A bit of levity — though many of us take our vegetarian cause very seriously — to balance out the grim crises in Iran and elsewhere we’ve covered here in PULSE. Pictured is Lydia Guevara, granddaughter of Ernesto “Che”, in a campaign for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Yes, those bandoliers are of baby carrots. Launched first in Argentina, where Che Guevara was born, the campaign is PETA’s first for South America. And lest we forget, the biggest reason behind deforestation in the mighty Amazon is beef, a large chunk of it for export.
P U L S E 
Ha! I was just ducking in here to declare myself speechless. :-P
Except now I think I sputter that there is absolutely no possibility she was breathing in that shoot. I’m pretty sure that this was one of the last frames they got before she keeled over, and I’m just going to blow off all my feelings about this being done to Che’s legacy….
As a vegetarian who “joined the revolution” at 15, I’ve got to be with Lydia on this one. Unlike people like Johnny Lydon (Sex Pistols) who can be found spruiking for Country Life butter (!) for hefty paychecks in the UK, Guevara does this for a cause. The tongue-in-cheek homage to her grandfather (whose iconography has long been commercialised) is effective: making a cause sexy is not new and it might just be fitting that she’s invoking and reclaiming it.
This is in real poor taste. PETA is one of those feel good hollywood-friendly causes that every celebrity can participate in to rescue their sagging careers by generating some controversy while claiming to be acting on principle (does anyone recall a PETA-object pronouncing on the ethical treatment of Humans?). Sensationalism at its worst, it is a true complement to the age of reality tv and nonsense.
There is no homage in here, she is merely an accomplice to the trivialization of Che’s legacy. And there is a difference between making something sexy and in reinforcing the commonplace sexist stereotype of a woman as nothing more than the object of male titillation.
I agree. PETA exploits women to its own ends. This past winter, blistery cold, I drove by a PETA action with women wearing bikinis & holding protest signs outside a KFC. Yesterday, in our local paper, we read that PETA have gone after the band, Phish.
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20090620/NEWS/90619024/PETA-asks-Phish-to-change-name-&referrer=FRONTPAGECAROUSEL
Guevara didn’t have a sagging career, she just happened to be a vegetarian. Some people happen to act on principle, whether they are “Hollywood-friendly” or not. As for the perennial ‘sexy — or sexist?’ debate, we’re not going to resolve that one here right now. To each their own.
Some have sagging careers, others don’t have any. She comes in the illustrious footsteps of Khloe Kardashian. Both belong in the latter category. All are crying out for attention.
As for how effective these adds are: speaking for myself, I never got past the tits and ass to find out what the ‘message’ really was. I can’t imagine it being too different for most males (or for that matter the media which for example in Kardashian’s case focused solely on the size of her derrière). It never fails to titillate, even if it mostly fails to educate. In this case, however, it was just sad.
Do you know her well enough to psychologically appraise her and judge her needy of attention? No, you couldn’t, by your own admission you couldn’t get past the “tits and ass”, then presume to impute that most other males would be the same, that they would be completely eclipsed by the visuals to the point of unamenability to education. If the female form is such a distraction — and here it is covered and hardly pornographic — it is any wonder your gender is amenable to education at all. And here I thought Orson Welles’ aphorism had a large grain of truth to it, that men made civilisation to impress their girlfriends. I hope you have greater faith in women and our capacity for attention when we encounter an attractive male form. If you are distracted by the visuals, the responsibility is in the eye of the beholder. The message is the same.
In her personal defence, how do you know her motivations aren’t altruistic (or that she has no career)? That she genuinely cares about the welfare of all animals, including the human ones, and is an advocate for being a vegetarian? This cheeky visual is supposed to promote just that, and if some baby carrots and a beret distract you, I happen to think she’s on message. And frankly, I’d prefer this healthy, humorous sexuality in service of a good cause to sensationalist, gratuitous violence-porn any day.
Addendum: a few male images used in Peta ads (an organisation whose campaigns and marketing I neither endorse nor of which I am a member)
Well, I’d like to make a few points.
[1] Humans are omnivorous. Check your teeth. You have some for ripping flesh and some for grinding vegetation. There is a reason for this. Most of us have needed both forms of nutrition to survive. Some people can do well as vegetarians, especially if they make sure to combine their plant proteins in such a way as to provide whole proteins, but others are not built that way, the Dalai Lama being one of them. I am another. Some people sicken if they eat too much meat, and others if they don’t eat enough, and, of course, many if they don’t eat them in the right proportion to each other.
It isn’t “cruelty to animals” to eat them or wear them any more than it is “cruelty to plants” to eat them or wear them. Plants die just as surely as animals, and have been shown to be “screaming” as they are killed — in reality they are equal as life forms — and if one were to turn into a fruitarian, as some Buddhists have, only eating fruit that has dropped, one would essentially be a baby killer, or at least practicing forced sterilization of sentient beings… besides killing oneself with malnutrition.
Point being: that everything alive lives off and through everything else, and, for the most part, in accord with the requirements for its survival. True, many of us no longer need animal pelts to keep alive, but we definitely still need plant materials to stay alive, and so finger pointing on these things should be resisted.
