AJC.com > Opinion > Woman to Woman > Archives > 2008 > February > 16
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Is indecency running rampant in our shopping malls?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
It’s amazing that my colleague thinks any of us would for one minute “shrug off” the sight of a half-dozen Victoria’s Secret types in underwear and high heels walking by in a mall. Why, husbands might finally beg to go shopping!
I hardly relish going to bat for Victoria’s Secret or, especially, Abercrombie & Fitch, a store once faced with a “girlcott” by Pittsburgh teens for a misogynist t-shirt line, a business forced to shell out $40 million in a racially-charged employment discrimination suit.
Still, I’m pleased that the city of Virginia Beach is no longer going after Brendon Payne, the unfortunate A&F store manager threatened with up to a year in jail for obscenity charges, merely for displaying posters that were part of a national campaign. Fortunately, local authorities finally conceded he didn’t violate a city code outlawing “obscene materials in a business open to juveniles.”
I regularly patronize an establishment open to juveniles that displays far more revealing images — my city’s premier art museum. A museum employee shared with me that a highly-prized recent acquisition, a naked statue, had not received “nearly as many complaints as we thought it might.”
Am I really comparing a masterpiece in an art museum to underwear models or racy photographs hung in a store populated by teens? Of course not — I was enthralled with the statue, whereas I find many mall displays a bit too salacious for my taste. Yet when even the Virginia Beach city attorney admits one A & F poster is akin to something you might see “walking down the streets,” I’m reminded why acceptable “community standards” are not decided by some handful of outraged citizens. A rigorous legal criteria ensures that neither museum nor mall aesthetics are subject to random, punitive witch hunts.
My sympathies never lie with alienating, elitist retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch — girlcott them, boycott them, shop elsewhere if the vibe offends. Yet I’ll always go to bat for art, and for the ability of young people to somehow survive exposure to an underwear model in an underwear store, or the image of a statuesque guy spotted in a field on a lazy summer afternoon. Now — you want to talk mall indecency? Look at the price tags …
Services »
Commentary
By Shaunti Feldhahn
Imagine that you’re out with your teenage children and suddenly see a young woman walking nearby, completely topless except for one strategically-placed hand. Or some guys and girls run by, and one has clearly had his pants and underwear completely off - he’s pulling them up, but you can see most of his backside. Or perhaps a half-dozen good-looking women strut by in nothing but underwear and high heels.
Many observers would be irritated or shocked; some might even be angry enough at the young woman to report her for indecent exposure. But while these incidents would violate any local statute for indecency or partial public nudity, most of us would probably shrug them off as a momentary or isolated incidents.
So why do we shrug it off when retailers take those same images, blow them up larger than life, and put them in hundreds of malls and teenage clothing stores around the country? The pictures currently in the windows of Abercrombie & Fitch and Victoria’s Secret contain the exact images described above, and would violate public indecency standards in person. And yet the whole point is for kids to see them in our malls!
Virginia Beach police recently tried to enforce local obscenity laws, seizing two giant A&F posters from a mall store and citing the store manager on obscenity charges - which were later dropped since obscenity is a tougher legal standard than indecency.
What was A&F’s reaction? Instead of contrition and a promise to be more respectful of our kids, spokesman Thomas Lennox’s rejoinder was, “These photos are tame.”
And that is the reason advertising is getting more indecent: Some retailers have a warped sense of “normal,” and mainstream America isn’t letting them know. In Virginia Beach, the A&F store got complaints - but the mall management got none! All indecency and obscenity laws depend on an image violating acceptable “community standards.” Well, most people find sexual advertising far less acceptable than A&F thinks. If concerned people don’t join groups like iCareCoalition.org to push back, we have only ourselves to blame when A&F is able to say the Virginia police had an “incredible overreaction” - because, in their view, the community obviously finds those pictures totally fine.