I was a vegetarian because I wanted to feel humane. PETA made me reexamine what I was doing and how much humanitarian worth it possessed. PETA shook my conscience awake about an issue I had not fully seen until they laid it out grotesque and obscene; women should be used, sex and women should be degraded and thus human beings, and especially women, do not matter as much as animals.
PETA- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals- let us first start by examining the name itself. People, we must be unique enough from animals to require some distinction. This fact is actually promising for animals though; if we were merely animals there would be no talk of ethical treatment. PETA has made films of slaughterhouses but there are also films made by documentary film crews on every continent of the world showing people how animals tear each other apart in nature. I don’t believe that lions, tigers, and bears will ever eat tofu, oh my! If we believe that we should treat our livestock differently that’s one thing, but to see a world in which animals die of old age or from being smothered with hugs is something else entirely, a Disney delusion.
Animals will never plot in an Orwellian animal farm and there will never be a “Planet of the Apes”. In fact if apes wish to survive on this planet as a species we must conserve them. They will not conserve themselves or us for that matter. We must bear the responsibility for them because we actually can. They are innocent and thus bear no sin; we, however, do.
We are different. We can speak of ethics and actually have a need to. We do fall and must actually work to be good, but we can and dare I say most of us do. I may just be optimistic though, a trait that should be chalked up to my humanity, and then there’s PETA.
PETA offers as commercials, or public service announcements, grotesque portrayals of human sexuality, with particular disregard for women. Women are most often not afforded the benefit of clothing while they deliver their objections regarding our treatment of animals. Though this may be the only true way to actually dress vegan due to the nature of producing crops, even dare say cotton, in lands which are cultivated from the wild, this is not the reason behind their nudity.
The reason these women are nude is specifically so they can be exploited for the betterment of animals, though I would posit that the exploitation is not likely to achieve its aim, so in reality it serves no real reason at all.
Causing men to lust only makes them less likely to think. They will only begin to use PETA ads as far as they go without being unsettled. They will feel nothing for the animals because one cannot feel lust and disgust side by side, and guess which one of those emotions will be jettisoned? As an added bonus to feeling nothing for the animals they will also feel less for women too due to desensitization.
The ads also try to encourage women to believe that veganism is the way to become sexy, so they too might one day be worthy of their own PETA advert. Does the term sick emotional blackmail in place of a real argument mean anything to you or did I just make that up? Oh well it is now a term. Besides women need to be empowered in order to make a change rather than being pushed towards the emotional eating of delicious saturated animal fat.
PETA will not have succeeded in the marketing strategy of making veganism sexy but would have rather simply caused some lustful thoughts and the eating of some desert with no greater end than that. Doesn’t everyone deserve something more than that? How can one expect to be taken seriously as an ethicist if one uses such flawed ethics, and logic, for PR?
It is disordered to place the well being of animals above the well being of women. It is further disordered to cheapen sex and thus disregard and disparage the well being of women in a second way. My personal hope is that women in our culture learn to respect their own dignity and then the ads would just stop because no one would do them in the first place. Godspeed women, Godspeed.
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