Phoebe Buffay: Vegetarianism as Visual Morality
Animal Rights Reviews, Pt. 1: Friends
This was written before Matthew Perry’s death. Though I am critical of his character, Chandler, in this post, he will always be my favorite friend from Friends. I’ve been rewatching the show over the last few months, and Perry passed just before I finished the final season, leading to even more tears during the finale (and reunion show) than usual. I hope to revisit other episodes of the show in the future, but for now, let’s continue with this one.
Writing What They (Don’t) Know
As a standard rule, I dislike vegetarian/vegan characters in fiction. Because they’re written by carnists—people who believe (often subconsciously) that certain species of animals should be eaten—the characters fail to hold any sort of consistent moral stance. And fellow vegetarians and vegans spot immediately that these characters aren’t much more than virtue-signalers.
Though I could go on at length about carnist creatives who project their own prejudice against animal advocates by creating caricatures of their plant-based characters, today I am going to focus specifically on Phoebe from Friends and how her character is a more apt representation of vegetarianism than one might think at first glance.
The Present Referent
In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams claims the “absent referent is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product.” For instance, meat is “dismembered” from the once-living animal, removing their existence and individuality from the product we then consume. Even the term meat, rather than flesh, enforces this separation. Instead of seeing the animals who were killed for their flesh, we see only a piece of food. Thus the animals become absent, unacknowledged referents on the shelves.
In being vegan, we acknowledge the animal from which the meat—or any other animal-based product or service—came. Where animal lives are hidden, vegans see them, bringing them into the present rather than leaving them behind.
Vegetarians, however, fall somewhere between these two, seeing animals only where their deaths are most obvious. I call this the present referent. In meat, vegetarians can make a direct connection to the animal who was killed, but there remains a degree of separation with products like milk and wool.
The One With the Fur Coat
In the episode “The One With the Yeti,” Phoebe is gifted a fur coat. In this instance, we see her vegetarianism extend past meat to include the coat. The animals killed for that coat became the present referent, so she rejected it.
Of course, the writers took the opportunity to poke holes in her ethics, and poke fun at her, as they frequently did. First, Chandler jokes that the coat Phoebe already has was made by children in a sweatshop. This is a common excuse against animal advocates, wherein carnists claim that human rights are more important, though they themselves take little to no action against these abuses. Chandler is certainly not one to buy all his clothes secondhand, so his argument begins in bad faith; he is simply reducing Phoebe to an equal playing ground of immorality.
Next, Joey tries on the coat and Chandler, once again, makes a joke by calling him Ms. Manelli. The implication is that wearing the furs of dead animals is inherently effeminate, and therefore emasculating to Joey, who then removes the coat. Using the coat in this way further objectifies it, and the animals are removed from the conversation entirely.
As a final insult, the writers make Phoebe fall in love with the coat. As she lectures about “cutting-edge hairy carcass” fashion, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror and can’t help but blurt out that she thinks she looks great in it. She wears the coat for the rest of the episode.
When Ross later asks about it, she gets defensive, saying, “Okay, let’s get some perspective, people. It’s not like I’m wearing a seeing eye dog coat!” Additionally, she had said earlier that minks “are not very nice,” giving her justifications for why certain animals can be killed for their pelts and others can’t.
Throughout all this, the writers attempt to lower her sense of morality by silently saying, “Hey, Phoebe [and all other vegetarians], if you hate this so much, why do you like the way it makes you feel?” In other words, they lower her to their (minimal) level of moral consideration towards animals.
This is the wearable equivalent of meat-eaters saying they like meat too much to give it up, missing the entire point of vegans’ and vegetarians’ rejection of meat. We reject these things (that were once beings) not simply because of how they make us feel, but often despite how they make us feel. Where they embrace the absence of the animal referent, we acknowledge the animal.
One bright spot comes at the very end of this episode where Phoebe says that most of the minks “probably wanted to be coats.” This gets some laughs from the audience because it’s such an obviously absurd argument; the implication of this line is that animals don’t actually want to become coats. It’s at that point Phoebe can’t bear the guilt any longer and gives the coat away.
Visual Morality
Vegetarianism is often dictated by visual morality, or the degrees of separation between the referent and the referent’s visual presence in an end product. Because meat is the flesh of an animal, there is very little separation between the two; their body is present in the product. With dairy, however, the cow—and, specifically, the abuse they faced—is separated much further; the cow cannot be seen in the glass of milk or slice of cheese.
Similarly, with furs and skins, the animals are very present, as their deaths are obviously required to produce these materials. But with wool, consumers can keep the referent absent with the understanding that animals do not need to die for humans to obtain it. These distinctions are pushed further into the mainstream through “humane farming” declarations by corporations that profit from using animals for their wool.
Some Friends They Are
Phoebe’s friends never sympathetically or good-naturedly interact with Phoebe’s vegetarianism. It is a part of her that they do not acknowledge. When Phoebe throws in a quip about animal abuse, her friends often smile as the studio audience laughs. They are not laughing with her; they laugh at her. Whether it’s the silliness of her character or the humor of the joke itself, her vegetarianism—the fact that she would so bluntly state something as immoral—is the joke. When the laughing ends, the friends move on, ignoring what she said.
This is a painful reality for vegans and vegetarians, and it has been as long as humans have advocated for the moral consideration of animals. Friends, family, peers, neighbors, acquaintances—they often ignore our calls for compassion or ridicule us outwardly. We often hope that those with whom we are closest would be most empathetic to our cause, but that is rarely the case.
In Phoebe’s situation in this episode, Rachel calls her “quirky,” saying they all “get a big kick out of it,” implying that her vegetarianism is nothing more than a joke to them. While Phoebe feels vystopia—a term coined by Dr. Claire Mann to describe the pain of caring about animals in a world that perpetually abuses them—her friends think she’s just being weird. Rachel claims that cremating the coat—the idea posed as a joke in and of itself—would be a “crime against nature,” then scoffs and corrects herself: “fashion.”
Phoebe to the Future
Obviously, Friends is a sitcom, developed and written by carnists, so it would be foolish to assume they would accurately and consistently portray Phoebe’s vegetarianism as a reasonable moral stance. To offer any sense of legitimacy to her vegetarianism would be to acknowledge it as a form of morality and, therefore, to recognize their own complicity with immoral actions against animals.
That being said, Phoebe is one of very few vegetarian or vegan characters in popular fiction, and she may be the most famous one. While her love of animals was mostly treated as a joke, on the rare occurrences it came up, her presence as a main character in one of the most popular shows of its time is a great start for pro-animal representation in fictional media.
I hope to see more vegan characters in the future who are not defined solely by their “quirky” personalities, but rather carry their animal advocacy as a legitimate part of who they are as citizens of their worlds.
be conscious, be kind, be vegan