While searching the internets for the latest “meat-as-sex” Burger King commercial (BK’s Burger Shots, natch), I stumbled upon this SNL parody of BK’s “Whopper Virgins” series. I’m fairly certain that SNL is poking fun at BK for devising such an absurd and culturally insensitive campaign, but with varying levels of success.
 

 
Take, for example, the man who tried to run away with the Whoppers: “This food could feed my village for a month!” Here, Western excess as exemplified by Burger King is the butt of the joke, as opposed to the impoverished villager himself.

Other “subjects” seem puzzled; they’ve never seen a burger before, so they’re unsure what to do with it. The “Whopper as a hat” bit is deliberately over the top, but in trying to poke fun at BK’s idiotic PR stunt, SNL also mocks (unintentionally?) “those silly foreigners.” Or perhaps SNL means to imply that the BK “researchers” are the stooges, seemingly for expecting such behavior from the uncivilized heathens to begin with?

I only wish SNL had aimed their axe at the root of the problem, namely, the conflating of “meat” with sex, and “meat”-eating with masculinity.

Your thoughts?

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Usually, the makers and marketers of “meat”-based foodstuffs attempt to remove the finished product from its live animal origins as much as possible; by dismembering, reconstructing and altering animal corpses, then, butchers make it easier for consumers to conveniently “forget” that they’re consuming formerly sentient creatures.

Not Royco! Nope, they want you to know that those chicken and “beef” bouillon cubes are the real thing, baby! Whereas most people see an innocuous, flavorful cube of powder when they unwrap a bouillon, Royco makes it clear that there’s really a live (dead) animal buried within those indistinguishable powder particles.

First, their chicken bouillon:

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While I understand what they’re getting at, this series of print ads for Lifebuoy hand wash are unfortunate, to say the least:

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As a follow-up to Sunday’s disturbing series of ads for Hobie Kayaks (Truth in Advertising: Fishermen are stone-cold killers.), today I have an ad campaign for the Little Boys line of “gourmet” “sausage.” Apparently, this New Zealand-based company thinks that little boys are natural born killers.

Here we have two mischievous little rubes, about to decapitate a helpless chicken:

Or, in the words of The Inspiration Room, “One boy with a chicken and herbs, the other with a small axe. What possibly could they be up to next?” Such inappropriately cutesy language to describe animal abuse, dontchathink?

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When I first spotted this series of ads for Hobie Kayaks on Ads of the World, I was taken aback. Flabbergasted, actually.

This is some violent imagery – the kind you’d expect to see on the box of an adult video game.

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Again with the meat-as-sex meme.

In this commercial for fast food chain Arby’s, a dutiful wife dresses up as an Arby’s waitress for her husband’s birthday. In the bedroom, if you know what I mean, where she delivers a chicken corpse to her eagerly awaiting hubby. Cue sexxxay, “doing it” music: Boom-Chicka-Wow-Wow! As the wife/waitress slinks into the room – somewhat uncomfortably, mind you, as though she was wheedled into doing this against her better judgment – the Arby’s logo (a red hat) “pops up” over dude’s head while he smiles with hunger/lust.

(Oh Arby’s, so clever with the double entrendes, you are! Original, too.)

Here, beef functions as an aphrodisiac and dinner time is sex-ay time. It goes without saying that dude is a REAL MAN because he eats REAL MAN food, i.e., food with a face. No veggies on his plate, nosiree. Except for ketchup, of course.

Which begs the question: if eating meat is analogous to having sex, is the wife/waitress a living piece of Chicken Cordon Bleu?

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Tagged: animals animal rights animal welfare commercial meat arby’s video youtube animals and women intersections parallel oppressions sexual politics of meat sex death piece of meat speciesism sexism misogyny feminism

Can I just say how deeply it pains me to see Phoebe Buffay Lisa Kudrow happily frying up some Kung Pao Chicken in this commercial for Nintendo DS?

Bonus boggles for the parting “Chinese food, and it was easy” comment. Please tell us, oh wise Personal Trainer peoples, why you expect your audience to assume that “Chinese food” is any harder to prepare than “Italian food” or “Mexican food” – or “American food,” for that matter?

Might these expectations be attributed to your perception of “Chinese food” as “foreign,” “exotic” and “ethnic,” hmmm?

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Tagged: animals animal rights animal welfare meat lisa kudrow phoebe buffay pop culture video youtube commercial ad Kung Pao Chicken chinese food othering nintendo nintendo ds friends

As seen while watching TBS’s 207th airing of Anchorman this morning:

Two points:

1 – There’s already a term for animals whose diets primarily consist of the corpses of other animals: carnivores.

2 – The so-called “meatatarian” profiled above is eating a bun which – correct me if I’m wrong – is most decidedly not made of “meat.”

And yes, I get it, Wendy’s is trying to crack a joke here; supposedly this commercial is “funny” because of its ridiculousness: of course humans can’t survive on meat alone.

Except there’s really nothing funny about mass murder, which is precisely how Wendy’s turns a profit.

That, and they’re also implicitly mocking veg*ns with the whole “it’s a lifestyle choice” spiel.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

At least we’ve moved on to stage two, eh?

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Tagged: animals animal rights animal welfare wendy’s vegetarian vegetarianism vegan veganism meatatarian meat bacon hamburger cheeseburger commercial obnoxious ad youtube video

Burger King’s latest ad campaign – Whopper Virgins – is a convoluted mess of racism, sexism, speciesism and colonialism, all crammed into a a series of 15-to-30-second ads.

To wit:

Let’s dissect, shall we?

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The Surfrider Foundation, who describes themselves as “a non-profit grassroots organization dedicated to the protection and enjoyment of our world’s oceans, waves and beaches,” engaged in a fun guerrilla campaign to bring attention to the problem of litter and pollution, particularly as it affects the world’s oceans and waterways:

To put beach pollution into perspective, trash was collected from various beaches, packaged it to look like seafood and displayed it at local farmers’ markets. This is the print extension for those who couldn’t actually make it to the market.

(Description and photos via Ads of the World.)

I actually kind of dig the idea and print campaign; they filled Styrofoam food packages with trash such as cigarette butts, plastic doohickeys, rusted cans and (ew!) “used” condoms:

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