Daily BrewPETA again tests recipe for success: Objectifying women and sensationalizing human tragedy
The animal rights group PETA has a way of making headlines, and its recipe is no secret.
You take one part sensational outrage at the everyday plight of pets and animals, sprinkle in a heavy dose of female nudity and a dash of sexual innuendo. Add sensational outrage to taste. Replace with sensationalized human tragedy if preferred. Set to boil.
Take for instances dueling headlines in Canada right now. First you have PETA trotting out scantily-clad women – dressed as “sexy pizza” – In Winnipeg, during one of the province’s coldest months.
And now, PETA is trying to post a billboard in Hamilton, Ont., that makes light of a woman who kept her husband’s corpse for six months, in the hopes he could be resurrected.
”Are there corpses in your home? Time to go vegan,” the desired billboard reads, according to the Hamilton Spectator.
"If you have chicken breasts, steaks, or bologna in your refrigerator, we have news for you: You’re sharing your home with corpses," PETA president Ingrid Newkirk says in a press release.
It is an unfailing equation. Whether they choose to exploit the female body, or exploit recent tragedy, their message inevitably captures attention.
Case in point: PETA’s recent sojourn to Winnipeg, Man., where two young female members of the group dressed up like “sexy pizza” slices to promote the consumption of vegan pizza.
CBC News reports the sexy protest was in response to a Manitoba Dairy Conference event being held this weekend. PETA has taken issue with the way dairy farms produce milk, and you can read all about that here.
And that’s how it works. Scantily-clad woman begets attention, which begets awareness, which equates to a successful campaign.
This time, however, locals have taken notice. Winnipeg Free Press columnist Bartley Kives takes umbrage with the campaign, calling it “half-baked” in a recent column.
He writes:
They could claim their efforts were successful because three media outlets — the Free Press, CBC and Citytv — covered the stunt.
But in reality, all (the models) accomplished was to create a creepy situation. The most startling facet of Wednesday’s demonstration was the casually cruel manner in which young men hurled jibes at the women as they shivered in the -16 C cold.
"Come on girls, shake it for that pizza," shouted one scruffy dude who circled the duo three times without accepting a piece of pizza or a booklet of PETA literature.
It isn’t the first time food-infused babes have been used to make PETA’s point. Two years ago, two “lettuce ladies" crashed a weight loss event by then-Toronto mayor Rob Ford.
In 2008, similarly dressed PETA activists handed out “soy chicken” sandwiches outside a downtown KFC. Here’s a first-hand account.
Sure, one might say, PETA uses a few attractive models to make their point. Who doesn’t?
Well, the issue goes further than that.
Last year, the group ran a campaign in Australia under the slogan, “Vegans Go All The Way.” The poster featured a come-hither photo of 16-year-old singer-actor Samia Najimy.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the teen model had to convince them not to add a bed in the background of the photograph.
There was this soft-core Super Bowl commercial featuring women writhing with carrots and pumpkins.
And this poster calling for a boycott against circuses that features a nude Olivia Munn for some reason.
We could be here for a while. You can check out this Buzzfeed list of the worst PETA ads for more examples, if you can stomach it.
It is not a subject that has been overlooked by those in the animal rights movement, either.
A group called the Vegan Feminist Network maintains an “organization watch” charge, in which it monitors the tactics of other animal rights groups.
According to their scorecard, PETA is “known to have used the sexualized bodies of women, known to have used pornography, known to have used racially insensitive tactics and known to have depicted violence against women.”
In a 2008 paper entitled “Disturbing Images: PETA and the Feminist Ethics of Animal Advocacy,” Maneesha Deckha argues that the protection of animals should not require the objectification of women.
She argues that PETA’s bend toward sexualization is what propelled the group to the forefront of the animal rights movement.
In 1990, it ran a very successful “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” campaign featuring Pamela Anderson and other models.
Some of PETA’s ads cross the threshold of simply drawing attention to fur through nakedness and sexualizing the white female body as object for male pleasure … to actually creating an explicit association between the discursive text message and the image of white women as sex objects.
Yahoo Canada News has reached out to PETA for comment on their promotional strategy. Thus far, there has been no response.
The closest thing to an answer we could find on PETA’s website is this FAQ answer:
You are free to believe whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt others. You may believe that animals should be killed, that black people should be enslaved, or that women should be beaten, but you don’t always have the right to put your beliefs into practice. As for telling people what to do, society exists because there are rules governing people’s behavior.
Funny they mention that “women beaten” thing, because there is another recent campaign stirring controversy. In it, a badly-injured woman is shown as a narrator suggests the injuries were caused by a suddenly sexually-virile boyfriend who recently went vegan, but only after taking a cheeky head-fake toward spousal abuse.
This brings us back to the other tool PETA tends to use in its advertising: Shock and awe.
Which brings us back to that billboard in Hamilton.
The campaign is reminiscent of one PETA tried to run in 2008, shortly after a young man was murdered, dismembered and partially eaten during a sudden attack on a Manitoba Greyhound bus.
The group tried to run an ad comparing the murder to the everyday consumption of animal flesh. Because it screams “pillars of humanity” to compare a tragic death, made more tragic by mental illness, to a slice of sandwich meat.
One wonders if Manitobans have forgotten that campaign. And whether they prefer the “sexy pizza girls” PETA brought to town this time.
Both got the group plenty of attention.
