Article My Generation Was Groomed
Article My Generation Was Groomed
Yesterday, 6:21 PM
Quote:Les Wexner was the most influential mall tycoon of the late ’90s and early 2000s. As CEO of L Brands, Wexner oversaw The Limited and The Limited Too, Bath & Body Works, Express, and — most crucially for millennial teens — Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch. Wexner’s brands defined what it meant to be a cool young person in that era, and did it so successfully that Wexner became very, very rich on the backs of his devoted adolescent customer base. The defining aesthetic of a generation was the result of his vision.
All of which gets a little concerning when you consider just how many men who worked for and with Wexner have been accused of sexual misconduct involving very young people — starting with Jeffrey Epstein.
Now to avoid just copy/pasting everything from the article (I'm trying to confine myself to re-posting roughly half of it, but you really should read the whole thing), I'll just summarize the crux of what immediately follows this by saying that it turns out Wexner was Epstein's biggest financial client, like for decades, and that there are a lot of sex crimes people in his employ and orbit, including many high-ranking ones like the former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch and the former chief marketing officer of L Brands, appear to have been involved in ranging from groping of Victoria's secret models to sex trafficking and prostitution, and that many of their victims were quite young. Much pedo type shit. Anyway, I wanna get to the conclusion because it is the point:
Quote:Wexner’s persistent presence in the Epstein story is often overlooked, as he’s not a household name in the way that President Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Bill Gates are. Still, Wexner’s influence is undeniable because his companies were so central to the prevailing aesthetic and ethos of the 2000s. When I was a teenager in those years, every girl I knew got her first bra at Victoria’s Secret, and most of my classmates either wore or aspired to wear Abercrombie’s jokey graphic T-shirts. The companies that made up L Brands were as fundamental to the experience of being a millennial adolescent as speculating over the state of Britney Spears’s virginity was.
Wexner’s brands were not neutral purveyors of clothing. They defined culture and were architects of what was cool, which is to say they provided teens, tweens, and young adults with an ideology of what is acceptable and desirable, and what is not.
At L Brands mall stores, being cool meant being thin (neither Victoria’s Secret nor Abercrombie was what we would today call “size inclusive”). It also meant being white. Abercrombie infamously refused to hire people of color to work the sales floor and sold numerous racist T-shirts, while Victoria’s Secret dressed white models as “sexy little geishas” and Black models in jungle-themed lingerie.
Perhaps most importantly, though, at L Brands stores, what was cool was what was raunchy. The late 1990s and early 2000s were a sexualized and then pornified era, and perhaps nowhere was this grim, compulsory sleaze as evident as it was at the mall.
In her 2025 book Girl on Girl, the journalist Sophie Gilbert describes Abercrombie’s trendy, envelope-pushing raunch circa 1999. As Gilbert writes:
Quote:The Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly’s Christmas issue that year, titled ‘Naughty or Nice,’ featured nude photo spreads, mentions of oral sex and threesomes, and an interview with the porn actress Jenna Jameson, in which she was repeatedly harangued by the interviewer to let him touch her breasts. The publication provoked outrage in the media, but the company’s strategically sexual marketing to its teenage consumer base was sound: A 2000 Time story reported that sales had increased sixfold in just six years.
Meanwhile, Victoria’s Secret televised its annual Fashion Show for the first time in 2001. In 2002, the brand launched Pink, its first collection aimed at teenagers. Pink joined the Fashion Show in 2006, featuring young models in barely there lingerie, clutching cheerleader accessories and stuffed animals.
“Les was pretty excited about Pink, and so it got a lot of attention,” a former CEO of Victoria’s Secret said of Wexner in a 2022 documentary. “He saw an opportunity, and he likes to exploit an opportunity.”
All of this is to say that the people who taught young millennials how to be cool were people with a history of inappropriate conduct around the very young. In that case, it is perhaps not a coincidence that the cool to which they taught teenagers to aspire was a pornographic kind of cool.
