Selling steamy sex

That's more or less how the Girls of 3iYing - a pen name for a group of five women who run a N.Y. marketing and design firm - open a column that takes aim at the graphic sexuality that can be found on the Web site and in the advertising for L.A.-based American Apparel (among others). Yep, that's the same American Apparel that's owned by Dov Charney, who has made no secret of his interest in pretty young models. (For mature audiences only, here's the Web site.) The 3iYing-ers find that from a girl's perspective "erotica in marketing is excessive, dirty, uninformative, and most importantly, a huge turnoff." (And it should be noted that places like American Apparell are marketing to girls.) Here's how they explain it:

Girls cringe at overtly sexual ads, yet paradoxically, marketing campaigns targeted at teen girls are sex-obsessed. It's impossible for us to browse, shop, and surf online without being bombarded with groping bodies, akimbo legs, come-hither gazes, and other provocative imagery. Even when we escape to teen magazines, we find sex staring back at us.

Further in the piece there's this:

Girls want a deeper storyline. To us, sexuality is more than physical. It combines visual, intellectual, and emotional elements. Girls will stop at an advertisement that is mentally intriguing. Sensitivity, playfulness, authenticity, and emotional expression between couples is far more fascinating than being a trinket for men to play with... Gratuitous sex dilutes the sales value of your expensive advertisements. Often, ads are so sexual, it's not clear what is really being sold. By relying on sex to sell your product you are not only getting lost in the steamy sea of marketing erotica, you're not highlighting what you want us to love in the first place—your product.

Judging by what goes on at MySpace, YouTube and the like, I'm not totally buying into the premise. The question, I suppose, is whether soft porn advertising has influenced teenage girls to the point where they think they should look and act slutty - or whether they were headed that way to begin with.