30 May 2013

Are Playboy bunnies feminism’s biggest paradox?

If modern feminism is about freedom of expression, then there’s nothing wrong with choosing to be viewed as a sexual object.

Sara, Hana and Aree have pretty different interests. Sara is a trainee psychotherapist who dreams of running a holistic therapy centre, Hana manages her own cupcake business but hopes to move into event planning and Aree recently graduated with a degree in Accounting and Management. But they have one thing in common. Every day, they dress up as sexy bunnies and hop on the bus to work at the Playboy Club on Old Park Lane.

“Everyone thinks we’re strippers,” Hana tells me. “But, realistically, when I come to work I’m covered from my shoulders to my toes so I’m probably wearing more than I would on a night out back home in Belfast.”

It’s not a convincing argument from a woman who’s wearing nothing more than a leotard and a pair of tights (sorry, two pairs of tights; multiple pairs apparently stop your legs wobbling), but it’s easy to understand how Hana’s grown tired of defending her job. Hana works as a valet bunny, which means she serves drinks in the Players’ Bar upstairs. When she’s working, she’s not allowed to sit down, she can’t tell anyone her surname and she’s forbidden from dating members. The same rules apply to Sara and Aree, who work as a VIP host and croupier bunny respectively.

“People know the rules before they come in,” says Sara. “You can look, but you can’t touch. It’s as simple as that.” And if someone did touch? “They’d be asked to leave.”

And quite right too. Sara goes on to explain that every bunny undergoes rigorous self-defense training before taking up a job at the Club; something she seems proud of, but I can’t help but think is unnecessary. These women aren’t war reporters. They’re not working on dangerous territory. They’re serving drinks and dealing cards in a £12,000 a year members’ bar. However rarely they have to use their self-defence skills, and they claim not to have ever needed them, it seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you wear high heels, a leotard and bunny ears and hang around with drunk men, they’re probably going to touch you. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but it does mean you should be aware of the reaction you’re provoking.

Back in the Sixties, when the first Playboy Club was launched in Chicago, Hugh Hefner was, rightly or wrongly, the poster boy of women’s sexual and economic freedom. This is because he employed women at a time when they struggled to get jobs. Nowadays, though, sexual inequality doesn’t exist to the same degree. I’m not undervaluing the work the bunnies do (they have to go though basic Mandarin and Arabic training, and what these girls don’t know about cocktails isn’t worth knowing), but isn’t dressing up as a rabbit for a living a bit, well, degrading?

A Bunny Girl croupier spins the roulette wheel at the London Playboy Club, 20 December 1967. Photograph: Getty Images

The girls have two answers. First, they tell me that 40 per cent of the Club’s members are women. This is basically the same as claiming you’re not racist because you’ve got a black friend. Secondly, they tell me that the Club has a long history of employing its retired bunnies behind the scenes. To understand this, I’m told, I have to hear about the recruitment process.

After filling out an application form online, wannabe bunnies are invited to a recruitment day at the Club. This day has a GCSE Drama vibe. There are team building exercises, group questions and one-on-one interviews. Typically, of every 60 girls who show up to a recruitment day, three are hired. Yes, they’re looking for natural beauty. Yes, they’re looking for past experience. But they’re also looking for something more: longevity.

Take Aree, for example, who dreams of becoming a deal inspector. Trainee croupier bunnies work first at London’s other casinos, where they spend six weeks on roulette training and two on blackjack. They’re given times tables for homework every night. Only after completing the training can they start work at the Playboy Club.

When Aree retires, which she predicts will be within five to ten years, she’ll hang up her bunny ears and apply for a behind-the-scenes job at the Club. Her dreams of becoming a deal inspector will, in all likelihood, be realised.

“A lot of the bunnies who started work here have moved onto into deal inspector or cash desk positions,” explains Sara. “There is room to forge a career out of every area of the Club. Bunny Jess moved into food and beverage management after working as a valet bunny. It is possible, if you want to stay.”

Hana has similar ambitions. “I definitely want to be here in ten years time. I have always wanted to be an event coordinator at the Playboy Mansion. Now I’m here, I just want to keep moving up through the company. That’s just not a prevalent culture in a lot of other companies.”

