.

I'd rather see more sexy ladies in lingerie in magazines and catalogs, than see you sweating out in the heat in your pink tutu protesting them.

Victoria Secret Girls > You

I'll watch him in his pink tutu, feverishly protesting the destruction of big, hard trees!

Victoria's Secret Catalog offers a much more realistic body image for young women than male-oriented trash rags like Frederick's where every women is just a slut begging to serve some aniMALE. Victoria's Secret Catalog is a catalog by women for women showing them how to be empowered and confident by building upon their natural beauty, unlike the grossly disproportionate and over-decorated porn star-like image that Hollywood movies and New York advertising agencies bombard us with.

Why protest at a storefront for something the subsidiary catalog branch does? That's like protesting at the US post office for something the US army does. They're completely separate. You're only threatening the job security of struggling college-age single women stuck working retail jobs which are by definition low-paying and crap anyway. Why do you have to make it harder for us?

I'm sorry, but the ultra-air brushed, underweight models of victoria's secret are anything but realistic images of beauty.

There is no punishment involved in using our voices to speak out against actions taken by victoria's secret that are bad for our planet and for the people that live on it.
The money made by your store goes right back to the company and allows them to keep being profitable, therefore allowing them pay for more and more catalogues.
As for making your self-described "low-paying crap" job difficult, or threating your job security, that is not at all the intent nor what happens in reality.
If the company loses enough money over a protest, it changes it's policies- it doesn't close it's stores down.

why dont u put ur money where ur mouth is and buy up the victoria company or start your own ecco-conscious corporation. Leave the sexy models alone, yes they look just as good in person as in the catalog :) As for the factoids you cite, how about the source of your information??

Just because I can't afford to do a corporate take over of victoria's secret doesn't excuse the companies unapologetic waste of trees and land. As for a works cited page, this is blog, not an english paper.

P.S. there are a number of eco-friendly companies that do sell fun and sexy undies, including American Apparel and lunapads.com

happy shopping

Victoria's Secret has done more to liberate women's sexuality than any of you! How many of you drive cars to your "environmental justice" protests, or take carbon-spewing city busses? Vicky's has built an empire on women's sexual self expression as defined by women and not men! Finalyl putting the power back where it belongs after centuries of women's sexuality being dictated and strangled by men. Anyway Vicky's ALREADY announced a move to matching the Minimum 10% Post-Industrial Recycled Fiber before your stupid protest, putting Vicky's equal to almost every other industrial printer. You should research these things before you go shooting your mouth off.

Look for that Prison Label
www.prisonwall.org/labor.htm

"Companies such as Boeing, Victoria's Secret, and Eddie Bauer have subcontracted with companies using low-cost prison labor to manufacture everything from aircraft components to lingerie and software packages. TWA contracts with the California Youth and Adult Correctional Agency to use prisoners to make airline reservations."

--

Slavery is Legal in the U.S., did you know that?
www.metagrrrl.com/metagrrrl/2002/01/slavery_is_lega.html

"J.C. Penney, Victoria's Secret, IBM, Toys R Us and TWA are among the US corporations that have profited by employing prisoners. Put together long mandatory sentences for minor drug offences, a strong racial bias, prisons run by corporations for profit, the sale of convict labor to corporations, and a charge for prison room and board and you have a modern system of bonded labor - a social condition otherwise known as slavery."
- [from Take It Personally: How to Make Conscious Choices to Change the World edited by Anita Roddick, p.75]

--

Uncle Tom's Cell: Prison labor gives a market face to an old idea -- slavery
www.refuseandresist.org/resist_this/053199prisonlabor.html

"Corporations ranging from J.C. Penny and Victoria's Secret to IBM and Toys R Us utilize prison labor to cut costs and increase profit margins. In fact, the next time you call TWA to make airline reservations, you may be speaking to one of 300 youth offenders working as receptionists in a Los Angeles prison."

--

Youth Oppose Prison Labor - demonstration at a Victoria's Secret store charges that prison labor is used in products manufacture, a charge denied by the company
www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1295/is_8_64/ai_63904145

"On June 3, members of Youth Cru, a coalition of student activist groups, held a protest outside a Victoria's Secret store. The group alleges that subcontractors use prison labor to make some lingerie for the company."

Thanks for the illuminating information about the prison labor. Just one more reason to take action!

Then boycott - a wonderful aspect of the evil capitalist system is that it provides you a choice. And that choice will ultimately dictate how a company conducts its business.

I think our voice would be heard through the corporation front, not the store front where kids and family are walking by.

A lot of women like victoria secret (a lot of men do too). Your voice at the store front won't change the consumer's opinion. So why attack the consumer????

