Masculinity and Meat-Eating: A Critical Analysis of PETA's Campaign

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Adams). Derrida maintains “meat eating is not a simple, natural phenomenon, but is irreducibly linked in our culture to masculinity along multiple material, ideological, and symbolic lines” (quoted in Adams). Despite the absence of “real” meat, the patriarchal myth of masculinity remains on its website: “men are strong, men need to be strong”, thus men need vegan bacon. With this in mind, PETA’s use of sexually explicit and misogynistic ads makes sense. The group is attempting to reach male meat eaters (“Make your ‘stock’ rise”) and assume the familiar patriarchal subject cannot and should not change. The reiteration of such advertisements show that apparently you have to keep participating in the traditional construction of maleness …show more content…

By encouraging women to take off their clothes so that they can sell nonhuman animal liberation, PETA has associated female activism with pornographic exploitation and rendered invisible other types of activist roles women adopt. To further demonstrate this, PETA’s website has offered a series of online games for visitors to play. The games have ranged from shooting tomatoes at “old hags” who wear fur to shaking “Hairy Kate and Trashley Trollsen” as hard as possible while recordings of violent screams play in the background. PETA’s 2015 “Games” section included “Breasts, not Animal Tests” and “Commando Chicks: Stick-a-Chick”. The first game required players to grab as many female breasts as possible without accidentally grabbing any nonhuman animals. In the second game, players had to keep a “flying” packaged chicken from entering into their grocery cart; otherwise, the player’s family would die of salmonella. It is unclear in these games how aggressively shooting tomatoes at women (the term “hag” is defined in Merriam Webster’s dictionary as an ugly woman), physically harming Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, grabbing women’s breasts, and making sexually violent references suggestive of rape (“Stick-a-Chick”) can help liberate nonhuman animals. What is clear, however, is PETA’s assumption that reenacting violent acts and sexually exploiting women are effective advocacy techniques. Ironically, these games exemplify “a structure of overlapping but absent referents that link violence against women and nonhuman animals”. According to Adams, “it is through the structure of the absent referent that patriarchal values become institutionalized”. Through phrases like “stick a chick” and games that ask players to grab women’s breasts, the experience (rape) and

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