Have yourself a horny little Christmas

Looking at the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog makes me want to buy their clothes, but I'm too exhausted from self-abuse.

By Cole Kazdin

Nov 26, 2003 | Nothing says "Christmas" like a good old-fashioned circle jerk by the fire.

For all you squares who don't know what a circle jerk is, turn to Page 88 of the Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly, under the picture of wet, naked college kids and the heading "Group Sex." (It's difficult to figure out where you are in the book since most pages aren't numbered.) It reads: "Sex, as we know, can involve one or two, but what about even more? ... A pleasant and supersafe alternative to this is group masturbation."

The challenge for me, when masturbating with my friends to the nubile nudies in the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, is trying not to think about serious things like racial diversity; it tends to kill the mood. But because most of the models in the catalog are white and because a lawsuit has been filed against the clothing retailer for allegedly discriminating against a black woman who applied for a job at the store, it's hard for the issue not to rear its nonsexy head.

Part "Barely Legal," part vapid teen magazine, the Christmas issue of the A&F Quarterly is unparalleled in the amount of naked frolicking it uses to sell clothing. And considering the demographic it is trying to reach, it's downright risqué. Besides the couples seemingly in the throes of sexual intercourse, there are subtler seductions. If you look very, very closely, somewhere around Page 100, you can find not-quite airbrushed male pubes on a well-cut frat guy, as he slides in the buff down a wet rock into crashing waves. It's beyond anything our parents saw in Playboy.

"It's very healthy to be free and be honest about it," says Sam Shahid, an A&F board member, and head of Shahid & Co. in New York, the firm that designs the racy ad campaigns. The cover of the Christmas issue promises "280 pages of moose, ice hockey, chivalry, group sex & more." There wasn't a whole lot of ice hockey or chivalry, unless, by "ice hockey" they mean bare asses, and by "chivalry" they mean nipples.

One layout is of four giggling topless coeds, tanned and blond, sprawled across a plaid blanket in the woods, pulling down the boxer shorts of a freshly scrubbed muscular guy, with a Cheshire cat grin revealing Tom Cruise-like pearly whites. And his ass.

Then there's a completely naked couple, making out, or having sex, on wet rocks. There's Tom Cruise-guy again, naked by the fireplace, but for a strategically placed gift with a bow. And look! Two naked men (can 18-year-olds be called men?) in the river, standing barely far enough away from each other not to be construed as gay -- though that's how I construed it.

"There's no such thing as being too sexy," Shahid says. "You're speaking to the kids. Everybody talks about sex all the time." He says none of the sexual content in the catalog is meant to shock -- though this comes from the same man who gave us the borderline kiddie porn ads for Calvin Klein years ago.

The A&F catalog regularly evokes plenty of outrage and numerous boycotts from Christian, conservative and parent groups all over the country. "Everyone has their own hang-up," he says. "We think it's beautiful and gorgeous and we're not offending [anyone]." And he adds that most of the ideas come from the models themselves. "They have a great time and we don't do anything that they don't want to." The "kids," as he refers to them -- almost parentally -- pair up, form friendships, and sometimes have tears in their eyes at the end of the shoot.

But maybe that's because they can't find their clothes. In the catalog, the first sweater doesn't show up until Page 122 and by then, you're too tired from masturbating to shop. But I'm missing the point. The catalog isn't about the clothes. Huh?

"How many plaid shirts can one have?" Shahid asks. He explains that they are selling the "aspiration and the idea." He says Abercrombie & Fitch is "cool and sexy and very Eastern seaboard," and when you buy the clothes, "your image in your head is: I'm one of those kids. I put one of those shirts on and, Oh! -- I'm one of those kids. It denotes a particular feeling. There's nothing wrong with it."

There is something wrong with it, according to Brandy Hawk, the 19-year-old college student who filed the recent lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Camden, N.J. Hawk went to prep school and describes the A&F style as virtually her uniform; it was always a place she wanted to work. "It never really occurred to me that I'd be the only black person working there," she says. She had an interview this past May, where the assistant manager explained that they were looking for their employees to represent "casual lifestyle, American youth, athletes, sorority girls," says Hawk. When Hawk -- an athlete with previous retail experience and a wide-open schedule -- never heard from them again, she was mystified. She says a security guard at the store found out from the manager that she wasn't hired because she wouldn't represent the company well.

Hawk couldn't believe that being black had anything to do with it, but when she found out about a similar lawsuit filed in California by a young Mexican-American man, she was heartbroken. This free and casually fabulous lifestyle that she and her friends had so loyally bought into suddenly didn't want her. "I really took it as a slap in the face," she says. "It's knocking the wind out of me. It's like your best friend doing something ..." she pauses, looking for the right word, but can't find one to convey the severity, "like your best friend doing something really bad to you."

Hawk filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in June, and then, just last Wednesday, filed suit in U.S. District Court. When we spoke on Saturday, she said there had been no response yet from the company.

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