Trigger warning for violent imagery, some of which involves female nudity, under the jump.**

A subsidiary of the department store Beymen, blender bills itself as a “concept store.” (Caution: meat-loving hipsters ahead!) The “concept” (scare quotes because the whole concept of a concept store is way too fucking pretentious for this thrift store shopper to stand), as you may have already surmised, involves the pairing of fashion with misogyny, the conflation of sex and violence, and the linkage of women and nonhuman animals: consumable objects, unite!

With several locations in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey, blender doesn’t just sell clothing and assorted shiny baubles; oh no! Nor are body dysmorphia and low self-esteem its only wares. Ever the hipster-catering douchebags, each blender store is also home to a butcher shop! Because nothing accents a $500 white angora scarf quite like ghastly blood smear stain. (No, really!)

Curiously, blender attempts to sell its audience on this concept by treating at least half of them like pieces of meat, too!

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Over the weekend, PETA’s Bruce Friedrich was the featured guest on ARZone’s weekly live guest chat. (You can find a full chat transcript here.) While the primary focus was on veganism and welfare reforms, a few participants dared question PETA’s feminist cred – specifically vis à vis its sexual objectification of women – with, ahem, interesting results. Case in point: Friedrich’s assertion that “PETA is about as feminist as it gets.”

My initial instinct, of course, was to pen a 10,000 word, line-by-line rebuttal of Friedrich’s statements, but just the thought damn near gave me an aneurysm. So not worth the stress! Instead, I decided to pop the vegan maraschino cherry on my Anti-Feminist Vegetarian Bingo card.

The game? It’s on like Donkey Kong, bitches!*

Anti-Feminist Vegetarian Bingo: Bruce Friedrich/ARZone Live Chat ed.
FYI: A plain-text version of this card, complete with links to refutations and debunkings, is available here.
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SO CLOSE! We were SO CLOSE to scoring a big fat sexist bingo! Next time, maybe. Probably. Most definitely.

Anyway, let’s take a look at of some of the “feminist” nuggets Friedrich dropped during the chat. The “hits” are labeled with the appropriate square; the non-hits, to be incorporated into v.2!

Square B-1: “Sex sells.”

Regarding our use of sex in our campaigns:

[...]

2) Sex sells and isn’t offensive to most people. That’s the super-brief reply to that question.

Oh, the old “sex sells” cliché! Such a classic, that one.

99.9% of the time, when people say that “sex sells,” what they really mean is that women’s sexualized, dehumanized, objectified, dismembered, and all-around pornified bodies sell. Or, put more succinctly: “sexism sells.”

Speaking of GQ magazine’s recent Glee spread, Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency breaks down the difference between “erotic or sexual images, stories, and video of people engaging in healthy sexual lives and experiences” and “the patriarchal objectification and sexualization of womens’ bodies.” (Transcript here.)

The images in which PETA trades don’t commonly involve healthy depictions of female agency and sexuality, but rather women posed and performing for the male gaze; usually invisible or implied, but sometimes – as with PETA’s 2011 soft-core porno/Super Bowl ad, which is discussed in more detail later on in the chat – fully present, leering, sneering and degrading. Almost all of PETA’s naked women ads are suggestive of mainstream pornography, what with their emphasis on thin, white, conventionally attractive models, bent and contorted into submissive postures, vulnerable, vacant, and ready for a good fuckin’. Bonus points for faux lesbianism for het male enjoyment!

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Good morning – errr, afternoon (!) – all. I hope you had a wonderful holiday weekend, plates filled to brimming with plenty of yummy vegan food, enjoyed in the company of equally-vegan friends and family (hey, a girl can dream, can’t she?). As promised, today I’d like to share another guest post-slash-book excerpt, this time from Nick Cooney, author of Change of Heart.

Nick Cooney is the founder and director of The Humane League (formerly known as The Humane League of Philadelphia), a farmed animal advocacy group that engages in veg outreach*, humane education, and targeted campaigns – as well as the occasional emergency animal rescue. The group primarily operates in Philadelphia and Boston, with additional campaigns in the Washington DC and Los Angeles areas. Nick holds a degree in Non-Violence Studies from Hofstra University and formerly worked conducting nutrition education programs with the University of Pennsylvania’s Urban Nutrition Initiative.

