News Flash: Lettuce Ladies Will Be Ogled and Not Listened To

I'd never seen or heard of FMyLife.com until a little over a week ago, when a Twitter friend directed me to it because I'd had a particularly bad day (e.g., computer virus chaos followed by falling and busting my chin open, passing out, and getting stitches--fun). The tag line on the site is "My life sucks but I don't give a f****" (yes, the asterisks appear there; I didn't substitute them for letters), and according to the site itself, "Fmylife.com contains a daily dose of short anecdotes, based on a simple recipe: in a few sentences, users can tell everyone the shitty moment which ruined their day." So I had just barely learned about all this when a PETA blogger wrote a post on it last Wednesday, which began thus:

The posts on FMyLife got me thinking about PETA's campaigners. Does everything always go right for our warriors on the front lines as they wear bikinis in blizzards and parade down crowded streets with little more than pasties to cover their naughty bits? So I asked around and, sure enough, dug up a few great FML stories to share:

I went to a fire station dressed as a Lettuce Lady to hand out Tofurky sandwiches. The firefighters just stared at my chest the entire time I was trying to explain the benefits of a vegetarian diet. At the end of the hour, I looked down and saw my fake boob (and a little bit of my real one) hanging out of my lettuce. FML . . .

I'm generally a compassionate and overly empathetic person, to my own detriment at times, but I have to say that in this case, I really don't care about anyone's embarrassment or ruined day. "The firefighters just stared at my chest the entire time I was trying to explain the benefits of a vegetarian diet." No way. Really?! I'm shocked.

I'm not going to feel empathy for people who experience embarrassing clothing mishaps when they go out in public wearing next to nothing for the express purpose of bringing attention to their bodies--especially when it's done in the name of a good cause, but the near-nakedness actually impedes the intended cause. Blatantly turning yourself into a sex object doesn't make people listen to the thoughtful, brilliant things you may have to say--it makes them look at you, the whole point of going out in the getup in the first place, but it doesn't get them to take you or anything you say seriously. Indeed, in many cases, it does just the opposite. But Lettuce Ladies and PETA campaign directors, maybe if you tried approaching these firefighters as if you take your cause (and yourself) seriously, they'd take it and you seriously too, and maybe they'd listen to you instead of staring at Lettuce Ladies' chests.

I much prefer this guy's method of getting firefighters' attention, a respectful method that apparently has brought a lot of people into the plant-based diet fold--and a method that, I'd be willing to bet money, has changed a lot more minds and diets than the Lettuce Lady stunts. (I previously directed your attention to firefighter Rip Esselstyn and his notable work--and book--in this post: "A Dog & Whales with a Home; Firefighters with Healthy Hearts (and, um, other parts).")

As I said a couple weeks ago, I really loved the Cloris Leachman "Let Vegetarianism Grow on You" ad that PETA put together, and I could support campaigns like that, but the usual Lettuce Ladies aren't doing the cause much--or arguably any--good. Stories such as another included in the FMyLife post, in which a PETA stunt woman dressed in a "sexy Santa costume" lamented that the newspaper the day after her protest focused on the fact that strong winds kept lifting her skirt and showing her "pink 'Red Sox' panties," aren't exactly anomalies. What these women are wearing--or rather not wearing--always gets more attention than the actual message, and it makes a mockery of the cause.

Keep the vital undercover investigations. Keep the Cloris Leachman ad and make more like it. Keep the efforts to engender compassion among teens and children. But PETA, please, lose the Lettuce Ladies.

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Edit: Immediately after publishing and re-reading this, I realized that I had come down harder than I originally intended to on the young women who take on the Lettuce Ladies roles themselves. I believe in personal responsibility and accountability, absolutely, but I also recognize that a lot of these young women are convinced this is serious, effective activism by an organization they admire and respect. I do recognize that most of them wouldn't decide to go out and do what they're doing without the encouragement of PETA. So my apologies if this post seems to be placing all or even the bulk of the blame on the "Lettuce Ladies" themselves; their sponsoring organization holds at least equal, if not more, responsibility here.