Brennan and Fiction: the Victorians were a little trashy.

Right now I'm reading Villette, which is one of the novels Charlotte Brontë wrote that no one cares about. It takes place in a French girls' school and so far just seems to be a super gothic take on a very common style of Victorian girls' school novel, where everyone has fun little intrigues and is very attractive and they solve some kind of mystery like Nancy Drew. Instead, Brontë deals with the reality of a girls' school as a viper's nest full of evil teenage bitches embroiled in extensive networks of spies, informants and saboteurs, which is basically how I remember my high school years. (Think of this as the 19th century's Mean Girls; I really like the author's own line about 'the wide difference that lies between the novelist's and the poet's ideal "jeune fille" and the said "jeune fille" as she really is.')

What's interesting about Villette is that it's told from the perspective of a narrator about whom we know quite little and who repeatedly describes herself as calm, collected, uninteresting, dispassionate, and basically totally normal. We don't read the story (or at least, we don't start out reading the story) for Lucy Snowe, the drifting governess and domestic servant through whose perspective we have access to characters with feelings. Snowe is constantly under siege from other's affects, and I'm struck reading the novel how much modern authors emphasize observation of others rather than the direct reception of their affects.

"In an unguarded moment, I chanced to say that, of the two errors; I considered falsehood worse than an occasional lapse in church-attendance. The poor girls were tutored to report in Catholic ears whatever the Protestant teacher said. An edifying consequence ensued. Something--an unseen, an indefinite, a nameless--something stole between myself and these my best pupils: the bouquets continued to be offered, but conversation thence forth became impracticable. As I paced the alleys or sat in the berceau, a girl never came to my right hand but a teacher, as if by magic, appeared at my left. Also, wonderful to relate, Madame's shoes of silence brought her continually to my back, as quick, as noiseless nd unexpected, as some wandering zephyr."

This is still readable as a simple bounded communication where Miss Snowe's students observed her and began to treat her differently; but she herself repeatedly notes her reception or refusal of others' affects. She maintains control of her class by refusing their affect of mirth or the one it could trigger in her, anger. By remaining cool and dignified she earns the respect of a few key girls in the front of the room, after which most of the others stop trying to torment her and set to work in a totally different frame of mind. Only one girl continues to try to annoy Miss Snowe, and when Miss Snowe pushes her into a book-closet and locks it for being disruptive, a frisson of approval travels around the room:

"It so happened that this girl, Dolores by name, and a Catalonian by race, was the sort of character at once dreaded and hated by all her associates; the act of summary justice above noted proved popular: there was not one present but, in her heart, liked to see it done.

They were stilled for a moment; then a smile--not a laugh--passed from desk to desk: then--when I had gravely and tranquilly resturned to the estrade, courteously requested silence, and commenced a dictation as if nothing at all had happened--the pens travelled peacefully over the pages, and the remainder of the lesson passed in order and indusutry."

Still, what strikes me most are the passages where Snowe receives others' affects, because this is essentially what she's in the book to do, being a vaguely impoverished 30-something Englishwoman who will not talk about her own past, even in a first-person narrative. In this passage she deals with Madame, the principal of the school:

"Dîtes donc," said Madame sternly, "vous sentez vous réellement trop faible?"

I might have said "Yes," and gone back to nursery obscurity, and there, perhaps, mouldred for the rest of my life; but looking up at Madame, I saw in her countenance a something that made me think twice ere I decided. At that instant she did not wear a woman's aspect, but rather a man's. Power of a particular kind strongly limned itself in all her traits, and that power was not my kind of power: neither sympathy, nor congeniality, nor submission, were the emotions it awakened. I stood--not soothed, nor won, nor overwhelmed. It seemed as if a challenge of strength between opposing gifts was given, and I suddenly felt all the dishonor of my diffidence--all the pusillanimity of my slackness to aspire."

I might be the only one who really digs Victorian literature, but whatever. As I was reading and noticing this stuff about Snowe, I was reminded of another placeholder heroine -- Bella from Twilight. I've never read the series (couldn't stop obsessing over the grammar errors; also killed The Da Vinci Code for me), but based on what I've heard and read about it, Bella has no real personality. She has feelings, but only in response to other people's feelings, and she's kind of left intentionally blank so that we can step into her shoes and stare soulfully at some sparkly vampires, or feel what it might be like to do that.

