It’s a slow blogging couple of days for me, because I’m run down, but I wanted to expand on a comment I left over at pandagon in reference to PETA.
Julian Elson said this:
I’ve heard about PETA’s sexism before, but mainly from anti-porn feminists. I assume that opposition to soft porn and innuendo isn’t super-widespread here on Pandagon (although Hugo himself counts himself among their number, AFAIK). Besides suggestive advertising and pin-ups, how’s PETA sexist? (assuming that aforementioned things are, in fact, sexist) Is it just that the particular type of anti-fur models they use are all sorta “thin young blonde woman” types, and you never see an overweight, middle-aged black man standing naked at the chalkboard repeatedly writing “I’d rather go naked than wear fur?”
I remember two major campaigns: “I’d rather go naked than wear fur,” aka “Carnie Wilson shows some ankle,” and the one where a failure to get a Brazilian wax was equated with strangling a meercat and knotting its broken body around your neck.
Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, and Money puts it better than me:
Last month, Volokh suggested that women “might have more difficulty getting their husbands to move with them than men would have getting their wives to move with them (perhaps because the women’s spouses are more likely to have hard-to-move jobs than the men’s spouses)” and “might have more difficulty clerking, especially in a highly demanding clerkship, if they have children than comparable men would.” This is right, but of course this isn’t an alternative explanation to sexism–these practices constitute sexism.
Exactly. Saying, “Women are being used to sell a product–in this case, veganism–because people prefer to see them naked,” is like saying, “Women aren’t getting hired because women don’t have the same career support men do.” They aren’t alternative explanations to sexism–these practices constitute sexism. When PETA makes the marketing decision to use young, skinny, white, female bodies as advertising props, it is supporting cultural beliefs about what is and is not appropriate treatment for those bodies. It is using a cultural shorthand that makes it infinitely easier to market some women’s bodies as figurative consumer goods, and which further dictates that some bodies must be kept under wraps either because they are above or unworthy of exposure.
It’s easy to distinguish between nakedness as lighthearted attempt at humor and nakedness as transparent excuse for softcore–and easy to look at the way the softcore liberties are gendered. What if, say, Al Gore and his ass had agreed to be in a PETA ad, announcing that he would rather go naked than wear fur? Pretty fucking scary, sure, but funny, right? Funny because it’s Al Gore and here he is starkers in a national ad campaign. Because who wants to see his ass? Why would PETA ever think anyone would want to see his ass? Has he ever been reduced to a sexual object? By Tipper, even? Okay, now picture Halle Berry announcing that she’d rather go naked than wear fur.