Full Frontal Factory Farming

May 18, 2008

Shown above: women in yellow bikinis in cages during a PETA protest against battery cages for egg-laying hens.

Shown above: egg-laying hens in battery cages. (source: Compassion Over Killing)

Vanessa at Feministing has stooped to a new low in her constant criticism of PETA:

Should we be surprised this is the work of PETA? It just never ends. And you have to love their press release on the “demonstration”:

She put quotes around the word demonstration because she doesn’t think it is truly a demonstration. She thinks it’s a sexist stunt and only a sexist stunt, nothing more. She trivializes the activists by refusing to acknowledge their political speech as speech. She thinks animal rights is just a joke, not something we should seriously consider, so when women get inside cages to protest battery hen cages for egg production, Vanessa won’t call that political activism. And she certainly won’t admit the personal agency of the women involved.

No wonder all she can see is sexism. She truly can’t see the actual message at all. She’s so blinded by her own judgments that she can’t form a serious analysis. Feministing criticism of PETA is too shallow. It winds up silencing women’s voices and ignoring their political and social activism.

Ironically, this shallowness is the best reason that PETA should re-evaluate this type of activism. The sad fact is that most people are too shallow. They don’t ‘get it.’ They can’t see the forest through the trees and they can’t understand animal rights when they’re blinded by perceived misogyny or sexiness. (Granted, many people simply refuse to see the truth no matter how you present it to them. They’ll justify their exploitation of animals through any means possible.) The few people who are open to a paradigm shift and are receptive to animal advocacy deserve a clear message without any distraction. Sexualization distracts and confuses so maybe it shouldn’t be used.

However, it sure does work to drum up publicity. Feministing, for example, can’t stop writing about it. In fact, the only time they ever write about animal rights issues are when they’re criticizing animal rights advocates. It’s obvious these campaigns work to get attention and that’s exactly why PETA keeps doing them.

Let’s get a few things straight here:

Objectification is the act of treating someone as an object. That is, objectification is refusing to acknowledge the individuality, the personality, the sentience of another. Example of objectification: “interchangeable bleached blondes with fake tits“.
There are lots of different kinds of objectification - it’s not only about sexual objectification. Sexual objectification is treating someone as a sexual object, not as an individual. But sexualizing something is not necessarily objectifying it. They are different. Example of non-sexual objectification: the way all factory farmed animals are treated.
Sexualization is turning something that’s not sexual into something that is sexual. It’s making something sexy. There are lots of ways to make something sexy and some are better than others. Making something sexy doesn’t necessarily demean, trivialize, objectify, dehumanize, or otherwise harm women. It all depends on the context. Examples of sexualization: “My Bush Would Make A Better President”, “Will Give Blow Job For Impeachment.”
Consent is damn important. Agency is damn important. Personal, bodily autonomy is damn important. When women express their autonomy and freely choose to advocate for animals by doing whatever they want with their own bodies, their choices ought to be respected.
Context is important. When pornographers show naked women in cages the meaning is different than when PETA shows naked women in cages. PETA’s message that cages are inhumane and wrong is damn important here and contextualizes the images to say something along the lines of, “no non-consenting, sentient being belongs in a cage.”

I have a suggestion for Vanessa and anyone else who dislikes nearly nude women in cages type of activism: Next time you’re tempted to write about this, don’t. Instead of posting the PETA image and committing the same offense you criticize PETA for doing - using women’s bodies to promote a political agenda - use an image of the animal that the women are representing instead. Show PETA that you don’t need sexualized images of women to inspire you to write about animal issues.

Instead, the next time your write about reproductive rights, remind readers that female animals raised for food are routinely forcibly impregnated. The next time you write about how mothers should be allowed to breastfeed in public, remind readers that calves rarely get to suckle their mother’s milk because they’re turned into veal and their mother’s milk goes to humans instead. Next time you write about birth rape, remind readers of the institutionalized birthing process of a sow’s gestation crate. Make your feminism about all females, not just the human ones.

Posted by Elaine Vigneault | Filed Under Animals, Feminism, Food, Politics, Sexuality, veganism