Playboy for schoolgirls? Surely some mistake
Natalie Fairburn is finance director of Blueprint. Asked why her company should be producing a line of stationary aimed at schoolgirls and carrying the Playboy name, she tersely responded that her company "has no comment to make on that matter". Somebody must have a comment to make on this matter was my own response when I stood in Easons in Cork's Patrick Street last Saturday, astonished into almost total silence by this shelf-line of equipment.
Playboy and bunny-girls on a school shelf? Pornography and prostitution as fashion-symbols for pre-teen girls? Surely somebody somewhere had made a mistake? Well, yes, and the somebody was me. My silence was not total enough to inhibit my demand to see a floor manager; who admitted to some private awareness that this was not really a suitable line of goods to be peddling to young girls, but she had to admit as well that it was a big seller and most of the sales were to parents. Buying them for their daughters.
Patrick Irwin is the retail general manager of Easons in Dublin. Yes, there had been one or two complaints about the range, but he wouldn't agree that people buying it were making the connection with the sex industry and pornography. It was, he thought, a very nice line of stationery and while the company took the complaints seriously, it did not see that the logical next step would be to withdraw it.
Well, yes, he agreed that the visual linkage to the pornographic magazine and the bunny-girl prostitution business was there to be made, "but the buyers of the stationery are teenagers and won't be making that link". He felt I was stretching the connection way beyond his - and most people's horizons.
But if the connection wasn't expected to be made, I wondered, why should it be invited at all? Why should schoolgirls be lured into accepting something as innocently fashionable when, in fact, it was a direct reference to the use of women, by men, in the sex industry?
"I hear what you're saying," he said, "and if it's as clear a linkage as you say I would have a problem. But I only see it as a lovely range of stationery aimed at teenagers."
Seriously worried by now that I might be seeking evil where no evil exists, I went back to the shop to look again at the stationery. Pronounced Playboy letterhead, the bunny-girl logo, the range credited to Playboy and Rabbit Head Design (no UK number available).
As I read I was joined by a smartly-dressed, cheerful mother, who reached immediately for several of the items. She said she was buying them for her daughter. I asked if the reference to Playboy magazine bothered her and she said no, it didn't; I asked if she thought Playboy is pornography and she said yes, it is, but these things were just stationery. "Bunny-girls?" I wondered. "Yes, I know, but this is what she wants."
I realise that my disbelief is out of place, almost insulting. I realise that in one way Patrick Irwin is right: parents are not making the connection - but the connection they're avoiding is not so much the link between the stationery and Hugh Hefner's ill-gotten millions, but between pornography and the Ian Huntleys of this world, the murderers of children like Sara Payne. If in one way I abhor the thought that young Irish girls are being codded into thinking that the bunny-girl logo is fun and cool while in reality it objectivises them and puts a sleazy market-value on their bodies, even more insidious is how this kind of marketing disguises the all-too-real link between pornography, sexual fantasy and violent sex crime.
Mary Crilly of the Rape Crisis Centre tells me that the connection between pornography and sexual violence is so self-evident as to be unarguable. Pornography often portrays women as enjoying violence or as sexually submissive. At the same time, girls and young women, who'd scream abuse at anyone who touched them accidentally, are wearing provocative slogans on their clothes and wearing clothes which in themselves are as provocative as possible.
"Parents won't see what their daughters are wearing, they don't want to see, and they don't want to have to think about it." This must be true. Parents abandon their own sense of responsibility for the choices they are making because of their daughters' demand: "it's what she wants".
And when I check with Roches Stores in Cork, the assistant tells me that they've sold out - "a very popular brand indeed". Robert Ward is spokesman for the marketing department of Roches Stores. It wasn't so much that the line had been sold out as that the supply had been cut off. The range had been taken off the shelves last week as a result of an article in the Irish Independent.
"We had no issues with it but decided to withdraw it. It came to us as part of a package and when we looked at it again we felt it had slipped through the net and we took it off in all our outlets."
David Brandist is the buyer for Partners Stationery Suppliers UK, providers of this schoolgirl stationery for Ireland. He was away when I rang, but the receptionist said the company had received no complaints about the Playboy range. It is the business of Partners, along with the individual shops and buyers, to decide what is most likely to sell to their customers. These are the people who decided that Ireland, where the Minister for Health and Children was nearly burned at the stake a few weeks ago for daring to suggest a need for pre-teen contraceptive advice, was just the place to accept this blatant sexualisation of children. And, with the belated exception of Roches Stores, they were right.
- Mary Leland
