The Rolling Stones have never been one to shy away at offending the sensibilities of prudes around the world. Hell, that’s been their modus operandi for nearly 50 years. In keeping with this tradition a new Rolling Stone Museum that has just opened in the small German town of Luechow has some locals up in arms.
The museum hasn’t even officially opened its doors yet, but it isn’t whats contained within the exhibition halls that has some people’s noses out of joint but rather some of the fixtures in the mens room.
The museum operators thought it would be fitting to have installed mouth-shaped urinals in the mens room modelle after the iconic Rolling Stones mouth logo. But several women’s rights campaigners are now demanding the removal of the urinals arguing they’re shaped like female lips and offensive after photos were published in several German newspapers and magazines.
“There’s been an outcry among the people — about a dozen women have complained to me alone,” Marianne Joensson-Olm, equal-opportunities officer in Luechow, told a German news reporter.
Local feminist activist Roda Armbruster is also furious with the museum operators telling a German television network “That’s discrimination against women. Why does it have to be a woman’s mouth?”
“If it had been based on the emblem of the stones with the tongue, it would have been okay,” she continued. “But the tongue’s been left out and they really look like women’s mouths.”
According to the LA Times, the museum’s founder, Ulrich Schroeder, has denied that the urinals represent a man’s mouth or a woman’s mouth and says they are meant to replicate the band’s famous logo. The logo, a pair of open red lips, was created in 1971 by art designer John Pasche and modeled after Mick Jagger’s famously large mouth.
It’s art,” Schroeder told German newspaper Die Welt. “They were damned expensive and they’re staying where they are. That’s final.”
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