I think these kind of empty, placeholder-type characters create the opportunity for us to feel the imaginary affects directed at the individual. We have a good impression of what Bella senses, if not always what she thinks about it. We feel her requisite, normal feelings, like confusion and annoyance with her dad; but we receive powerful affects from the supernatural boyfriends in her life, and I've been told much of the novel's appeal is this, its ability to make you feel what Bella is feeling, to feel the affects attributed to her and to belong to the transmission system described in the novel.

I also just finished Anna Karenina, and I experienced something very like that when I was reading. Tolstoy is a verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry wordy guy and he writes epics the likes of which Stephen King can only dream about, but he goes into insane intimate detail about the affects and effects of affects for his characters. Karenina's storyline in the novel is basically just about the contorted, confused feelings of a woman trying to leave her husband, the effects of these feelings on her lover, and the effects of his feelings about her feelings on Anna. The novel is third-person and follows several different tracks, but the reader is invited into the innermost mind of each character, even secondary characters, so that we can feel each affect and see the way they interact in a larger view.

Obviously the mechanics are on different levels, but in terms of the transmission of affect, I think Anna Karenina and Villette are doing for me what Twilight does for many people -- it gives me the ability to feel what a character feels, and to partially enter that character's world. Victorian gothic literature is just a little more acceptable, apparently because the people who complain about the sexual content and coercive affects in Twilight don't read very much. Villette is much more about the competition, manipulation and personal political intrigue between young women, but Anna Karenina is just as vaguely suggestive as Twilight, and when it was published, Anna's adventures served much the same purpose that Bella's do now. Morality had to be served by Anna's suicide at the end of the novel, but otherwise, both works seemed designed in large part to transmit imaginary affects into the reader.

Pathetic Appeal: Final Draft

Link!

Since we were assigned to write for our blog audience, I concentrated on the characteristics most of us have in common: we're young, most of us lean left and think of ourselves as politically interested, we respond positively to humor and negatively (or at least unpredictably) to drama. It was difficult for me to find something I thought all of us could do, and in doing so I decided to cut a small segment of my blog population, those who would normally vote Republican (and not for Ron Paul) or who would not be abjectly horrified at the prospect of a Republican President Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, or Sarah Palin. I introduce "the Democrats" as the first group under discussion, because this title allows both inclusion and exclusion from the audience -- we're inside the leftist group, but we don't necessarily consider ourselves those who have failed to organize, since we're young. By both shifting and taking the blame, I can demand support without necessarily making the audience feel too personally guilty. I move through humorous enargeia images of both stereotypical party members, inviting identification with me as an observer of the absurd and repulsion for the idiocy of the other party, but I tried to use a self-deprecating tone in order to keep out of ivory towers and reassure the readers that we're not being arrogant.

I move through the piece with the theme of sabotage, first introducing it as the missing tactic of "fighting dirty," using examples from my life and widening the identification to the "we" first person. I then excuse the audience from decency, to which most liberals immediately gravitate as an ideology, by explaining how it doesn't work because Republicans will only meet us halfway. By convincing the readers to co-opt their shady tactics, but in a cleverer way than they can, and for ultimate justice, I allow the reader to participate in a fantasy of political overthrow, which I reinforce by explaining Republican ideological tactics with metaphors (the American soldier, Joe the Plumber) that liberals will probably instinctively reject, and then by suggesting that Ron Paul is the only sane option, and also that Democratic primary elections won't suffer from our absence. The fantasy is the catharsis that releases our tension with our own party's inactivity and our frustration with the high likelihood of a Republican president in 2012, turning this energy into the James Bond intellectual espionage affect that my readers will need to re-register as Republicans and not feel dirty. I think this radical-seeming tactic can be more appealing than more general ones like donating to the Democratic campaign, especially with a young audience, because it seems bigger and more "real."

Pathetic Appeal: Rough Draft

Link to GoogleDoc

Since we were assigned to write for our blog audience, I concentrated on the characteristics most of us have in common: we're young, most of us lean left and think of ourselves as politically interested, we respond positively to humor and negatively (or at least unpredictably) to drama. It was difficult for me to find something I thought all of us could do, and in doing so I decided to cut a small segment of my blog population, those who would normally vote Republican (and not for Ron Paul) or who would not be abjectly horrified at the prospect of a Republican President Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, or Sarah Palin. I introduce "the Democrats" as the first group under discussion, because this title allows both inclusion and exclusion from the audience -- we're inside the leftist group, but we don't necessarily consider ourselves those who have failed to organize, since we're young. By both shifting and taking the blame, I can demand support without necessarily making the audience feel too personally guilty. I move through humorous enargeia images of both stereotypical party members, inviting identification with me as an observer of the absurd and repulsion for the idiocy of the other party, but I tried to use a self-deprecating tone in order to keep out of ivory towers and reassure the readers that we're not being arrogant.

