Ashley A. at The Female Gaze directed us to a sigh-inducing example of PETA’s use of sexual objectification to forward its cause. I know, PETA is low hanging fruit, but the pictures so nicely illustrate the difference between the roles that men and women are supposed to play and what about a woman is supposedly important.
We have the by-now-expected naked or mostly naked chick who loves animals:
Men, though, apparently get to remain fully clothed while loving animals (or, alternatively, there were half-naked men there but photographers decided against taking pictures of them):
And, in case you were wondering, the slide show includes not one, not two, not three, but four boob/crotch shots (40% of the total slide show):
This story could also have easily been included as part of our What Warrants a Slide Show? post which is worth looking at, especially if you like half-naked ladies. We aim to please.
NEW! (July ’10): Muriel Minnie Mae sent in a story about PETA advocating vegetarianism in Jordan by using the same general idea — women clad in lettuce — but in a much less revealing, covering the woman from her neck to her feet in lettuce leaves (including her entire arms) and combining it with a hijab:
It’s still using women’s bodies to advocate for animal rights, and her body is being turned into something that is symbolically edible. And though it seems less obviously sexualized to me, the fact that she apparently caused a traffic jam and the police took the entire group in and questioned them for three hours indicates that it was at least startling to people and may, in context, have seemed as shocking as some PETA protests here.
Or maybe people just thought it was really weird to see a woman dressed in lettuce.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
