hint of boob and ass crack = OBSCENE

This article about Virginia Beach police seizing some mural-sized Abercrombie & Fitch ads confirms the world's suspicions about how prudish we Americans can be.

Police, saying they were responding to citizen complaints, carted away two large promotional photographs from the Abercrombie & Fitch store in Lynnhaven Mall on Saturday and cited the manager on obscenity charges.

Adam Bernstein, a police spokesman, said the seizure and the issuance of the summons came only after store management had not heeded warnings to remove the images.

The citation was issued under City Code Section 22.31, Bernstein said, which makes it a crime to display "obscene materials in a business that is open to juveniles." He did not say what was being done with the pictures and when the manager, whose name was not released, is scheduled to appear in court.

The manager, reached by telephone, declined to comment on the incident Saturday, saying that he was conferring with and waiting for guidance from Abercrombie corporate officials.

The mural-like black-and-white photographs were taken from the store at midafternoon.

Bernstein confirmed that one depicts three shirtless young men from the back, walking through a field. The man in the lead appears to be about to pull up his jeans, which have slipped down enough to reveal his upper buttocks.

The same image is displayed on the Abercrombie Web site.

The other image is of a woman who is topless and whose "breast is displayed with her hand covering just the nipple portion," Bernstein said. "You could still pretty much see the rest of the breast."

The seizure was "prompted by several customer complaints, and the management of Abercrombie & Fitch was notified of those complaints," Bernstein said.

Anyone who's lived in Europe knows that the Abercrombie ads are tame. The immediate peevish reply to my contention is usually, "But we're not in Europe." True. But the deeper point, which my hypothetical respondent is missing, is that we become less than what we can be when we start being afraid of our own bodies-- to the point where the merest hint of a hidden valley is considered vulgar. The fact of the matter is that, were we exposed to such advertising on a more routine basis (it's amusing to think that what Abercrombie is doing is somehow risqué), we'd get used to it, and getting used to it would be healthy: in the case of such ever-so-slight bodily exposure, desensitization isn't a bad thing.

"But we can also get used to ads that feature dismembered babies," my invisible interlocutor says. True, but that argument assumes we're on a slippery slope, and slippery slope arguments are fallacious. I could argue backwards in time, reversing the slippery slope to ask why my interlocutor doesn't advocate returning us to the days when women weren't allowed to expose their ankles. If titillation is the door to concupiscence and even graver sins, then we should go all-out to wrap our bodies up from head to toe. We might even think about introducing whole-body clothing that minimizes any hints of the human form, especially the female. Let's call such an outfit a burqa.

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