Guest Post: Women's Image

Here is something new at Vegan Family Values: a guest post!  This was written by my husband, Mike Neese, in response to an unfortunate post that we viewed via FaceBook. 
When seen as a joke in passing, I can see the humor, but when the implication is taken seriously this becomes propaganda.

 

 Jokes aside, justifying an argument based on one example is fruitless. Second using women’s beauty as a metric to validate a point of view is not just stupid, but insulting. I mention this only because I have seen this same picture comparison for women as liberal, conservative, republican, and democrat. To that end not only is it offensive and propaganda, but exploitative, and sends the message to women that they are both ugly for what they believe, and that their attractiveness is more important than their beliefs. Third this is an unfair comparison, using cherry picked photographs to “prove” a point; using an airbrushed glamor image of one and a candid/real image of the other.
 I suppose I could start posting actual research on the benefits of veganism to individual health, like the evidence shows:
Vegans have lower total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglycerides, while having about the same HDL cholesterol as Lacto-Ovo and Non-Veg.
Vegans have lower rates of high blood pressure than Lacto-Ovo and Non-Veg.
Vegans have a lower BMI and body fat percentage than Lacto-Ovo and Non-Veg. People who have been vegan for more than 5 years have the lowest BMI of all diet groups studied here.

Or the many other interesting things found here at Vegan Health but my guess is if you are taking life style advice from anonymous picture posting on the internet I should just post pictures of ugly people for you to laugh at, clearly this is acceptable behavior.
My apologies for the rant, but these images irk me on two levels, first propaganda (which is basically a form of lying) and second the exploitation/degradation of women.  Honestly people have enough of a hard time making informed choices without funny lies floating around, and women have a hard enough time battling self image issues with current media standards without having their belief system tied into the mix.
Food for thought:

Vegan (and healthy)

Not vegan (clearly this road goes both ways)