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opinion
AMY HALLORAN recalls a grande crusade Slutbucks? Maybe not. 
"CINDY THE STARBUCKS MERMAID" (detail from 1991 comic by Rex Lameray). In 1991, I embarked on a stickering campaign to boycott Starbucks. I wasn't arguing for workers' rights at the fancy cafes or on the plantations where the beans were grown. I was peeved that the company was using a mermaid to sell coffee. 
Linking women to coffee really got my feminist goat. Too often, women are responsible for keeping people caffeinated. The women's movement of the 1970s grew out of the civil rights movement, an era where women were encouraged to keep the coffee pouring, perhaps instead of ideas.
I typed up sayings on my Mac Classic, printed them out, and copied them onto sheets of sticker paper at the all-night copy shop. I cut the stickers into strips. On the way home, in the midnight-blue mist, between the yellow glare of streetlights, my friends and I stuck the stickers on benches and telephone booths. We whistled our way past the Starbucks on Broadway as we palmed protests onto the store's doors.
"Keep their legs spread and keep ‘em pouring coffee!" "If I were a mermaid, I wouldn't want to hang around with my fin split, warming someone's addiction." The next year, the logo changed to a close-up of the same design. The mermaid's fins, belly and breasts disappeared, but her face remained, seemingly content to straddle a coffee cup. My feminist response to the company's perpetuation of coffee-pouring stereotypes was righteous, but I don't know if it was effective. Probably some marketing adjustment was already in line. Now another marketing adjustment has put the company in the news. The recent re-release of the original mermaid logo has some Christians in San Diego lobbying on her behalf, or at least, on behalf of a society that is not as sexually driven as what they witness. The Resistance is calling Starbucks "Slutbucks" and declaiming the mermaid as prostitution. What the group thinks of Disney's Ariel losing her lovely voice for the right to marry a prince, I do not know. Starbucks logo is hitting local news, too. The Rat City Rollergirls have a logo with concentric circles, and two stars. The coffee company claims the logo is too close to theirs for comfort, and asked them to alter it; the team asked the company for sponsorship, or to pay for the change. The two are trying to reach an agreement outside of lawsuits and roller derby arenas. |
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