Crossposted on The-F-Word.org
It looks like Dutch animal rights group Animals Awake is taking a few cues from Peta, an organization I've criticized heartily for treating women like a piece of meat to get men to stop eating meat. The embed and html links don't appear to be working on this site, so here's a link to the video instead.
Warning : the video is quite graphic in its depiction of violence against women, so if you're especially sensitive to this, please don't watch. Here's a sanitized description of it instead:
Playboy Playmate and all-around sexy vegetarian Ancilla Tilia is shown performing a Burlesque kind of strip tease for a roomful of ogling men. It's all in good taste until a fisherman approaches her and hits her across the face with some kind of fishing instrument that looks like a two-by-four with a hook at the end and proceeds to disembowel her. The text "Stripping alive is not okay" then flashes on the screen, along with some supplemental text about how thousands of fish are flayed live every day. The slightly-less-graphic, behind-the-scenes photo shoot is here .
I get the general point of the ad, which is to anthropomorphize animals so that people will see them more as sentient beings and not merely fodder for their dinner plates. But many vegetarians, including myself, are so because we believe that a culture of violence towards any living creatures breeds a culture of violence towards all living creatures, including and especially women. Note that these kinds of ads never replace the bodies of tortured, brutalized and murdered animals with images of men -- they're always, always of women. The deliberate juxtaposition is intended to play on the imagery of women as helpless creatures in need of defending while also using sex to hook potential vegetarian converts, but it's also more socially acceptable to objectify women as objects of meat than it is men. That the women themselves volunteer to be presented in this manner doesn't change the fact that they are complicit in their own exploitation.
There are many ways to get messages of vegetarianism across without doing so on the backs of women. For shame, Animals Awake, for shame.
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That video is disgusting... I can't believe they engaged that imagery.
I think that the problem with groups like PETA is that they're primarily movements of white, priviliged people, have NO analysis of what that implies, and thus do all the appropriative white, privileged bullshit that tramples others.
I see violence like that (against men) in movies all the time.
Why is it only an issue when it's a woman?
Why on earth do you see people being disemboweled all the time?
I do believe that they said "in movies" if you did not catch that.
And I feel like there might be a distinction that needs to be addressed in which those movies that they see, the men being disemboweled are probably not being put on the same level as animals. They are probably blowing each other up in war movies, or having their entrails ripped out by zombies or some other action movie theme. There is a difference between the two ideas, but I do agree that typically, violence against men is usually dismissed while a single violent act against women is met with fists raised.
I realize they were talking about movies, but I still don't think this is a very common image to be seeing all the time. And also I think there are very important differences between horror/action movies and public activism.
That makes me sick. I flagged the video five or six times.
I had commented on YouTube (why why WHY) that it was horrible and promoted violence against women, and got this reply:
"PROMOTING violence against women? how?"
Sometimes all I can do is facepalm.
I don't think it's trying to promote violence against women -- it is actually trying to do the opposite. It's extremely obvious that they're trying to say "If violence against women is wrong, which is definitely is, violence against fish is also wrong." Whether or not they succeeded is the issue you could debate, but I don't see why you're acting like the person who responded to you was stupid.
I have a problem with them equating the brutal beating and murder of a human being with fishing.
I've never gutted a live fish myself (they must do some serious hard core fishing in the Netherlands!), but I have caught salt water fish on a baited hook, put them in a bucket of fresh water (where they died) and then took them home and scaled and gutted them later,at my convenience.
That is a million miles away from the murder of a human - it's a creature on top of the food chain (me) feeding on a creature below me on the food chain - just like a lion eating an antelope.
That's why I've always had a problem with the extreme vegetarian/vegan/animal rights rhetoric - it ignores the fact that we are omnivorous animals, and like all omnivorous and carnivorous animals we feed on other animals.
Wow.
The only other thing which disturbs me about this post is the lack of outrage, i.e. comments re: how reprehensible the commercial is.
Just...wow.