PETA released a video advertisement Nov. 2 on their Twitter page featuring women who are apparent survivors of sexual assault as they emotionally describing their experiences. One woman described how she felt like an object. One woman talked about how afraid she was. One woman described how her assaulters called her derogatory names. Another declared how she wouldn’t “wish this on anyone.”
Toward the end of the video, the ad switches gears as the women begin to hold up pictures of farm animals while text appears on the screen describing how many animals are born into the meat, egg and dairy industries every year. More text then appears, stating, “Almost all of them are a result of forcible artificial insemination.” The phrase “forcible artificial insemination” then fades, and is replaced by the word “rape.”
The ad, which attempted to convince viewers to abstain from such cruelty and go vegan, does so by unabashedly comparing rape victims to animals. The video unsurprisingly prompted backlash on the internet.
The overall sentiment of those who felt the ad went too far was that PETA’s comparison implied that animals feel the same type of trauma and pain in breeding practices that people do when they’re sexually assaulted. One Twitter user said, “No survivor of sexual assault should have to go through their trauma being compared to an animal’s when we’ve already been dehumanized.”
When I first saw people talking about this ad on my Twitter feed, I was sickened, but not surprised. I have always been wary of PETA’s advertising tactics, as have many others, because of their tendency to use shocking images in their advertisements to generate publicity. PETA has also been called out numerous times for using images that are especially degrading to women.
They’ve held public, live protests and installations against eating meat, like this one from 2010 featuring naked women’s bodies wrapped in plastic to symbolize meat packaging. Or this one, in which they had a partially nude pregnant woman get on her hands and knees inside a cage to portray unfair conditions for animals. They’ve been accused of fat-shaming people, specifically women, with their “Save the Whales” billboard in Florida that portrayed an overweight woman in a bathing suit on the beach.
But the most offensive PETA ad I’ve seen is their “Boyfriend Went Vegan” ad, which portrays a woman limping through the streets with a neck brace. The ad goes on to explain that the woman’s boyfriend had become a vegan, and thus had become much more lively during sex. The ad essentially implied that having a better sex life would lead to painful injuries. Not only is this completely untrue, it also perpetuates the idea that sex can and should be painful for women.
The reason I bring up a myriad of other ads that PETA has released is to show that not only has the organization released problematic ads in the past, but also that they’ve gotten flack for their ads multiple times. And yet, here we are, discussing another offensive ad that PETA has released, proving that they have either not learned their lesson, or simply don’t care.
In a statement released Nov. 3 in response to the recent Twitter backlash, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk said, “Kindness is a virtue, empathy is something we have to have, it can’t be all about me, me, me, my species, my gender, my narrow group.”
Whether or not you believe PETA actually released this ad just to bring out viewers’ empathy and kindness (I have a hard time believing they did, given their history of using controversy to their advantage), the ad still attempts to compare human sexual assault to what PETA calls the sexual assault of animals.
I do not doubt that animals sometimes endure horrible living conditions, and I do think that everyone, including meat-eaters, vegetarians and vegans, should be paying attention and working to fix this injustice. However, the comparison of the experiences of these animals to human sexual assault is just irresponsible.
We live in a world where sexual assault is stigmatized, where rape victims cannot get the justice they deserve from our judicial system and where women and their bodies are objectified regularly. Comparing one injustice to the other does nothing for either case, and PETA’s insistence that they never did anything wrong, as well as the fact that they didn’t acknowledge the ad’s lack of sensitivity in their statement, is simply demeaning to rape victims.
Besides, as an organization that promotes better morals and ethics, shouldn’t PETA be one of the first organizations to respect the thoughts and contributions of sexual assault victims?
At this point, every time I see a PETA ad, I prepare myself for the worst. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case, but until PETA realizes it also has ethical obligations to the people it is trying to affect as well as the animals it is trying to protect, it will, in my eyes, not be considered a serious and honest organization.