For crying out loud, teenagers can figure out how to get their swerve on without corporate help.

Such facts seem to escape moral crusaders like Lt. Gov. Corinne Wood, who has launched a campaign to stop Abercrombie and Fitch from printing their catalog, but never gets around to saying exactly why.

Like a shy teenager who still spells out S-E-X when she speaks of it, Wood “urges concerned citizens” to rise up against A & F and it’s “blatantly sexual marketing campaign.” That campaign involves wrapping the catalog in neon green plastic that says “XXX.”

XXX. There, feeling sexy?

If you are, it probably means you’ve seen something referred to as XXX that isn’t an A & F catalog and you aren’t going to get any wild ideas from neon cellophane.

Again dancing around what actual sex the catalog may include, Wood drones on about how “editorial comment throughout encourages promiscuous premarital sex.”

Wood, my religion and I find nothing wrong with premarital sex. If you and yours do, then this catalog business is something for you to take up with your church and not the state of Illinois.

Anyway, the release doesn’t give any examples of these titillating suggestions, which makes me think they’re either overblown or so good Wood wants to keep them to herself.

I think by about age 13, most of us have heard of the birds and the bees. I suppose I can see some value in keeping junior high kids from buying shirts that say, “flirt like crazy, wake up sandy,” but isn’t it pretty obvious that A & F targets college students?

If you’re a parent and you don’t want your kids seeing a stupid catalog, don’t let them. It’s up to parents to parent their kids, it’s not up to a publication to make sure its pages please anyone beyond its demographic.

The release states that Wood’s outrage began when she spotted her daughter with the catalog. That to me sounds like a problem for the Wood family to handle that I personally don’t give a crap about.

I haven’t seen the catalog, but I’m sure I’ve seen worse, as have most college students that make up its target audience.

By this age, all of us are old enough to have whatever sex we happen to like and have generally figured out whether we’re going to do it. If someone says to me, “You know, I was an abstinent Christian until I saw that Abercrombie & Fitch catalog! Now I’m a promiscous heathen!” then maybe I’ll be convinced any of it matters.

Even then, I probably wouldn’t be too bothered. I for one am sick of promiscuity getting such a bad rap. But that’s another column.

A catalog sells clothes. Commercials sell toothpaste, cars and everything else under the sun. Both use sex to do it. Advertising has used sex to sell its products since day one, and people have been at it even longer. Maybe if the religious right (that Wood tries so valiantly to distance herself from) didn’t paint sex as a writhing, sweaty source of disease and low self-esteem, we wouldn’t be so bothered by this catalog.

College kids have always, will always have sex, and whether a dumb catalog mentions it or not isn’t going to change much.