[All photos and video are linked to, but the photos will be embedded after the jump]

Update: Rachel at the F-Word has more on this topic, in reference to a Dutch animal rights group who uses a video of a stripper being skinned alive to make their point.

Alright, I’m really sick of this. I know, every feminist blog from here to the ends of the earth has commented on PETA’s ad campaigns and protest techniques—how they routinely use sexualized images of women to create dialogues about animal cruelty, and how uncool that is for many reasons. And it made me really angry, and then it made me really sad. And then I stopped caring and decided to ignore it all.

Then today I got angry again. Really fucking angry. First I was greeted with this lovely photo over at Jezebel. I thought I was looking at the actual bloodied, injured body of a woman and I was momentarily horrified. Then the caption informed me that it was a PETA protester, staged at a bullfight in Spain. Then I mistakenly decided to wander over to PETA’s website to see if they had any reasoable justification for the image—I couldn’t find one, but I did find these photos from a staged protest in Washington D.C. in which a man uses a stick to beat a woman in a fur coat, ripping the fur off of her and exposing her flesh (get it, just like we do to animals!). The accompanying text uses all sorts of cute puns like “News crews…caught all the action—giving new meaning to the term “beat reporting” and “Thanks to all who made our action a smashing success!”**** Turns out, this is actually a reenactment of a PSA PETA released recently called “Fur is Dead.” I was shocked by the video, which—as described by PETA themselves, shows “A man club[bing] a woman unconscious and then rip[ping] her fur coat off her body.”

The last thing I really want to be doing with my time is criticizing another “progressive” activist organization. At the end of the day, I support PETA’s work—though it’s not the area I choose to focus my energy, the “ethical treatment” of animals should be important to all of us, both as an end in itself, morally, and because it has a huge impact on our health and our environment. But that said, I personally refuse to equate the treatment of animals with the treatment of oppressed human communities (because it’s not just women…check out PETA comparing the American Kennel Club to the KKK). I suppose this is rooted in a debate about whether there is a spectrum of rights when it comes to sentient beings, whether they be “animal” or “human” and honestly, that’s not an argument I’m prepared to have, which might make render my opinion somewhat useless but…BUT.

The point here doesn’t have to be about what rights animals do or don’t have. It is simply about context: PETA knows they are operating within potent historical narratives—without a history of the objectification/subjugation of women, or slavery and racism, their imagery wouldn’t be nearly as powerful. The viewer is meant to see a woman being beaten or a person in a KKK cloak and make a clear connection: I don’t want to be an abuser, I don’t believe in racial purity—are my behaviors analogous to these people? And making people put themselves in the position of the perpetrator or the victim is actually a pretty good way to cause your audience to reflect. But widespread racism, violence against women, colonialism…these aren’t animal narratives. They are human narratives, crimes committed by humans against other humans, violences that erupt from uniquely human social constructs, and they are still happening, every day around the world.

I am a straight white cis woman. I would never compare my experiences to those of a person of color, or a lesbian or transwoman, because those experiences  aren’t mine to coopt and manipulate to make my own point. Similarly, it is not PETA’s place to use tropes about violence against women to make points about violence against animals. They aren’t the same—a woman is not a bull or a baby seal or a pig or a cow. And forget about the fact that a lot of women would resent being compared to one of the above because they feel that as humans their rights are distinct, and focus instead of the fact that already women have a long history of being treated like and compared to “animals” (i.e., sentient beings who are viewed as having inferior intelligence and importance, and are thus able to be owned and treated like objects). We are not living in a “post-racist” or “post-sexist” world, it’s not like these things are “up for grabs,”—”hey, everyone knows beating women is wrong, let’s show people how beating animals is the same!” Newsflash: we haven’t ended violence against women yet, folks. Please, show pictures of animals being slaughtered. Expose horrifying factory farms. Educate everyone about how the industrialized food system has increasingly moved behind closed doors, hiding from the consumer the disgusting and unethical ways in which animals are bred and killed. There is enough history there to scare us into, at least, cutting down on the quantities of meat we consume, or eat more organic, or whatever small ways people can find to resist. But don’t keep conflating these multiple, unrelated histories—don’t use one group’s stories to speak for another group, whether animal or human, because it’s disrespectful at best and completely despicable, misogynistic, and racist at worst.

****Furthermore, these puns? Not cute. I didn’t even begin to touch how these stages protests are akin to entertainment, and there is nothing entertaining or humorous about beating women.