His first book, Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us About Spreading Social Change, was recently released through Lantern Books:

Scientific research has generated a wealth of information on how people can be persuaded to alter their behaviors, yet this body of knowledge has been largely ignored by those working to improve society. Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us About Spreading Social Change brings this information to light so that non-profits, community organizers and others can make science-driven decisions in their advocacy work. The book examines over 80 years of empirical research in areas including social psychology, communication studies, diffusion studies, network systems and social marketing, distilling the highlights into easy-to-use advice and serving as a psychology primer for anyone wanting to spread progressive social change.

As massive as my bedside book pile has grown, I’m afraid that Change of Heart isn’t in my immediate future. However, Elaine has already reviewed the book at Vegan Soapbox, and you can also check out a number of relevant reviews with Nick that have popped up on the internets, including those at Digging Through the Dirt** and Kiss Me, I’m Vegan.

Following is a brief excerpt from Change of Heart; the TOC, introduction and first chapter are also available for viewing at Lantern Books.

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Want To Spread The Animal Rights Message? It Helps To Be “Norm”al

We like to think we’re independent and that we make choices based on what we want to do, not what others are doing. However research on social norms—information about what most other people are doing—suggests we’re influenced by the majority opinion much more than we think. Invoking social norms can help animal activists succeed in getting the public to go vegan, boycott fur, and make other animal-friendly choices. Before discussing how, let’s look at some examples of social norms in action.

Famed persuasion researcher Robert Cialdini and his colleagues worked with a hotel to make changes to room signs encouraging the reuse of towels. Previously the signs had asked guests to reuse towels to help protect the environment, but Cialdini and his team replaced these with signs that simply noted the majority of guests did reuse towels. After switching from an environmental message to a social norms message, towel reuse increased by twenty-six percent. When the signs noted that most guests of that particular room reused towels, reuse increased by thirty-three percent.

This same effect has been shown in numerous other studies. White college students who were told they had more stereotyped perceptions of African–Americans than their peers later endorsed fewer stereotypes. An Oklahoma anti–littering ad campaign that showed littering to be a violation of social norms got the percentage of residents who said they would feel guilty if they littered to rise from thirty-seven percent to sixty-seven percent in just a few years.

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Regular readers know that I’m no stranger to pop culture analysis. (In fact, I watch so much television that it’s only a matter of time before I start to resemble the potato above. But at least it’s sweet!) Well, for my next VeganMoFo trick, watch while I dissect the above advertisement – and then refute it with some super-hot vegan food (not-)porn action. Shall we?

A large, rather symmetrical sweet potato (Seriously, when’s the last time you’ve seen such a beautifully proportioned sweet potato? I would love to peel the hell out of that baby!) occupies most of the real estate in the ad above. The potato is dissected into six discrete pieces by a cartoon-like, white dotted line that’s been superimposed over it, thus evoking the look and feel of old-timey butchers’ posters. You know the kind: hanging in Sam the Butcher’s storefront, such posters helpfully illustrate the different “cuts” of meat one can obtain from the body of a murdered and dismembered nonhuman animal. (Google, for example, “cuts of beef”. This is an image that PETA seems fond of mimicking/parodying, with debatable success. But I digress, and dangerously so!) Other images in the series depict a zucchini and eggplant carved up similarly.

Because every “cut” of the sweet potato is identical to the others, the ad seems to be suggesting that such visual analogies are ridiculous; humorous, even. Compared to “meat,” plant-based foods are boring. Monotonous. Lacking in variety or diversity. Undifferentiated masses of blah. In other words, being a vegan/vegetarian sucks balls.

The most interesting aspect of this ad series is that it’s promoting – wait for it! – vegetarian food (!). Specifically, Fry’s Vegetarian Foods, which specializes in meals heavy in mock “meat.” Though I’m disappointed to see a vegetarian company engage in the negative stereotyping of plant-based foods, I can’t exactly say that I’m shocked, given the context.

I know, I know; it’s all in good fun, right? Except when it’s not. The consumption of animal flesh and secretions is largely a choice in Western cultures – and one category of “reasons” (excuses, really) that carnists commonly use to justify their dietary choices involves societal mythconceptions and prejudices concerning cruelty-free options, i.e., that any foodstuffs that do not contain animal by-/products are necessarily boring, bland and monotonous. Rather than cater to these harmful stereotypes, we should actively challenge them.

