Porn with animal involvement is not to everyone's tastes but People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) plans to launch a
porn site – all in the name of animal rights.
PETA said
it hopes to raise awareness of veganism through a mix of pornography
and graphic footage of animal suffering.
PETA
has often been accused of campaigning for animal rights at the cost of
exploiting women.
A Facebook group, Real Women Against PETA, was
launched after the organisation paid for a billboard showing an obese
woman with the message: "Save the Whales. Lose the Blubber. Go
Vegetarian."
"PETA
is extremely disingenuous," said Jennifer Pozner, executive director of
the New York-based advocacy group Women In Media & News. "They have
consistently used active sexism as their marketing strategy to garner
attention. Their use of sexism has gotten more extreme and more
degrading.
PETA
has filed paperwork to launch its pornography site when the
controversial new. xxx domain becomes active in early December.
Visitors to the site will initially be presented
with pornographic content as well as images from PETA's salacious ads
and campaigns. Those images will be followed by pictures and
video shot undercover of the mistreatment of animals. The site will
also include links to vegetarian and vegan – using no animal products –
starter kits as well as recipes.
"We try to use every outlet that we can to speak up for
animals," PETA campaign manager Lindsay Rajt said. "We anticipated that this new triple-X domain name
would be a hot topic and we immediately decided to use it and take
advantage of it to try to promote the animal rights message."
Jill Dolan, director of the program in gender and sexuality studies at Princeton University, was critical of the PETA campaigns.
"Exploiting
porn to get people's juices going seems lame; exploiting pornographic
images only of women to make their point is retrograde and misogynist,"
Dolan said in an email. "Come on, PETA. Don't be Neanderthals."
Rajt denied that PETA has been insensitive to women.
"Our
demonstrators, the models, all chose to participate in our campaigns
… It's not a very feminist thing to do to turn to women and tell them
whether or not they can use their voices, their bodies to express their
voice."
PETA's ad campaigns have
featured adult film stars Sasha Grey, Ron Jeremy, Kelly Brook (above) and Jenna Jameson. In
2008, the organisation's YouTube account was temporarily shut down
after showing videos of celebrities and others posing nude.
"When
people first visit the site, it will be very enticing and once they go
just a little bit deeper, that's when they'll be confronted with images
that we hope will make them stop and think and get them talking and
hopefully encourage them to make a lifestyle change to a plant-based
diet," Rajt said.
