PETA Made Me Do It: The 7 Types Of Sexist PETA Ads That Turned Me To Meat

Remember all of those GoDaddy ads that featured NASCAR driver Danica Patrick fake-stripping? PETA had no problem with those. Those were fine. But once GoDaddy created an ad that featured a woman selling a puppy on a GoDaddy-hosted site, A LINE WAS CROSSED. Of course, PETA’s rationale for their objection was as thin as their objection to most of the ads they speak out against — they argued that the ad featured a puppy mill, but as far as I can tell, it was just a barn.

So yeah, my issue with the whole situation is that Super Bowl ads that objectify women are just fine to PETA, but god help if an animal is even cast in an advertisement. I know it’s not PETA’s job to fight for women’s rights, but you’d think that an organization whose central belief is ostensibly that all life is equally valuable would posit women and men as equally valuable, too. (Which is laughable anyway; they not only believe in kill shelters, they run one of the largest kill shelters in the country and kill animals they can’t place faster than other kill shelters.) But they don’t, and they have a long history of selling women as only sexually valuable and normalizing violence toward women in their ads.

I was a vegetarian for seven years, and I went on and off between vegetarianism, veganism, and eating meat for a few years after that. Part of the reason I became a vegetarian in the first place was some of the gentler PETA literature. Part of the reason I stopped — on top of becoming severely anemic from dietary iron deficiency, which, yes, absolutely does happen to some people despite what PETA and other animal rights organizations will tell you — was also PETA. Why would I support a lifestyle that was not only unhealthy for me, but was advocated most prominently by people who straight-up hate vaginas?

So in reluctant support of GoDaddy and in absolute hatred of PETA, I present all the reasons PETA made me eat meat. NSFW, obviously, and there are graphic violent images of human women, in case that’s a sensitive point for you.

1. PETA thinks it’s super funny to mock public service announcements about abuse. In this ad, a woman’s boyfriend went vegan and had so much energy that he put her head through a wall and landed her in a neck brace. With bonus ass shot!

2. PETA thinks they’re making a super good point about killing animals for fur when they show women getting beaten to death on the street.

3. Oh, yeah, also, it’s ALWAYS women who die and get chained up, covered in blood, shot, boiled to death, and abused in PETA ads, never men, because PETA’s world is not really gender-neutral. They see violence against women as normal and violence against men as too far-fetched an image to be useful to make a point. On top of that, those women are almost always naked or close to it, which essentially sexualizes not just violence against women but the murder of women. It’s like snuff porn.

4. When PETA’s not killing women, they can’t think of anything to do but display the bodies of thin, naked women in order to sexualize their message. This is most often celebrities…

5. …But it’s also a theme: Tits sell vegetables, I guess. The women in their ads aren’t pictured because of their morals, which you’d think would be the goal for an organization that assumes that it’s operating at a higher moral standard than, say, the Beef Council. They’re just there as bodies, because that’s the way, by and large, that PETA conceptualizes women.

6. Oh, and by the way, it’s important that these female bodies are conventionally beautiful, because NO FAT CHICKS, amirite?!?!?! PETA consistently sells vegetarianism as a way to lose weight – not to be healthy, but specifically to have a “better” body, as if being thin is necessarily more attractive than being, well, anything else.

7. And on top of that, PETA has a weird vendetta against female pubic hair. No commentary is given on male bushiness, but hey, ladies, you really need to keep that shit under control, because no man is going to love you if you don’t feel like shaving off every inch of you body hair. They’ll even give you a free Brazilian wax to get rid of it! Lord knows, animals should have hair, but not women, right?

You know what’s even better than being vegan? Having periods that don’t make me feel like I’m dying. Not that PETA would know — if PETA were a human being, they’d be the kind of dickhead who plugs his ears whenever women start talking about menstruation so that he can continue to pretend that the only thing that women are supposed to exist for is ogling or fucking. And honestly, I just don’t want to hang around that guy. Not only is he obnoxious, I can’t help but think that if he’s not smart or compassionate enough to assume that women have real intellectual and physical worth, then he’s not the sort of person whose judgment or opinions on lifestyle choices I should trust.

One last little bit of irony:

Glass houses, PETA. Glass houses.

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Images compiled from:
[Business Insider] [Canberra Times] [Creative-Ads] [Daily Mail] [Fashion Fame] [MyTalkFest] [RationalWiki] [ThinkProgress] [Vegan Feminist Network] [Vegan Feminista] [VegPress]

Original by: Rebecca Vipond Brink