Determined to go Gillette one better on the repel-your-customer front, animal rights activist group PETA has issued an eye-bleach-inducing video of scraggly and tubby men swinging vegetables strapped to their privates in a bid to persuade men to adopt vegetarian diets.  Against a soundtrack of lust-fueled gangsta rap, PETA claims it's a masculinity issue.  The argument seems to be that swinging – and eating – vegetables is what makes men sexy:

You can't unsee this:

There are so many problems with this that it's hard to get all of them:

Number one, it's the unsexiest thing I've ever seen.  Using vegetables as a substitute for real private parts is something that eunuchs, not normal men, would do.  Sorry to get down to PETA's level here, but such things are called "meat" for a reason, and no vegetable can substitute.

Number two, the actors used have been made up to look absolutely horrible – like perverts, fetishists, creeps, not appealing and handsome men who exude sexual virility.  If you saw one of these people in real life swinging those vegetables, you wouldn't call him sexy; you'd call the police.

Three, it's insulting as heck to men. Are men just sex machines who can be manipulated through private-part matters by PETA ads and can't be sexy otherwise?  Are all men really that insecure about masculinity, to which vegetables will offer a solution?  Not the ones I know.

Four, it's ridiculous.  Vegetarianism has long been associated with wimpiness, given terms such as "carnivore" and "vegetarian," which have been applied even to concepts such as socialism.  Fine for PETA to want to dispel the image that vegetarians are wimps.  But putting out caricatures of pasty, wimped up men with fake sexual organs alongside manic faces isn't the way to dispel this image.

Five, it's junk science.  I looked all over the internet for any validation from a reputable medical source about whether vegetable-eating makes men virile.  Nope, none found.  LiveStrong, which is quite a good source for health information, reports that three things will increase sexual stamina for men who actually need that: Vitamin E, Vitamin D, and Niacin.  Guess what: the magic ingredients are found in, gasp, animal products, or more to point, meat.  (Vitamin E is also found in plant-based oils; Vitamin D can also come from the Sun.)  Promoting vegetables as a virility-enhancer is actually not the way things are according to the human body.

This shows how out to lunch they are.  They would have to hate men to put out ads like this one, given how gross and creepy the men come off.  Yet they want such men on their side, eating vegetables to supposedly increase their masculinity, those poor sorry saps.  Call this a big backfire.  More men are going to eat meat than ever from this one.

Image credit: Grabien, Grabien screen grab.