Which brings me to the VeganMoFo Photo Essay portion of this post. What follows are twelve gorgeous, creative, yummy dishes that incorporate sweet potatoes as a primary ingredient. (I might have just as easily executed this project with zucchini or eggplant, but hey, ’tis the season, am I right?) The tip of the proverbial iceberg, these photos and recipes demonstrate that vegan foods are anything but boring.

Now grab a knife, fork and potato peeler and dig in, MoFo-ers!

1. Roasted Sweet Potato Salad With Black Beans and Chili Dressing:

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Based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (psych101 students, represent!), Ellyn Satter developed a corresponding hierarchy of food needs, arguing that one cannot “choose” to consume healthy products unless one’s more basic needs – such as having enough food to eat, having acceptable food, and having reliable, ongoing access to food – are already met.

Satter’s Hierarchy of Food Needs:
Bottom to top, the six needs are as follows: Enough food; Acceptable food; Reliable, ongoing access to food; Good-tasting food; Novel food; and Instrumental food.

The choice to consume vegan food (vs. the necessity of consuming vegan food) seems to rest at the apex of Satter’s hierarchy, and as such, can only be made “when all underlying needs are consistently satisfied”: “The person functioning at the apex of Satter’s Hierarchy of Food Needs reliably gets enough to eat of rewarding food and has food acceptance skills that are good enough to allow him or her to eat a variety of food. That person is thus in a position to consider choosing food for instrumental reasons: to achieve a desired physical, cognitive, or spiritual outcome. This description is analogous to Maslow’s concept of self actualization.”
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While this hierarchy is primarily being discussed in relation to our consumption (or lack thereof) of nutritious, healthy food, i.e.:

The graphic suggests that getting enough food to eat is the most important thing to people. Having food be acceptable (e.g., not rotten, something you are not allergic to) comes second. Once those two things are in place, people hope for reliable access to food and only then do they begin to worry about taste. If people have enough, acceptable, reliable, good-tasting food, then they seek out novel food experiences and begin to make choices as to what to eat for instrumental purposes (e.g., number of calories, nutritional balance).

As Michelle at The Fat Nutritionist writes, sometimes when a person chooses to eat nutritionally deficient or fattening foods, it is not because they are “stupid, ignorant, lazy, or just a bad, bad person who loves bad, bad food.” Sometimes, it’s “because other needs come first.” (Source: Sociological Images)

it’s equally applicable to veganism and vegan foods: obstacles such as hunger, poverty, food insecurity, lack of access to food, etc., severely constrict people’s ability to choose a vegan diet, on multiple levels (e.g., individual, community, population). As long as we’re serious about creating a vegan world, we must address these human inequities as well. (That, and it’s the right thing to do.)

Check out the Food Empowerment Project for more.

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An ad for Butch dog food, in two parts. The panel on the left shows neatly wrapped sausage, over which is superimposed the following text: “I’m as guilty as the next girl of licking the odd bone. But believe me, there’s no substitute for being stuffed full of meat.” In the right panel sits a small pug, an expectantly eager look on her face. Just in case her gender isn’t readily apparent, the ad is dripping in pink.

Writing about the life and death of porn star Stephen Hill – perhaps most famous for his role as Barack Obama in Palin: Erection 2008 – in Salon, journalist Susannah Breslin bemoans the fate of male porn actors, or “mopes”:

If porn is a joke — and, particularly these days, it most assuredly is — male porn stars are its punch line. Reams of text have been written about how porn supposedly victimizes the women who work in this branch of the sex trade, but inside the straight porn industry, it’s the female performers who have the greater power, higher status and bigger paycheck. [...] So-called woodsmen are paid significantly less than their female counterparts, for their efforts are treated like props on the movie sets where they perform near Herculean sex acts of which most men can only dream [...] and more often than not end up as decapitated, frantically thrusting tubes of meat in this industry’s final product. Due to the hardcore nature of the porn business and the toll it takes upon all its workers, the porn industry functions as a meat grinder for the human condition, and men are its offal. They may score bragging rights as professional cocksmen, but the reality is these are the working stiffs of a business that has virtually no interest in the men it employs and all the interest in the world in the women with whom its movies are forever preoccupied.

Just two paragraphs previous, Breslin described a visit to the set of a porn film, circa Valentine’s Day 2001:

From the outside, it’s one more stucco building on a suburban street in the San Fernando Valley. Inside, some 90 men have congregated to masturbate on a young woman for the making of an adult movie called “American Bukkake 13.”

