Visual Analysis: Celina Jaitley for PETA

The ad I'm actually analyzing is at the very bottom of this post. Its main headline is "Beaten, Shackled, and Abused," and it features Celina Jaitley. But before all that, it's history time!

PETA has gotten a pretty bad reputation in recent years for publishing highly sexualized ads, almost universally featuring women, to combat animal abuse and promote vegetarianism. The Lettuce Ladies, pictured right, wander the streets of major cities, promising that "vegetarians taste better." One of their more recent and most famous campaigns, "I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur," built the structure from which PETA is still working: vegetarians are sexy, and if you share their opinions, you can have access to these sexy people.

Women are much more likely to become vegetarians than men; animal rights organizations are almost always disproportionately female, even compared to woman-dominated mainstream social justice. PETA, seeing that it already had major supporters from one sphere, decided to go after the other, using one of the most famously effective advertising strategies: the highly sexualized display of women's bodies.

Especially since vegetarianism and a concern for animals are often treated as highly feminine traits (a conception capitalized on by meat manufacturers like Hungry Man and Burger King), PETA was trying with its earliest ads to make vegetarianism sexy, to women as well as to men. By presenting a self-owned sexuality that involved vegetarianism, PETA promised women that caring about animals didn't turn them into sexless mommy drones with shrill voices. PETA also promised men that if they cared about animals, they would be much more attractive to women.

As time went by and the sexualized ads grew incredibly popular, PETA began to shift its focus from presenting a female figure who looked at the audience and proudly displayed her body, like the ad in which Pamela Anderson shows us that "all animals have the same parts." In this ad, Anderson is highly sexualized and totally naked, but she's looking us right in the eye with a huge smile on her face. She knows we're looking and she enjoys the attention.

Contrast this with later ads by PETA in the same basic vein. In these ads, women do not engage with the camera; they are draped across the screen like Titian models, not sitting up or greeting us with energy; and these women are increasingly pictured in situations which suggest sexual abuse or bondage.

The bondage connection only got easier when PETA shifted its ads' attention from promoting vegetarianism, as in the Pam Anderson ads, and moved toward animal abuse, including protests of the Ringling Bros. Circus and of elephant abuse in general, sometimes specifically Thai abuse.

Here our model is looking at the camera, but she looks half-animal herself, and unlike the shock value we get from the human meat ad, her wounds seem placed to make the text work rather than to suggest death or pain. This isn't a woman who knows she looks good; this is a sex kitten, dehumanized, depersonalized, and designed to serve the viewer. Even the colors in the font and the bright background have much more to say about sex than death: the model's expression, heavy makeup and airbrushed attractiveness automatically tell us that this isn't a "serious" ad, that we can respond with lust or envy/emulation. And this is a smart move by PETA: no one likes ads that make us feel guilty about animal abuse and factory farming, so why not choose an ad that motivates us in a different way? If we can motivate people to participate in the animal welfare movement by promising them that this movement is full of attractive women who will have sex with them (like the Lettuce Ladies), what could possibly go wrong?

But this ad also plays on a slightly nastier media trope, that of presenting women in pain or in danger to suggest a subordinate position and make it easier for a (presumed heterosexual male) viewer to mentally "dominate" them. Sociologists and gender theorists have linked this need to sexually subordinate women to the usurpation of mainstream scripted pornography by online Gonzo, rises in sexual assault, and increases in domestic violence. Some scholars believe this unconscious social misogyny arises from a need to protect heterosexual male privilege by casting women as less than human and available for free use. This is part of what we mean when we say someone is being objectified or treated like a sex object, and why Pam Anderson isn't doing quite the same thing in the ad above: she is a sexual subject, clearly interested in interesting the viewer. Pam Anderson can decide to get naked on a billboard if she wants to, and her alert expression, big smile, confident posture and sense of physical energy let us know she did make this decision. The shackled blonde model, a nameless body instead of a celebrity icon, doesn't give us the same sense of self-assertion. The ad silently asks us what we want her to do (or what we could do to her if we helped stop Thai elephant cruelty).

This repulsive theme slips under the radar almost because of its placement in a PETA ad. This ad wants you to do something ethical, right? So it wouldn't be trying to wake up anything unethical in your subconscious, right? If you're helping animals you definitely can't be hurting women, right? PETA not only nourishes the misogyny they're using, they're nearly encouraging it by providing the safe zone of a conversation about a different kind of ethics.