This, I suppose, is the answer I was looking for. In the Sixties, when women found it difficult to get jobs the Playboy Club employed them. Now that it’s difficult to keep hold of jobs, the Playboy Club offers long-term employment opportunities. A career that places importance on attractiveness is always going to raise eyebrows among feminists. But these girls are pretty, they’re smart and they’ve got more job security than me, so power to them.

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Playboy bunnies in 2011, before the launch of the new Playboy Club in Mayfair. Photograph: Getty Images

Tabatha Leggett is a freelance journalist who has been published in GQ and VICE and on the London Review of Books blog and Buzzfeed.com.

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Feminism

18 August 2016

The songs I write are usually described as “personal” – but for me they’re political

“Political songwriter” was a monikor reserved for Billy Bragg, or Paul Weller, or the Redskins. But not all political music is in-your-face.

After all these weeks of overwhelming news events, thoughts of dread and awfulness and apocalypse, a funny thing has happened to me. I’ve started writing songs, which I haven’t done for a year or more. Not about the dread, or the awfulness, or the apocalypse, but in spite of them, or perhaps more than that – as a deliberate alternative, a need to counter the negativity by doing something creative.

I talk to Ben about this and he reminds me of the lines by Bertolt Brecht: “In the dark times/Will there also be singing?/Yes, there will also be singing./About the dark times.” I love that, though I’m not so sure it’s exactly what I’m doing. I don’t want to write an anti-Trump or anti-Brexit song, and I probably couldn’t if I tried. I was never the kind who wrote overtly political songs.

I was regarded as a confessional songwriter, though all my talk of love was often more a means to describe the state of things between men and women than an attempt to be romantic. Our first single, “Each and Every One”, was intended as an angry lyric about being a female musician, patronised and overlooked by male music critics. My band the Marine Girls had attracted several reviews along the lines of “not bad for a girl” and so the opening lines addressed this: “If you ever feel the time/To drop me a loving line/Maybe you should just think twice/ I don’t wait around on your advice”. It was the instructions of music critics I wasn’t waiting around for, but I wrote it too subtly, and so it was heard as a lovelorn lament, a lonely girl waiting for a letter from a boy.

In contrast, the description of “political songwriter” was reserved for Billy Bragg, or Paul Weller, or the Redskins, with their in-your-face lyrics: “Keep on keepin’ on/Till the fight is won . . . No point in fighting anyway/If we don’t win the day/No point if we don’t/Shoot the bastards afterwards”.

I always preferred songs containing specific characters, personalising the politics. Stories are better than slogans, and so Paul Weller’s “Eton Rifles” is better than his “Walls Come Tumbling Down”, as it seems rooted in an actual event (however imaginary). Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding” is loved for the richness of its detail, the “new winter coat and shoes for the wife/And a bicycle on the boy’s birthday”, and my favourite Billy Bragg lyric is “Between the Wars”, a peace-seeking plea for sanity in a nuclear-weaponised world. The lovely lines “Sweet moderation, heart of this nation,/Desert us not, we are between the wars” have always stayed with me, and came into my mind again recently, as we seemed to be disintegrating into furiously polarised factions. I tweeted about how much I loved those words, and Billy replied to me, saying that back in the day they brought him a huge amount of grief from the SWP. Plus ça change.

Frustrated at finding that all my songs were read as personal and domestic (which happens to many different kinds of writers who happen to be women), I tried as I went on to be more overt in my feminism. I wrote “Ugly Little Dreams” about the actress Frances Farmer, and it sounds angry and still current to me – “It’s a battlefield Frances/You fight or concede/Victory to the enemy/Who call your strength insanity” – and “Me and Bobby D” about the lives that men could be revered for yet which were more or less impossible for women: “Sure, I’d love a wild life/But every wild man needs a mother or wife”.

I tried to subvert gender stereotypes in “Protection”, talking about a woman standing in front of a man to protect him, and ending with the line “You’re a girl and I’m a boy”, and in “Hormones” I described being a menopausal woman with menstruating teenagers. These weren’t the bog-standard lyrics of the charts, and most of the songs got nowhere near the charts, but they are still not regarded as truly political.

That’s not going to change now. I’m doing what I have always done: writing songs that are “personal” on the face of it, but which come out of a desire to escape feelings of powerlessness and despair. Singing in the dark times.

Tracey Thorn is a musician and writer, best known as one half of Everything but the Girl. She writes the fortnightly “Off the Record” column for the New Statesman. Her latest book is Naked at the Albert Hall.