Bharatiya Bunnies: The real reason why Playboy clubs are no fun

The prospect of seeing Playboy Bunnies, even those that are draped coyly in sari-like ensembles specially designed for an Indian aesthetic, frisking around on Goan beaches so agitated BJP MLA Michael Lobo that he threatened to go on a hunger strike if the government permitted a Playboy club franchise in his constituency.

The BJP government in Goa acted with alacrity to say that it would not give PB Lifestyle, the Mumbai-based company that markets Playboy merchandise, a licence to run a “beach shack” since they are given only to individuals, not companies. But that, as media commentaries have noted, only amounts to a technical rejection: the door may still be open for a Playboy Club Bunnies to hop up in through the back door.

PB Lifestyle had sought permission to put up the Playboy franchise’s world’s first “beachfront club” – and its first club property in India: over the next few years, the franchise, evidently sensing a vast and unfulfilled demand for such services in India, plans to set up more than 100 clubs cross India.

But Lobo would have none of it. Playboy, he reasons, epitomises “vulgarity, decadence - and prostitution”. Before the government announced its decision, he said he was at a loss to understand why his own government was considering permitting the global brand to get a foothold in Goa, and opening the floodgates to an “alien culture” that sits ill with traditional Indian notions of womanhood.

Bailancho Saad, a women’s rights group, too echoed much the same sentiment to oppose the proposal, noting that Playboy has a reputation the world over for “denigrating women and promoting voyeurism”.

Other BJP leaders in the state, including the party president for the state Vinay Tendulkar, too pushed back strongly against the proposal, largely on the grounds that “such things are not in our culture”.

Earlier, the government, which was evidently well-disposed towards giving PB Lifestyle a licence, sought an affidavit from the company attesting to its commitment never to permit “vulgar indecent activities that demean women”. The company went farther as a concession to Indian sensibilities by cloaking its Bunnies not in the figure-hugging, flesh-baring high-hip corsets that Bunnies wear the world over, but in a more demure vestment that is fashioned like a sari – with a thigh-high split.

Much like the cheerleaders at the IPL franchises in India, who wear considerably less racy outfits than are typically worn by pom-pom shakers, the ‘Bharatiya Bunnies’ would have endeavored to be far less morally corrupting than Bunnies are in the popular imagination. Lobo’s concern for the commodification of women that the Playboy brand represents is not without merit. As feminist icon Gloria Steinem wrote, in her fabled magazine expose “ I Was a Playboy Bunny ” in 1963, for which she secretly infiltrated the Playboy Club in New York and worked as a Playboy Bunny, for all the elaborate effort to ensure that the Playboy Club premises were run clean—with strict rules of conduct for the Bunnies about going out with patrons—the whole business runs on the principle of pandering to male fantasy and prurience.

In Steinem’s case, that sense of commodification by a vengeful Playboy, which was irked by her expose, continued even two decades later. “Among the long-term results of this article,” writes Steinem, were the continual printing by Playboy magazine of my employee photograph as a Bunny amid ever more pornographic photos of other Bunnies. The 1983 edition insisted, somewhat audaciously, that her article had “boosted Bunny recruiting”.

And in 1984, on Steinem’s 50th birthday, Playboy magazine published a photograph of her in an unguarded moment at a benefit dinner for the Ms Foundation for Women. “I was reaching upward and my evening gown had slipped, exposing part of one breast,” writes Steinem in her post-script to her article. “No other publication used this photo. But Playboy never forgets.”

When the Playboy Club franchise started up in the 1960s, they were iconic of those times of sexual liberation in the US. The feminist movement hadn’t quite gained ground, and although over time even the Bunnies got to negotiate benefits and changes in their working conditions, the effort to spin Bunny work as a symbol of female empowerment continues to this day.

Yet, for all the exhortation to Playboy Bunnies to always look cheerful (“Think about something happy or funny,” advised the ‘Bunny Bible’. “Your most important commodity is personality), and for all the hype about the “glamour” of the Bunny job, the life of a Playboy Bunny is pretty banal. The reality, as Kathryn Leigh Scott, another Bunny who served at the same time as Steinem, writes in her book  The Bunny Years , was that the job was just like any other: “hard work, long hours”. And in tight costumes that commodified them for the male gaze.

In India, though, women don’t have to walk into a Playboy Club to feel commodified: the wolf whistles and cat calls on our city streets—and the daily dose of reports of rape and sexual molestation—do them just fine. And while it’s easy for MLAs and MPs to pick on the Playboy Club as representing the sum of all dangers to Bharatiya culture, the wider disease will remain unaddressed for eternity.

As Steinem concludes her post-script to her expose, one of the long-term results of her article was for her the realisation that “all women are Bunnies”.