ALLIE SHAH, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
01-04-2004
Young consumers see no harm in racy ads
By ALLIE SHAH, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
Date: 01-04-2004, Sunday
Section: LIVING
Edtion: All Editions.=.Sunday
Buff young bodies intertwined, suggestive slogans, and skin, skin, skin. This is the stuff of eyebrow-raising ads aimed at adolescents.
Sex sells, everybody knows, but businesses' use of it to sell to teenagers and preteens has raised more than eyebrows. It has raised a stink.
The fuss about Abercrombie & Fitch's flesh-baring Christmas "magalog" is well known. The quarterly catalog full of nude and scantily clad young men and women frolicking together was yanked from stores after several parent groups launched protests and made boycott threats.
While the preppy clothier is perhaps the most blatant example, it's not the only company pushing the boundaries. The proliferation of racy advertisements in teen magazines and on television has stoked a national backlash from parent groups.
French Connection United Kingdom came under fire for using the initials FCUK to promote its line of clothing and perfume to teenagers. An ad appearing in Seventeen magazine last fall featured a shirtless young man and a smiling young woman in her underwear in bed, with the phrase "Scent to bed" and "FCUK fragrance."
Pick up other teen magazines - there is a crop of new ones from CosmoGirl to TeenVogue to ElleGirl - and you will see ads for J.Lo Glow, Jennifer Lopez's perfume, featuring a naked Lopez in the shower, the steam strategically covering key body parts.
The way Dwayne Fisher sees it, the use of skin and sexual innuendo to sell to teenagers like him is just a fact of life.
He said he's mature enough to handle the racy images and savvy enough to recognize that it's all just part of the pitch. He's 16, but he said it's a person's maturity level and not age that's the issue.
The proud owner of a shirt that said "FCUK You 2" and an occasional shopper at A&F, he doesn't think such marketing is inappropriate. The French Connection shirts are funny, he insists, not sexual.
Fisher, who works in a clothing store, can wear what he wants, within reason, because he buys his clothes with his own money. But his mom, Laura Fisher, said he knows there's a time and a place to wear that shirt.
Joe Kelly said he is no prude, but he lobbies against "toxic messages" aimed at young girls through his non-profit organization based in Duluth, Minn., called Dads and Daughters.
"We're not anti-sex," said Kelly, whose twin daughters are 23. It's the way sexuality is marketed to teenagers that he finds objectionable.
"It takes power away from girls over their sexuality. We want girls to have power over their bodies and their sexuality," he said. "We want them to understand that sexuality is about humanness, intimacy. It's not titillation, and it's not pornography. This is not a responsible way to do business."
Every month, Kelly posts a message about a troubling ad and the company involved on his Web site (dadsanddaughters.org). Then he urges Web site visitors to write a father-to-father letter to the company's CEO, who almost always is a man, explaining why the ad is harmful to girls and asking the executive to picture his own daughter's face in the ad. His efforts have paid off. Federated Department Stores, the Cincinnati-based chain that owns Macy's, dropped French Connection's fragrance and clothing line after corresponding with Dads and Daughters.
Examples of using sexuality in advertising date back to the 17th century, but sexuality is creeping into the under-18 market, said Tom Reichert, an advertising professor at the University of Alabama and author of "The Erotic History of Advertising."
The motive, of course, is profit.
"They're trying to get hold of that billion-dollar, 13- to 19-year-old buying business," Reichert said.
In some ways, the increase in sexual advertising to a younger audience is a natural progression from the increase of sexual images on television, the Internet, and in the larger society.
But young people are at a greater disadvantage than adults exposed to the same highly sexualized images, because kids generally lack the critical skills necessary to know that they are being taken advantage of, Reichert said.
Consider when Calvin Klein was the undisputed leader of provocative ads. In 1995, a series of TV commercials and magazine ads showed underage models in their CK underwear in sexually suggestive positions.
"Parents and media critics went crazy over those ads, but the kids didn't. They really did not see that these images were pornographic," Reichert said. "So in a lot of ways, they're vulnerable and susceptible."
Illustrations/Photos: * * *
Keywords: YOUTH, ADVERTISING, SEX
Copyright 2004 Bergen Record Corp. All rights reserved.
