Abercrombie & Fitch is entitled to run its business almost any way it wants, although it did get spanked for discriminatory hiring practices.

However, this story about how employees deemed not attractive enough are hustled away to the storeroom, out of sight of customers, is so very very icky that I get the hoobie goobies thinking about it.

Ick. Ick, ick, ick, ick, ICK!

What are we doing to ourselves, what are we doing to our youth, where did our values go so far astray? We are marinating in a strange brew of entitlement and self-loathing, setting up impossible standards and then hating ourselves for our inability to live up to them. We must not only be young forever, we must be young and beautiful.

But by whose standards, please? Some numbnuts who has risen to district manager of an Abercrombie & Fitch? This person gets to decide who is beautiful enough to represent the company? Are our sensibilities, as consumers, so rareified that we would make our shopping decisions according to whether we are attracted to the elf who greets us at the door? Honestly, if you haven’t been chased out by the onslaught if music in A&F, which is played at jet-engine decibels, then surely you are tough enough to withstand the shock of seeing a young person who might not ever appear on the cover of a fashion magazine.

Besides, even if that person is worthy of a cover shot, he or she would be airbrushed anyway. Lilies must be gilded and then gilded again. We are never good enough.

Labels: feminism, pop culture, shopping