[2] Though I revile the exploitation of Che, and somehow feel it more acutely when it’s his own blood, it is in fact the done thing all over the globe, and I try to think of it as the only form of homage the conditioned minds of the masses can really come up with, try to make peace with it that way.
[3] Yesterday I got the bright idea for the Iranian women bridling under the strictures of theocracy to walk out on the streets in their thousands naked. I got the idea from the Moyers Journal piece on Leymah Gbowee. I try very hard to be respectful of Middle Eastern mores, but no matter how hard I think about it, it has never amounted to more than purely a religious or cultural way of letting men off the hook for the duty to reach full manhood, the duty to modulate their animal instincts, and so never stops pissing me off.
It is utterly callow, and it is violent, no matter how they try to balance it with their, mostly sincere, reverence for women.
It seems a massive case of blaming the rape victim for being too alluring. Rape isn’t sex, but violence, and this fetish for covering women never amounts to more than sanctioning rape as the natural sexual impulse, when one gets right down to the kernel of it. I can see the fear of taming warriors too much by making them act like full grown men instead of id-crazed little boys, but if we’re really talking about peace on earth
THIS DESPERATELY NEEDS RESOLVING
in a manner acceptable to everyone.
extinction means gone forever.
This is the most important issue at the moment..
You’d probably be interested in this New Yorker piece. I think we all should wake up to the sixth mass extinction event, since we seem to have caused it.
It absolutely IS the most important issue at the moment, but I sometimes think the plutocrats prefer to keep us crazed to save our fellows at all times, just so we can’t do anything about it.
surely the problem with meat is the capitalist aspect, which ends up with battery farming, people thinking it’s a basic right to eat meat thrice a day, and so on.
99 – I very much doubt the women of Iran would like your naked march idea, although some of the men might.
Ann – using males as sex objects surely doesn’t resolve the sexism issue, but expands it.
Robin, yes the beef trade and capitalism has much to do with it.
That wasn’t the point about males as sex objects. Two wrongs don’t make a right. It was to point out that we each need to take adult responsibility rather than abdicate and deflect responsibility by taking the high-hormone teenage boy’s defence — blaming and holding her responsible for one’s own distractedness (too “provocative”, distracting etc) — 99 pointed this out well.
As for respecting women, we can start by refraining from demeaning Lydia’s credibility and her political advocacy with no basis whatsoever, whatever we happen to think of vegetarianism.
Thank you for seeing the problem but it is not only meat.
I made that little film if you watched it. I also run a website dedicated to raising awareness of these issues. Some of the stories come from sources that I would normally have contempt for but this issue is so importnat that all other concerns go out the window.
http://exitstageright.wordpress.com
qunfuz
Yes, down with factory farming, and the capitalist imperative to kill us all with the profit motive!
It is a basic right to eat meat, because it is a basic right to survive and many cannot survive without eating it. It has historically been against the law for serfs to eat meat, the right to survive being legislated in favor of the feudal lords. And even some, but not all, do need to eat it three times a day to stay healthy, depending on one’s biochemistry.
I’m pretty sure you are right about the women of Iran taking a dim view of my idea, but I think the young ones in Tehran and abroad who are kicking up such a fuss over it, unwittingly and militantly playing into the hands of our covert ops, might better choose it to make their point at this point in history.
I have come to understand the terror of Westernizing in the midst of this debacle, even as I would not stand for my freedom to wear or not wear whatever I damn well pleased, would be dead by now if I lived in certain countries. I abhor the radically too sexualized fashions in the West, and see how they influence the degradation of societies, and I think the young women in Tehran are victims of fashion magazines and movies and tvs, just as they are in Westernized societies, but if they are so hell bent to be liberated from their head scarves that they will help hand Iran over to Halliburton, they ought instead to be hell bent enough to scandalize the clerics right down into molten puddles under their crumpled robes. Quite possibly more effective and less lethal… if they do it in large enough numbers.
i didn’t mean that the way it sounded like other things are not important.
but there is such a thing called biomass.
biomass self-created and has made the planet habitable.
we are destroying it now.
the less living things there are then the less living things there can be.
that is the situation.
we are now losing more than 1000 species a day
sorry
i meant more than a 100o species a year.
However, it could easily be a day because there are so many different species of beetle that when you cut down acres of forest you don’t know what has gone.
the same thing goes for species of fungus, moss and others.
so although that was a mistake i might well have been right.
Thanks for the excellent video and comments, Michael. The loss of biodiversity is one of our most important pressing and urgent issues and I agree that we need to underline this in addition to highlighting the environmental impact of the overconsumption of meat, which is but one facet of a larger issue.
It just occurred to me how much happier I’d be if Lydia had used this bit of grampa’s iconography for women’s rights instead of PETA. I think Comandante Che would have been heartily proud of that.
Agreed; even better, ally with Vandana Shiva who recognizes the interconnectedness between the commodification of women and the commodification of nature.
Oh! YIIIIIIIIIIPES, Ann! That roooooooocks! What a great thought! And Leymah Gbowee! I love it! I love it!
Let’s do it!