The Discerning Brute: fashion, food & etiquette for the ethically handsome man

Yes, it’s that time of year again! When the stores roll out the fur racks and the egos swell into furry puffs of animals’ skins to showcase big wealth, uber-luxury, and so-called ‘high-class’. What are fabulous, anti-fur peeps to do? Duh… Get loud and get organized… and get on it NOW.

celebs in fur promote cruelty

More and more men wear fur

Last year there was almost no anti-fur presence on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the thousands of Cruella DeVilles too often went unchallenged on the public sidewalks. Obnoxious hipsters are wearing those flappy fur hats by the thousands, and gals are dragging corpses uptown and downtown.

That’s why this year I am putting a call out to get sophisticated, and get started early. We need classy fashionistos and fashionistas to gather materials, strategies, ideas, and events so there is a strong anti-fur presence coming from a place that is intimidating. We want people to know Fur is not welcome in our cities and towns. I’m not talking about picketing…

We need to come at this problem from two places, the web and the street.

WEB:

1. Use social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace to send out your personalized call to action, or to expose the fur industry. This is the one I typically send out (make sure to attach images of animals typically used for fur in their uncaged/untrapped cuteness and then link to a video or image of a fur farm):

Hello Friends!

The seasons to bundle up are quickly approaching. Unfortunately there are many people who try to stay warm in the most horrible way – that’s right, fur season is back.

I can’t imagine that people in the fashion industry continue to use fur. Designers are often bullied into including fur in their collections with threats from magazine editors who are paid off by the fur industry to exclude their lines unless they comply. Many other people simply have no idea how fur garments are made – or don’t want to know.

By ignoring the ways in which the things we purchase and support are made, we silence the cries of those who are tortured. The truth is often too horrible for us to believe, so many of us lie to ourselves. We deny that their cries even exist, because if their cries did exist, they would be impossible to ignore and it would mean we would have to change.

The cries of the fox, chinchilla, or rabbit who are vaginally and anally electrocuted to death – the raccoon who is bludgeoned to death, the mink or chinchilla whose neck is snapped, the beaver whose ribcage is crushed, and whose miserable life is spent caged, malnourished, and unloved in a death-camp, are silenced. The wild Lynx who chews her own arm off to escape, or slowly bleeds to death in a steel trap is no better off.

While a huge amount of fur imported from Asia is in fact dog and cat fur, we wouldn’t be wearing fur if the animal were our own dog or cat. So what’s the difference?

This winter, please speak for the silenced. Let people know that their fur and fur-trim is the product of a tortured, murdered, and silenced animal – and it is anything but sexy, chic, and classy.

Please join fashion icons Stella McCartney, Calvin Klein and Kenneth Cole, supermodel Christy Turlington, Actress Charlize Theron, Pink, Ellen, Martha Stewart, Danity Kane and others on http://furisdead.com/ and http://www.hsus.org/furfree/ to learn more about fur and what you can do to help.

Feel free to pass this letter along.

Joshua

2. Send a letter to an editor, a magazine, or a company that is selling or promoting fur – and make it print-worthy. Unfortunately this is almost every magazine, newspaper, and department store.
Here’s how: http://www.hsus.org/furfree/resources/letters_to_the_editor_about_fur.html

STREET:

1. Fur Walks: Simple! Gather 4 or 5 of your friends, and get decked out in awesome outfits, and appear as if you’re stylish luminaries on your way to a dinner or an event, and who just so happen to continually come across people in fur, so you just have to say something. No pins, posters, or picket lines! This is stealth-mode! Come up with a few clever/interesting things to start a conversation like, “Where did you get that coat?”.

2. Video / Leaflet / Interview presence: Lets gather our resources on literature, portable video capabilities, and media skills to turn the tables on how people see activism. Everyone wants to be a star, so if we approach people in fur as if we are reporters, asking their opinions and starting conversation that way, it is much easier to give them literature and get through. Plus we can direct them back to our blogs/websites because they’ll love to see themselves! One of my favorite ideas is to use a camera and host method where you make video interviews of people in fur where our stylish/funny host interviews them on camera and starts the dialogue that way.

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What are your ideas?

Get involved, spread the word and plan a meeting/action ASAP!