VOICE your OPINION to the CORPORATION.

I swear, you abuse our rights and hide under 'liberalism' and make true liberalists look bad by running around wearing a stupid outfit yelling out crap nobody cares about. Good job buddy, keep degrading our society.

If they deny it, then where is your proof? You dont see to feel the need to provide evidence of your accusations, yet you're willing to state them like facts. That's not right.

Vote with your feet, man! The nice thing about capitalism is that it gives you a choice - and if you don't agree with Victoria's Secret, there's always Camoflouge (added benefit of supporting a local business).

Any business will respond to a hit to the pocket book.

"Vicky's has built an empire on women's sexual self expression as defined by women and not men! Finalyl putting the power back where it belongs after centuries of women's sexuality being dictated and strangled by men."

Nice rhetoric from a corporate stumper. I don't know about the rest of yall but Victoria's Secret has nothing to do with my sexual self-expression. In fact, the idea of it actually being a liberating force is laughable to me.

It sounds like V.S. would have you believe that women were confined to wearing nun habits before they came along. The fact is, before they came along there was a whole lot more sexual experiemenation going on. How many nude hot tub parties, parnter swaps or good ol' fashioned salad oil orgys do you get invited to nowadays? ;-) Not that these things represent the height of person sexual self-expression, but they certainly do require a level of inhibition that you don't find that much today in a culture that demands that women have to look air-brushed perfect in order to be sexually attractive. (Who keeps sending these messages in our culture?)

The statements the writer makes are also annoying because the writer tries to equate the trappings of sex with the actual sex act itself. Lingerie is only a small part of the the environment that sex occurs in: it (lingerie, toys, etc.) is not the thing. Rather, sex is a relationship between (usually) two people that has the power to suspend time and place and, for a few moments, to give people the feeling of being one with the world.

I think peripherals such as lingerie can be a lot of fun, but they are only an enhancement. Why would people want to channel all their sexual expression through mass-produced, mass-marketed clothing -- apparently manufactured by prison labor -- that other women wear around the world? So much for feeling unique.

It seems to me that the vehicles for sexual self-expression are endless -- Victoria's Secret didn't invent them! Now that I know that Victoria's Secret mails out over 395 million (brainwashing?) catalogs a year, over 90% of which come from virgin timber, mostly from Canada' Boreal Forest, I have a difficult time feeling the "sexiness" of it. To me, it is more of a turn off.

"..putting the power back where it belongs after centuries of women's sexuality being dictated and strangled by men."

That is a totally ignorant statement. Women have been celebrating their sexuality since time began and nearly every folk culture around the world has examples of this. Google "sheela-na-gig" for a vivid example.

I read a bumper sticker once that said, "Sex is like pizza. When it is great, it's fantastic and when it's bad it is still pretty good." How true. It's been going on for an awful long time and it will continue long after Victoria's Secret is gone.

Victoria's Real Secret

Junk mail is more than just an annoyance; it's an environmental disaster.

GREGORY DICUM

In an ad that ran earlier this year in a number of newspapers, a sultry model in a satin bodice and frilly, feathered wings stared poutingly from the page. At first glance, it appeared to be an ad for Victoria's Secret -- except, that is, for the wicked-looking chainsaw the model was holding and the tagline, which read, "Victoria's Dirty Secret." In fact, it was a bold rebuke of the company for using paper from virgin forests to print its catalogs and just one very public salvo in the campaign to call attention to the environmental threat that arrives daily in our mailboxes.

Junk mail is more than just an annoyance -- it's destroying our forests. Set aside all the junk mail you get for the next week. By the time you're done, you'll have a pile that, if your household is typical, will weigh one and a half pounds. It'll be a grab bag of unwanted catalogs for useless products, unsolicited come-ons for credit cards, pleas from Robert Redford for the soul of the Democratic Party, and, of course, those infernal AOL discs -- a snowstorm of unwanted paper and other material. In fact, it is estimated that the average American will spend a full eight months of his or her life handling junk mail.

"In the United States, 59 catalogs per man, woman, and child are sent out every year," says Shana Ortman, the paper-campaign organizer for ForestEthics, a San Francisco-based advocacy group behind the newspaper ad. The group's goal is to bring attention to the unintended environmental consequences of everyday business practices.

The paper in most junk mail comes straight from natural forests, many of them endangered. Indeed, according to the Center for a New American Dream, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that promotes cultural change as a way to reduce society's environmental impact, 100 million trees are cut down each year to create this tide of unsolicited correspondence.

