Marcos treatment of Jasmine is only loving if your judging it based off the standard treatment of the ‘head’. He makes it clear Jasmine is only an incubator by referring to the baby as his son. He doesn’t care if she has the ability to communicate her wants, needs, and opinions. He acknowledges that she probably could learn to read/write but doesn’t see the point in teaching her. when he watch’s the security camera footage of her he mentions it almost looks like she’s thinking but seems to express doubt that she’s actually capable of thought. Marco never really seems to view her as a human. His treatment of her is better than the treatment most ‘head’ receive, but it is still a horrific and inhumane way to treat a human being. The only way you can interpret Marcos treatment of Jasmine as “loving” or “affectionate” is by dehumanizing her. She’s is kept locked away in a room for long periods of time, left to go to the bathroom in a bucket. Even after he moves her into the house his treatment of her is still terrible. He only improves his treatment of her after he notices that she’s very attractive, and essentially rapes her. When he first gets Jasmine he ties her up In a barn, leaves her absolutely filthy, and has her sleeping on the same floor she urinates/defecates on. In a lot of discussion threads I saw people saying they were shocked he ended up killing her because it seemed like he was really starting to ‘love her’, and some even expressed that the ending didn’t seem sensible or consistent with Marcos character, but if you truly examine the way Marco treats Jasmine it’s horrific. I think the way a lot of readers interpreted the relationship between Marco and Jasmine is another testament to how the book made the readers participate in the same dehumanization the characters did. I would be reading some horrific scene and then it would dawn on me ‘oh my god they’re doing this to people!’ And my horror would intensify.
The language used to describe the people they are slaughtering is so sanitized, The dehumanizing effect of only referring to the people as ‘head’, ‘male’, or ‘female’ was so successful that I found myself falling for it at times. The real impact comes from how well this book demonstrates how easy it is to cast somebody as an ‘other’. A world where a virus has put an end to animal consumption, and normalized cannibalism was pretty hard to read about, The horror and gore obviously leave an impact, but those are not the reasons why this book is so stuck in my head. I just finished ‘Tender Is The Flesh’ By: Agustina Bazterrica this afternoon and I can’t stop thinking about it.
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