We’ve spent much of the past 10 years unpacking the baggage of the 2000s: all that sleaze, all that casual misogyny, all that fat-shaming, all that cynical, performative raunch — and at the same time, that intense fixation on innocence, on purity, on virginity. The contradictions have troubled me so much that I built a whole essay series around it. Over time, what I’ve found strangest about the raunch-purity paradox of those years is that it felt so compulsory, as if there were no other options outside of the binary with which we were presented, no other way to be a person that had worth.
You had to diet yourself as thin as possible, because the Abercrombie low-rise jeans required it, and you had to navigate people (often adult men) reacting to your partially exposed Victoria’s Secret underwear, because the thongs required it. Complaining about any of the above felt like a waste of time: It meant you would come off as humorless and uncool and behind the times, and anyway, what other options did you have?
As millennials move through their 30s and 40s, we’re still making sense of the misogyny and racism that was normalized by adults in our teen years. At this point, it’s worth asking the question: Did the people who did this to us do it on purpose? Were we simply watching capitalism in action? Or was it something closer to being groomed?
(The bolding at the end is mine for emphasis.)
ALL of this about the influence of these brands at that time is 100% true. I was there. Yes, this shit was inescapable. Frankly, I didn't connect the dots at the time. Like I didn't notice that all these companies were part of the same conglomerate, owned by the same guy, for example, let alone did I know who Jeffrey Epstein was or anything about what was going on behind the scenes. But now it all makes sense! Fucking disgusting, terrifying sense!
One of my favorite quotes from Andrea Dworkin is this one:
"Feminists are often asked whether pornography causes rape. The fact is that rape and prostitution caused and continue to cause pornography. Politically, culturally, socially, sexually, and economically, rape and prostitution generated pornography; and pornography depends for its continued existence on the rape and prostitution of women."
I firmly believe that this principle applies to more than hardcore pornography. It seems that it applies to sexual objectification of all kinds, including the pervasive variety that defined the youth culture of my teenage years. Here is your evidence.
So now you know: all that shit wasn't just rebellious teens wanting to be sexy, it was gross pedo predators grooming them.
Edited Yesterday, 6:51 PM by Impress Polly.
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I recently read a powerful article by Constance Grady that was published in Vox and thought I'd share because it's worth really absorbing. It's about the time frame when I was a teenager and, frankly, it makes sense of...a LOT about the culture of the time. Shit that was going on behind the scenes that you didn't know back then. First let me introduce you to a character named Les Wexner.
Quote:Les Wexner was the most influential mall tycoon of the late ’90s and early 2000s. As CEO of L Brands, Wexner oversaw The Limited and The Limited Too, Bath & Body Works, Express, and — most crucially for millennial teens — Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch. Wexner’s brands defined what it meant to be a cool young person in that era, and did it so successfully that Wexner became very, very rich on the backs of his devoted adolescent customer base. The defining aesthetic of a generation was the result of his vision.
All of which gets a little concerning when you consider just how many men who worked for and with Wexner have been accused of sexual misconduct involving very young people — starting with Jeffrey Epstein.
Now to avoid just copy/pasting everything from the article (I'm trying to confine myself to re-posting roughly half of it, but you really should read the whole thing), I'll just summarize the crux of what immediately follows this by saying that it turns out Wexner was Epstein's biggest financial client, like for decades, and that there are a lot of sex crimes people in his employ and orbit, including many high-ranking ones like the former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch and the former chief marketing officer of L Brands, appear to have been involved in ranging from groping of Victoria's secret models to sex trafficking and prostitution, and that many of their victims were quite young. Much pedo type shit. Anyway, I wanna get to the conclusion because it is the point:
Quote:Wexner’s persistent presence in the Epstein story is often overlooked, as he’s not a household name in the way that President Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Bill Gates are. Still, Wexner’s influence is undeniable because his companies were so central to the prevailing aesthetic and ethos of the 2000s. When I was a teenager in those years, every girl I knew got her first bra at Victoria’s Secret, and most of my classmates either wore or aspired to wear Abercrombie’s jokey graphic T-shirts. The companies that made up L Brands were as fundamental to the experience of being a millennial adolescent as speculating over the state of Britney Spears’s virginity was.
