She tosses her head, her shiny dark hair streaming down her back as she lets her silk robe fall to the floor. She's dressed to impress in black lingerie and garter stockings, and it's clear she's ready to go and get what she wants. Seductively, she licks her lips and starts to slink toward the object of her affection — a pumpkin.
This "veggie love" advertisement, which centers around the theme that "vegetarians have better sex," was produced by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The commercial was intended to make its television debut during the Super Bowl in January but was banned by television networks for its level of sexuality, according to Lindsay Rajt, PETA campaign coordinator. Despite its television prohibition, however, the advertisement has still managed to win publicity and cause controversy.
"Our Super Bowl ad was sexy, provocative and informative — it's a great ad," Rajt told the Daily. "When you're trying to promote an alternate dietary lifestyle and fast food commercials are dominant, your ad has to be attention-grabbing."
Major television networks originally approved the vegetable love advertisement that has been gaining steady Internet popularity, according to Rajt.
"Our NBC sales rep was initially excited about the ad," she said. "We were shocked when we got the rejection e-mail." Rajt suggested that the decision to keep the advertisement off the air might have been affected by PETA's ongoing campaign against prominent Super Bowl sponsor such as Kentucky Fried Chicken.
She added that advertisements are essential for PETA to get its message out to the public.
"Animals are not ours to eat, to wear, to use for experiments," Rajt said. "They have no voice, so we try and get their message across through our ads. We really hope to call attention to the healthy, sexy and humane reasons for turning vegetarian. Vegetarians have … fun, and anything that will help us spread that word is a positive thing."
And according to Rajt, vegetarians really do enjoy bigger benefits when it comes to sexual activity.
"Meat clogs your arteries, and the consumption of meat is directly linked to impotence," she explained. "No one wants that."
PETA claims that not only do vegetarians have better sex, but that vegetarianism promotes good health in the long run, too.
"The three biggest killers in the U.S. today are heart disease, cancer and stroke. The risk of all of those diseases is significantly less for vegetarians," Rajt said. "Also, vegetarians weigh … less than the general population. We're getting out a good message in a sexy way."
But not everyone sees it that way. Many women's rights groups have expressed anger at what they see as blatant denigration of women in PETA's advertisements.
"A lot of PETA's ads and protests take advantage of female bodies in highly sexualized positions in an attempt to promote animal rights issues," said one author of the recently founded Gender Blender Blog, which aims to promote social commentary concerning gender and sexuality at Tufts and beyond. "PETA's ad campaigns often feed into a media culture that treats women as sex objects. I … would have expected more from a group that is working to further a great cause."
The author, who wished to remain anonymous, said that PETA's sensationalized advertisements were more offensive than effective, even to vegetarians like her.
"Even though PETA's ads attract attention, much of the attention is negative … Recently, PETA members dressed up as members of the [Ku Klux Klan] in protest against the American Kennel Club (AKC), [arguing that] the AKC is trying to create a ‘master race' and therefore the comparison is apt. I cannot imagine that PETA did not predict that people would be offended by this demonstration," she said.
"I became a vegetarian because of the inhumane and unethical treatment to which animals are subjected," she continued. "I do not know any vegetarians who became vegetarians because of sexy PETA ads or shocking PETA demonstrations … It is frankly insulting to me as a vegetarian that PETA's ads are using sex and sexism in order to sell a very serious issue."
Assistant Professor of Sociology Sarah Sobieraj had a different reaction. She said that she was slightly baffled by the amount of criticism that has been leveled against PETA for its advertisements.
"I find this a strange place to point if the broader concern is the sexualization of women in the media," she said in an e-mail to the Daily. "PETA is doing this for political reasons … Those seriously committed to stemming the tide of images that sexualize violence against women would be better served to look at ‘Law and Order: SVU' or the horror film du jour."
Sobieraj also mentioned the difficulty many activist organizations like PETA are up against.
"Why do activist organizations have to resort to such sensationalist tactics to be heard in the mainstream news media?" she asked. "Activist voices are remarkably hard to find in our public political discourse, but they are … active, and they strain themselves terribly in efforts to curry the attentions of the news media, usually to no avail."
In line with Sobieraj's anaylsis, PETA's president, Ingrid Newkirk, recently wrote a letter to The New York Times saying that without sensationalism, the public simply doesn't care about certain causes.
"While cruelty to animals is a serious matter that should elicit widespread public outrage, efforts to reach the public through more serious means often fall on deaf ears in a world in which sex sells and there [is] both a war and an economic downturn," she wrote.
According to the Gender Blender blogger, however, such excuses are not legitimate reasons to perpetuate sexism, but rather "a question of misplaced and inappropriate advertising strategies."
"Ads that focus on a woman's sexualized body … serve to further objectify women," she said. "The classic ad that focuses on a woman's breasts or butt in order to sell an item often has little to do with the item. This is the problem that I have with PETA. Selling sex in order to encourage vegetarianism is irrelevant to the issue at hand."
Rajt, however, said she strongly disagreed with claims that PETA's advertising techniques are derogatory towardwomen. "We often do sexy things to get the word out about animal abuse, but PETA isn't sexist. Lots of our ads feature men … We're staffed largely by feminists, including myself," she said.
"I think that telling women to put their clothes back on could actually be construed as anti-feminist," she continued. "Females choose to participate in our advertisements. Women should have the choice to use their bodies as they choose."
