Does PETA treat women like meat?

It's been bugging me for years, but Elana Centor over on BlogHer yesterday said it better than I ever have. How the heck does an organization with the word "ethical" in its name manage to exploit, demean, and insult women in so very many ways in its ads, all with near-impunity?



Centor talks about several PETA ads that use pictures of naked, scantily-clad, and highly sexualized women to draw attention to the group's message, including their current ad with a naked Alicia Silverstone:

This is not about about whether someone should or should not chose a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle. This is not about fur or faux fur. This is about a blatant marketing strategy and the exploitation of women to achieve their desired results.



PeTA has gotten away with demeaning women for 30 years. It's time for women to leave PeTA and support another like-minded organization. If that were to happen then perhaps PeTA can focus on what their mission is ---being ethical.

Centor quotes Elaine Vigneault as saying:

The main argument for these types of ads is: Naked bodies get noticed. Sex is probably the easiest way to market something. Stick a pretty female face on almost any product and it sells better. Show a nude body and get attention.

In response to a comment from BlogHer founder Elisa Camahort, she quotes an article from Working for Change:

PETA's treatment of women is more than a one-time error in judgment, and it's more than a trend. It's a clearly calculated campaign to stand out in a saturated media environment by appealing to the most prurient possible tastes. Consider:



# A television ad in which a woman is being beaten to death with a bat in a subway, with a man ripping off her fur coat, and the inscription: "What if you were killed for your coat?" The ad was pulled by PETA as "too violent in the wake of September 11," but it remained on PETA's web site.



# Another ad, this one print, with a blonde woman in an Uncle Sam outfit -- unbuttoned with cleavage showing -- and the inscription "I want YOU to go vegetarian." The woman, it turns out, is Playboy's Kimberly Hefner. The ad was distributed as a cutout poster in "Stars and Stripes," the newspaper of the nation's armed forces, distributed around the world to soldiers as they bomb away. PETA has praised the military's operations in Afghanistan, because its propagandistic food drops were, more or less inadvertently, vegan.



# Another ad, with another young, blonde woman in a come-hither centerfold pose and the bizarre inscription "Pleather Yourself."



# Another ad, featuring yet another young blonde woman, this time naked, in a classroom setting, only partly turned to the blackboard (underdeveloped cleavage showing) on which she is repeatedly writing "I'd rather go naked than wear fur." The model, it turns out, is Dominique Swain, star of Lolita, and a PETA press release touts her as "the youngest star ever to pose au natural for PETA's anti-fur campaign."

Lots of thoughtful discussion and responses here.

Comments

[shadepuppy]

"makes us wonder why so many members of the general public continue to get sucked in..."



The internet sites that explain the sinister side of PETA are the only information that I've seen that would give the general public any BIG reason to avoid PETA. There are occasional news items about them doing something extreme or causing a scene - but it's "on behalf of animals" (fur, circus animals, etc.), and I just thought that they were people who loved animals who had some members who went overboard in their methods. I didn't truly believe some of the info on anti-PETA websites because there are "hate" sites for every good group or company. This site pointed out some links that led me to see the pervasive theme of their anti-cat/dog philosophy, and their deceit in not explaining this philosophy in their fund-raising letters filled with photos of starving and abused dogs.



As a feminist, I'm turned off by the ads mentioned in this article, but I know that "sex sells", and if they were a group that was doing good work, I would understand the reasoning behind the ad campaign. I wouldn't approve, but I would understand.

[The OTHER Pat]

What makes you think this is the tipping point? Many of us here wrote off PETa a long time ago. This is just one more thing on the list of "Things that make PETa a disgusting organization." And makes us wonder why so many members of the general public CONTINUE to get sucked in to their PR propaganda.

[Christopher]

Forgive me for being insensitive to hot naked women causing other women to have body issues and men to have unrealistic expectations, but why is this the tipping point for bailing on PeTA?



If sexy ads are what it takes for you to finally dump PeTA, fine. But it's sad that the EVIL and VILE things they do and their radical, bizarre, and hypocritical positions weren't enough.



"OMG, they have naked women and that makes me have body image issues!!!! Now I've had enough!" "JESUS! They exploit hot models who get paid a lot to look hot, real men should reject these models and the causes they represent."



It seems to me that such positions are as shallow as the ads.

[Marcy]

Any credibility they still had is going right out the window.



Sad...

[Christie Keith]

Thanks, Elaine! I had linked to the BlogHer article... it's the last line of my post.

[Elaine Vigneault]

Thank you for writing about this.

By the way, here's the link to the BlogHer article:

http://www.blogher.org/can-you-be-feminist-and-support-petas-marketing-strategies

[John]

PETA? Hypocritical? How unusual!

[Elana]

Wanted to respond to Christopher and his assumption that the scantily clad women were a tipping point for recommending that people avoid PeTA.

I have been uncomfortable with PeTA's approach from the gitgo. The fact that they targeted women wearing fur and not men wearing leather has always struck me as a sexist act. The reason I blogged about it on Sunday is the Alicia Siverstone ads...it was topical and in the news and so I thought I would blog about an issue that I have been thinking about for over 20 years... definitely not a tipping point...just tying into the news of the day.



ealana