But that's just the start of the junk-mail burden. The center points out that the manufacture of all that paper uses as much energy as 600,000 SUVs would in a year. "And just one-fifth of bulk mail gets recycled," says Sarah Roberts, the organization's communications director. It adds up to more than five million tons of extra trash in America's landfills each year. Nearly 100 billion pieces of bulk mail are sent around the United States each year, and it's junk from start to finish.

Victoria's Secret is a case in point. "They're one of the largest sources of catalogs," says Ortman. "They send out 395 million catalogs a year using paper from the most critical areas of the boreal forest in Canada."

A wide swath of subarctic evergreen woodland that circles the globe in Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia, the boreal forest accounts for about one-third of all the forestland left on Earth. Sparsely populated and still very wild, the region is threatened by vast clear-cuts that provide fiber for the world's seemingly unquenchable thirst for paper.

"People are getting catalogs they aren't asking for from lists that they can't get off of," says Ortman, who places the blame for the wasteful situation on the catalog companies.

More than most companies, Victoria's Secret relies on provocative visual imagery. Pop-culture-friendly images of suggestively posed, nearly naked women are the company's bread and butter. This overt sexiness has enabled Victoria's Secret to grow to more than 1,000 stores across the country and allowed Limited Brands Inc., its parent company, to post more than $1.2 billion in gross profits on revenues of $3.3 billion last year. But it's a double-edged sword: Victoria's Secret pushes the envelope in using sex to sell underwear, but it's easy for activists to subvert the same images to make their point.

That's why, when the company caught wind of ForestEthics' plan to drop by with bodices and chain saws at its "Angels across America" lingerie show in New York last winter, it abruptly canceled the public portion of the event -- featuring Tyra Banks, Heidi Klum, and other supermodels -- with just a few hours' notice, rather than risk embarrassing media attention.

Victoria's Secret has made some changes -- increasing using recycled paper in one of its minor catalogs, for example -- but Ortman notes that it has also recently renewed its contract with a major supplier of paper from endangered forests. (Victoria's Secret representatives did not return calls for comment.)

The Victoria's Dirty Secret campaign is just the most visible element of ForestEthics' attempts to get the direct-mail industry to change voluntarily. "We are trying to cause an industry shift," says Ortman. "When we started the catalog campaign two years ago," she continues, "we announced at the annual meeting of the Direct Marketing Association in San Francisco that we were going to be looking at them now. A lot of them were blown away. They hadn't really thought about where their paper was coming from."

So it cascades into our homes, even though nobody likes junk mail and 44 percent of it gets tossed out unopened. That's why the Center for a New American Dream is lobbying Congress for the creation of a national "do not junk" list that would allow people to block all unsolicited mail to their addresses. The concept is based on the wildly successful Do Not Call Registry, which has largely relieved households across the land of dinnertime telephone interruptions. The center reports that more than a quarter million people have gotten involved in efforts to reduce junk mail.

In the meantime, although it's sometimes nice to receive 100 pages of unsolicited soft-core porn in the mail, is it really worth the environmental cost? Junk mail is one of those few ecological problems about which you can make an immediate difference while also improving your life. When you get a catalog or flyer you don't want, call the company and ask to be removed from all its lists. It may seem tedious at first, but in a few months the deluge really does slow down.

And the environment's thanks isn't the only gratitude you will earn: The Center for the New American Dream estimates that each U.S. Postal Service letter carrier lugs around almost 18 tons of junk mail each year, adding one more indignity to the burden of sleet and snow and dark of night.

Date created: 09/ 2/2005
URL for this story: www.memphisflyer.com/gyrobase/Content

I did a protest in Bridgewater, New Jersey. I however was not able to protest directly in front of the mall, or the shopping cenetr across the way, but i was able to protest on the side of the road. My advice for those who wish to protest today is that there should be other backup plans. on the plus side it made me feel so good about what i did. have fun and think green. good luck

< Victoria's Secret has done more to liberate women's sexuality than any of you!>

Do you really know enough about all the people who are protesting Victoria's Secret to know this? Many eco-activists, including myself, are also feminist activists. And although the original post is about boreal forests, not women's sexuality, I fail to see how self-objectification which plays into male fantasies of idealized Barbie doll women is liberating to women.



Sorry, but 10% is a tiny drop in the bucket considering the huge loss to boreal forests. When the trees are gone it will affect the life-support systems of the planet and every living thing on it. At that point, whether or not you want to work at Victoria's Secret or wear Victoria's SEcret undies will be moot.



How is protesting at the Capitola Mall "attacking" the consumer? I see it as informing the consumer. Perhaps there are consumers who don't know about the boreal forest issue who would rather support companies who aren't ravaging the planet?

