Moo Bar. What were they thinking?
**After a highly effective campaign by the Warwick Anti-Sexism Society, the owners of Moo
Bar finally made a press statement about the radical refit to their bar which saw their walls
plastered with prostitute calling cards.**
Some mentioned slavery, some mention schoolgirls,
some have images of women with their legs wide open, some describe the women (like a
corner shop) as ‘open all night’. Their press release contained some good news: the
(arguably) most offensive image which led the campaign, ‘Black Runaway Slave Girl Aged
18 Years Old Seeks Plantation Master’, has been removed, which is a win for common
decency. However, the rest of their statement left me, and many of those who signed the
petition, wanting.
The statement is clearly an attempt to steer the debate away from the potentially sexist
aspects into a debate about the nature of art. Maybe the owners hoped that the students
who were so outraged by the wallpaper would be awed by this argument, unable to
respond now that they had been reliably informed it was, in fact, art. Their own line on this,
however, is fundamentally confused and occasionally insulting, not only to the intelligence
of their patrons but the movements they draw in for comparison.
Their statement, for example, draws comparisons to ‘street art’, the current trendy
movement to associate yourself with, but the correlation is false. They say, precisely, that
the cards were “of huge significance to the burgeoning street art movement”. Street art is,
whether you respect it artistically or not, a movement with a clear set of discernible ideas
at its heart, which have nothing to do with calling cards for prostitutes.
Street art is about individuals taking back public space, from private businesses or the
state, for art. To bring art to where people live and work rather than having it the preserve
of elitist or rarified spaces such as art galleries. It breaks down the bridges between the
society it is representing and the canvas it uses. It is for everyone, for free. This was not
the use of the calling cards originally: they were about selling women’s bodies, exploiting
them for profit. It was, and continues to be, associated with the ill-treatment or abuse of
vulnerable women. Moving the cards into a profit-making bar equally does not make them
like street art, it is simply re-appropriation: it is insulting that the owners do not think we
can tell the difference.
A comparison to guerilla marketing is fairer: at least this shows knowledge that these
images were not created for aesthetic purposes but as commercial images to sell women’s
bodies. Even if you argued that these images were an early form of guerilla marketing,
defined as using unconventional means to sell products, you ignore the key differences.
These images have to be ‘guerilla’ because the industry is constantly toeing the line of the
law, because that product is the body of a woman. This comparison, anyway, does not
intrinsically give value to the images: presenting them alone out of this context does not
illuminate this comparison. It is not enough to point it out in retrospect.
The owners, it seems, want it both ways: for the calling cards to be a symbol of profit-free
art and of the changing face of profit-chasing advertising. Both guerilla marketing and
street art intrinsically rely on the use of free public spaces. By putting them inside a bar,
with nothing of these movements to contrast the cards with, it implies that the cards alone
can make those comparisons clear. Art relies on context, and the context of these calling
cards does nothing to make the points the owners say they wanted them to.
However, they are juxtaposed with something: more objectified bodies, this time male
models. In their statement, they say: “…not one comment has been made about the
juxtaposed images of the near naked male models… We think this silence speaks
volumes.” I think that comparison speaks volumes: it is offensive to suggest a balance has
been redressed by showing half-naked men who are well paid, respected, objectified,
sure, but not literally to be labelled and sold but to sell something else. The thread of
objectification may connect the two industries (a point of debate little mentioned in the
press release) but little else does.
Ultimately, all these comparisons are false. It is an attempt to distract from the real industry
these images represent: the sex industry, of which they mounted no defense. Alone and
out of context, these images do nothing to discuss “the change in moral values concerning
women and prostitution”, instead it shows how little those values have changed.
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