This anti Ann Summers thing is idiotic. Ann Summers has played an important role in allowing people to express their many faced sexualities. It does not dictate body type or sexuality. Yes it is run for a profit but you idiots have not attacked it for that reason. You are working to the agenda of right wing anti women anti sexuality anti gay sexophobes. You are anti-libertarian and therefore have no places on Indymedia

I kinda think that it is a bit fucked up as a target, smacks of some weird moral anti-sex thing. Surely there's better things to attack regards this topic? Does make us out to be some kind of Victorian anti-sex purists.

I guess it makes sense to attack a company that makes money out of objectifying sexuality, however there are much more justified targets than Ann Summers. Maybe once we've closed down all the banks, army bases, police stations etc. and hand carved ourselves some dildos we can start bricking in your local sex shop window, but until then although I support your actions, I just feel they could be better directed.

That said I don't want to tell other people what they should be made at, just can't help feel it's slightly manufactured anger, especially having read the "communique" from the original Ann Summers hit, what a load of elitist, insurrectionist bollocks. Got no problem with insurrection, but putting a bin through a window doesn't make you the Red Army Faction.

What was the excessive use of ampersands all about as well?

Even if Ann Summers is guilty of some gender stereotyping and objectification of women's bodies (e.g. in their advertising posters) it is a long way from being the worst offender. It is not for instance like a clothes shop where the sizes only go up to borderline underweight, and people who don't have the correct body are not catered for, or a trendy and elitist bar where only the young, fashionable and conformingly beautiful are welcome. A good argument can be made that by transforming the sex shop from some seedy place in a back alley into a pretty normal High Street shop, female masturbation has been made less taboo, sex toys are not just for some super-kinky minority any more, and in general people are more able to unashamedly enjoy their sex lives and not have to be all furtive about it. That a large part of the motivation for this was to increase the market for certain products and therefore make money for capitalists doesn't make the outcome any less welcome.

Regardless of your intentions, the targeting of Ann Summers while so many other High Street shops do far more to normalise the female body and dictate sexual expression along narrow lines makes this look to others like you are simply illiberal and anti-sex. You may not see yourselves as the armed wing of Mary Whitehouse's Victorian morality brigade, but if I saw an Ann Summers smashed up and a designer clothes shop or a plastic surgeon's premises next door untouched then that's who I would assume had been past.

If people want to be whipped or dress up in costumes or something else you find unsavoury, this is their right and it is simply not tenable to assume that these are invariably desires created by someone who wants to make a profit, or for that matter by patriarchy. There are at least as many men out there who want to be tied up and spanked by their female lovers as vice versa, and Ann Summers does not significantly discriminate or, as was said above, "dictate body type or sexuality". I strongly suspect that people who are into some unusual sexual pasttime not sanctioned by the mass media or prevailing social attitudes are far less likely to be mocked or rejected by an Ann Summers shop assistant than by the average narrow-minded sexually repressed prude in the street outside.

Shops like Ann Summers are possible because we are all a bit more open about sex following the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s. A similar shop would have scandalised just about any community it had appeared in before this radical and for the most part liberating transformation of attitudes.

Do you want to roll back the sexual revolution?

This is unfortunately how it looks if you try to keep open expression of sexuality off the streets by smashing up sex shops.

PS Previous article about Ann Summers from 29 March which this one didn't bother linking to is at  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/03/476879.html

I agree whole heartedly. Please, sentiments of the action fine, choice of target is rubbish! Yet again something that doesn't make sense and makes radicals look stupid. Please don't bother with this again.

Seriously? Ann Summers is owned by David Gold - the most odious, vile, sexist chauvinistic porn peddler. Do not tell me it liberates me because I can buy a dildo on the high street. Who decides what targets are "most acceptable"? Is there some form of consensus as people black bloc up to say, "well, banks matter more than body image?"

This just buys further into the same old crap about what causes are more worthy, what issue is the greatest and where the energies of any sort of movement should go. I notice no press attention surrounding the other sex shops and Soho's dens of abuse which were liberally paintbombed. Yes, Ann Summers isn't a tax avoiding bank, but then neither is Santander and that got completely smashed up. What it does do is perpetuate sexist patriarchal myths and expectations upon women, and just because it sells a few battery powered toys amongst its skimpy outfits and hen night jokes doesn't make it some great white hope of sexual liberation. Why no complaints about any other shops or targets? Why is everyone so invested in a mainstream porn emporium?

I'm still not sure what you are actually protesting against with Ann Summers. Is it the products they sell or the advertising they use?