Playmate Birthday Cakes for Tweens and Teens
Playmate cakes for 12 and 16 year old girls? I think the blogger's tongue-in-cheek monologue sums up my feelings nicely. Via Cakewrecks(dot)blogspot(dot)com, one of my truly favorite humor blogs.
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I'll never understand people who let their tween kids get Playboy cakes and wear t-shirts with the words Sexy Girl and Boy Crazy embroidered on them.
I bet if I put my son in a Male Prostitute shirt people would faint.
But my daughter? Zip her into a Playboy jacket and a pink Hot Stuff shirt and nobody will care.
Sad.
Ah, I love that blog. But in all seriousness, I'm saddened that the playboy logo has become fashionable in clothing and accessories for teens and even children. I've seen real playboy bunny tattoos on 16-year-olds. How sick is it to define yourself based an internationally recognizable symbol of misogyny?
hmm... An interesting note about my assumptions/ignorance... when I read 'playmate' I was confused and immediately thought it had something to do with how, when children are little, their friends are referred to as 'playmates' or they have 'playdates'... I was completely confused on what these cakes could even be.
So, silly me was thinking that these cakes would be something that made light of the girls coming of age to teenagerhood, something toddler-esk? I thought the link would take me to cakes that were made by desperate parents that didn't want their little girls to grow up and have a mind of their own...
Then I clicked on the link and had a 'oooooooooooooooooooooh... PLAYMATE!' moment....
Wow. haha, and here I thought the opposite. Instead they are oversexualizing twelve year olds. Great.... a new low for society.
I'm going to get shot down in flames for this, but....
The bottom line is that it's sad that this has been co-opted into mainstream culture.
That is exactly what has happened.
You could argue - correctly - that mainstream culture puts pressure on girls (and boys) to look 'sexy' and that the definition of what is considered sexy is a very narrow one. It is also true that overt sexualization of girls in the mainstream media starts at too young an age.
That said, I do think that the comments on the blog saying 'what were the parents thinking?' are a little off the mark.
Twenty years ago, a pop group, Right Said Fred scored a novelty hit with a song called 'I'm too sexy'. In the wake of that, t-shirts bearing the logo 'I'm too sexy for my t-shirt' were popular for about a year. Even though the playboy buny logo comes from pornography, in today's climate I see it as no different.
Imagine, if you will, that it's the late 80's, a 14 year old boy goes to a female friends house after school and finds that she's got playboy bunny pillow/bedspread/posters etc. At the time, that would have sent out so many wrong messages as the logo was exclusively associated with porn.
Not so today. The association has become so diluted as to be almost meaningless. Today, the connotation is certainly 'sexy', but not 'pornography'.
The "everybody's doing it and thinks it's OK" is hardly an argument to support this. By itself a playboy bunny cake isn't going to wreck a girl's psyche, but it's one part of a barrage of unhealthy and often conflicting messages about how girls should present their bodies to the world and how they are not their own.
I do agree that some of the commenters on cakewrecks go too far-- having a playboy cake when you're twelve doesn't mean you'll be working the street corner when you're 18.
I agree. And for the record, as someone who was around before the image got co-adopted, it does make me feel uneasy.
If we are talking about the sexualization of young teenage girls, yes, there is a problem, but, I think the target here is the wrong one. There are clothes marketed at young teens, and younger that genuinely do sexualise girls too young.
As far as the playboy bunny is concerned, the problem is with mainstream culture itself. Marketing has become much more slick, and, partly as a result of that the focus is much narrower. There is less (no?) room for anything remotely challenging. This can be seen in all areas of popular culture, whether it's pop music (easier to sell a million copies of a record off the back of Pop Idol to a million people who wouldn't normally go into a record store regularly than actually do the hard slog of letting an artist develop) to films (some examples have been covered here regularly) to fashion.
Sexism is rife in mainstream culture for this very reason. It is much easier (and you can make a faster buck - which is what this basically comes down to) by drawing on stereotypes and asumptions than challenging them. It is indeed a sad state of affiars...while it is right to call out the worst offenders, as this site generally does, surely a greater challenge would be to attack the very system that constantly perpetuates them.
I think you hit on a very good point about where we should place our focus. It reminds me of debates about prostitution which seem to ping pong between whether to address the john or the sex worker end of the problem. Zeroing in on the individuals involved (on either end), it seems to me, is only addressing half the problem, at best. How did either of these people get to a place where they thought of their own or other people's bodies as commodities? I don't mean to reduce prostitution to such a simple dynamic, it's obviously more complex, but I think you get what I mean.
Yeah, I saw that on Cake Wrecks, and saw comments there, as here insisting that's it's a meaningless logo, maybe they just like the cute bunny, etc. Except I don't buy it.
It's clear from the bulk of the comments both here and on Cake Wrecks that most people don't see this as a meaningless logo. They associate it with Playboy, porn and sex. I'm wager a guess that young girls who wear it also have an inkling and see it as something that makes them seem sexy and "naughty". And as for the argument(over there) that it's just such a cute rabbit design, are you going to seriously tell me there aren't a million ways to depict a rabbit that aren't THE offical Playboy bunny logo?