It’s that time of year again! Every year in the lead up to Christmas we release our Crossed Off list – an annual blacklist of corporate offenders who objectify women and sexualise girls for profit.
These companies - some we’ve been exposing for years - continue to flog their sexist and harmful products and services and refuse to change their unethical behaviour. That’s why we’re asking our supporters to once again vote with your wallets and send the message: sexploitation doesn’t sell.
Boycotting the companies below will also demonstrate you care about Corporate Social Responsibility and choose to spend your Christmas dollars ethically. And see below for companies you can spend your money with in good conscience!
Etsy
Two years ago, musician, fashion designer and mum of 5 girls Anna Cordell launched a petition calling on the global online marketplace to stop selling incest and child abuse-themed merchandise – including child sex abuse dolls and replica child body parts. In this time, 68,000 of you signed Anna’s petition. The company has been slammed by child safety advocates and politicians and attracted national media attention for its unethical practices. A growing number of Etsy sellers have even shut their shops as a result. Despite all this pressure, Etsy continues to ignore us. Show Etsy how you feel about their facilitating and profiting from the sale of illegal child sexual abuse material – shop elsewhere this festive season.
Made in China
We discovered a vast range of child sex abuse dolls this year on major online platform Made-in-China.com, including replica toddler girls – some created from customer supplied photos of real little girls. After we exposed them, they removed scores of these dolls. We called on the company to go further and to permanently ban all child sex abuse doll suppliers on their platform. They haven’t, and we continue to find these dolls modelled on the bodies of little girls.
SHEIN
We called out online fashion giant SHEIN earlier this year over their sexualising and objectifying depictions of not only women, but girls too. We uncovered a range of highly sexualised images of girls which we believe exploited young girls and put them at risk of being targeted by predators. The company uses a paedophilic aesthetic to flog merchandise for little girls and toddlers. The platform, marked as being for ages 12+, also fetishises school girls for profit with its porn-style ‘sexy school girl’ costumes. Don’t buy from SHEIN.
Honey Birdette
With a long history of broadcasting sexist and porn-themed representations of women to an all-ages audience, the Playboy-owned sex store is a regular fixture on our list. From pornifying breast cancer for profit, eroticising violence against women (including choking) and reducing female athletes, flight attendants and lesbians to a male porn fantasy, Honey Birdette consistently disempowers women and girls – including young female staff who report a toxic workplace culture of sexual harassment and abuse. Spend your money elsewhere.
Shopping Centres
If you can possibly avoid them, stay away from major shopping centres that continue to host Honey Birdette’s porn-themed advertising and facilitate the display of porn and BDSM-inspired imagery to an audience that includes children. After years of calling on these centres to take action – with almost 80,000 of you signing Kenneth Thor’s petition – their CEOs have refused. Some even boast they are ‘Male Champions’, pledging to fight sexism, even as they profit from hosting sexist and sexually violent depictions of women in their own centres! We know it might be hard to avoid the big malls in the lead up to Christmas, but where possible we encourage you to consider alternatives. We also ask you to boycott the children’s activities they host until they start demonstrating corporate social responsibility. You can find the complete list of shopping centres here.
General Pants
We’ve been campaigning against General Pants sexploitation for more than a decade - from change rooms plastered with pornographic imagery, live pole dancing displays, and a series of sexist and objectifying larger-than-life shopfront ads. Over the years, these ads have included pornified images of women’s bodies alongside slogans like “Sex”, “Wet Dreams” and “Slippery when wet”. This year’s “Welcome to Summer” video campaign, featuring long, lingering close-ups on women’s breasts, backsides and crotches, is even worse. General Pants is a serial sexploitation offender – shop elsewhere!
Tom Ford
Fashion designer Tom Ford has sexually objectified and exploited women in his brand advertising for many years. This year, we exposed Ford’s sleazy new beauty range with lipsticks labelled ‘Age of Consent’ and ‘First Time’, as well as his ‘Lost Cherry’ perfume. The names of these products all reference sex with underage girls – also known as rape. But the eroticisation of girls as objects of men’s sexual desire has serious real-world consequences for girls. It puts them at risk by undermining important social norms - that children are off limits for men’s sexual use.
City Beach
We first exposed City Beach pushing porn products to teens more than a decade ago - they are still doing it today. City Beach is selling Playboy - a major brand of the global porn industry - to their youth market, with t-shirts, hoodies, shorts, socks, hats and beanies all emblazoned with the Playboy logo and images of women’s objectified bodies. The youth retailer responded by defending their promotion of the porn brand to teens – even as the company’s founder has been accused of abuse, drugging and raping women, and bestiality.
Rebel Sport
With decades of research documenting the harms of objectification to women and girls, it’s hard to understand why Rebel Sport would reduce women to ‘boobs’ and ‘bums’ to sell them activewear. The retailer’s “We know boobs/bums” campaign sexually objectifies women by treating them as a collection of disembodied parts and invites the male gaze.
Boost
Earlier this year we exposed fruit juice and smoothie brand Boost Juice’s “Nothing but Passion” campaign which played on common porn tropes, depicting pixelating pieces of fruit with a ‘censored’ label and a pair of lips dripping with juice, suggestive of semen. When we raised objections with the company - and asked how such advertising might put their young female employees at risk of sexual harassment – Boost defended the sexualised ads as “fun” and “cheeky”. But sexist, objectifying and porn-inspired imagery is not “cheeky”, it is at the expense of women’s dignity.
Chocolab
Our team loves chocolate, but NSW-based chocolate company Chocolab have put us off. After pressure from our supporters, the company was last year forced to remove their Facebook post promoting a block of chocolate featuring the slogan “F*ck me Daddy”. But the chocolate company continues to sell a number of products with degrading pornographic slogans. Look elsewhere for your holiday chocolate!
Playboy
Playboy is not just a magazine – it is a major brand of the global pornography industry. Playboy and its founder, alleged serial rapist Hugh Hefner, played a massive role in mainstreaming and legitimising the trade in women’s objectified bodies and turning pornography into big business, resulting in the industry that exists today.
Playboy not only sexually objectified and exploited women, but girls too – publishing nude and pornographic images of girls as young as ten, as well as a wide range of cartoons that portrayed girls as both desiring and being unharmed by sexual abuse.
Playboy’s parent company, PLBY Group, tries to distance itself from its abusive origins, with President, CEO and Director Ben Kohn claiming “Today's Playboy is not Hugh Hefner's Playboy”. We believe it’s worse. Playboy is a corporate child predator and groomer, flogging its merchandise to children in China with its first Playboy Kids store. It still trades off its porn magazine roots, and in the pornified bodies of women. The porn brand also recently launched its new OnlyFans style platform named Centrefold.
Below is a list of retailers stocking Playboy products. These companies are endorsing a company built on the sexual exploitation of women and girls. Send a message and refuse to financially support these companies propping up Playboy.
Where can I shop?
Looking for some positive alternatives at which you can shop with a clear conscience? Check out the companies and brands that have signed our Corporate Social Responsibility Pledge not to objectify women and sexualise girls. If you would like to sign up to our CSR Pledge, you can get in touch with us here.
From all of us at the Collective Shout team, we wish you a safe and happy Christmas and holiday season, and look forward to continuing the fight against sexploitation with you in the new year.
You can find the lists from previous years here:
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