Visual Analysis, Final Draft: The Elephant in the Room

VISUAL ANALYSIS: Celina Jaitley for PETA, "Beaten, Shackled and Abused."

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 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 away 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 a cross 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 or "I'd Rather Go Naked" ads, and moved toward animal abuse, including protests of the Ringling Bros. Circus and of elephant abuse in general, sometimes specifically Thai abuse.

On the right, 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 rather than strong shame or pity. 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. This time the disturbing tagline, "BEATEN, SHACKLED, ABUSED," is rendered in a less frivolous but still highly graphic font -- the letters are still off-kilter, but larger and more imposing, and instead of a colored shadow, they're backed by images of fencing. Still, this is a pictorial font, a strange choice for a PSA. Usually when ads are trying to inspire calm or a serious tone they use simple, sans serif or traditional fonts in one or two colors, not stylized block letters. PSAs that use block letters are usually going for fun, light, cautionary messages which ask us to do something simple -- to be fair, usually those letters are more colorful than Jaitley's text, but PETA's fonts tend to look more frivolous and energizing than the text on ads made to shock you into stopping and thinking. They let us know that the activity we're undertaking won't be major or life-changing, but more something we can do to help out our community, something that isn't hard. The block letters and graphic font also appear at the top right of the image, leading us across and down directly to Jaitley's spotlighted face and breasts, inspiring desire, and down her dirtied and shackled body (theoretically inspiring shame) to the call to action, which motivates us to change emotion into behavior.

Dark-skinned, vaguely ethnic men pose behind Jaitley with weapons, one poised to strike, encouraging a racially charged sense of foreboding. We're not personally afraid of these poachers, since the jungle they're in looks remote from our (presumed) surroundings and we cannot legitimately fear the danger threatening the elephants and Jaitley by proxy. Instead, the ad asks for empathy, placing a woman in the same position as an animal and intimating that the experience for the elephant would be similar to the experience Celina Jaitley is having. Empathy should inspire pity (the shackles should be painful, Jaitley is probably uncomfortable), pity should inspire shame and guilt (Americans support the plight of elephants by going to circuses and zoos), and guilt should inspire corrective action (join PETA, fight animal abuse).

But do we really feel pity for Jaitley? Do we feel sad that she might have to endure the same hardships as the elephants? The tank top and hot pants she wears are light gray, suggesting that we should associate her with gray elephants, but the cosmetic weathering and suggestive tailoring don't say "elephant," they say "Playboy cover." The shackles on Jaitley's legs aren't cutting into her skin, though we can see in the brighter light that the chain is slightly rusty -- these are props rather than real restraints, suggesting BDSM more than human trafficking, and she's artistically wrapped the chain around her hands herself, so she can't be that uncomfortable. The only wound Jaitley has is a friction burn of some kind on her chest, which doesn't look painful or serious (or diseased or infected, as it would be on a real elephant) and, along with an artistic dirt streak, helps draw the eye down her cleavage. Jaitley is very beautiful and posed elegantly, which might tell us that the elephant she represents is also beautiful and worthy of saving; but elephants are not sexy creatures, and involving this much sex in the image makes us forget about elephants in a way we might not forget about tigers or snakes, which are often associated with sex in the popular imagination.

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 (like the ones behind her) and not available to white or American ones (like her viewers/saviors). Instead, she looks like she stepped out of the "Survivor" video, giving us Americanized hotness in whatever convenient jungle she runs around in. At the same time, likening nonwhite women to animals associated with their ethnicity is nothing new.

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. In the PETA ad, the odalisque face has the double benefit of looking dramatic and not being a smile. The viewer can engage in a kind of doublethink about Jaitley, associating her both with the odalisque image and with a woman who is sad and serious about elephants or who might be suffering.

These ads have an obvious surface purpose: animals and people are very similar, made of "the same parts," and we should feel shame when an elephant is shackled, beaten and abused, just like the shame PETA suggests we should feel when we look at a captive woman. 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 using 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. When the viewer feels desire for Celina Jaitley and feels that she might be available to him, as PETA suggests by using a variety of very attractive models in its ads and through campaigns like the Lettuce Ladies, the viewer is led to believe that assisting PETA with saving the elephants or going vegan will give him access to Celina Jaitley. Viewers must be given to understand that women who care about animals work within PETA, to which can be joined the social notion that sharing a woman's interests gives you a better chance of sleeping with her.

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. (The ad also does not appeal to men who are not interested in being or owning this sex slave, though our culture encourages this kind of desire in men.) Strangely enough, PETA is offending politically-minded women, 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, and also save some elephants.

However, if viewers read the ad with a critical eye or do not buy into normative representations of captive women as sex objects, the ad may actually inspire anger or repulsion with PETA for using a racial and sexual stereotype and engaging in the sexualization of abuse. Aristotle (and PETA) assume that young men are slaves to sexual desires that match social norms. In reality, young men with some awareness of women's agency, the reactions women often have to sexualized violence, empathy directed at real women instead of represented ones, or different norms of sexual desire have an excellent chance of resisting this PSA because they react adversely to images of captive women.