Sex Sells

When I came across this lovely PETA ad (which is unaltered except for the text, so yes, that faux sheep corpse is in the actual ad), I knew I had to mess with it. PETA is notoriously awful, and this offensive, deceitful ad is just one of many examples.

The original text implied that sheep are killed for their wool. This is a blatant lie. In fact, sheep need to be sheared so their wool doesn’t grow too much and suffocate them. Except for the occasional nick during the process, sheep are completely unharmed.

Using a naked, attractive woman in advertising is a common tactic that promotes the objectification of women. So I replaced the text with the phrase “sex sells” to bring awareness to PETA’s perpetuation of this sexist tactic. And I added, “The sheep is fine. Your lie detector isn’t,” to encourage people to not take ads at face value, especially if they are designed to incite a strong emotional response.

For this project, I worked exclusively in Adobe Photoshop. My prior experience with the program consisted of a little digital drawing back in middle school and early high school, so working with its photo editing tools was completely new to me. I enjoyed learning how to use the Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tools, and I had to use a combination of the two when I removed the text from around the model’s legs.