Animal Cruelty is Not Sexy

Cross-posted at Female Impersonator

"Sex sells". When it is not selling me pants, sunglasses, bikini waxes, and a fat-complex it is now selling me morality. Take away the message and what is the difference between an ad like this and one like this? The answer is absolutely nothing. Naked women have nothing to do with Levi's pants or vegetarianism. The message, "this lifestyle promoted in this ad is sexy", does not vary between the two ads. The only difference is that one lifestyle is that of buying jeans, and the other is the lifestyle of not eating meat.

We humans must be incredibly stupid to fall for such shoddy marketing. I really have no words for a society that buys cheap body-spray en masse when the half-wit marketing experts at the firm have nothing more to say for their product other than it makes women take off their bras. How does it do that? Nobody knows, simply because there is a cognitive dissonance when I try to compute a reality in which people are convinced to buy a product on the promise of sex that it cannot possibly deliver.

Axe Body Spray is hardly the worst offender. Axe promotes no political agenda other than the dudely enjoyment of foul smelling cologne masking the fact that you have not showered in a week, or the simple-minded pursuit of titties. This ad campaign works, I might say, because the people who would use cheap cologne to excuse not taking a shower would be the kind of dupes to connect buying something with getting laid.

Liberals, however, claim to function on a higher level. Empathetic beings concerned with the plight of life everywhere do not need bared breasts and toned asses to buy, or not buy, a lifestyle.

Wrong.

Guess what bikini models have to do with the suffering of chickens? Absolutely nothing. If PETA really wished to highlight the suffering of animals, they would make their protests horrible, frightening, and sickening. With so shortage of horrifying images of animal suffering (five minutes of googling produced this, this, this, and this) why does PETA, among other organizations, feel the need to sell the idea that animals are suffering for our lifestyle with sex?

Melanie B, from the Spice Girls, would also like you to know that Sex Trafficking is hot. "Get your tits out for trafficking!" an activist asks us. We all know that strippers and prostitutes always get the best side of the law, because society as a whole values their opinions and personhood so much. Making our causes into our pimps and baring it all for a liberal cause, of course, wins the respect of many. It is also very relevant to the discussion at hand. Animal abuse and the unwilling trafficking of sexual slaves in our own country is titillating and sexy.

PETA reminds me of a circa-1970s Al Sharpton, who shot himself and his cause in the foot by involking the ire of New York Jews with some insensitive antisemitic remarks. To this day, Sharpton and his pose of goons continue to give activists a really bad name by various other classy shenanigans such as sexism and rape apology. Of course, the average American can tell you that he or she thinks Sharpton is full of shit. He or she will place Sharpton in the "bat-shit crazy" category alongside PETA. The most damaging person to their causes, obviously, is PETA activists and Sharpton themselves. The average American is not convinced. Thus Sharpton and PETA are unsuccessful.

In contrast, anti-abortion activists continue to get considerably more positive press than PETA. The reason why is not rocket science. Perhaps it is because their ad campaign is so blessedly simple and horrifying. I am firmly and absolutely pro-choice. However, I will say that if I had no opinion on eating meat or abortion, the anti-abortion ad would be significantly more morally compelling than a strip-tease for animal rights.

There are only two rules to good advertising: keep it simple and relevant. The anti-abortion ad is a picture of an abortion, thus it is relevant. It just states, "abortion is bad". The PETA ads, however, are convoluted and self-defeating. Alicia Silverstone with no clothes on does not really have anything to do with my greasy hamburger. The PETA ad asks the viewer to make a connection between nakedness, fur, and animal cruelty. The connection is tenuous, and thus, falls apart. The abortion ad achieves its purpose while the PETA ad does not.

Not only does PETA need to fire its marketing executives, the organization itself is probably the only thing on the planet more self-defeating than Al Sharpton. Commenters will poo-poo my critique all they want, but the fact remains that feminists can be agents of their own oppression especially when they sell their bodies for a cause that has nothing to do with sex. Yes, the woman who climbed into a cage while naked and pregnant in the cold to protest animal cruelty did so consensually. Would she, however, have posed nude if female nudity was not the biggest successful seller of unnecessary over-processed shit on the planet?

In conclusion, I hate PETA, and will continue to do so because:
(a) They utterly fail at marketing
(b) They protest the cruelty of animals with the objectification of the female body
(c) They diminish the horror of their cause with meaningless strip teases
(d) They diminish and poo-poo the objections of activists for other causes
(e) They are the most unintentionally self-parodying group on the face of this Earth

I will not continue to suffer any fools, especially sexist fools that sit on their high-horse naked and defeat feminism's basic tenements in order to diminish the real issue of the objectification of women, and to sexualize the suffering of animals.

Note: As the author of this post, I will delete comments that are trolling and offensive, and ask that all contributors to this tread ignore all those who will attempt to hijack the thread.