PETA are one of the biggest names in animal rights and vegan activism. But their form of animal liberation is built, in large part, on the exploitation of women and the creation and dissemination of offensive and misogynistic images.
If you Google 'PETA advert' you will be faced with a seemingly endless parade of naked or almost-naked women*. Women tied up; women shrink-wrapped and bloody, like victims on Law & Order; women in sexy lingerie; women reduced to the sum of their parts. Within the thousands of images on that Google search, there are a handful of pictures of men. I counted one naked, two topless and five fully dressed male models and celebrities, to literally hundreds upon hundreds of women.
Other PETA adverts show a woman in skimpy underwear with pubic hair peeking out the sides and the tagline: Fur trim - Unattractive. Or how about poster featuring a disgustingly body-shaming cartoon of a chubby woman in a bikini with the slogan: Save the whales - Lose the blubber. Go vegetarian? Scrolling through images from PETA adverts is like being assaulted in the eyeballs. It's virulently misogynist, fatphobic, hateful. It makes me want to go and eat a huge beefburger just to say "fuck you."
No doubt PETA think that the woman-as-slab-of-meat approach to advertising is very clever and subversive - a way to wake people up the realities of the meat industry, to ask people to have compassion for animals by saying "we wouldn't treat a human being like this so why do it to another animal?" But if all of this is about compassion, why are we women not worthy of a little compassion? In a world where women are reduced to pieces of meat every single day, where degradations are enacted on our bodies for entertainment or hatred or both, there's nothing clever about exploiting womens bodies: it's just the same old shit.
PETA need to realise how alienating their current approach is: any liberation that relies on the objectification, subjugation or exploitation of another group is not a 'liberation' that I want to be part of.
* I would have included some here, but I couldn't stomach hosting such hateful images
I've been contemplating vegetarianism for a while. What would be helpful and informative is a website that gives me details in a neutral way about how to eat more ethically, cut down on animal products etc. I've honestly never thought about the PETA website as somewhere I'd want to look, and that's largely because of their methods and tactics. I don't want to see shock-horror photographs or sexist advertising - I find them completely counterproductive in that they turn me off their arguments.
ReplyDeleteYes exactly, it's entirely counterproductive. Huge numbers of people who would be sympathetic to their aims are totally turned off by their approach, I don't get why they don't see this.
DeleteI personally dislike this treatment of women, and have other issues with PETA as well so tend to get advice on these choices from alternative sources (like here!) rather than them. They seem so out of touch with the people they purport to represent.
ReplyDeletePrecisely. For me, veganism is a counter-cultural and progressive movement and what PETA does is the exact opposite. Using these kind of images just serves to alienate PETA from people who might otherwise be sympathetic.
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