1/9: Challenging Abercrombie & Fitch

I think it's funny how cultural critic Slawoj Zizek wrote the ad copy for Abercrombie's lame attempt at regaining its sales which have been declining due to high prices by having a pornographic catalog. They are listed below:

A&F -- Selling Sex
by Donna Garner
Aug. 3, 2003

A few weeks ago a worried mother wrote a letter to the editor of our local newspaper. It seems she and her children had been walking in the mall outside the Abercrombie & Fitch store when one of her children saw a nude picture displayed for all the world to see. Because my husband of 40 years and I were at the mall recently, we decided to verify the mother's complaint.

As correctly described by the worried parent, several big pictures of nudes were displayed prominently around the store. At the register was the back-to-school 2003 quarterly edition of the A&F catalogue. Preferring to rely on firsthand knowledge rather than secondhand accounts, we bought a copy of the catalogue.

We had to keep reminding ourselves that this objectionable piece of trash was supposed to be a catalogue whose purpose was to sell clothes. We found 123 pages filled with an erotic poem and accompanying pages of nude pictures. Among the many pages were numerous nudes portraying various configurations of partners, indicating that group sex is evidently fine, too. Of course, there was the expected politically correct pose of two naked homosexual men locked in each other's arms.

For 123 pages, A&F evidently wasn't too worried about selling its clothes because most of the models were not wearing anything at all. Finally on page 124 the catalogue section began by showing the wrinkled, frowzy, unkempt A&F clothes with a few women's paper-thin underwear thrown in for good measure.

An interview with women in a porn company was placed alongside a picture of three nude women; and the text across from the picture told intimate sexual details about the exploits of college men. Community standards would not allow me to quote directly from the article, and that should tell us something about the low-life writers at A&F who produced the catalogue and didn't mind exposing teenagers to such gutter language.

My husband and I began to think about all the teenagers who walk around with A&F emblazoned on their clothes. Why would sensible parents allow their children to become walking billboards that offer free advertisement to A&F and its degenerate marketers?

We adults need to understand something: A& F is not just selling clothes; it is selling teenagers a lifestyle of promiscuous sex.

With companies such as A& F influencing the youth culture, why should any of us be shocked to learn that almost 25% of the nation's sexually active teens have been infected by a sexually transmitted disease, many of which will last a lifetime? The really amazing thing is that roughly 75% of America's teens are not infected by STDs yet.

Nothing should please us more than to see a company such as Abercrombie & Fitch suffer financial collapse, and let's hope it happens soon before they ruin the lives of those young people who have somehow managed to resist A&F's marketing plan to sell sex to impressionable teenagers.

Contact information for Abercrombie & Fitch follows:

Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly, Back to School 2003; P. O. Box 182168, Columbus,OH 43218; abercrombie [at] abercrombie.com; 1-800-873-7290

Donna Garner: wgarner1 [at] hot.rr.com

P. S. The erotic poem follows so that parents and responsible adults can catch a glimpse of how dissolute A&F really is.

WARNING: FOR ADULTS ONLY

"Back to School"
by Slavoj Zizek

*As published in Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly, Back to School 2003; P. O. Box 182168, Columbus,OH 43218; abercrombie [at] abercrombie.com; 1-800-873-7290

Thus means: Forget the stupid spontaneous pleasures of summer sports, of reading books, watching movies and listening to music. Pull yourself together and learn sex.

As we know already from Daphnis and Chloe, the late antiquity novel, there is nothing spontaneous about sex: One has to learn it, one has to be introduced to it.

The naked couple without a spectacled teacher would be reduced to two clumsy ignorants unable to perform the act.

A melancholic nostalgia for the good old Victorian days, when it was still a terrifying transgression if a music teacher seduced the daughter of the family...

The only successful sexual relationship occurs when the fantasies of the two partners overlap. If the man fantasizes that making love is like riding a bike...

And the woman wants to be penetrated by a stud, then what truly goes on while they make love is that a horse is riding a bike...with a fantasy like that, who needs a personality?

There can be no friendship between twins: they are too close, so the only way for each of them to maintain his identity is to liquidate the other. A friend has to be outside my reach, beyond my grasp. And there can be no friendship with someone whom I am not ready to betray: A friend is someone I can betray with love.

A woman intermittently kissing two men: Does this constellation not merely explicate the fact that, while a man cheats his feminine partner with another real woman, a woman can cheat a man even if she makes love only with him, since her pleasure is never fully contained in enjoying him?

The object of desire is hidden behind the thigh but the true cause of desire is the tattooed cross on the arm. Is it not clear that we really make love with signs, not with bodies? This is why one has to go to school to learn sex.

Is the naked couple a stain disturbing the classical beauty, or does it stand for the authentic bodily reality unmasking the fake of the kitsch architecture? Neither: They are both fakes.

Movies are right: The romantic dream is in color, the reality of sex is in black and white. Here, however, school has to teach us another paradoxical lesson: The intensity of real sex can only take place in black and white. When we are immersed into love making, the world loses its colors.

If there ever was a happy couple, this is one. The first lesson of love to be learned at school: Do not look into each other's eyes! Only by ignoring each other can a couple learn to endure each other and, eventually, to become aware of the other's proximity.

It is obvious that the couple in front of the window are fantasizing that someone is observing them through the window! They need that gaze in order to be in love: They perform their love for that gaze.

The apple in paradise really was a book Eve was reading: What seduced Adam into sin was the burning curiosity about what is written in the book. This is the ultimate proof that sex has nothing to do with sin: Man became sinful the moment he was interested more in what's in the book than in Eve's gorgeous naked body

The solution is, of course: There was nothing in the book. Eve just pretended to be immersed into the book to seduce Adam...

In true passion, one does not need a head or brain: The whole body turned into a montage. This loss of the body, this dissolution of the body into a composite of organs, is called happiness.

No way to escape sex -- even in pure mathematics, it will haunt you: How much energy is released when two bodies hit each other? Or is it that pure mathematics is much sexier than sex?

Is the girl really dreaming that she is a butterfly? But what if she is a butterfly dreaming that it is a girl? It is only when her lover is able to discern the butterfly that is in her more than the girl herself that he will passionately desire her, that making love to her will not be only copulation.

The tired anxious gazes of the participants display the question: Was it okay? Did we perform well?

Another lesson to be learned at school: Not only under our dress are we all naked -- we are truly naked only under our clothes. If we are simply without dress, we are not really naked -- there is nothing less erotic than nudism.

Usually from a conservative cultural standpoint, the problem with today's culture, especially youth culture, is that of ethics, specifically of standards, limits being blurred. For example, sometimes in the news you don't even know what is publicity and what is news. That is to say that the news is turning into a kind of talk show...What do I see? A Utopian vision. A fugue. A truly modern synthesis.

Shit, why not have a cake and eat it too? You can have critical theory and nudity and enjoy it!

*Since text was published in all caps, I took the liberty to put it in poetic style.