Sabrina Jade, who has long, reddish brown hair and emerald green, catlike eyes, is seated on a towel in the middle of the floor. A plastic cone has been duct-taped around her neck like a funnel, or an Edwardian collar. Jim Powers, the director, came up with the idea when he saw a dog wearing a similar apparatus around its neck after a visit to the vet.

(Links and emphasis mine.)

Um, yeah. If men are “tubes of meat,” women are the farmed animals who are force-fed the least desirable pieces of their murdered and dismembered cousins. Forced into carnism and/or cannibalism; at once “meat” and “meat-eater.” Enslaved, caged, tortured. Right up until the time when they’re hoisted into the air, hung upside-down by a hook through the thigh, and left to die, throats slit, bleeding out. In the meantime, maybe some randomly passing slaughterhouse worker decides to jerk off into the dying animal’s eyes. Just so he knows, in that 30 seconds, that it’s not he at the bottom of the shitpile, nosiree.

Maybe, maybe not.

And that’s all I’ll say about that.*

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Update, 8/3/10: www.schlongs4seals.com is live! I’m still working on the interactive photo gallery and discussion features, but the blog is functional (and has already logged more posts in August than I was able to write here in all of July) and all of the other pages are done. Also, I’ve uploaded all my schlong-related artwork to a set of photo pages as a temporary solution whilst I hunt the internets for a shiny piece of WP-compatible photo gallery software.

Leads for said software would be both awesome and appreciated!

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Update, 7/14/10: www.schlongs4seals.com is now mine. Muahahahaha! (At the time of this writing, the domain just redirects back to this post, but still: Muahahahaha!) Stay tuned for details!

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Update, 7/13/10: I just received a notice that Facebook deleted my SCHLONGS4SEALS page because:

You created a Page that has violated our Terms of Use. A Facebook Page is a distinct presence used solely for business or promotional purposes. Among other things, Pages that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed. We also take down Pages that attack an individual or group, or that are set up by an unauthorized individual. If your Page was removed for any of the above reasons, it will not be reinstated. Continued misuse of Facebook’s features could result in the permanent loss of your account.

So, just to recap: serious requests for women to send in their tit shots “for the animals” = a-okay; satirical requests for men to send in their crotch shots “for the animals” = hateful, threatening and/or obscene. Facebook, I do believe you hate women!

Anyhow, I’m currently weighing my options, which look rather slim at the moment. I could try setting up a similar page, but then I risk having my account disabled – a hassle which just isn’t worth it. Flickr might prove more welcoming to a SCHLONGS4SEALS group – I mean, hey, it’s home to entire groups dedicated to sexually harassing upskirt photos (!) – and indeed, the faux PSAs I created are all safe and sound in their own lil’ Flickr collection. But, you know, different social media sites, yada yada yada. My final and grandest idea is to go Thatchers out and launch an entire SCHLONGS4SEALS spoof website. Which sounds great, but OMG I so do not have the free time!

So, we shall see. In the meantime, if you’re on FB and find this whole affair as despicable as do I, why not hop on over to that *other* page and report it for similarly violating FB’s TOS? Seeing as most of us are either women or have friends who are women, might I suggest choosing “targets me or a friend” from the drop-down menu, as this continued objectification of women most certainly constitutes “an attack on an individual or group.” Please and thank you.

A screenshot, taken on 6/26/10, of the “Support For The Seals!” Facebook page. The image shows a fan photo – which has since been deleted – submitted to the page by Petra Simkova, in which the wearer of a pair of white undies (men’s briefs?) is flashing what JK Rowling would oh-so-demurely call a “rude gesture” at the camera. In other words, what we have here is an exaggerated crotch shot and a middle finger – all in all, an adequate summary of my feelings towards Facebook and Michael McDade (aka SeaL Shepherd).
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Update, 7/3/10: If you’d like to participate, but don’t have a Facebook account, not to worry! Just send me your package @ easyvegan [at] gmail.com and I’ll upload it as an admin. You can choose to remain anonymous OR be credited (with a link back to your blog or site), whichever you prefer!

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A bottom-less Pamela Anderson strikes a flirty pose as she models PETA’s ‘Save the Seals’ tee. The shirt is all-white save for a black sketch of a fuzzy-wuzzy seal on its front. The ad’s copy reads, “What do I have in common with Barack Obama, Vladmir Putin and the Dalai Lama? We all oppose the massacre of baby seals. It’s time to end Canada’s shameful slaughter.” And, in red and gray text: “Pamela Anderson for PeTA” and “SAVETHESEALS / END CANADA’S SEAL SLAUGHTER.”
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Over the weekend, I was browsing a few friends’ Facebook feeds when I happened upon Support For The Seals!. Purportedly, the page aims to “raise awareness” about seal hunting in Newfoundland – by (wait for it!) encouraging female fans to post photos of their tits:

Boobs for seals…did he just write that? Yes he did. Show your “support” for the seals!

