Peta's Sexually Explicit Advertisements

PETA's Sexually Explicit Advertisements

I. Introduction The purpose of this paper is to investigate the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' (PETA) campaign “I'd Rather Go Naked than Wear Fur,” in order to argue that, rather than changing people's thoughts and behavior for the benefit of animals, the campaign succeeds merely in demeaning and hyper-sexualizing women. While PETA has often been successful in generating visual rhetoric that appeals to both the public’s logical reasoning and emotional sentiment, the visual rhetoric in this campaign is unable to generate the same effect. An analysis of the implementation of the three rhetoric appeals - pathos, logos and ethos - show that the organization’s inability to catalyze behavioural change in their target audience can be largely attributed to conflicts

In fact, the advertisements have been far more successful in perpetuating the dominance over and degradation of women. In their attempt at implementing pathos, PETA’s campaign was unsuccessful due to the exaggeration of the sexual nature of their advertisement. In a similar sense, the organization failed to properly utilize logos when they neglected to consider the overt hyper-sexualization of the female body in North American media. Instead, PETA relied on the intended audience to make a logical connection above and beyond their capability, considering their field of experience regarding the use women’s bodies in the surrounding media. Moreover, the organization disregarded ethos in their advertisement through their suppression of the rights of the social movement of women in an effort to further their own. PETA’s “I’d Rather Go Naked than Wear Fur” campaign resorts to sexually explicit imagery without regard to the perceptions of their intended audience and, consequently, renders their campaign