The playboy bunny has captured the adoration and exaltation of today's youth. One can find the icon on the back's of cars, shirts, key chains, and now on junior sizes.
"The rabbit, the bunny, in America has a sexual meaning, and I chose it because it's a fresh animal, shy, vivacious, jumping - sexy... A girl resembles a bunny..." says Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine, to journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1967.
The Playboy bunny has become a popular icon not only among adults but its image has become mainstream. Children are now targets and billboards for not only the logo but the underlying conceptual theology on gender and sex. A theology they are too young to understand; yet, have already adopted and internalized before they have had a chance to experience alternative perceptions on sex and sexuality. How did this pervasive bunny breed so fast? The media and advertisement has shaped and changed the perception of its unacceptable character into an acceptable one. Advertisement has become the PR for the sex industry.
Glamour the New Career for Women:
In 2005 a survey found in an article by Kira Cochrane, Why Porn is the New Glamour?, that 63% of girls between the ages of 15 and 19 wanted to become glamour models and 25% lap dancers. Porn or at least soft porn has been glamorized and the lines between classy and trashy have been blurred over the last two decades. The playboy bunny icon can be found anywhere from pens, erasers, cute little pink slippers, on shirts, pants, and now on clothes for kids. First wave feminists fought against the promiscuous bunny and protested the playboy lifestyle for demeaning women as sex objects. Where are those women now? After years of marketing, the industry has craftily changed public perceptions. Not only have they changed the publics' opinions but are ensuring acceptance by the next generation.
How the Bunny Breeds:
Hugh Hefner told the Washington Post, "I don't care if a baby holds up a Playboy bunny rattle." In a few years this just might be the case. The movie Thirteen aimed at preteens depicts a scene where two junior high school students, Caroline and Emily are debating over why the playboy bunny was a popular choice for an airbrush tattoo at a bar-mitzvah. "Kids want it because it's a cute little bunny," says Emily. Caroline objects and says, "It's Playboy, which makes them sexy or something."
Alison Pollet in her 2004 article, Strip till You Drop, says, "The bunny's getting an extreme makeover; the company's amping up its playful, mildly risqué qualities and de-emphasizing its pornographic ones," Despite the statement that CEO, Christie Hefner, Hugh Hefner's daughter, told Business Week Online in 2004 that their "target age was 18 -25 and a crossover into a younger market was unintentional", their product placement in teen stores has become pervasive. Hot Topic stores carry the logo on hats, blankets, pillows, shirts, etc. The rabbit now appears on pencils, stationary, erasers, and makeup. M.A.C. makeup now has a colour called "Playmate Pink".
The goal for any company logo is to Increase recognition, desensitize the public, become part of the norm, and gain acceptability among the markets. Christie Hefner tells Ariel Levy how the company's icon should be interpreted by the public in Levy's book Female Chauvinist Pigs (2005), "The rabbit head symbolizes sexy fun...A little bit of in-your-face...but in a fun way...'frisky' is a good word." If children at a young age encounter this image and learn to equate it with 'fun' and 'frisky', then the chances of them free falling down the rabbit hole into a not-so-wonderful wonderland of sex, objectification, and perhaps pornography are a high possibility. Even if one does not enter the industry or uphold their vision they are still empowering and perpetuating one. The world is embracing a popular one sided vision of what it means to be sexy - the Hefner vision.
