The Naked State of the Union, in case you haven’t seen it yet, is the latest nudity-dependent stunt from the good people at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). It’s kind of brilliant. You go to the website, and you see a very attractive woman who promises to take her clothes off. The catch is that she takes her clothes off very slowly, and so if you want to see her completely naked (which you do), you have to listen to her talk about why you shouldn’t eat meat, or use monkey shampoo, or walk your dog too fast, or something like that. I’m not sure what she said, actually. I was mostly focused on the naked thing. But because the video, wisely, doesn’t have a fast-forward option, I did have to listen, in some sense, to her spiel, and it probably seeped in mildly.
Very tricksy, PETA.
The obvious question, of course, is whether I approve, morally, of exploiting our societal horndogged-ness to get across what’s otherwise a pretty noble message. After all, we’re all against being cruel to animals, and as it happens I’m particularly against being cruel to cute animals (I should start my own organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Cute Animals in Particular (PETCAP)). And we’re all in favor of hot women getting naked.
And yet, and yet … There’s something that makes me uneasy about the whole thing. It’s like if the National Organization for Women had a national Whoppers for Everyone Day to help sell its noble message of treating women with dignity. I mean, we love Whoppers, right — and sure, maybe they treat the Whopper cows badly, shooting them up with hormones and cramming them into tiny pens that don’t give them room to move, and sure, those cows expel a lot of methane into air, increasing the rate of global warming, and sure, it’s probably bad for our souls to eat animals that have been commodified in defiance of their existential cow-ness — but hey, feminism’s good, right, and we’re gonna keep killing and eating the Whopper cows for the foreseeable future anyway, so we may as well exploit that to advance the cause.
What if, instead, PETA got some of its celebrity supporters to just do really silly things, like sing karaoke to Journey songs. Everybody loves Journey, and karaoke, and celebrities. I bet that would work as well, and it would be innocent and pure and add to the sum of goodness in the world.
Just a thought.
UPDATE: I just noticed that our very own Righteous Revolution blog has been on the case too. She writes:
They have a nasty little habit of objectifying and degrading women, destroying what dignity we may have, in order to make a point about the dignity of animals. Yes, animals have dignity. Yes, the meat industry (etc) is disgusting and destroys that dignity. But you don’t call attention to that fact by becoming the meat industry, by treating women like the meat in that industry.
