'Pam Anderson PETA permit nixed by Montreal'

Good grief alan, again you are off the mark by a mile in your suppositions, in this it is about who has "no clue".

All you people do is attack,attack and attack..NO DIALOGUE when someone says ANYTHING you don't agree with...Last I checked,it wasn't me who was labelling anyone or calling anyone names.

But...I'm the one doing the judging.

What is the point of any of these forums,anyway?

It's just a bunch of cheerleading the ideas of a CLIQUE..Trying to humiliate anyone with a different point of view and posturing self-righteousness.

I'm not the one making a joke out of myself.

As has been said ad nauseum on babble in almost every thread,it's the left against the left and if these forums are a reflection of those in the left camp,no wonder we do not and will never have a left leaning government.

Get over yourselves.   

You don't agree with being called buddy..tant pis...I have a problem with being called a sexist..GET IT?

Guess what?...As much as you'd like to believe that you hold all the answers and how much YOU are right and the whole world is wrong,alot would disagree.

It is YOU who is coming across as someone suffering from delusions of grandiore..There'll always be people who disagree with you,so DEAL WITH IT.

And stop playing the gender card,OK..The world isn't against you because you are female.

As I said,get over yourself.

So is Pam Anderson(as well as all other women models/actresses) some kind of traitor to women for choosing to do what she does ?

VanGoghs Ear wrote:

So is Pam Anderson(as well as all other women models/actresses) some kind of traitor to women for choosing to do what she does ?

I don't think so, VGE. I think that's a rather massive and huge diversion and in bad taste and a few other things besides. I'll leave you to figure out, on your own, the difference between traitors and victims when it comes to the subjugation of women.

This thread, indeed this issue, is about whether our society (in this case, my city) should or should not take a stand on the degradation and objectification of women in public spaces which it owns.

I understood what you meant. [b]Who cares[/b] if Pam Anderson is a feminist or a vegan or a Christian Scientist or straight or queer or suffers from bad breath? The ads she produces are part of the subordination of women in our society. She herself is obviously a victim of that subordination - even if she profits from it handsomely and willingly. You can find slaves in slave societies that will tell you how happy they are and how they are better off economically than if they were cut loose. Should we debate whether they are "traitors"? Or should we do something about slavery?

The ones we have to face here are [i]ourselves[/i]. Where do we stand? What do we support? If Pam Anderson disappears in a puff of smoke, the issue raised here will remain.

To get back to PETA, they do animal rights a great disservice with their ads that demean human beings. Sexism is one of their stocks in trade, so is lurid use of violent crime stories, including the sexist and racist-tinged story of the murders of the Downtown Eastside Vancouver women, most of them Native and most of them in the sex trade. Not to mention their infamous Holocaust display.

One of their cruellest campaigns was the "Milk Suckers" trading cards for children, showing conditions they claim milk-drinking causes in kids such as acne, obesity, flatulence from both ends, excess phlegm etc - the kind of things kids get mocked and bullied for on the playground. For shame.

By the way, I know the expression "animal rights" is contentious. I am using it in the Pachamama sense of the rights of Mother Nature, and the right for all living beings to be treated with dignity. I'm not a vegetarian (though I don't eat much meat) and I'm certainly not a vegan (what, no CHEESE???) and find PETA's ideas rather over the top, but that is not my quibble with them - it is how they exploit sexism and other discriminatory and exploitative situations to make their point.

lagatta wrote:

To get back to PETA, they do animal rights a great disservice with their ads that demean human beings. Sexism is one of their stocks in trade, so is lurid use of violent crime stories, including the sexist and racist-tinged story of the murders of the Downtown Eastside Vancouver women, most of them Native and most of them in the sex trade. Not to mention their infamous Holocaust display.

One of their cruellest campaigns was the "Milk Suckers" trading cards for children, showing conditions they claim milk-drinking causes in kids such as acne, obesity, flatulence from both ends, excess phlegm etc - the kind of things kids get mocked and bullied for on the playground. For shame.

By the way, I know the expression "animal rights" is contentious. I am using it in the Pachamama sense of the rights of Mother Nature, and the right for all living beings to be treated with dignity. I'm not a vegetarian (though I don't eat much meat) and I'm certainly not a vegan (what, no CHEESE???) and find PETA's ideas rather over the top, but that is not my quibble with them - it is how they exploit sexism and other discriminatory and exploitative situations to make their point.

The problem with this argument is that animals are an oppressed group, and historically the argument you present falls in the same lines.... "I don't hate those people and I'm not against their emancipation I just hate the strategies of their spokespeople".

Unionist wrote:

I'm not sure why we're debating something as fundamental as this, but what message do you think a child - female or male - gets from an image like this?

The only conceivable conclusion one can get from the thought experiment that the ad presents.

"exploiting humans and treating them as body parts is wrong, it makes me uncomfortable, and animals are not that different so maybe that's wrong too".

That's what I thought anyway, but I guess there's also the possibility that people will have the Judeo-Christian reaction that animals are necessarily inferior to human beings as well as anatomically different, that comparisons are immoral and wrong.

500_Apples wrote:

Unionist wrote:

I'm not sure why we're debating something as fundamental as this, but what message do you think a child - female or male - gets from an image like this?

The only conceivable conclusion one can get from the thought experiment that the ad presents.

"exploiting humans and treating them as body parts is wrong, it makes me uncomfortable, and animals are not that different so maybe that's wrong too".

That's what I thought anyway, but I guess there's also the possibility that people will have the Judeo-Christian reaction that animals are necessarily inferior to human beings as well as anatomically different, that comparisons are immoral and wrong.

I'll tell you how my 8 year old reacted.  The ad was in The Mirror, here in Montreal, with a write up about the controversy.  My daughter asked why she had writing on her.  So I had to explain how butchers have similar pictures up of animals, and how the different parts represent different cuts of meat.  I explained what the ad was trying to do.  I talked about vegetarianism, and I talked a bit about PETA.

You know what she said after all this? (we have these kinds of conversations a lot, she wasn't missing anything)

"Well I think she looks a bit inappropriate."

500_Apples wrote:

She's not a victim... she's benefited tremendously.

Head slaves are kind of like corporate VPs. They may not be the CEO, but they're still exploiters.

Here's a video of Malcolm X on house negroes and field negores:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQe9nUKzvQ

The diversion is now full and complete, and has gone into even more offensive directions. Thanks a lot, VGE - and thanks, Unionist, for having got sucked in and even commenting on it.

I read the commentary, and then finally went and took a peek at the ad itself.

What I found most offensive is that anyone would think such a garish, airbrushed thing would even be remotely attractive. Both the design and the butcher motif are just corny and dumb to the point of embarrasment. It belongs in the back of some joke shop with the whoopie cushions and the bar pranks.

By contrast there are plenty of ads (not so much this side of the atlantic, of course) which show actual nudity  and manage to simply present a person's body in a natural way - not as something to leer over.

Really I think the city's refusal to approve the event was a backhanded act of charity, because otherwise this stale ad would probably have gone over like a lead balloon. It certainly would not have made the national news, and there is a good chance we would not be talking about it here.

Clearly the ad is sexist, because it commodifies women, and clearly the point is that we commodify animals in the same way. It is hypocritical of Pam given that she has made a liviing commodifying women, yet protests the same treatment of animals. It is hypocritical of those who pulled the ad, because clearly they have no objection to commodifying woman, they just don't like the underlying message that essentially the act of commodifying is tantamount to consuming, which is tantamount to eating. 

PS. Pam hails from BC, to my everlasting shame.