PETA Porn

All the Google Image Search results for PETA were disturbing/too racy, so instead I typed 'Ron Swanson Meat.'

Generally speaking, I’d say that PETA – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – is a group of confrontational idiots, run by confrontational idiots. I like animals as much as the next guy and I’m very much against factory farming; I’m just also against handing out violent, disturbing comic books to children of fur wearers, running campaigns comparing animal consumption to the Holocaust, and suggesting that murder victims and animals killed for food are one and the same. I think that there’s a line between being committed to something and doing stupid shit because you love attention, and PETA flew across that line years ago in a rocketship powered only by their own insanity.

For a long time, PETA has championed against human consumption of animals by having attractive women take off their clothes in public. I guess their idea is that beautiful naked women will draw attention to their cause at the expense of the womens’ dignity – and Lord knows, you can’t make an omelet without exploiting a few daddy issues – but I think their plan has backfired, because thanks to them I now have it in my head that if I continue to eat meat, PETA will continue to show me naked women, and that is the textbook definition of a win-win situation.

I mean, they’re essentially rewarding me for acting contrary to their cause. What’s phase two of this operation? If I wear a fur coat, they’ll pay my credit card bill? Kill a dog and I get free gas for a year? Look, I’m not suggesting that killing a dog is something I’d want to do. It’d probably be a real crisis of faith for me. But then, it costs easily $40 to fill up The Mystery Wagon, and, I mean, it’s not like we’re about to run out of dogs or anything…

PETA’s most recent counterproductive publicity stunt is their announcement that they’re going to start a porn site. Read on:

(From nationalpost.com)

The nonprofit organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) whose controversial campaigns draw criticism from women’s rights groups, said it hopes to publicize veganism through a mix of pornography and graphic footage of animal suffering.

This, I believe, is a bad idea. It betrays a poor understanding of economics, and an even poorer understanding of pornography. Now, I’ve gone on record many times as saying I can’t/don’t/won’t understand economics, but I do know a thing or two about porn, if only because it’s way more fun to study than economics.

There’s a lot of porn out there. Every 39 minutes, a new porn video is created. According to a statistic that’s at least a couple years old, there are 4.2 million porn sites online. To put that another way, 12% of the entire Internet is porn.

This is where limited economics comes into play: There’s a lot of competition in the porn market. We haven’t cured cancer and there’s no flying cars yet, but at least feel good in knowing that if you want to see something dirty, you’ve got more options and variety at your fingertips than anyone else in human history.

My point is this:

If a man wants to look at pornography online, I’d say it’s pretty unlikely that he’s going to go to a website where his smut is mixed in with pictures of bleeding, tortured to death animals. When a person looks at porn, he isn’t out to have his mind changed about his dietary habits or ponder the ethicality of animal testing.

So yeah – this plan would work like gangbusters if PETA’s porn site was the only porn on the Internet, but it’s not. If you show a guy slaughtered animals when he really just wants to look at some tits, he’s less likely to consider your point of view and more likely to go to any of the 4.2 million other porn sites on the Internet that don’t have an animal rights agenda.

It’s an ineffective plan, to say the very least – PETA’s going to invest a lot of time and energy and nudity into a website that nobody is going to use, right? Well, actually, no. People are going to use it. And this is where PETA’s plan stops being ineffective and starts to downright backfire.

Crushing is a sexual fetish in which people get turned on by watching small animals get tortured to death in various erotic or sexual settings – usually by getting crushed underfoot. The government has done its part to stamp out (so to speak) crush films by legislating against them under various animal cruelty laws, which is one instance where I think we can all agree that government censorship is a beautiful, warranted thing.

So: There’s a not insignificant subculture of Internet perverts who specifically seek out and encourage animal cruelty for sexual purposes, and now PETA, the radical front dedicated to stopping animal cruelty, is making a porn site full of sexy naked women and animal cruelty photos. In other news, the DEA is going to start handing out free meth.

I eat meat because I really like the taste; I hate the idea that in factory farms, a lot of the animals providing this meat die terrified and in significant pain. I don’t think women wear fur coats because they’re jazzed up at the thought of animals being messily skinned, nor do I think people who take insulin do so because it was tested on animals. The vast majority of people, I’d say, benefit from exploitation of animals and acknowledge that it’s a bad thing, but also acknowledge that there’s only so much we can feasibly do to completely stop it while maintaining our own quality of life.

And for this, PETA guilt trips all over us with their ad campaigns and their pie throwing and their support of the Animal Liberation Front, but then they turn around and create a porn site for people who are specifically aroused by the thought of animal suffering and pain – People for the Unethical Treatment of Animals.

I’m all for activism as a means to kick off social change, but I think at this point PETA’s goals have taken a backseat to shock value and spectacle, as evidenced by this most recent stunt. And it’s fine by me if they want to humiliate themselves and become irrelevant; I just wish they’d do it a little quieter so I don’t have to hear about it.

Truman Capps made it through this whole update without making any jokes about veganism, and for that he apologizes.