Our country is too concerned with finding ways to become offended and making mountains out of molehills. This is all too evident in a recent story from the Greenwich Time that made its way across the Associated Press wire.
A few Greenwich citizens are up in arms over display advertising in the windows of Victoria's Secret stores. Mannequins and print models are dressed in thongs and fashionable underwear. I don't know if these folks heard, but Victoria's Secret does sell those things. Do people expect ads for candy apples or women dressed in thick parkas, or what?
The outspoken lady who was quoted in the Greenwich Time has proclaimed that she is not a prude, but that seeing those things makes her uncomfortable. It's a women's underwear store. Does she wear underwear? Do her children wear underwear? If not, that opens a whole new line of discussion, and a series of questions that surely will make her even more uncomfortable.
I guess she must wear underwear, but she gets them by going to some cellar where ladies in dark, hooded robes hand boring granny-panties and bras to her after she requests her size. I also am left to assume that she never takes her children to malls, where Victoria's Secret decorates its windows with ... the things they sell.
Citizens claim that these ads are designed to titillate. Well, I suppose I can see where they get that: The most beautiful women Victoria's Secret can hire are dressed only in underwear. I could see how that could be viewed as arousing.
However, I remember my days growing up in a conservative household where a J.C. Penney's catalog was occasionally left lying around. Being the good, honest, clean young man I was, I never turned to the underwear section of that catalog. And even if I had, I surely would not have found those women titillating.
Wait, what am I talking about? To a young boy, anything is titillating, no matter what it is. So to assume that any particular Victoria's Secret window display is more titillating than a TV show featuring images of Britney Spears seems ludicrous.
Grade-school girls are dressing like Madonna and Britney these days, with hip-huggers, bare midriffs and bras sometimes exposed, unintentionally, of course. I have to wonder if these families have ever sent their children to school, where there are other children who may use dirty words, show them dirty things and wear revealing clothes.
And if these kids advance to higher education? Assuming other schools are anything like ASU, you can't walk anywhere without seeing a sea of thongs hanging out of the back of young ladies' pants. It is almost like these girls think their pants don't fit unless their behinds hang out of them. This current craze is, I'm sure, titillating to many college men.
Granted, businesses must ponder their target audiences and who will view their advertisements before placing them. Considering that Victoria's Secret is an undergarment company marketing to women who usually are younger rather than older, their thong display seems appropriate.
We are not talking about the store posting images of young girls in thongs; we are talking about adult women modeling a product that many women feel they need. While the advertising does face a street, the ads are not offering nudity or sexual acts to passers-by, and the stores are certainly within their rights to post advertisements in their windows.
All things considered, a display in a store like Victoria's Secret is not the end of the world and surely is not going to destroy the moral values being instilled in Greenwich children.
Matt Snowden is a finance senior. Reach him at matthew.snowden@asu.edu.
