Following my post about "vegangelical..."

...Here are some observations from Feministing about the objectification of women to promote meatless eating.

As Feministing points out, using objectified women to sell meat is nothing new. [Here's one of my favorite examples, a Carl's Jr. commercial starring Paris Hilton, a hose, a car, a bucket of suds and a hamburger.] But apparently animal-rights activists, vegetarian organizations and vegan organizations exploit the same tropes as well. For example, here's a commercial from the super-nutball, super-sexist PETA in which Alicia Silverstone comes out of a pool, naked, in slow motion. Somehow, this sells vegetarianism. In a press release about Eva Mendes posing naked for their "Fur? I'd rather go naked!" campaign, PETA, unsurprisingly enough, calls Mendes "one of Hollywood's sexiest leading ladies," "a regular red-carpet knock-out" and, just for some useless "hot-blooded Hispanic" stereotyping, a "sexy Latina." The print text makes it clear that Mendes does not appear as someone you should pay attention to because she decided to abjure fur out of compassion or humanism or rational decision-making. You should pay attention to her because she's glamorous and attractive, and she doesn't wear fur, and do you YOU want to be just as glamorous and attractive as she is? PETA, while supplying my two examples, ain't the only offender of such sexist, objectifying bullshit. See the Feministing entry for details about a vegan strip club [???!!] and the group Vegan Vixens [????!!!!].

Ann Friedman, post author, sums up the screwiness: "[U]sing the "ideal" female body type -- something men want and women want to be -- as an incentive to go vegan...is deeply fucked up, especially because there are dozens of real, compelling reasons to switch to a vegan lifestyle -- none of them based on sexist bullshit." 

P.S.: Here's a super special bonus article from Salon, analyzing the misogynist, objectifying tactics of the popular Skinny Bitch "secret vegan ambush" cookbook.

Lifestyles of the rich and vacuous

Oh, what a dreadful dilemma the aging hipster parents, in their 40s and expecting kids for the first time, face. They have spent so much time creating exquisite, exorbitant interiors, and they now must change their plans. 

Must their curtains woven from mermaid farts and moonbeams succumb to the slovenly onslaughts of partly formed humans who cannot properly wield spoons? 

Will the throne of imported unicorn horns, garnished in a tastefully pseudo-ethnic pattern with laser-etched bees' knees, be relegated to the garage before a tiny being with the gait of a drunken landlubber trying to set up a folding chair on the deck of a ship in a typhoon careens into its corner and bumps its head?

Who gives a shit?

The New York Times Home & Garden section, with its earnest examination of the heart-wrenching dilemmas faced by 0.0000000000000000003% of the U.S. population, cannot be taken seriously.  Most people make a compromise between their new kids and the fabulously decorated, kid-unfriendly house they lived in before kids. I'm sure there's some wailing and gnashing of teeth as certain beloved objects are discarded or removed, but it's not a tragic turning point of life worthy of some Catholic Sacrament of Banished Knickknacks. By characterizing this compromise as some sort of undefeatable tension in the lives of new hoity-toity parents, the New York Times makes the interviewees come off as self-absorbed idiots who not-so-secretly like their Louis Quatorze chairs more than their kids. 

BITE THE WAX TADPOLE, MORONS!!