City Beach Human Relations Fail
Caitlin Roper who is leading the campaign against City Beach's pornified clothing range received a phone call from City Beach HR, Anita Dorwald. She was the City Beach rep who participated in the conciliation attempt for Caitlin's Human Right's Commission complaint last year. (Read more about that here.)
Caitlin's report on the conversation is as follows:
Ms Dorwald said that if we are going to distribute flyers using their logo, they must be "factually correct" and then proceeded to quote the 'headless, gagged, bruised women' part. (see flyer here)
I told her I could give her specific examples to back up each of those claims. She kept denying that they sold them. When I did start listing specific examples, she said, "Oh but we don't sell those anymore, so that's not factually correct." The implication was that City Beach had proactively removed the offending shirts from sale, but in reality, after the clothing items had been available in stores for months, as well as advertised on their online shop, the time had come to phase them out and replace them with new stock.
Ms. Dorwald stated that City Beach doesn't sell pornography. However, Two In The Shirt, TITS brand uses famous porn stars on their clothing designs. TITS was also nominated for ‘Best apparel’ award in the pornography industry’s annual awards ceremony, the 2012 AVN Awards, alongside ‘Best double penetration’ and ‘Best young girl scene’.
When I raised the issue of TITS brand, a brand City Beach has sold for at least two years, and their award nomination she said sarcastically, "Uh, I don't really follow what the pornography industry is doing."
She said she had no idea of any links to the pornography industry with the TITS brand, and how could they have known that?
I would have thought looking at the foreplay shirt or one of many others would suggest so much, or simply following the website URL printed on the inside of the TITS shirts would have also given her that info.
Taking a few seconds to think through the fact that the brand is called 'TITS' may have also alerted her to the pornographic nature of the shirts.
Then there is the 'Hustler' shirt they are selling 'Talk Shit, Get Hit.' That’s Hustler as in the notorious pornographic magazine. So their argument is that they didn't know, but now that they do know, they don't care.
More info on 'Hustler' can be found here. *caution and trigger warning* distressing content.
Ms. Dorwald kept making reference to my 'moral high ground' and I kept correcting her. I felt she was attempting to paint those objecting to porn t-shirts as overly sensitive moral zealots, as a way of absolving City Beach of their corporate responsibility to deal with these legitimate issues.
I said it has nothing to do with being offended, or being sensitive, or whether or not I or anyone else likes the products- that the issue is with City Beach selling pornographic items to teenagers. She rejected my claim that pornographic items were sold to teenagers. I then asked if there were any age restrictions on purchasing these items, if a thirteen year old went to purchase, would anyone stop him? To which she admitted they would not.
The conversation just went round in circles for awhile, with her repeatedly throwing out the 'but we don't sell pornography' and 'morals effort' arguments.
She concluded, regarding the flyers, that if I was going to use City Beach’s logo and distribute flyers, they must be factually correct "or else we will have to reconsider our legal position."
We maintain that the flyers are 'factually correct' and have since added a blog post on www.porntees.blogspot.com with specific evidence to support claims made on our flyers. However we decided the flyers do need altering - we have now included more images of the t-shirts and merchandise sold in City Beach on the flyers. The merchandise speaks for itself.
I informed her we would be continuing with protests around the country, and of the strong positive reactions we had from the public who were horrified by the stock we showed them.