Playboy is being marketed to pre-teens like Barbie or Bratz
Kate Townshend
TES
February 15, 2008
At a school where I was
teaching, a nine-year-old girl asked me with genuine
furrowed-brow anxiety: “Is Playboy rude?” She had been
given a Miss February Playboy necklace as a gift from an
older sister and some of her more worldly classmates had
begun to make her feel that it might not be the obvious
and uncomplicated object of envy she had imagined.
Teachers are often expected to deliver sex education as
part of the curriculum, and I like to think of myself as
relatively unflappable. But sex education is one thing,
explaining the pornography market is another. The
significant thing, however, is that this is unlikely to
be an unusual scenario for primary teachers.
As a supply teacher I see lots of different schools and
children. While the challenges and rewards of a tough
inner city primary are inevitably different from those
of a leafy village school, a few things remain constant.
Year 1 children will always shuffle nearer and nearer to
shoe stroking distances on the carpet and the staffroom
will always be mysteriously hard to find.
Oh, and one more thing. There will always be one little
girl eagerly clutching her Playboy pencil case or
fountain pen who might even happily tell you during news
time about her new Playboy-themed bedroom, complete with
curtains and matching duvet set. It is, in certain
primary school circles, the height of cool to display
that iconic set of bunny ears with its traditionally
girly Barbie pink colour scheme. And, hey, it’s a brand
like any other. In the same classes Tracy Beaker,
Transformers and Bratz merchandise will compete for
equal attention. So what’s the problem?
Well, let’s take a look at Playboy. Whatever the
well-documented and ethically dubious problems involved
with marketing any kind of must-have name to children,
much of the stationery that graces our primary
classrooms ties in with children’s television programmes,
films, computer games or books. The Playboy bunny, on
the other hand, is not some feisty talking sidekick from
the latest must-see movie.
In the original sense of the word, it is a scantily clad
adult female, paid to use her sexuality for the
gratification of adult males. And the Playboy business
is in essence a multi-million dollar, international
pornography empire.
These are the uncomfortable facts behind the
unthreateningly pink and fluffy rubbers and rulers
teachers are increasingly used to seeing in classrooms.
Don’t believe it? Take a casual stroll into your nearest
WHSmith and look for the fashion stationery section.
This is not functional office equipment but stationery
clearly aimed at children. The majority of children
consider the Playboy brand to be cute or pretty, with no
deeper understanding of it than this.
In partial response to this disassociation of the brand
from its roots, the London branch of Anti-Porn UK is
running a campaign against Playboy. The campaign’s aim
is to “raise awareness as to the true nature of Playboy”
and it calls on all of us to “bin the bunny”.
While this campaign and others like it aim to raise
adult consciousness of the way in which Playboy is
becoming an everyday brand, for those on the frontline
of its range of influence, explaining the issues
involved is not as simple as it appears. A local
headteacher told me: “We can’t address the issue because
the whole problem with it is that it creates an
association between children and an entirely adult
phenomenon. It is hard to explain things to children
without exposing them to what we are trying to protect
them from.”
The bottom line is that children often want things that
make them feel more grown up. But I cannot accept the
idea that for the little girls in the classes I teach,
the values they absorb will eventually tell them that
their highest potential worth is based on their sexual
attractiveness, and that their bodies are commodities
for male enjoyment before, above and beyond their own.
We are trained as teachers, rightly, to keep our own
political, ideological and religious opinions out of our
teaching and provide our pupils with the resources to
make their own decisions. Playboy’s targeting of the
pre-teen market inevitably catches children before they
have the knowledge or the sophistication to make
informed choices. Binning the bunny must be a better
option than covering our classrooms with it