By the way, there is a large scholarly body of research focusing on the links between the oppression of women and the destruction of the Earth. You might want to investigate it by doing a google search on "ecofeminism". Seriously, try being a little less reactive and a bit more curious about why anyone might say there are problems with Victoria's SEcret catalogues.

In this college town, anyone can go down to Pacific Avenue in the spring and observe a great many young women who could pass for Vicky's models. "Not found in nature"? You need to get out more.

Vicky's models are not disproportionate barbie dolls. You think that just because Playboy and Frederick's - WHICH CATER TO MEN - promote the disproportionate plastic image of unnatural feminine beauty, that Vicky's is no different? Go into a Vicky's store sometime. It's by women, for women. Only women shop there (except right before Christmas, when there's a line of men buying gift certificates.) This is why Vicky's models are realistically proportioned and naturally beautiful, unlike the plastic-injected barbie dolls you'd see ELSEWHERE.
It sounds like you have issues with female sexuality in general, probably stemming from your own. Please stop projecting and deal.

I'm sorry but I really needed to respond to this. You say that there are plenty of potential Victoria's Secret models you see in downtown Santa Cruz. How would you know this? Were they not wearing any clothes?

The problem with the bodies of the most of the Victoria's Secret models is that they have six pack abs and big brests. These two qualities are not natural together. Guess what breasts are primarily made of besides mammary glands? Fat. Fat on women is predominantly distributed throughout the hips, buttocks, below the navel, breasts and in the upper arms. It is next to impossible for women to have (natural) big breasts and nearly no fat on the rest of her body. Nature likes balance. Research proves this -- you can do all the ab crunches you want and build muscle, but you can't take off fat from isolated parts of your body.

Breast size also corresponds to bone size. Small framed people usually have small breasts and big boned people usually have larger breasts. If you look at most of the Victoria's Secret models, a lot of them have thin pencil necks with big boobs. This is not natural. Believe me, I would know since I worked fitting clothes for people for several years.

Based on your comments I would guess that you are a man who has little knowledge of or experience with natural women.

From everything that I've seen, I would guess that most or all of these models for Victoria's Secret have had surgical breast mutilations. Since they are sending out over a million catalogs a day, they are sending a lot of messages to us, telling us that women need to be extremely thin and have large, unnatural breast mutilations in order to be sexy.

I don't want to give my business to a company who tells me that I need to go on a diet or be mutilated and is destroying our forests.

"I don't want to give my business to a company who tells me that I need to go on a diet or be mutilated and is destroying our forests."

then don't no one is forcing u to purchase anything from victoria's secret or any other catalog. The rest of us enjoy looking at beautiful women (natural or fake boobies, who cares). The vicky company produces these catalogs because some one out there male or female wishes to to see them.

including Victoria's Secret models. Every woman should be allowed to decide for herself what ideal of beauty she wishes to pursue. Every woman, not a vocal minority of self-appointed fashion police!

Dooood,

Instead of complaining about what other people feel about Victoria's Secret, why don't you just go about your business. I've yet to read anything here that says you aren't allowed to go and enjoy your Victoria's Secret catalog?

Why are you attacking other people for informing others? You make no sense. You appear to only want to cause trouble and to silence anyone who criticizes anything about Victoria Secret.

These comments are for discussion. If you don't have anything intelligent to contribute, you don't belong here.

And you're not projecting? You accuse people on this board of doing what you are doing! I feel sorry for you, little anonymous poster who works for VS. You really have some quite serious issues yourself, and a lot of growing up to do. As for me, I'm a woman and I don't have issues with my sexuality or anyone other women's. I do have issues with a company that is destroying boreal forests to sell crap that's made in sweat shops. Sorry that you can't grasp the issues here.

And you're not projecting? You accuse people on this board of doing what you are doing! I feel sorry for you, little anonymous poster who works for VS. You really have some quite serious issues yourself, and a lot of growing up to do. As for me, I'm a woman and I don't have issues with my sexuality or anyone other women's. I do have issues with a company that is destroying boreal forests to sell crap that's made in sweat shops. Sorry that you can't grasp the issues here.

slave labor? These forests are in the u.s. according to the article. Why do you have this need to make unfounded accusations. Fortunately for Vicky corp does not take indymedia serious, or else you would be hit with a libel suit.

stomp your feet, clap your hands....keep it up.
Nothing will change, because you are just a grain of sand on the beach. Unfortunately, $$$ and demand will win.
stomp,clap,stomp,clap...tired yet? lol

how is this company doing anything different from other companies sending out catalogs (Robinsons May, Macys etc.)?