Sexy snowboards get chilly reception

Let’s say your 16-year-old son desperately wanted to buy a snowboard that had a Playboy Playmate from the 1970s emblazoned across it — albeit in a picture without any seriously private parts showing. Would you kill him?

How about if your son was 23 years old? Would you care?

A new line of Burton Snowboards — dubbed the “Love” line — is raising just such questions and sparking a spirited debate among parents and snowboarders across the country. The boards feature retro images of Playboy Playmates that — while certainly leaving little to the imagination — somehow seem innocuous compared with the fare that regularly gets served up these days in “Girls Gone Wild” TV commercials and the spam that clogs our inboxes.

At a snowboard store in Colorado’s Copper Mountain ski area, parents and snowboarders alike squared off on issues of free expression vs. public decency.

“If my 12-year-old or 13-year-old wanted to snowboard and he wanted to buy that board, I would not really be into it,” said Tanya Benyo, a shopper at the store.

A shopper named Bill Putnam viewed the very existence of these snowboards with a sense of humor. “There are things to be concerned about in the world, and this is not one of them,” he said.

As bad as cigarettes?
The release of Burton’s Love line of snowboards — and of a separate Burton line called Primo, which features garish drawings of mutilated hands — has ignited a firestorm in the otherwise levelheaded state of Vermont, where Burton Snowboards is based. Both limited-release lines are wildly popular with young men in their late teens and early 20s — and that detail has given many parents a serious case of the shivers.

Some 150 protesters stormed Burton’s manufacturing complex in October. A local columnist suggested spray-painting over the controversial images. From there, the controversy spread across the country. Eight ski resorts in Vermont, Colorado and California have banned their employees from using the Love and Primo lines.

The vitriolic opposition has left company founder Jake Burton Carpenter scratching his head.

“You’d think we were selling cigarettes,” Carpenter told the Burlington Free Press in late November.

Burton Snowboards, founded in 1977, has grown to be an industry leader in the nearly $500 million snowboard manufacturing business. It sponsors many of the stars of snowboarding, including 2006 Winter Olympics gold medal winner Shaun White, but more importantly for Vermont, it employs 500 workers and pumps millions into the state’s economy.

TODAYshow.com The company contends that the vintage Playboy images are 'retro, tongue-in-cheek and harmless.'

And in these tough economic times, Carpenter’s ominous statement that he “would rather relocate the company to another state than compromise our commitment to listen to core snowboarders” isn’t exactly music to local politicians’ ears.

“Burlington is the San Francisco of the East Coast,” local City Councilman Paul Decelles told The Boston Globe. “It blew me away that people are this upset for this long about the issue.”

The flap has especially rankled Jake’s wife, Donna Carpenter, who heads the company’s women’s initiatives program. Under her direction, Burton’s female employees receive flex time, a mentorship program and pay equal to men’s — and even she acknowledged that she was initially put off by the idea of putting jiggly 1970s Playmates on snowboard top sheets.

“I’ll admit that when I was first told about the ‘Love’ board about a year ago, I was ready to go off,” Donna Carpenter wrote in a statement. “Pornographic images of women on a snowboard? I don’t think so.

“But then I saw them … These are not X-rated images. These are vintage Playboy images … They are beautiful, kitschy, well-fed models; nothing obscene is revealed. These board graphics are retro, tongue-in-cheek and, in my opinion, harmless.”

As for the company’s Primo line, Donna Carpenter says the cartoons are open to interpretation. “The images may be unsettling, but a lot of art is meant to make us uncomfortable.”

‘It’s offensive’
The Carpenters’ arguments for free expression have not placated some local residents or cooled their opposition. The local nonprofit group Spectrum Youth & Family Services pulled itself out of a Burton-sponsored program that gives free snowboards to needy children.

Spectrum’s office manager, Nicole Zarrillo, told The Boston Globe, “When you really think about it, it’s a young man standing on top of a naked woman’s body. I probably could have gotten past it, because I try to have an open mind, but seeing it like that, it’s offensive.”

Other detractors of the Love and Primo snowboards argue that skiing and snowboarding are family activities and that young children are going to see the boards on the slopes and lift lines.

Experienced snowboarders say that’s much more unlikely than many parents may think. David Waite, manager of the 35^th Avenue Skateboards and Snowboards shop in Federal Way, Wash., said the Love boards are geared toward the most advanced snowboarders — not the kind of guys you’d find hanging out around bunny slopes and the easiest, most family-friendly ski lifts.

“This board is not easy to ride. Not at all,” said Waite, 35. “This is for the guys who would be hiking up” to ski areas’ most treacherous peaks.

Waite said he thinks the tempest over the snowboard images is silly and overblown.

“It’s making Mount Everest out of a molehill in my front yard,” he said. “It’s a graphic on a snowboard. I mean, how long can anyone be exposed to it? In reality, people put stickers on their boards, there’s snow on the board, they get dirty, they have bindings on them. There are all these distractions. You’d have to really be studying the board to even find out what’s going on there.”

Brandon Garfield, 23, a snowboarder and an employee at a Snowboard Connection store in Seattle, agreed with Waite.

“I doubt it’s really that shocking to anybody,” Garfield said. “It’s going to be hard to see everything anyway. You’re always going to have snow on your board.”

‘That’s my job as a parent’
Sky Pinnick, 30, is the owner of Rage Films, a company based in Bend, Ore., that produces extreme skiing movies and other action-sports films. His job exposes him to skiers and snowboarders in different countries all over the world.

The snowboarding culture is “a culture who likes to be edgy and fight the norm,” Pinnick said in an interview from New Zealand. “As soon as you take the creative expression away from snowboarding, the sport will lose its credibility. If parents have a problem with [the snowboards], don’t buy them or let your kids buy them. The imagery isn’t anything more than what you would see on a magazine at the grocery store.”

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But for Tanya Benyo, the shopper at the snowboard store in Colorado, the key issue is whether such images are appropriate for a public ski area at all.

“You might as well buy a Playboy magazine or something,” Benyo said.

For her part, Burton co-founder Donna Carpenter agrees with Benyo on this point: She wouldn’t let her 12-year-old son buy a Love board, either.

“But that’s my job as a parent, to decide what is and isn’t appropriate at any given age,” Carpenter said. “Will he be shocked if he sees them in a lift line? I sincerely doubt it. I do know that it’s my job to talk to him about the real issues women face in our society. His attitude about women will be shaped by his parents’ words and actions, not by a snowboard graphic.”

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