‘Stay Firm and Fresh’ PETA ad suggests a vegan diet will keep men fertile

There are carrots. There are cucumbers. An elongated eggplant makes an appearance. Each is flanked by a pair of some rounder member of the produce kingdom — think onions, coconuts and limes.

Oh, PETA. Does your lack of subtlety know no bounds? The activist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have released a new online video ad sporting the catch-phrase "Stay Firm and Fresh."

The idea here seems to be that eating a vegan diet will increase a man's sexual stamina, and apparently the advertising firm Fallon London thought the best way to visually represent this concept would be to strap some atomically accurate arrangements of fruits and veggies to the crotches of a collection or rather sketchy looking dudes and have them dance around in slow motion.

If that doesn't make a fella want to give up meat, we don't know what will.

Also see: Can the smell of fresh bread make us kinder to strangers?

The ad apparently honours World Vegan Day. Advertising magazine Australian Creative characterized the campaign as "unequivocally awful", and Huffington Post described it as "so lewd and full of so much thrusting" that "we're almost inclined to never want to eat a carrot again."

PETA has a bit of a reputation for poor choices in advertising.

An ad released early this year which also espoused the sexual advantages of a vegan diet, seemed to imply that being vegan would make men so randy they might actually injure their girlfriends — and that this was a good thing. The ad was roundly criticized by domestic violence activists for it's message.

Also see: Controversial diet makes a comeback: video

But perhaps it's not the message of the "Stay Firm and Fresh"ad that's the problem. Who knows, maybe PETA's associate U.K. director Mimi Bekhechi was right when she said, "When it comes to making love, the blood trying to squeeze through clogged arteries make for a sluggish carnivore in the bedroom."

The problem is that this ad does very little to get that message across. What we do learn is that an old man with a giant gourd tied to his crotch is unlikely to convince anyone to go vegan.