florabundance
Well-known member
I thought it was an interesting article and a lot of posters on here express their views (positive/negative) about the playboy look in terms of makeup, but rarely about the company(?) itself.
The problem with Playboy
With Lily Cole posing for French Playboy, and a new film featuring a bunny girl heroine, Hugh Hefner's famous brand seems more popular than ever among young women. But please don't be taken in by the fluffy image, pleads Joan Smith.
There is a scene towards the beginning of the new film, The House Bunny, in which some of the women who live in the Playboy mansion go shopping. They seize hot little numbers from the racks and congregate at the till, squealing like over-excited 10-year-olds. It is a prelapsarian moment because the film's heroine, Shelley, does not know she is about to be booted out of the mansion that Hugh Hefner, the octogenarian Playboy founder, shares with his girlfriends.
Shelley is a Playboy bunny - a real blast from the past. Dumb but lovable, she wanders on to a college campus after being exiled from Hefner's abode and discovers a sorority house occupied by a bunch of social misfits. Each of Playboy's hate figures is represented among these losers and feminists, including a woman so terrified of sex that she wears a clanking metal corset. But Shelley takes pity on the hopeless college women, offering to pass on the tricks that only a Playboy bunny can teach them - how to love shopping and conceal just how clever they are.
These are reportedly tough times for the Playboy empire - its shares trading at $2.33 (£1.35) at the beginning of this week, down from $12 a year ago. But one area where the brand has recently been successful is in reaching out beyond its core male audience and convincing young women that the bunny girl image is benign, and even cool. The power of the brand's cross marketing is impressive: Alta Loma Entertainment, a subsidiary of Playboy Enterprises Inc, readily agreed when the producers of The House Bunny asked if they could film at the Playboy mansion, and Hefner plays himself as an avuncular figure in the film, which has a 12A rating.
Over the past decade, much of the brand's revenue has come from a range of women's merchandise, sold in shops around the world; a Playboy store opened in central London last year and the bunny logo is featured on every item sold there, from frilly knickers to fluffy slippers. The logo can also be found on pencil cases and jewellery, leading Kate Townshend to note in the TES earlier this year that in some primary schools it is "the height of cool to display that iconic set of bunny ears". Hefner appears in a reality TV show, The Girls Next Door, which features him horsing around with his Playboy-model girlfriends - the show seems to be aimed at an audience of teenage and twentysomething women. And, this month, the cutting edge teenage model, Lily Cole, appears on the cover of the French edition of Playboy, wearing nothing but white socks and cuddling an outsize teddy bear.
For any young woman seduced by that sweet bunny logo, it's worth considering the history that underpins it. Because while Playboy continually tries to market itself as hip - and is under even more pressure to do so at the moment - the reality is that the brand is based on ideas about women that would be hilarious if they weren't so demeaning. Hefner has always presented himself as a champion of sexual freedom, claiming he can't understand why feminists turned on him in the 1970s as they began to make a distinction between genuine sexual liberation and the fake liberation championed by Playboy. "It was the first time I was labelled as the enemy," he said recently. "And I didn't know what the fuck they were talking about."
t's hard to believe anyone could be that obtuse. Hefner was born in 1926 and his family were Methodists; he characterises his career as a rebellion against his parents' puritanism, but the reality is that his empire is built on a model of gender relations that reflects the period in which he grew up. Women had always existed to serve men, waiting on them at home; the Playboy clubs which opened in the 1960s turned this drudgery into a paying job and tried to make it seem glamorous. The clubs were staffed by Playboy bunnies - the actual women behind that fluffy logo - who were no more than glorified waitresses.
Bunny Regina, who worked at the Playboy club in Detroit in the late 1960s, kept a copy of her bunny manual, which regulated every aspect of the women's behaviour in minute detail. Its aim seems to have been to make sure that the women were docile, passive objects. Bunnies were allowed to "converse briefly with patrons, provided that conversation is limited to a polite exchange of pleasantries", but not to eat or drink in front of them. They were inspected when they came on duty and awarded demerits if they were improperly turned out: five demerits for "unkept" hair, lipstick which was too pale or "repeated costume offenses" such as "bunny ears not worn in center of head, bent incorrectly". A bunny who racked up 100 demerits faced dismissal. In 1963, the feminist writer Gloria Steinem went undercover to work as a bunny at the New York Playboy club and denounced the job as grindingly hard work for very little money.
In the 21st century, the bunny logo has been carefully detached from this reactionary history and is being rebranded to young women as something cool and female-friendly. It's easy to see why Playboy is happy to be associated with The House Bunny, which links its ethos with teen romance, and glosses over its long-standing links with the legal sex industry. The Playboy empire has come a long way since its main business was gambling clubs where men could enjoy being waited on by bunnies, but it is still promoting a 1950s version of gender relations in which women have to pretend to be little girls and avoid challenging men.
Playboy products have very little going for them, apart from the bunny logo, and anyone who wants really sexy lingerie would do better visiting Myla than the Playboy store in London. But Hefner appears as a father figure in The House Bunny, and is still claiming that he helped to liberate women. It's a breathtaking piece of cheek from an 82-year-old polygynist whose chief claim to fame is dressing up adult women as rabbits. Young women shouldn't fall for it.
