| Wednesday, April 8, 2009 |
| Meet Your Meat |
The astute Vegans Against PETA reader is probably wondering by now whether I read any blogs other than Shakesville, as at least half the things I link to lead there. Today I read with disgust and interest this post at Shakesville about an ad for Burger King and another ad for milk. The Burger King ad is a rap to the tune of Sir-Mix-a-Lot's one and only hit "Baby Got Back," and is a rather clever ode to SpongeBob's square butt, accompanied by....women shaking their asses, with no SpongeBob ass in sight? And the icing on the shit cake is that "the Burger King" in this kid-targeted commercial is going around measuring the women's asses in the video. The milk ads, which are from Russia and haven't run (yet) feature women stylized to resemble cows, with milk standing in for semen, which is being shot into women's eyes like the money shot in porn, coming out of their mouths, and running down their bodies.
Of course, no industry has the lock on misogyny in advertising (though the beer industry comes damn close) but once you've read the Sexual Politics of Meat, it's hard not to notice the extent to which misogyny and hypermasculinity are used to advertise animal products. Of course, this makes sense since eating animals and degrading women are all part of a hierarchical system with straight white men at the top, and everyone else falling in line below. What's confounding is why PETA is always trying to out-misogyny the meat industry, as if the victor will be the one who can be the most misogynist and hypermasculine. Looking at commercials like this makes me worry about where PETA will go next, since they've now locked themselves into a game of misogynist oneupmanship with the meat industry. Are they gonna make their campaigns directed at children even less tasteful and incorporate games where some Vegan Overlord orders girls to weigh themselves every time they eat a vegan meal vs. a meat meal?
This is why you don't get into a dick-measuring contest with misogynists -- as the ever-escalating extremism of the porn industry has shown, you have to be willing to constantly up the ante if you want to use objectification to sell your product. One second you've got soft-focus pictures of smiling naked women that seem relatively harmless, but before you know it those women have toilet bowl seats around their necks or are being orally raped by the entire football team. PETA's argument is that they use sex because "nobody is listening," but if you want people to listen to sex in a world that's already sex-saturated, you have to make it more extreme and hardcore and offensive than anything else out there, otherwise it just gets lost among all the objectification that isn't going to extreme lengths by targeting children or splattering semen in women's eyes.
Finally, in case anyone wasn't aware, Burger King's veggie burgers are not vegan and haven't been for a long time. At the beginning they were (and I believe they were soy-free as well?) but they now have dairy, eggs and soy in them, thus rendering them inedible for vegans and a lot of other people. That's one king who won't be getting this Empress's business any time soon.
(Edited to add: Holy crap, I actually got through an entire post without using the f-word! **Cue applause and fanfare**) |
posted by The Venerable Vegan Empress @ 7:20 PM   |
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Name: The Venerable Vegan Empress
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If you have any ideas for an article here or would like to write a post, I'd love that! I work full time, volunteer and take classes at my city's university, so I don't work on this project nearly as often as I'd like. Just send me a comment with your contact info -- I approve all comments before posting, so if you include info that you don't want published let me know and I won't publish your comment.
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