Menino is targeting retailer's ad campaign

Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who has blasted ''Stop Snitchin" T-shirts and gone after illegal guns in his campaign against violence, is now targeting a trendy Copley Place retailer whose ad features female models appearing to be attacking one another.

Menino says the trendy retailer that uses an anagram of a vulgar word for its name should pull the advertisements and use more positive images of women.

FCUK stands for French Connection United Kingdom, which has stores on Newbury Street and at Copley Place.

''The ad campaign both connects and promotes negative images of women and violence, certainly not how we want girls and young women to see themselves, and most definitely not a path we want them to follow," Menino said in a statement.

The advertising campaign, titled ''Fashion v. Style," is supposed to represent the struggle between the two, according to the company's website. In one poster, a slender brunette with a raised fist grabs at a blonde woman as she falls. In a video commercial on its website, another pair of women rip off parts of their outfits and begin throwing each other across a room in a frenzy of hair pulling and slapping. The women kiss at the end of the commercial.

Sele Baleng, 23, of New Hampshire, who was leaving the Copley Place store last night, agreed with Menino. ''Personally, I think it's promoting violence," she said, ''It's like 'Girls should abuse each other,' and I don't think it's right to encourage that," she said.

Yesterday, a manager at the store referred all comments to the company's corporate offices. A spokesman for the British-based company could not be reached.