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Why aren’t we at it like rabbits? Bunnies used to be sexy — until the culture wars caught up

Rampaging rabbit furries. Credit: DENIS LOVROVIC/AFP/ Getty

Rampaging rabbit furries. Credit: DENIS LOVROVIC/AFP/ Getty


March 11, 2021   5 mins

We’re hovering on the cusp of spring. The air is warmer, green shoots are growing, birds are building their nests. It’s the beginning of that season in which animals and humans alike feel the sap rising.

The idea that we’re meant to be at it like rabbits at this time of year goes all the way back to ancient myth. And yet we’re not. We can blame it partly on lockdown, which effectively banned sex between anyone not cohabiting. But in truth, this unhappy situation hasn’t so much prised horny young people apart, as exaggerated a divide that was already growing.

Covid hasn’t just heightened economic problems; it’s leaned heavily on existing social fractures – including what has been called the “sex recession”. And a fresh recent front in the ever-expanding culture war – concerning rabbits – sheds some light on that.

Lola Bunny was the extremely pneumatic cartoon star of the 1996 sport fantasy Space Jam, who wore a crop top and high-riding shorts that left little to the imagination. She was very much on the same page as The Caramel Bunny, a wide-hipped, long-eyelashed cartoon bunny from the mid-1980s, who was voted one of the top three sexiest cartoons of all time.

Between then and now, though, something changed radically. Lola has been reincarnated as a considerably less sexy bunny for the Space Jam sequel. The new film’s director, Malcolm D. Lee, has said the previous design was “not politically correct”. He added: “This is a kids’ movie, why is she in a crop top? It just felt unnecessary, but at the same time there’s a long history of that in cartoons. This is 2021. It’s important to reflect the authenticity of strong, capable female characters.”

The redesign has prompted a level of culture-war reaction out of all proportion to the seeming triviality of redrawing a 25-year-old cartoon character. The two sides have lined up in their standard formations, with Slate laughing at the conservatives for complaining, while millennial men who loved Lola the first time round clocked up millions of YouTube views slamming the change.

But Malcolm D. Lee is right to say the style of joyful, fecund horniness so richly symbolised by rabbits has fallen radically out of fashion. The old Lola represented the high point of a sex bunny trend that kicked off with Bugs Bunny in a horned helmet and pigtails, impersonating a seductive Valkyrie in 1957, hopped through the Sixties with Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Bunnies, took in the ultimate cartoon bombshell Jessica Rabbit, and climaxed in the 1990s, with the Rampant Rabbit.

Since that high point, both sexy rabbits and the politics of sex have become steadily weirder and more antagonistic. There is a grim story to tell here about the future of desire in the post-pandemic era, and it’s one that can be traced through rabbit iconography: right from the sacred rabbits of Greek love goddess Aphrodite and the hare-card pre-Christian fertility goddess, Eostre, through to the Lola Bunny redesign. And it was in the convergence of commerce, sex and rabbits in the Rampant Rabbit, where things really started falling apart.

The Rampant Rabbit, an elaborate vibrator, caused shockwaves when it appeared — for no one talked much about masturbation in the 1990s. This Rabbit was an event, made famous by a Sex and the City storyline in 1998 in which Charlotte buys one and then refuses to leave her apartment because she’s too busy using it.

The image this presented, of limitless female pleasure liberated from the inconvenient necessity of sex with an actual man, resonated with all those late-teen and university-age girls born to second-wave feminist mothers and raised in the 12 years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. A popular joke at the time asked: “What’s that useless flap of skin called at the end of a penis?” and the punchline is: “A man.”

Women who took charge of their own orgasms with a Rampant Rabbit also embraced an aggressively sexualised “ladette” version of feminism, that framed behaving like men as sexual empowerment. Somehow being ogled was also, supposedly, empowering; Sirin Kale recently described how, when she started university in 2007, “every fresher had their photo taken; the pictures were pinned to a bulletin board […] older male students scrawled on the photographs of the girls, rating our attractiveness.” Kale looks back on those events now as negative, but I was there in the 00s and being ogled was supposed to be something women enjoyed.

