Susie O’Brien
November 13, 2017
WHAT are “pleasure parlours” packed with raunchy lingerie, sex toys and bondage items such as whips, paddles, bridles and harnesses doing in the middle of mainstream shopping centres?
I don’t blame one Melbourne father for objecting this week to the Honey Birdette store in his local Westfield Shoppingtown. His change.org petition attacking their large pornographic advertising images has now been signed by 43,000 people.
Such stores are staffed by retail workers called “Honeys” who are dolled up to look like sex workers. Many have their bras hanging out of their tops, and they’re told they must wear high heels and have perfectly pouty red lips.
Funnily enough, CEO and founder Eloise Monaghan didn’t choose that form of attire for a recent corporate video, or for the majority of her official appearances.
She has her top fully buttoned up — which is how women dress when they’re given a choice. When I asked Monaghan yesterday why she didn’t dress like her sales staff, she answered: “I am today.” However, I doubt she’s walking through Canberra airport with her top unbuttoned and her bra showing.
No, I‘ll bet that demeaning look is just for the “Honeys” whose job it is to use their sexuality to get customers to buy things.
Lingerie label Honey Birdette has come under fire. Picture: Penny LaneI am not sure how being “ready to take over the world one libido at a time” is a legitimate job description and yet it’s on the company’s website.
“With ruby red lips and high heels, it is their pleasure to deliver the Honey Birdette experience to you,” the website reads. Why should girls have to “rock a red pout” and wear stilettos in order to sell lingerie?
At a time when Hollywood is under a cloud because of sexual abusers and predators like Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, it seems very wrong to make sexuality and the impression of sexual availability a job requirement.
The company says it has a “zero tolerance towards sexual harassment in the workplace”.
And yet a corporate-mandated sexual harassment message comes through loud and clear in a recent video, which shows women in their lingerie dancing with men fully dressed in suits. The clip, put up two weeks ago, is called “Office Party”. If my office had a party like that, we’d all be sacked.
The Little Black Book, which until recently was rumoured to be given to new staff, says workers should channel the following words: “sultry, saucy, sensual, playful”. It also tells workers to meet customers with a “pout”.
Honey Birdette CEO and founder Eloise Monaghan (left) pictured in 2010.When I spoke to her yesterday, Monaghan denied the controversial Little Black Book existed at all. And yet it was talked about on the website in a piece signed by Monaghan herself.
Monaghan also insisted the company met all workplace safety and human resources guidelines, but there does seem to be a large number of former workers insisting otherwise.
Late last year, a number of former employees claimed they were encouraged to see sexual harassment as part of the job and a legitimate way to encourage sales. One worker says she was whipped by a customer with a riding crop and was encouraged to hand out her phone number. Another said she was encouraged to flirt with customers and was “harassed on every shift”. Others have left similar comments on online job boards.
Monaghan said the former staff complaining about conditions were merely “venomous trolls”.
It’s time she dragged this company, which is peddling outdated and dangerous images of women, into this century. Not only is it putting current workers at risk, it sends a message to teens that to be sexual is to adopt tawdry stereotypical pornographic images, stances, outfits and props.
A recent Australian study suggests that more than 90 per cent of 13 to 16-year-old boys, and 60 per cent of girls the same age, have been exposed to pornography online.
Nearly 90 per cent of such material is violent; mostly by men towards women. Often women in the clips react with a neutral or positive response, giving the misleading impression they like it.
The Honeys have claimed they have to do the same thing: make playful gestures and jokes when customers take things too far. They have to keep smiling and act as if they like it.
Sexual harassment is a serious workplace safety issue, not a flirty selling point. Young women should not have to put up with such behaviour in order to make a sale.
Monaghan seems to accuse all objectors of disempowering women, saying her company is all about “empowerment”.
I cannot see how.
What’s empowering about standing around all day on stilettos? Having your bra poking out? Wearing huge amounts of expensive make-up? Laughing at sexist jokes from customers?
I have no problem with such stores being located in places where adults can visit them.
However, kids don’t need to be walking past shops that bill themselves as the “pleasure parlour” offering a “treasury of amusements to send you blissfully to the brink and beyond”.
And the people who work in them shouldn’t have to be “like Hollywood starlets, only naughtier”, “sweet sirens” and “rock ’n’ roll vixens” in order to do their job.
Reprinted with permission Susie O’Brien
See also: ‘MTR accuses Westfield of aiding and abetting sexism in Ben Fordham interview’ – MTR
Honey Birdette and the changing attitudes to sex in advertising – The Conversation
One Response
Does this company employ male staff as ‘assistants’ wherein the male employees have to dress in g-strings and tight tight pants which scarely cover their buttocks? Are there any male employees selling products directly to male customers and wherein the male customers have sex right to sexually harass/sexually assault these male employees? I doubt it because of course as usual it is women who are being told by this female owner of company that being subjected to male sexual harassment/male sexualised insults is ’empowering!’
If there aren’t any male employees dressed in g-strings with tight tight scarcely fitting pants then obviously this is sexist discrimination against men! Furthermore male employees at this company should also be referred to as ‘Honeys’ and it must be mandatory for any male employees to routinely pout and engage in sexually inviting poses!