viz. - PETA

Meat is Murder, PETA is Porn

Michael Widner — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:30:00 +0000

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?

Ugh! Milk Gone Bad

erinhurt — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:58:22 +0000

Yuck!

So I've put off posting about this image because I find both it and PETA's numerous ways of using women in confusing and often objectified ways distasteful. They've titled one of their latest campaigns "Milk Gone Wild."

A just as smarmy take on Joe Francis' "Girls Gone Wild," PETA's current campaign wants to draw a connection between hot women and the dangers of drinking milk. But for me, the images they use don't add up to making any kind of supportive visual argument. Instead, they lose credibility. (Update: Some of the images below the fold might not be safe for work.)

Here are visuals of the pictures that disturb me the most:

Posing for your eating habits

LaurenMitchell — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 02:43:03 +0000

I’m wondering why the debate over meat-eating and the treatment of animals keeps happening on women’s bodies. This newest addition to the controversy happened on America’s Next Top Model when the contestants were taken to New York’s meat-packing district where they participated in a photo-shoot dressed in various articles of clothing made out of raw meat.

There has been quite a hubbub in response to the episode which aired last week, and it’s not really clear what message Tyra Banks and company were trying to send. PETA’s official statement in response to the episode basically says that they think using raw meat glamorizes the violence and torture of animals. They wish that America’s Next Top Model had dressed their girls up in veggies just like Pamela Anderson did for their ads. A blogger at www.grist.org , an environmentalist blog, thought the images might wake people up to the fact that meat actually comes from somewhere--it doesn’t always look like a pre-packaged hockey puck that waits for you at the grocery store.

Tyra may not have been trying to send any message regarding eating meat. The meat theme is probably a sign that they’re running out of absurd photo-shoot ideas, which is really what the show is based on. However, this would be perfect fodder for Carol J. Adams who looks at how animals-as-food and women are objectified in a very similar way. They are both something to be consumed and something that is asking for that consumption and objectification. I think she’d find that these images illustrate her point beautifully in that both the meat and the women are objectified simultaneously in a way that is very unapologetic about portraying women as purely seductive beings and meat as something to be consumed and butchered.