PETA, sex and vegetarianism

PETA has a long history of objectifying women in their ads. In addition to the charming billboard at left, they've been known to dress women up as chickens, pigs and other animals (always in bikinis) and leave them outside in cages. In one case, they made giant styrofoam trays like the grocery store meat ones and saran-wrapped bikini clad chicken women to them, supposedly to illustrate the evils of factory farming.

So I really shouldn't have been surprised when they came up with this. It's the casting video for their rejected Super Bowl commercial, featuring a bunch of conventionally attractive, skinny women in bikinis "playing" with vegetables.

I think the video speaks for itself, so I'm not going to spend a bunch of time ranting about objectifying women. Obviously the claim at the end, that "studies show vegetarians have better sex" is deeply flawed. Vegetarian are far more likely to be well-educated, liberal, feminists, health-conscious and a host of other things which are correlated with better sex lives, so implying that vegetarianism is somehow responsible for this is shaky as best.

Mostly, I'm angry about the way PETA chooses to promote their message. By focusing entirely on external reasons for being vegetarian, PETA does nothing to make people think critically about what they eat. Marketing vegetarianism as another way for women to lose weight plays on existing female insecurities about attractiveness and conventional beauty standards, and it does nothing to make people think about the problems with meat production. By blindly promoting vegetarianism without engaging in critical dialogue about our food system, PETA is making two unfounded assumptions: that being vegetarian is always better for the environment and animal welfare than eating meat, and that opting out of the system will somehow improve it.

These are both dangerously simplistic assumptions to make. There are many cases in which eating meat is sustainable and a good idea--when it's local and responsibly raised, when you're in an environment where herding has evolved over thousands of years and is better for the land than agriculture would be (eg. the Masai in Eastern Africa), when vegetarian food is grown with pesticides on land which was formerly rainforest  (eg. tofu in many cases). Even if being vegetarian is better in most cases, there's nothing sustainable about gardenburgers or any of the other processed, packaged fake meat products that so many vegetarians rely on for protein.

Even worse than this, though, is the idea that going vegetarian will change factory farming or the industrial food system. I'm not saying that acting conscientiously doesn't matter--there's personal value and discovery to be had in efforts to be aware about your own consumption. There's a reason I eat the way I do and try to buy used books, used clothes and not consume at levels that many American do. But with global meat consumption growing every year and the industry spending so much time marketing itself and convincing people to buy its products, people going vegetarian is not going to make a huge dent in the system. If you personally want to be vegetarian, go for it, and more power to you. But far more important than that personal choice is a choice to actively work towards ending factory farming. And that's really what PETA should be talking about.