viz.

Imogen Bailey; image from http://www.imogenbailey.com/peta.html

It's not news to say that PETA, in its quest to protect animals, regularly objectifies women in disturbing and disturbingly consistent ways. We've had a couple of posts on viz. already that discuss some of PETA's tactics, such as Posing for Your Eating Habits and the Girls-Gone-Wild parody examined in Ugh! Milk Gone Bad. I object to PETA's ads both for how they perpetuate some of the worst sexism and objectification and for how they are counterproductive; I am a PETA-hating vegetarian. But the trainwreck that is their media campaign is, at least, provocative, if nothing else (which, I suppose, is their "strategy"). Now, PETA has done it again with a new set of videos and pictures that connect eating vegetables to pornography, which they call the "Veggie Love Casting Session". Before we look at "Veggie Love," however, I thought I'd share a few salient images that demonstrate how it is a logical outgrowth of their previous work.

Warning: the rest of the images in this post are NSFW (Not Safe For Work).

All images from PETA.org

The message these images convey is simple: women are sexy animals. I suppose PETA wants us to treat animals with as much respect as we, as a society, treat women. Since, however, PETA seems perfectly fine with the sexual objectification of women and the insistence that they always be beautiful and naked, their message becomes incoherent. Indeed, the "Veggie Love" ads make clear PETA's alliance with the values and visual motifs of porn:

Veggie Love Casting Session screenshots from http://features.peta.org/casting-session/default.aspx

Playing on the designs of paid pornography websites, the PETA site promises "explicit casting footage" starring bikini-clad women (and one man) in the throes of passion... with their vegetables of choice. Visual allusions to fellatio recur throughout the images and videos. The message, again, is one equating vegetarianism with sex. It makes me wonder who the audience is. Since most of the celebrity spokespeople for PETA are women and most vegetarians are women (a 1992 report claims 68%), perhaps PETA is trying to induce more men to give up meat. Is PETA implicitly promising naked women to men who "go veg"?

Regardless, it's yet another sad entry in the hall of shame that is PETA. I sometimes wonder if the organization is funded by the meat industry. What better way to discredit vegetarianism and animal rights than to make their most outspoken proponents seem like sexist lunatics?