, I suggest it is incumbent upon you to reach, reach hard, for the less obvious yet still superb female choice.

Yes those are the numbers. Screen time, including voiceover time, for fabulous men outweighs fabulous women in Seaspiracy at a rate of twelve to one. That ratio is "only" four to one if we discount the male narrator, but why would we?

Though men outweigh women so significantly, somehow the screen time allotted to white male villains is less than, only seventy percent of, the three minutes and twenty seconds given to white female villains.

As an aside from my main point on gender, I will note, regarding race, that there are both male and female Asian villains. In fact, the Vox article to which I referred above noted that "everybody who is Asian is seemingly a villain." That's not true - we see more Asian victims than villains, but the basic point holds. The Asian heroes and experts category was the easiest to tally as it totaled to zero. Though that is not the main thrust of this essay, most of us understand why that is so problematic in the current climate. Meanwhile, non Asian people of color get less than a full minute, and that includes the fourteen seconds in which the film's only black woman, Professor Christina Hicks, felt she was misrepresented.

If those numbers surprise you, if you watched the film and didn't notice the disparity with regard to both time and tone of male to female representation, or have read nothing of it in your friends' rave reviews, might it be time to consider what we have become inured to in our society?

A request: if you find any of those numbers of interest and want to use them or share them (and I am happy to share my raw data) may I ask you to make sure you credit me and DawnWatch for the work on putting them together, and that you please cite and link to this piece?

That request stems from a deflating experience. What seems like eons ago, when #MeToo was getting attention, I asked the superb group "Faunalytics" for figures on the proportion of women to men in our movement. They gave me data in areas such as attendance at conferences, likelihood to be vegetarian or vegan, and general sympathy with animal welfare, which I worked with, calculating that it was fair to say that 75-80% of our movement is female. Before I wrote my own piece, I happened to speak with somebody known as one of our feminist leaders and I shared that conclusion and my thoughts on the significance, given our movement's leadership at the time. I was surprised when a week later my point and numbers were parroted in a mainstream article by a white man, with the woman I had spoken to given a general thank you for her contribution to the piece.

Being a slow learner, I contacted the same woman last year looking for advice about how to negotiate with a man in our movement who seemed to be using my work to further his own. It was not long after the George Floyd murder, Black Lives Matter was, understandably, considered to matter most, and I was shamed for "looking for attention" and "seeking the spotlight." I guess she thought middle aged white women were getting way too much positive societal attention - especially white women named Karen.

For the sake of animals, the damaging idea that women must not seek the spotlight, and need not be given it, has to change. While I know that Kip and the other Seaspiracy producers had no conscious intention to do harm, the way the film deals with male activists vs. female activists mirrors the shameful history of our movement, and despite the film's many merits, somebody has to say that is not okay.

I hope animal advocates will watch Seaspiracy and absorb its wealth of information about the fishing industry, and recommend it to anybody who still eats fish. I also hope that anybody who funds animal rights projects will take care to put money behind those that give women the representation they have earned. It is time for women, including white women, historically the backbone and bulk of this movement, to get the acclaim they deserve and the power to help animals as they desire.

Yours and all animals',
Karen Dawn of DawnWatch
https://DawnWatch.com