1) Suggest to 100 friends! (link above)

2) More friends = more boobs = more support for the seals!

Much thanks to these brave ladies! Get your mammos!

Now, if I wasn’t already suffering from blog fatigue, I might offer a coherent vegan/feminist critique of this so-called “campaign” (scare quotes because it reads more like a Girls Gone Wild casting/sexploitation call); and, knowing me, this essay would clock in at no less than 2,000 words. Probably it would contain a good deal of salty language, and not a few references to “the kyriarchy” and “intersectionality.”

For example, I might begin my rant with a brief analysis of the “post your bra color for breast cancer” Facebook campaign on which Support For The Seals! is based, arguing that it:

1) trivialized breast cancer by making it all about the boobies (instead of, you know, life or fucking death);

2) excluded some actual breast cancer survivors from participating (i.e., those who have undergone double mastectomies have little need for bras; insensitive much?);

3) played into cultural memes which reduce women to body parts (What, no “boxers or briefs” campaign for testicular cancer? No, that would be silly!); and

4) did little to actually raise awareness of the issues surrounding breast cancer (Dietary and environmental risk factors, anyone? Time to drop the I word, methinks!), thus transforming the well-intentioned but misguided effort into a day of titillation for Facebook’s (heterosexual, sexist) male members.

I might also argue that Support For The Seals! is infinitely worse than the aforementioned breast cancer campaign, as a) it involves actual photos of actual women’s actual breasts, whereas b) the link between the objectified body part and the cause it’s supposed to further is much, much more tenuous (nonexistent, you might say).

I might point out that, practically speaking, this page does little more than provide a bunch of internet pervs with additional wanking material (as if they’ve a need for more, amiright ladies?); certainly, it does nothing to actually “raise awareness” about Canadian seals and the many threats they face, nor does it provide concrete assistance (material support, monetary donations, volunteer pledges, etc.) to those working to end seal hunting.

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I can’t see the point in women being equal to men if men are not equal to each other. *

Yes!

And also:

I can’t see the point in nonhuman animals being equal to humans if humans are not equal to each other.

Think about it.

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Mars, Inc. wants you to know that a bitch is a bitch is a bitch – and, whether she be digging for gold or for bones, that bitch ain’t shit.

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Eight of Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary’s sixty-two Signature Billboards, all from the “We Know Our Victims Well” series. Clockwise from the top left:
They long to live as much as we do.
(A single white duck gazes into the camera.)
They long to be loved as much as we do.
(Hen and rooster Libbie and Louie find refuge in one another’s touch.)
They face life together like we do.
(A pair of ducks wander through the snow.)
They love their children as much as we do.
(An adult llama and his child smile together.)
They need their mothers as much as we do.
(A cow nuzzles his mother.)
They protect their children as fiercely as we do.
(A cow and her calf stare defiantly ahead.)
They raise families like we do.
(A duck family – complete with five youngsters – strolls along in harmony.)
They fall in love like we do.
(One cow licks another with obvious affection.)
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A few weeks ago, the always-awesome Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary unveiled a new campaign to aid activists in combating speciesism – and all the oppressions it sanctions – specifically that directed towards “food” animals. With its Signature Billboards, Peaceful Prairie gives faces, individualities, life stories, and emotions to the many animals we call “food” – cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, lambs, goats and fishes:

They speak for themselves…

We don’t always have the opportunity to raise awareness of the animals’ plight during daily email correspondence but now, with Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary’s latest campaign, we’ve made it easy and effective for anyone to learn how their actions can save the lives of other animals, lives that matter to them as much our lives matter to us.

The graphics – each of which pictures one or more nonhuman animals, as well as a brief but powerful statement about her life experiences, relationships with/to other nonhumans, and/or personhood – are organized around four main themes:

• We Know Our Victims Well;
• 55 Billion Reasons to Live Vegan;
• Humane Farming, An Oxymoron; and
• Subjects of a Life

Designed for use as email signatures, you can also display these graphics on your blog or website, or share them on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

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