But it didn’t take long for the downsides of this all-you-can-eat 00s buffet of sexuality to become apparent — especially for the women elevated as its figureheads. For with the arrival of mass social media, the machine rapidly became voracious, and devoured many of its most iconic figures. Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan are perhaps the quintessential icons of Noughties display-everything female sexuality. And Lohan’s mental health issues were a gossip-column staple for most of the mid-noughties, while a recent documentary has detailed the psychological abuse Spears endured in the public eye during this period. Small wonder, then, that Spears’s interpretation of the iconic sexy bunny took a darkly sadomasochistic turn, with shiny black PVC bunny ears and chained wrists.

Girls born since the turn of the millennium, though, have taken a new approach to the digital age’s relentless appetite for sexy young flesh, that’s paradoxically both less and more sexualised — or, perhaps, more resigned to being sexualised but a lot more controlling about who gets to do so than the “ladettes”.

For this generation, the sexy rabbit has both become a virtual costume that can be donned with the touch of a button, in the form of Snapchat bunny ears filters. In the explosion of “furry” subculture, it’s also become increasingly conflated with an individual’s own carefully curated online “self-identification”, powered by a so-called Tumblr feminism hyper-focused on the politics of image and identity.

It’s no surprise these girls do sex, and sexiness, in a bleakly net-native style. On the one hand, they’re hyper-politicised about sexualisation in images of girlhood, as well you might be if you’d grown up in a porn-saturated digital culture; surrounded from childhood by the pressure to self-represent, to control their representations and perfect themselves for representation. Such girls might well bridle at the bouncing 1996 depiction of Lola Bunny — after all, she just looks like every other image they’re tormented by on Instagram every day.

Equally, though, it’s not that these girls are categorically averse to sexiness. For as Tumblr feminism also asserts: “Sex work is work”. If you’re going to be ogled all the time by everyone, everywhere, online and off, why not monetise it? The informal objectification Sirin Kale experienced in 2007 is out; instead, in 2021, universities hold “Sex Week” events in which porn stars give presentations on how to make money charging people to cop an eyeful of you on OnlyFans.

Perhaps, then, the millennial men raging at the Lola Bunny redesign do have a point after all. But it’s not a culture war objection — more an existential wail at the ever widening gulf between the sexes. Charlotte’s withdrawal into her apartment with a Rampant Rabbit signalled the late-nineties idea that women no longer needed men for sexual pleasure. And today, under the intolerable pressure of social media objectification, women are increasingly withdrawing even their visible beauty — unless an ogler is willing to pay.

If we’re to take Lola Bunny as representative of a nubile young woman today, we could read her redesign less as a sign that she’s de-sexualised. She isn’t: she’s paywalled. Beneath the compression shorts and the practical sports bra, Lola is just as curvy as ever. But she’ll only put a more revealing outfit on for her simps on OnlyFans.

At the bottom of the sexy bunny rabbit hole lies a grim mess of over-exposure, hyper-stimulation, mutual suspicion and exploitation. No wonder young people were having less and less sex even before the pandemic struck. We’re entering a new normal where the whole terrain of normal, youthful horniness – once sacred to Eostre – has been privatised for paying subscribers.

For a generation of young, single people, even when the world does unlock, following the white rabbit will no longer lead to the sacred spring underworld of flirtation and desire. Instead, it leads to a minefield of microaggressions and vending opportunities.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 years ago

The redesign has prompted a level of culture-war reaction out of all proportion… 
That could apply to just about everything today, not just a cartoon redesign. The need to find perpetual grievance is, well, perpetual. It is a blessing to not be part of this miserable cohort.

Mike Boosh
Mike Boosh
3 years ago

Wait until the male equivalent of the rampant rabbit gets invented. Once realistic affordable VR and s*xbots become available men won’t be leaving the house either, and women may look back fondly on those days when they received attention at all. The feminist cause will need to find a new focus then. An interesting side effect is that the human race may well become extinct or at the very least greatly reduced in number.

Scott Carson
Scott Carson
3 years ago
Reply to  Mike Boosh

“Once realistic affordable VR and s*xbots become available…..”

To be honest, they don’t even need to do that. As long as they can make a sandwich, fetch a beer and keep quiet while the football’s on the robot manufacturers are onto a winner.

