Remember all of those GoDaddy ads that featured NASCAR driver Danica Patrick fake-stripping? PETA had no problem with those. Those were fine. But once GoDaddy created an ad that featured a woman selling a puppy on a GoDaddy-hosted site, A LINE WAS CROSSED. Of course, PETA’s rationale for their objection was as thin as their objection to most of the ads they speak out against — they argued that the ad featured a puppy mill, but as far as I can tell, it was just a barn.

So yeah, my issue with the whole situation is that Super Bowl ads that objectify women are just fine to PETA, but god help if an animal is even cast in an advertisement. I know it’s not PETA’s job to fight for women’s rights, but you’d think that an organization whose central belief is ostensibly that all life is equally valuable would posit women and men as equally valuable, too. (Which is laughable anyway; they not only believe in kill shelters, they run one of the largest kill shelters in the country and kill animals they can’t place faster than other kill shelters.) But they don’t, and they have a long history of selling women as only sexually valuable and normalizing violence toward women in their ads. Keep reading »