Tuesday, August 23, 2011

On PETA, Oppression, and Porn

Mary Elizabeth Williams has a recent article on Salon about PETA's new advertising tactics or, more accurately, the renewed manifestation of their tried and true advertising tactics. PETA has a pretty steep history of objectifying women to help raise awareness about animal cruelty. Naked female bodies do have a way of drawing people's eyes, but that doesn't make it acceptable.

PETA's newest tactic is to buy up the PETA.xxx domain and use it  "as a pornography site that draws attention to the plight of animals." Williams compares this to PETA's earlier "Veggie Love" campaign that featured scantily-clad women sexually interacting with vegetables.  

Williams points out many of the problematic aspects of using objectification of women to promote the ethical treatment of animals, but she doesn't spend much time talking about one of the biggest ones.

PETA's treatment of women is a form of oppression, and promoting oppression (of women) to eradicate oppression (of animals) just doesn't make sense.I'm not equating women to animals to make this analogy. Instead, I'm interested in the way that all forms of oppression feed into the same system, a system built on hierarchies, power struggles, and rhetorical posturing.

By demonstrating the way that women can be turned into objects for pleasure, PETA is tapping into the same base nature that allows us to justify cruelty to animals.  This is why the "oppression Olympics," as they're called, are always counterproductive. Trying to determine who is the most oppressed group just leaves everyone licking their own wounds while side-eyeing everyone around them. Truly facing oppression means recognizing the commonalities of the oppressed and demanding fairer treatment across the board. Until PETA does that, I don't see how they can be taken seriously.

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