sexist campaigns & where the problem lies: the sexist majority, catering to the sexist majority, or rather misogyny towards women who participate?

two links:

-- an article that proposes we stop supporting non-profits that use misogyny to promote their causes: "who is this supposed to help?" - charities are using increasingly offensive images of women to promote their causes, such as peta highlighting pig welfare. [julie bindel]

-- a letter-to-the-editor from "the 'heavily pregnant' woman who kneeled nearly naked in a metal stall to remind viewers of how mother animals are totally commodified, abused, and denied their every desire on factory farms": "listen to our body language" [noemie ventura, campaign coordinator, peta uk]

and my reaction, from a recent response i sent to a list where those were linked:

i for one am an animal righter who's very much against peta and their sexist tactics - but i do think that the discussion around women who work for peta and participate in these kinds of campaigns, and their position, is a worthwhile one to have. the letter from that peta staff person is important to take into consideration (and i'd like to point out that it's rare that the actual women who participate in those campaigns express their personal opinion - it's usually a p.r. person trotting out the peta party line). my personal view is that when protesting these kinds of campaigns one should be careful to address the issue and not make it about shaming the women who use their bodies; because it's not that a woman goes nude to attract attention that's the problem, but rather the fact that women are expected to use their naked bodies even when the message sent is at the expense of their own dignity: peta wants people to start treating non-human animals with respect, but doesn't think it's a problem to use women's bodies in a demeaning manner to "appeal" to the public. the thing is, those campaigns rely on demeaning somebody - and so the message sent is the opposite of what peta thinks (or pretends) it sends.

so my answer to the question in the title of this post is: all three. but at the same time, criticizing a woman for getting naked "for a cause" is different than criticizing the fact that in our dysfunctional society it takes naked female bodies to draw the public's attention to justice issues. the former can be a misogynistic stance, because it focuses on a particular woman and can become about shaming her and thus not condemn but rather support the system at work, which treats women badly. but that's the whole point of protesting a sexist campaign: to say no to using and abusing women. it's what any organization dedicated to social justice should do on their own; and holding a group accountable for not only being oblivious to this problem but actually profiting from it means taking a feminist stance.

i think a woman who decides to go naked to draw attention to the plight of animals is choosing to do whatever it takes to draw that attention. as noemi ventura says, she "can decide how she wants to express herself" (and what she expresses). it's her activism - as long as it's just hers; nobody says that every woman on this planet should only do stuff that has a certain message. but when it comes to a group like peta, one expects something from their message. that it be ethical and self-consistent, for one. the problem is, if in this case a pregnant peta employee "kneeled nearly naked in a metal stall to remind viewers of how mother animals are totally commodified, abused, and denied their every desire on factory farms," then what is the message really? perhaps the peta employee, who embraces animal rights, may think that "being compared to [animals] is no insult"; but most people aren't there yet (that's why we need activism and awareness campaigns in the first place, right?). i disagree that peta campaigns "force people to look, think and, most importantly, take action" - actually, with a campaign like this one peta accomplishes nothing except to show the public a naked pregnant woman in a cage and compare her to an animal; which doesn't challenge or inform the public about anything at all, so they can go right ahead with both their sexist and speciist views.

but i still can't articulate the point any better than it's layed out in the following comment which i already quoted in a previous post:

It would be worthwhile to demonstrate how cruel the meat industry is to animals by tapping into empathy, using humans to draw a parallel. But the thing is, you have to do something that evokes feelings of outrage and shock. To draw the parallel, the viewers have to feel empathy for the human stand-in in order to then apply that to animals.

That’s not accomplished with putting women naked in cages or painting them up like tigers. In a society in which that is so closely related to images in a great deal of pornography, the display is likely to elicit sexual excitement or moral scolding than outrage on the behalf of the woman.