This is further complicated by the fact that the models themselves are in positions we're supposed to save animals from. If a viewer enjoys the image of this subordinated woman, maybe he can think of himself as her savior rather than her captor. I think these models are enjoying captivity a little too much to make heroism the dominant fantasy called up by the image, but the human mind isn't so discriminating that it can't do both at the same time. The fantasy of heroism allows for the fantasy of domination, even in men who would not think of themselves as seeking out women to dominate. This is partially because the fantasies are inextricably linked: heroism implies a damsel in distress just like domination. The woman is not a full participant in either scenario.

And then PETA decided to get racist with it!

Thanks for that, PETA. Note that this ad drops the "Thai" line. Someone at PETA headquarters remembered that elephants are often associated with India and that Indian women are a relatively underrepresented minority in the sexual objectification olympics, so they gave Celina Jaitley, an Indian actress and beauty queen, a call. (And misspelled her name.) Similar ads feature Shilpa Shetty, another Indian actress, boycotting the Ringling Bros circus by chilling in a cage or jumping through hoops while wearing tiger body paint.

Unlike the ad featuring the blonde, Jaitley's ad has a darkened background, and she's not actively mugging at the camera, suggesting a slightly more serious tone. Dark-skinned, vaguely ethnic men pose behind her with weapons, one poised to strike. Jaitley isn't making her best Playboy face at us (or even looking at us, which would suggest she could see us, which would remind we were creepy voyeurs); instead, she's making her best odalisque face, recalling an Orientalist art style once highly popular in Western Europe. Many artists, including Henri Matisse, painted seraglios and harems full of sexualized Eastern women half-looking or turned away from the viewer's gaze, displaying their (most often naked) bodies as if relatively unaware of an onlooker, or as if the onlooker were invisible. Odalisques have the double creep factor of reducing a person not just to her gender, but to her raced gender/gendered race: this isn't just a hot woman served up on a plate, it's an exotic woman, a rarer prize, suggesting all the mysteries and stereotypes of nonwhite female sexuality.

It helps PETA that they've sexualized a nonwhite woman in a Western way rather than dressing her in a skimpy sari or covering her with henna; these might make the model seem too exotic, too "Other," as if she were on display for specifically ethnic men and not available to white or American ones. Instead, she looks like she stepped out of the "Survivor" video, giving us Americanized hotness as she maintains her subordinate status in whatever convenient jungle she runs around in.

These ads have an obvious surface purpose: animals and people are very similar, made of "the same parts," and we should feel as bad when an elephant is shackled, beaten and abused as we do about Celina Jaitley. But the ad doesn't really make us feel bad for Celina Jaitley (except for the feminists in the audience). This ad makes most of its audience -- its probably young, male, white audience -- want to bang Celina Jaitley, and one of the ways pop culture tells us to seduce women is to share their interests, or at least pretend to. Celina Jaitley is interested in protecting animals. Get the picture?

This ad, operating as it does on an almost completely sexual level, is levied pretty squarely at the youth described by Aristotle -- "of [their] bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they are most swayed and in which they show absence of self-control"; "their impulses are keen but not deep-rooted," which might be why PETA is trying to hook them onto a moral cause without bringing up morality, fearing attrition; and "their lives are mainly spent not in memory but in expectation," meaning that the shaky promise of future sex works well on people who haven't spent 35 years going on bad blind dates.

The ad also works on Aristotle's youth because Aristotle's idea of youth does not include women. In fact, PETA ads are garnering attention from many women's interest and feminist blogs, and resistance is even beginning to spill into the mainstream -- a PETA ad was pulled from the 2010 Super Bowl, though mainstream complaints often have more to do with the obvious sexual nature of the ads than the treatment of the women in them. These are not ads which appeal to women unless those women are interested in either becoming or owning the subordinated, hyperfeminine sex slave depicted by the ads. Strangely enough, PETA is offending its only real safe zone. As Aristotle notes, young men's passions don't last too long, and I'm not certain PETA is trying to drum up interest in becoming a vegetarian for two months until you figure out you've been friend-zoned for being obvious.

The Celina Jaitley ad, despite the call to stop Thai elephant cruelty, is about evoking desire for Celina Jaitley. The advertisers hope this will prompt you to help out PETA, where you will go to meet Celina Jaitley or an appropriate substitute, with whom you can then have fantastic, bondage- themed (but still ethical) sex.