When I was in high school, every cool kid had a half-a-dozen pairs of The Gap Inc. (NYSE:GPS) jeans. We'd go shopping in their stores around Christmas season and see four or five of our classmates behind the register, and another 20 or 30 among the customers. In college, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE:ANF) became my new aspirational casual retailer of choice, and I could pick their iconic striped sweaters and slim cargo pants out of any crowd.

But now? Gap and Abercrombie, we are so over you!

Amey Stone and I were IM-ing, trying to figure out why this was. We had lots of ideas, firstly, as Amey said, "maybe it's those half-naked men standing in the doorway that are scaring off mothers with young children." This makes sense on a lot of levels. When I was a college kid, the half-naked men were the perfect sex symbol. But the target audience for these clothes has gotten both younger (12- and 13-year-old girls instead of college kids), and older (moms like Amey and me who used to be hot for the half-naked). If the younger set are shopping, in today's increasingly protective culture, they're doing it with mom -- and mom isn't about to bring her 12-year-old into a store that clearly sells sex alongside the sweaters.

As for the older set, we moms with two or three very young children? The last thing we want to see is a half-naked man, even if he's exceptionally cute. Let's be frank. Our libidos are 1/10th of their normal selves thanks to the hormones involved in child-rearing. We'll stick with the J. Crews and the safe boutiques, with the cute little frog umbrellas and not the clothes that make our eight-year-olds look like they're trying out for America's Next Top Swimsuit Model.

I participated in a panel discussion at a conference on Saturday with a couple of young, smart, geeky teenagers -- i.e., the absolute center of most marketers' universe. These girls, Iris and Sheena, were the very definition of "early adopter" and "Generation Y" all rolled into one, a tiny yet brilliant focus group on the future of technology, social networking, and the internet.

Someone asked if Iris had a blog, and she said, "I hate to say this, but [pause] MySpace." She and Sheena both related how they checked out their MySpace accounts daily to see if friends had tried to contact them. For the two of them, both from lower-income families and members of under-represented minority groups, their technology lives consisted of homework, their podcasts, and MySpace.

If I were less of an analytical sort, I'd immediately say that MySpace is clearly winning the social networking arena. The site has the teenagers! What's more, it has hours each day of attention from these girls, from my youngest sister, my babysitter -- all of the 13- to 25-year-old demographic, really. But then I thought for an instant more, and I realized that Iris and Sheena were both the perfect example of MySpace's market domination and the reason why Microsoft, AOL, and Google will always win the race for ad dollars.

There's no money in these teenagers' MySpace behavior.