Bit o' Nifty

St. Pauli Girl

It's terrible how beautiful women are objectified in order to sell products.

Case in point: St. Pauli Girl (Click "Past Girls.")

For the last 27 years, St. Pauli Girl has created posters juxtaposing attractive women with bottles of beer. This disgraceful use of sex to sell alcoholic beverages has always deeply offended me, and from 1977 on, I tacked these posters on my bedroom wall so that I could never forget what some companies were willing to do in the name of capitalism.

Particularly appalling, in my eyes, were 1983, 1985, 1989, and 1999.

Update: My musical friend from Denton frequently astounds me with the stuff in his head. He just sent this:

The Origin of the St. Pauli Girls
They worked in Hamburg, Germany in the 19th Century, in cabarets, clubs, and dives near the docks. Sailors would come in to be entertained. They did three things -- served beer, wine, food, coffee, whatever; sang and danced with piano accompaniment (a young Johannes Brahms supported his family this way) or other musicians; and took customers to back rooms to service them more intimately.

So they were combination waitresses-singers-dancers-prostitutes. And you know they had to be alluringly dressed. So why shouldn't their images be used to sell beer? The beer-drinking public is famously sexually frustrated.