I move through the piece with the theme of sabotage, first introducing it as the missing tactic of "fighting dirty," using examples from my life and widening the identification to the "we" first person. I then excuse the audience from decency, to which most liberals immediately gravitate as an ideology, by explaining how it doesn't work because Republicans will only meet us halfway. By convincing the readers to co-opt their shady tactics, but in a cleverer way than they can, and for ultimate justice, I allow the reader to participate in a fantasy of political overthrow, which I reinforce by explaining Republican ideological tactics with metaphors (the American soldier, Joe the Plumber) that liberals will probably instinctively reject, and then by suggesting that Ron Paul is the only sane option, and also that Democratic primary elections won't suffer from our absence. The fantasy is the catharsis that releases our tension with our own party's inactivity and our frustration with the high likelihood of a Republican president in 2012, turning this energy into the James Bond intellectual espionage affect that my readers will need to re-register as Republicans and not feel dirty. I think this radical-seeming tactic can be more appealing than more general ones like donating to the Democratic campaign, especially with a young audience, because it seems bigger and more "real."

Advice on pacing problems and flow will be especially welcome, because this sucker is a hot mess!

Dewey, Lippmann, Smith & Hyde: Obscure Folk Band or Worst Party Ever?

I took a course from Dr. Longaker a few semesters ago, Democracy and the Media, which I highly recommend and which was structured along the lines of a debate about the public. Dr. Longaker introduced two texts, The Phantom Public by Walter Lippmann and The Public and Its Problems by John Dewey, and each assignment was essentially a question about whether "the public" could be trusted with governmental decision-making, or whether it existed at all.

Lippmann, like McGee, held that the public was a fantasy, called falsely into being in order to deliberate on national crises that could not be decided by a formal government. Lippmann had faith in the rationality of governing bodies rather than the public, believing that most of government was a complex, formal business best left up to the experts -- the bureaucrats. "The public" could have no reasoned opinion on the vast majority of governmental affairs and could not possibly be polled through direct democracy on every single thing, like highway funding or rezoning regulations, and therefore found it ridiculous that the mass media does ask this phantom public to weigh in on a bevy of government issues that doesn't directly concern it. Government policy should only come with a public that is actually affected by the policy in question, so Lippmann felt the media should stay out of government except when the entire nation really was effected, like when presidents had to be elected, or in specifically local matters, where a public actually existed. Otherwise, our representatives are the only people who can really decide whether or not Texas wants to tax the lottery. Even though we elected them, we can't do much from a distance about the machinations in Congress other than send lobbyists, and media coverage of all government activity only encourages restiveness, particularly because the public has little hope of understanding most of the legislative process.

John Dewey, on the other hand, believed that if a person could come to understand a car, then he or she could comfortably come to understand a law. Dewey did not believe in the essential stupidity of the crowd, unlike most other rhetoricians, though he agreed with Lippmann that a public is created when a body of people is affected by something; it doesn't exist all the time, waiting to react. Dewey believed that rather than attempting to inform the public objectively, which never works, new journalists should throw off the shackles of staid debate and embrace pathos and other persuasive techniques as a form of information. Objectivity was an outdated illusion which was holding journalists back, doing the public a disservice, and too easy to manipulate. The new journalism had the benefit of an obvious spin, allowing an emotionally intelligent public to more easily decide whether and how to engage with it. As long as individual publics, created by issues, could be coerced into engaging with the media, asking questions, and truly deliberating on the information, a nonobjective media could inspire people to action, interest them in being informed, and be a lot more fun to write.

Dewey touched on it briefly, but Lippmann barely considered the role of pathos in the public at all (except to confound discourse), so I found it interesting that Smith and Hyde took an almost conservative view of the public as a big emotional body feeding on itself and the rhetor, the difference between a crowd and a group of people. Usually when the public is constructed as the crowd or the hoi polloi, rhetoricians focus more on the animal nature of the irrational body than its emotional sensitivity. Speakers fear calling up the darkest sides of human nature, inciting riots or mass violence or looting, but generally do not connect these uncontrollable states to emotions unless they mention anger or the "carnival atmosphere" that can accompany insurrection. Running under this construction is the belief that crowds and people are basically animalian, not that they're basically responsive to emotional appeals.

