PETA has praised the military's operations in Afghanistan, because its propagandistic food drops were, more or less inadvertently, vegan.

Treating women like meat: What's gotten into PETA?

How PETA is missing the forest for the trees
in its sexist campaigns

From Working for Change

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Animal rights activists and groups can be notorious for the single-mindedness of their advocacy, willfully ignoring on other oppressions in order to highlight and change our society's shameful abuses of animals. And People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the country's largest and best-known advocacy group for animal rights (as opposed to more service-oriented groups like the Humane Society or PAWS), has always had an unsettling habit of pushing the envelope in inappropriate ways in order to draw attention to its issues -- and of exploiting and mistreating its young, often female staffers and volunteers. But PETA's recent embrace of the exploitation of women's bodies to agitate for animal rights is beyond dubious. It's a level of offensiveness that would raise an uproar if it were coming from a right-wing political group.

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."
For decades, feminists have linked animal rights with women's rights; some of the earliest modern women's liberation protests involved beauty pageants in which women explicitly decried being treated like meat. Animal rights groups have always relied upon women for the bulk of their organizing, and any serious critique of patriarchal values has always described male dominance and mistreatment of everything: women, animals, the environment.

It's more than a little surreal to have the country's best-known animal rights group seemingly endorsing male violence in virtually all its forms: militarism, male violence against women, objectification of women, even, with the use of a naked actress associated with Lolita, statutory rape -- in the service of ostensibly encouraging people not to commit violence against animals. It's also extraordinarily discrediting, not just to PETA, but to the entire animal rights movement.

PETA's ads would be bad enough if they had been executed by, say, The Gap or some auto company. They would be incomprehensibly offensive promoting a right wing political cause. But in this case they're being trotted out in the service of an ethic that is supposed to oppose oppression, not embrace it. The ads lend unfortunate credence to the long-standing, often spurious rap against animal rights activists -- that they care more about animals than people. Moreover, it makes the rap specific to 51 percent of humanity. The modern-day PETA, it seems, loves animals; it just hates women.