Nick Lyne
Nick Lyne
3 years ago
Reply to  Mike Boosh

“Why do men have backbones?”

Larry Murphy
Larry Murphy
3 years ago
Reply to  Mike Boosh

Population collapse, indeed.

Annette Kralendijk
Annette Kralendijk
3 years ago

“We can blame it partly on lockdown, which effectively banned sex between anyone not cohabiting.”
Banning something does not prevent it. Even some of the “banners” were not immune to booty calls. If anyone actually believes that young, single people did without sex since last March unless they live together, well, let’s not be naive.

Last edited 3 years ago by Annette Kralendijk
Paul Rogers
Paul Rogers
3 years ago

Last March? This has been going on for a year and is still going.
Which part of the UK are you in exactly? The Isle of Man?

Annette Kralendijk
Annette Kralendijk
3 years ago
Reply to  Paul Rogers

Uh, last March was a year ago.

Ian Perkins
Ian Perkins
3 years ago

Even in the Isle of Man?

Annette Kralendijk
Annette Kralendijk
3 years ago
Reply to  Ian Perkins

I don’t know. Never been there. Maybe google?

Mike Boosh
Mike Boosh
3 years ago

Anybody that law-abiding and timid probably wasn’t getting laid before the lockdown anyway.

Annette Kralendijk
Annette Kralendijk
3 years ago
Reply to  Mike Boosh

Excellent point!

Mark Preston
Mark Preston
3 years ago

Given that any man can be on the receiving end of an unsubstantiated claim of sexual misconduct and can lose a university place or indeed a career on the basis of a simple accusation why would men put themselves in such a risky position?
And women are surprised with the growth of MGTOW.

Margaret Tudeau-Clayton
Margaret Tudeau-Clayton
3 years ago
Reply to  Mark Preston

Sorry, ut can you unpack MGTOW please? Just wanted to say that the negative impact on ‘flirtation and desire’ is one of the reasons that prominent French women spoke out against the MeToo movement.

Ian Perkins
Ian Perkins
3 years ago

If you’re asking what MGTOW means:
If your browser’s set up anything like mine, right click on the offending gobbledygook, and choose Search Google for “MGTOW”.
If that doesn’t work, it’s apparently “Men Going Their Own Way, an anti-feminist, misogynistic, mostly online community advocating for men to separate themselves from women and from a society which they believe has been destroyed by feminism.” 

Annette Kralendijk
Annette Kralendijk
3 years ago
Reply to  Ian Perkins

So the reverse of “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”?

Andre Lower
Andre Lower
3 years ago
Reply to  Mark Preston

Exactly. Something else in the article called my attention: The notion that “modern” women see no problem in monetizing access to their beauty.
Akin to prostitution, this attitude leaves little room for the possibility that women may actually like sex by itself – and contributes massively to modern males’ growing disconnection between their own libido and real world, flesh & blood females.
Between the wholesale demonization of male libido (#MeToo, etc.) and the monetization described above, sensible young men see no hope in believing that their libidos can find honest reciprocity. No wonder there is so much anticipation for the progress of the AI sex industry.

Annette Kralendijk
Annette Kralendijk
3 years ago
Reply to  Mark Preston

Are you seriously asking that? You can probably figure out why they do it. But your point that any man is vulnerable to any accusation from any woman is valid. And in the US it’s going to get worse as men lose the right to defend themselves on college campuses. Trump restored equal justice to accused men on campuses but it looks like Biden will be rolling that those rights back. Very sad, but people knew this when they voted for him.

Robert Forde
Robert Forde
3 years ago

Every time there’s a change in society, evidence-free commentators pile in to blame it on something or other. I am astonished that no one has speculated (and I admit that’s what it is) on the impact of reliable contraception for women in the 1960s. Before this, the randier we were, the more likely we were to produce offspring. Yes, there was contraception, but not anything like as reliable. Statistically, unreliable contraception means there will be quite frequent failures. Reliable contraception means we can choose more reliably whether to conceive or not. And that means overall randiness is a much less significant factor.
In short, how randy we are no longer affects fertility significantly. That must have consequences, because evolution works like that: activities that don’t favour reproduction get evolved out of a population, and much faster than we used to think. So, if millennials have less sex than their forebears, this may not be because they are sitting at home absorbed in self-stimulation (there’s no evolutionary advantage in that, after all). It may simply mean that we can reliably reproduce while having sex much less often, and sex drive is therefore diminishing. There must be consequences.

