The Lipster

Last month Starbucks, in one of those fathomless but probably heavily researched marketing moves, decided to revive their original 1971 logo and slap it on their new Pike Place coffee bags and cups. The Ur-Starbucks mermaid (taken from a fifteenth-century engraving) was happily posed exposing bosoms, belly and what passes for crotch in the mermaid world, holding her twin fish tails shamelessly around her ears and apologising for nothing.

As one Gawker commenter pointed out, she was technically a melusine, a two-tailed variety of mer-lady, and therefore not a cousin to Disney's Ariel, although she's almost certainly related to good time girl Sheela Na Gig, who can be found displaying her hoo-hah on churches in the UK and Ireland but was sadly less successful with her coffee franchise. Since then, in order not to offend certain sensibilities, the Seattle lady of the sea has been cropped so you can't see that belly and crotch, and had hair extensions added to cover her breasts.

Predictably, The Resistance, one of those zany American Christian groups that make the interweb so entertaining, has called a boycott on the 'Bux for using the retro logo. A spokesman said:

"The Starbucks logo has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute... Need I say more? It's extremely poor taste, and the company might as well call themselves, Slutbucks."

Slutbucks. Now there's a T-shirt I'd buy, with extra whipped cream to go please. Time to reclaim the mermaids, sirens and melusines anyway – they've always had a bad reputation for things like seducing sailors and drowning them, and ended up being symbols of prostitution in Elizabethan times (see this scurrilous placard depicting Mary Queen of Scots as a slapper). Hans Christian Anderson wasn't much better – least said about what he put the Little Mermaid through, the better. Sarah Hepola at Salon's Broadsheet says, "Frankly, this new logo is the most exciting thing I've seen at Starbucks since the introduction of the peppermint mocha," and I'd agree, although I still have the urge to set up Sheela's, a coffee chain with a difference, and nicer policies for their staff and bean-growers.