The problem with Playboy
With Lily Cole posing for French Playboy, and a new film featuring a bunny girl heroine, Hugh Hefner's famous brand seems more popular than ever among young women. But please don't be taken in by the fluffy image, pleads Joan Smith.
There is a scene towards the beginning of the new film, The House Bunny, in which some of the women who live in the Playboy mansion go shopping. They seize hot little numbers from the racks and congregate at the till, squealing like over-excited 10-year-olds. It is a prelapsarian moment because the film's heroine, Shelley, does not know she is about to be booted out of the mansion that Hugh Hefner, the octogenarian Playboy founder, shares with his girlfriends.
Shelley is a Playboy bunny - a real blast from the past. Dumb but lovable, she wanders on to a college campus after being exiled from Hefner's abode and discovers a sorority house occupied by a bunch of social misfits. Each of Playboy's hate figures is represented among these losers and feminists, including a woman so terrified of sex that she wears a clanking metal corset. But Shelley takes pity on the hopeless college women, offering to pass on the tricks that only a Playboy bunny can teach them - how to love shopping and conceal just how clever they are.
These are reportedly tough times for the Playboy empire - its shares trading at $2.33 (£1.35) at the beginning of this week, down from $12 a year ago. But one area where the brand has recently been successful is in reaching out beyond its core male audience and convincing young women that the bunny girl image is benign, and even cool. The power of the brand's cross marketing is impressive: Alta Loma Entertainment, a subsidiary of Playboy Enterprises Inc, readily agreed when the producers of The House Bunny asked if they could film at the Playboy mansion, and Hefner plays himself as an avuncular figure in the film, which has a 12A rating.
Over the past decade, much of the brand's revenue has come from a range of women's merchandise, sold in shops around the world; a Playboy store opened in central London last year and the bunny logo is featured on every item sold there, from frilly knickers to fluffy slippers. The logo can also be found on pencil cases and jewellery, leading Kate Townshend to note in the TES earlier this year that in some primary schools it is "the height of cool to display that iconic set of bunny ears". Hefner appears in a reality TV show, The Girls Next Door, which features him horsing around with his Playboy-model girlfriends - the show seems to be aimed at an audience of teenage and twentysomething women. And, this month, the cutting edge teenage model, Lily Cole, appears on the cover of the French edition of Playboy, wearing nothing but white socks and cuddling an outsize teddy bear.
For any young woman seduced by that sweet bunny logo, it's worth considering the history that underpins it. Because while Playboy continually tries to market itself as hip - and is under even more pressure to do so at the moment - the reality is that the brand is based on ideas about women that would be hilarious if they weren't so demeaning. Hefner has always presented himself as a champion of sexual freedom, claiming he can't understand why feminists turned on him in the 1970s as they began to make a distinction between genuine sexual liberation and the fake liberation championed by Playboy. "It was the first time I was labelled as the enemy," he said recently. "And I didn't know what the fuck they were talking about."
t's hard to believe anyone could be that obtuse. Hefner was born in 1926 and his family were Methodists; he characterises his career as a rebellion against his parents' puritanism, but the reality is that his empire is built on a model of gender relations that reflects the period in which he grew up. Women had always existed to serve men, waiting on them at home; the Playboy clubs which opened in the 1960s turned this drudgery into a paying job and tried to make it seem glamorous. The clubs were staffed by Playboy bunnies - the actual women behind that fluffy logo - who were no more than glorified waitresses.
Bunny Regina, who worked at the Playboy club in Detroit in the late 1960s, kept a copy of her bunny manual, which regulated every aspect of the women's behaviour in minute detail. Its aim seems to have been to make sure that the women were docile, passive objects. Bunnies were allowed to "converse briefly with patrons, provided that conversation is limited to a polite exchange of pleasantries", but not to eat or drink in front of them. They were inspected when they came on duty and awarded demerits if they were improperly turned out: five demerits for "unkept" hair, lipstick which was too pale or "repeated costume offenses" such as "bunny ears not worn in center of head, bent incorrectly". A bunny who racked up 100 demerits faced dismissal. In 1963, the feminist writer Gloria Steinem went undercover to work as a bunny at the New York Playboy club and denounced the job as grindingly hard work for very little money.
In the 21st century, the bunny logo has been carefully detached from this reactionary history and is being rebranded to young women as something cool and female-friendly. It's easy to see why Playboy is happy to be associated with The House Bunny, which links its ethos with teen romance, and glosses over its long-standing links with the legal sex industry. The Playboy empire has come a long way since its main business was gambling clubs where men could enjoy being waited on by bunnies, but it is still promoting a 1950s version of gender relations in which women have to pretend to be little girls and avoid challenging men.
Playboy products have very little going for them, apart from the bunny logo, and anyone who wants really sexy lingerie would do better visiting Myla than the Playboy store in London. But Hefner appears as a father figure in The House Bunny, and is still claiming that he helped to liberate women. It's a breathtaking piece of cheek from an 82-year-old polygynist whose chief claim to fame is dressing up adult women as rabbits. Young women shouldn't fall for it.