Micheal Lucken
Micheal Lucken
3 years ago
Reply to  Robert Forde

The below replacement level birth rate could be one of the consequences we are seeing of societies with such recreational opportunity paired with diminished incentive and desire for parenthood. It may well be that sort of society and people that get evolved out.

mattpope145
mattpope145
3 years ago
Reply to  Robert Forde

Interesting speculation, but don’t people do things despite their evolutionary disadvantage? You could say that evolution’s current is leaving behind the men who haven’t the willpower to refrain from this new digitised non-reproductive sexuality. Who knows?
From what I know of my generation I think it pretty likely that they (we) are absorbed in self-stimulation given what’s constantly on offer as soon as an urge arises. Something else to resist/sacrifice for the sake of meaning/depth down the line. Just because there’s no evolutionary advantage to porn-centric masturbation doesn’t mean it isn’t alarmingly common.

Jonathan Barker
Jonathan Barker
3 years ago

Speaking of Rabbits and the paradoxical and unpredictable nature of reality perhaps the first step could/should be is for everyone to go down the (quantum) Rabbit Hole with Alice.
It could be said that Lewis Carroll was one of the first postmodernist philosophers.

Cave Artist
Cave Artist
3 years ago

I thought the headline said rabbis. Very confused…

Scott Carson
Scott Carson
3 years ago

This prediction of a hormonal tidal wave post-lockdown is frankly terrifying. Perhaps we should administer a shot of bromide with every Covid vaccination?

Mike Boosh
Mike Boosh
3 years ago
Reply to  Scott Carson

They probably already are, along with who knows what else 😉

Last edited 3 years ago by Mike Boosh
Stephen Griffiths
Stephen Griffiths
3 years ago

Maybe the religions that advocate having children and see them as a blessing will be the winners here.

Peter KE
Peter KE
3 years ago

The woke world is evil and an attempt to destroy our society by left wing anarchist and thugs.

Ian Perkins
Ian Perkins
3 years ago

I did a Google image search to find out what Jessica Rabbit and Lola Bunny actually look like, and unless I’ve made some weird error, Lola Bunny doesn’t appear particularly rabbit-like, and Jessica Rabbit not the slightest bit cunicular.
Can anyone more familiar with the world of cartoons explain this?

Antonino Ioviero
Antonino Ioviero
3 years ago
Reply to  Ian Perkins

Jessica Rabbit took her husband Roger’s surname. She is a ‘toon, but not a rabbit one.

I agree Lola is weirdly anthropomorphic (knees?), but she’s got the characteristic long ears and scut.

Ian Perkins
Ian Perkins
3 years ago

Thank you. I’m still at a bit of a loss as to why two such non-rabbit-like cartoon characters generate such a hoo-ha about rabbits, and I won’t even ask what a ‘toon is!

Mike Boosh
Mike Boosh
3 years ago
Reply to  Ian Perkins

Toon = cartoon.

Ian Perkins
Ian Perkins
3 years ago
Reply to  Mike Boosh

I had wondered. So all this fuss around Jessica is purely about her name?
How many of us are likely to be hauled up before the thought police for culturally inappropriate and politically incorrect surnames? Jonathan Barker for instance – what grounds for termination with extreme prejudice might a warrior wokeist find in that name?

Last edited 3 years ago by Ian Perkins
Karen Jemmett
Karen Jemmett
3 years ago

Funny, I just ran a find search and couldn’t see any reference to ‘love’ in this article. Perhaps that explains the absence of the March Bunny?!

Annette Kralendijk
Annette Kralendijk
3 years ago
Reply to  Karen Jemmett

Liberals do not connect sex and love anymore. They are stand alone concepts.

David Brown
David Brown
3 years ago

Having followed the article’s link to a piece about the Lola Bunny redesign, it’s not only her silhouette and clothing that have changed: her face has too. I’m sure that this is not the intention, but it seems to me that she has simply done what we all have since the first film was released. She has aged twenty-five years.