Wexner’s brands were not neutral purveyors of clothing. They defined culture and were architects of what was cool, which is to say they provided teens, tweens, and young adults with an ideology of what is acceptable and desirable, and what is not.
At L Brands mall stores, being cool meant being thin (neither Victoria’s Secret nor Abercrombie was what we would today call “size inclusive”). It also meant being white. Abercrombie infamously refused to hire people of color to work the sales floor and sold numerous racist T-shirts, while Victoria’s Secret dressed white models as “sexy little geishas” and Black models in jungle-themed lingerie.
Perhaps most importantly, though, at L Brands stores, what was cool was what was raunchy. The late 1990s and early 2000s were a sexualized and then pornified era, and perhaps nowhere was this grim, compulsory sleaze as evident as it was at the mall.
In her 2025 book Girl on Girl, the journalist Sophie Gilbert describes Abercrombie’s trendy, envelope-pushing raunch circa 1999. As Gilbert writes:
Quote:The Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly’s Christmas issue that year, titled ‘Naughty or Nice,’ featured nude photo spreads, mentions of oral sex and threesomes, and an interview with the porn actress Jenna Jameson, in which she was repeatedly harangued by the interviewer to let him touch her breasts. The publication provoked outrage in the media, but the company’s strategically sexual marketing to its teenage consumer base was sound: A 2000 Time story reported that sales had increased sixfold in just six years.
Meanwhile, Victoria’s Secret televised its annual Fashion Show for the first time in 2001. In 2002, the brand launched Pink, its first collection aimed at teenagers. Pink joined the Fashion Show in 2006, featuring young models in barely there lingerie, clutching cheerleader accessories and stuffed animals.
“Les was pretty excited about Pink, and so it got a lot of attention,” a former CEO of Victoria’s Secret said of Wexner in a 2022 documentary. “He saw an opportunity, and he likes to exploit an opportunity.”
All of this is to say that the people who taught young millennials how to be cool were people with a history of inappropriate conduct around the very young. In that case, it is perhaps not a coincidence that the cool to which they taught teenagers to aspire was a pornographic kind of cool.
We’ve spent much of the past 10 years unpacking the baggage of the 2000s: all that sleaze, all that casual misogyny, all that fat-shaming, all that cynical, performative raunch — and at the same time, that intense fixation on innocence, on purity, on virginity. The contradictions have troubled me so much that I built a whole essay series around it. Over time, what I’ve found strangest about the raunch-purity paradox of those years is that it felt so compulsory, as if there were no other options outside of the binary with which we were presented, no other way to be a person that had worth.
You had to diet yourself as thin as possible, because the Abercrombie low-rise jeans required it, and you had to navigate people (often adult men) reacting to your partially exposed Victoria’s Secret underwear, because the thongs required it. Complaining about any of the above felt like a waste of time: It meant you would come off as humorless and uncool and behind the times, and anyway, what other options did you have?
As millennials move through their 30s and 40s, we’re still making sense of the misogyny and racism that was normalized by adults in our teen years. At this point, it’s worth asking the question: Did the people who did this to us do it on purpose? Were we simply watching capitalism in action? Or was it something closer to being groomed?
(The bolding at the end is mine for emphasis.)
ALL of this about the influence of these brands at that time is 100% true. I was there. Yes, this shit was inescapable. Frankly, I didn't connect the dots at the time. Like I didn't notice that all these companies were part of the same conglomerate, owned by the same guy, for example, let alone did I know who Jeffrey Epstein was or anything about what was going on behind the scenes. But now it all makes sense! Fucking disgusting, terrifying sense!
One of my favorite quotes from Andrea Dworkin is this one:
"Feminists are often asked whether pornography causes rape. The fact is that rape and prostitution caused and continue to cause pornography. Politically, culturally, socially, sexually, and economically, rape and prostitution generated pornography; and pornography depends for its continued existence on the rape and prostitution of women."
I firmly believe that this principle applies to more than hardcore pornography. It seems that it applies to sexual objectification of all kinds, including the pervasive variety that defined the youth culture of my teenage years. Here is your evidence.
So now you know: all that shit wasn't just rebellious teens wanting to be sexy, it was gross pedo predators grooming them.
