Jake Burton Carpenter under fire for sexy images on his line of snowboards

From MSNBC

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.