Especially with what we've learned about mirror neurons, Smith and Hyde's article is an extremely compelling explanation of the public. I wish they had spent a little more time describing how a crowd processes an emotion; after they talked about how emotions can fire back and forth it seemed like they slipped into a fairly straightforward pathetic dissection of John Edwards, and except for a few lines about how audience members could transfer pity for each other into identification into fear for themselves, they didn't talk about how the emotions were being reflected around the room. I wonder of mob mentalities develop because of this reflection process -- if crowds get out of hand because as emotions are reflected around the room, they may magnify as well as transfer.

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.

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.

Aristotle's Rhetoric: Book II, 12-26

In the 1970s, history, sociology, and indeed most of the liberal arts were rocked by the beginnings of subaltern studies, or the study of everyday people rather than kings, generals and the usual historical figures. Basically, somebody sat down and thought about whether the Renaissance would mean the same thing to the 95% of the population who couldn't read or write. Put in terms of the everyday, most of our big cultural moments (wars excepted) make much less sense. In the same way that our everyday lives are shaped much more by what we understand to be a moral and social status quo than the political minutiae going on in Washington or the arts scene in New York, most of the Greeks living at Aristotle's time were not much concerned with Aristotelian rhetoric, and it rarely touched their lives except through trickledown expressions of power by authorities influenced by Aristotle.

And, indeed, Aristotle had very little to do with and very little use for the poor and the average. Why would a skilled rhetor try to convince anyone without good birth, power, and money -- the people he describes in the latter part of Book II? For Aristotle, a poor person is indeed a person without money. This means Aristotle's conception of a person necessarily involves a certain amount of wealth, power and breeding. A poor person is a person who lacks basic qualities, and Aristotle suggests that their temperaments are simple opposites to his peers and that their emotions can be played upon by offering them what they lack -- offering full personhood.

Offering poor people money or resources or power or prestige usually does work, but not always. Poor people do, in fact, want money, because the rest of Aristotle's society also assumes that "people" have certain amounts of money and prestige and set up society so that everything only works if you start out at Aristotlian levels of personhood. We see this reflected in our own society -- millions of American homeless people cannot access VA and disability benefits to which they are legally entitled because they do not have home addresses at which to receive documents. The American VA and disability benefit system is set up to serve people with homes, because people with homes are the standard. People without homes don't just suffer from a lack -- they're unintelligible to the system.

Could it be that poor people don't just suffer from a simple fixable lack? Could it possibly be that the experience of being poor creates a totally different type of person, only understandable in some ways as lacking -- and most of those lacks created by a system which privileges different resources? Since most homeless people do have possessions, it's usually inappropriate to think of them as simply destitute. In fact, when reintroduced to home life, many homeless people cannot make the shift. Used to sleeping outdoors and to living in large camps of anywhere between a dozen and a hundred others, rehomed homeless people often feel socially isolated and lonely, not to mention claustrophobic. Homes obviously provide health-related benefits like protection from the elements and clean water, but they do not provide enough of those benefits to offset the change in social condition for many people, and returns from state housing to the street are actually incredibly common.

Not having money is not just the opposite of having money. Poor people in our society and for Aristotle are often defined by what they do not have access to, but poor people in Bhutan are defined by being the happiest people in the world by many metrics. There, poverty is equal to happiness, not a preventative factor. In Bhutan, happiness isn't a financially quantifiable phenomenon, except for how wealth complicates life. Poverty is a state in which other life can happen.

Aristotle's obsession with opposites is one of the ancient complications I've never been able to get past. Though Aristotle characterizes some types of people well -- for instance, I think his ideas about the powerful, wealthy and exceptional are probably solid -- opposites don't actually exist in a natural state, and you can't define something by defining its opposite. Defining the lower classes as he does is both inaccurate and kind of lazy.

Today, we still have issues communicating across class boundaries, and the American feminist movement has insane difficulty trying to be inclusive to women of color and women of the lower classes. These women have concerns that the American feminist movement doesn't address and almost can't understand -- decisions upperclass feminists make would be unthinkable or nonsensical to lower-class women. Many American feminists of the upper class choose to raise their children with gender-neutral clothing, environments and toys through early childhood. The decision whether or not to oppress one's child with media-based beauty expectations makes a lot less sense to a woman who knows that her child's social exclusion isn't just a tough circumstance he or she can rise above later in life, but a fatal mistake in a community founded on horizontal connections and solidarity in some ways based on social similarities. Teaching a child to perform masculinity or femininity is a necessary act in these communities, but the assumption by upper class women that the poor are trading empowerment for necessities is probably also false -- this assumption doesn't allow for women very different than the American feminist mainstream to resist gendered oppression in their own way, perhaps by developing different kinds of feminine performance, like the complex Chola figure.