Stripping fish AND women while alive is not okay

Crossposted on The-F-Word.org

It looks like Dutch animal rights group Animals Awake is taking a few cues from Peta, an organization I’ve criticized heartily for treating women like a piece of meat to get men to stop eating meat.  The embed and html links don’t appear to be working on this site, so here’s a link to the video instead.

Warning : the video is quite graphic in its depiction of violence against women, so if you’re especially sensitive to this, please don’t watch.  Here’s a sanitized description of it instead:

Playboy Playmate and all-around sexy vegetarian Ancilla Tilia is shown performing a Burlesque kind of strip tease for a roomful of ogling men.  It’s all in good taste until a fisherman approaches her and hits her across the face with some kind of fishing instrument that looks like a two-by-four with a hook at the end and proceeds to disembowel her.  The text “Stripping alive is not okay” then flashes on the screen, along with some supplemental text about how thousands of fish are flayed live every day.  The slightly-less-graphic, behind-the-scenes photo shoot is here .

I get the general point of the ad, which is to anthropomorphize
animals so that people will see them more as sentient beings and not
merely fodder for their dinner plates.  But many vegetarians, including
myself, are so because we believe that a culture of violence towards any living creatures breeds a culture of violence towards all
living creatures, including and especially women.  Note that these
kinds of ads never replace the bodies of tortured, brutalized and
murdered animals with images of men — they’re always,
always of women.  The deliberate juxtaposition is intended to play on
the imagery of women as helpless creatures in need of defending while
also using sex to hook potential vegetarian converts, but it’s also
more socially acceptable to objectify women as objects of meat than it
is men.  That the women themselves volunteer to be presented in this
manner doesn’t change the fact that they are complicit in their own
exploitation.

There are many ways to get messages of vegetarianism across without
doing so on the backs of women.  For shame, Animals Awake, for shame.