I’m astonishingly late to this particular party, but it’s the sort of party that’s still going strong on Sunday night, people keep going to the shop to buy more booze, and the crazy kids who just won’t go to bed are lying around in little piles groaning in defeat. So let’s turn up the music again on PETA’s horrific advertising campaign.A fuller explanation of the long-running campaign would include a skim over all of the ways in which the images used are ugly and vicious: equating women (not men, just women) with animals; portraying women as, variously, pieces of meat or brood-mares; offering nubile, willing pornstars as 'rewards' for vegetarianism; implying in no uncertain terms that the dignity of female human beings is less important than the autonomy of widdle bunny wabbits; the gross, boringly porny imagery; the constant rehashing of rape and murder fantasies; the incitements to violence against women.
But what's most astonshing to me is that the campaign just doesn't work. These images are supposed to shock - and in this day and age, seeing images of naked or half-naked women beaten up, abused, equated with meat, served up as tasty morsels, or tied up and having thick dribbling tubes shoved into their mouths is not shocking at all. It's commonplace. It's part of the language of contemporary pornography, part of the way we understand our entire sexuality, a secret and not-so secret code under-writing all gender-relations in this culture. If these adverts really were designed to shock, it'd be naked men in those cages, men shrinkwrapped and fetishised as murder victims, men explicitly phrased as no better than animals, without higher reasoning, worthwhile only for the way they look and (for so many pet owners) for how warm and fluffy they make us feel. Seeing Jodie Marsh's bottom is not shocking. Seeing Jenna Jameson's tits is not shocking. Given that the campaign continues to run, there must be something else going on here. What could it be?
Could it be that yes, in fact, PETA are explicitly trading on women's sexual autonomy to 'sell' animal rights? Could it be that PETA just don't give a fuck if women get raped, beaten, abused, used, if young girls grow up without self-respect, if young women develop eating disorders, mental health problems and low self-esteem? Could it be that this animal rights group doesn't give a crap about one half of the whole mess of human animals? If that's so, given that PETA actually kills 90% of the cats, dogs and other pets left in its care, I wouldn't take a desk job in their office.
In case it wasn't clear already, yes, I do think that women - and men, children and intersex people for that matter - are more important than animals. I don't get warm fuzzy feelings for 90% of the animal kingdom. I couldn't care less if pandas finally become extinct despite millions of pounds of national and international money being poured into trying to make them fuck. Sure, animal cruelty is bad, it probably shouldn’t happen, I’m definitely not down with the kitten-microwavers, but at the end of the day, I prefer people. Really. I think people are fantastic, and worthwhile. I’m behind animal testing, if it saves lives, which it does. I’d kick a hundred kittens in the face to save one AIDS victim. I'd shave several litters of puppies to save one junkie. I wouldeven inconvenience an asthmatic gerbil to save James Purnell.*
I find it stunningly hypocritical when people like PETA, who claim to have such massively bleeding hearts that they have to carry a little cup to catch the overflow, behave with basic disrespect towards their fellow humans. It’s not a new thing, of course. We’ve always found it easier to be humane to creatures that can’t talk back, creatures that don’t pose any real social threat to us, creatures that aren’t likely to call us out on our failings or break our hearts*. Maybe that’s why in the UK we had a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals (RSPCA, founded 1824) a full sixty years before we deigned to intervene to even try to stop people torturing, abusing or murdering their own kids (NSPCC, founded 1884).
On this picture – the offensiveness of which should not need spelling out, but hey, yknow, for the tired and unreconstructed, it’s a naked woman in a bag, covered in blood, pretending to be a piece of meat – Laura Woodhouse of TheFWord says:
55,000,000 animals killed a year for meat - how many women do you think are killed by male violence and oppression PETA? And do you give a shit? One of the comments under another photo in this set reads (in Spanish) ‘Now that’s the kind of meat I do eat!’
It's demeaning, it's degrading, and, as About-Face puts it, shows no compassion whatsoever for women, especially those who don't conform to narrow definitions of beauty.
This is one of a number of related things making me incredibly angry today. I've spent the past week writing an article for the Guardian about my time as a burlesque stripper, and writing it tapped into how very, very little stripping made me think of myself. Suddenly I'm getting growly at female objectification everywhere I see it, where last week I might have filtered it out, or ignored it, or just tried not to let myself get stressed over it for fear of being called 'humourless'. This, um, may or may not have just led to my picking a pissy little fight with Warren Ellis. Oops.
*Apart from when they die in various gratuitously horrible ways, like all of my sodding hamsters did. I really loved those hamsters, I took care of them, and the bastards repaid me by going bonkers, losing all their hair and vomiting up their intestines. That or having heart attacks on their cage bars so I found them the next morning hanging stiffly by their teeth, ripping my ten-year-old soul into little pieces in the process. I kid ye not.
