Beyoncé 'pimp culture' blast

This Is London
Feb. 21, 2006

Dame Anita Roddick has hit out at pop icons such as Beyoncé and Britney Spears for celebrating the sex industry.

The Body Shop founder said she despairs of the "pimp and whore" culture in which pop stars simulate sex and celebrities talk proudly about visiting lap-dancing clubs.

Dame Anita told the Standard: "A lot of people seem to think it's cool to be a pimp or a whore. It's not cool. The reality is dark and evil and appalling and unregulated.

"The reality is sexual trafficking, which is about young women being forced into rooms to have sex however many times a day so the pimp can take all the money. I don't get it."

Dame Anita, 63, said such imagery, coupled with the multi-million-pound beauty advertising industry, made it virtually impossible for young women to grow up with high self-esteem.

She said: "There are thousands of ads mostly focused on women and young girls that say you are not attractive, you are not sexy, you are not intelligent unless you look like this... [in] kids' magazines there is a passivity and a stupidity that is seen as the great way forward.

"And then you hear the statistics that we have the most violent young women in Europe because of binge drinking. I haven't got much hope. Something's gone very wrong."

Her daughter Sam has famously struck out with her own business, the erotic emporium Coco de Mer in Covent Garden, which sells fair-trade kinky handcuffs and claims to have a "female-centric" focus which aims to celebrate sex without exploiting women.

Dame Anita, who still refers to herself as a feminist, has turned her back on anti-wrinkle creams and said getting older had only made her more radical and more focused.

"I am not as stringent as some in the feminist movement," she said. "If someone wants a facelift, so be it. If somebody wants Botox, smile on - who cares?

"But for me there are more important things to worry about. I travel too much to epicentres of despair to worry about Western thinking about what a woman should and should not do and should and should not say."

Dame Anita left her full-time role with The Body Shop in 2002 but she and her husband Gordon still own 18 per cent and remain the biggest shareholders. There are now 300 stores worldwide and the chain is worth around £500 million.

Dame Anita is a non-executive director and still travels the world looking for new products and encouraging other cosmetics companies to adopt the firm's
community trade approach.

Speaking prior to a lecture at the British Library called The Creative Entrepreneur next month, she praised The Body Shop for its improved products but admitted she was sad that it had not retained the creativity that was so central when it was smaller.

"I had a dedication to changing workplace behaviour," she said. "We had babies in the office, mothers breastfeeding, we brought daughters into board meetings to tell us what we were doing wrong.

"Now it's quite hierarchical and patriarchal. I think the sadness is that the
bigger you get the less intimate you become." However, she has no regrets about the time she and Gordon devoted to the business, despite comments by Sam that she and sister Justine, who now works for the Body Shop in Amercia, hardly ever saw them.

Dame Anita has lent her support to the British Library as part of its Beautiful Minds programme celebrating creativity in the arts, sciences and business. She believes business can be ethical and supports the library's new business centre, which opens on 8 March.