Playboy bunnies come to London
A protest is planned in London on 4th June, against the opening of a Playboy club in Mayfair. The club is due to have a bar as you’d expect, as well as a casino and as is usual in Playboy clubs, all the waiting staff will be women, dressed as bunnies - ears and little fluffy tail included.
The protest, called the Eff Off Heff campaign is being jointly organised by UKFeminista and Object, two organisations I greatly respect but I can’t help but feel that the energy going into this is a somewhat wasted effort.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate Playboy Clubs as much as the next person. Mostly, they’re just dumb. The idea that some men want to be served drinks by women dressed as bunnies is, frankly, more embarrassing for men as a gender than it is for women. The problem is that entry into Playboy Clubs requires membership and members are exclusively wealthy and probably powerful. For men in positions of power to view women as nothing more useful than servile bunnies is a genuine problem in some workplaces and I certainly don’t want to see us return to Mad Men style office gender politics.
In addition, Playboy market products towards young girls. They make stationery and t-shirts for children as well as items like pencil cases, for girls to take to school. I worry about the message that this gives girls, and the identity that they take from it. I’m not sure they all understand what the Playboy bunny logo means but growing up seeing themselves as bunnies is not exactly going to foster ambition or strong self-image as opposed to a wish to grow up as a ‘glamour model’.
However, dodgy strip clubs are a genuine threat for the women who work there. There can be pressure on the women to perform ‘extras’ and can be full of young immigrant women with little or no skills struggling to earn a living and sometimes paying to perform there. In some ways, the Playboy clubs offer a safer environment for waitresses to earn good money, in tips especially. The outfits are less revealing than the standard thong and tassels in other clubs (if they wear anything at all) although the ‘bunny’ thing is possibly more demeaning. Also, the women there are probably not doing anything worse than modelling - using their looks to earn good money from people dumb enough to give it to them. We - women more so than men - constantly judge women who model in magazines and are increasingly becoming obsessed with their weight. Are Playboy bunnies doing anything worse?
Object make some great points in their general campaigns with regards to lad mag culture, pornography and objectification of women. Lads mags and page 3 perpetuate the objectification of women and bring it into an unbelievable number of households. Playboy Clubs only cater to a select few, but while they may be rich and powerful, there’s no doubt that our workplace culture is phasing these attitudes out. Far more damaging is the fact that young men are still buying Nuts Magazine and thinking that women in their lives should be as sexually available as the women in the mags.
Also, the pornography available these days is becoming increasingly violent. Simple penetration is not enough anymore as women are more degraded than ever before on film. It is also far more widely available on the internet and young men are viewing these images at a younger age than ever before. This has been shown to be having an effect on their expectations of sex with their partners.
Object rightly campaign that this is part of the same problem - objectification of women - but I’m just not sure that fighting against bunnies is the best use of our energies right now. Mostly, I think I’m just hoping that the Playboy Club will be ignored by the general population. It’s embarrassing and anachronistic and protesting against them is just giving them free publicity. I hate the clubs and what they stand for, but I won’t be protesting on Saturday.
