Americans are crazy. That's a fact. And two things are guaranteed to make them even crazier: sex and teenagers. Throw an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog into the mix, and you've got a recipe for national hysteria unseen since ... well, the previous Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.

Abercrombie & Fitch is always involved in a kerfuffle of some kind, man. In 2001 and 2003, well-meaning feminists and right-wing conservatives alike got out the pitchforks and went to war over the clothing company's eroticized images of young folk at play. Then there was A&F's West Virginia incest T-shirt scandal, and its racist stereotyping T-shirt scandal, and that whole brouhaha over an Olympic gymnastics team. I won't be discussing those here. Let's just say that they keep busy, those folks at A&F.

So. Sex. Teenagers. The newest dustup involves yet more A&F T-shirts (so little material, so much fuss!). These are for girls, and bear such pithy slogans as "Who needs brains when you have these?" and "Do I Make You Look Fat?" and "Blondes are adored, brunettes are ignored" emblazoned across the breast/chest area.

Hmm. Nasty sentiments, but regrettably reflective of the way a lot of teen girls think. Way to go, A&F! Encourage those self-brutalizing catfights! Next year, how about a special line aimed at cutters and anorexics? Now, that's hot.

Usually, when A&F is involved, I want to mock the critics as much as the crime. During the too-sexy-catalog wars, for instance, A&F's foes exhibited such a profound ignorance of teenage sexuality that it made one suspect that they'd all sprung, at age 30, from the forehead of a televangelist. (Parthenogenesis: It's not just for the Greeks anymore!) But this case is different because A&F's own target demographic took it to task. A group of teenagers calling themselves the Women and Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania launched a national "girlcott" to protest the annoying slogans, and last week succeeded in persuading A&F to discontinue "some" of the line. Don't ask me which shirts were dropped, or what criteria were used in the culling. The ways of A&F are too mysterious and wise.

Predictably, the negative publicity helped A&F's sales. It always does, which is one reason A&F goes out of its way to offend. The same week the company agreed to curtail the offensive T-shirts, it reported a 31 percent jump in revenue.

Whatever. Girlcotter Heather Arnet told the Chicago Tribune that it doesn't matter if Abercrombie gets free advertising because the notion that young women can kick back at the fashion industry got publicity, too. And with "Girls Gone Wild" soaring in popularity, the latter cause needs all the coverage it can get.

In short, this is an excellent outcome. Not only because it left cloying and overly concerned parents out of the picture, but because it showed that young women aren't quite as brain-dead as contemporary culture would have us believe. Look, I'm all for women being bawdy. Duh, look at the title of my column. What I hate is the false correlation between female sexuality and the bimbo aesthetic -- in other words, the misapprehension that only dimwitted human Barbies, under the tutelage of male Svengalis, are allowed to celebrate their assets (for the benefit of men, of course, and to the detriment of other women). The A&F T-shirts were a classic example of this malignant stupidity, and, baby, I'm not weeping to see them go.

HIS DAMP AND CHILLING HAND: Lest we leave men out of the column entirely, I now offer the following historical citation: "Look at the habitual masturbator! See how thin, pale and haggard he appears; how his eyes are sunken; how long and cadaverous is his cast of countenance; how irritable he is and how sluggish, mentally and physically; how afraid he is to meet the eye of his fellow, feel his damp and chilling hand, so characteristic of great vital exhaustion." -- Dr. Henry Guernsey, "Plain Talks on Avoided Subjects" (1882), as excerpted in "Put What Where? Over 2,000 Years of Bizarre Sex Advice" by John Naish.

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