Controversial T-Shirts – Getting Social Taboos Off Your Chest.

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Heather Corrina of Scarleteen.com is a t-shirt designer on a mission. Her latest t-shirt “I was Raped” has been featured on CNN and in the worldwide media at large. She is herself a rape victim and passionately feels that bringing her message to as large an audience as possible will increase awareness and reduce risk in modern society.

Following in the footsteps of writer Jennifer Baumgardner, who, in 2005 designed her “I Had An Abortion” T-shirt in conjunction with the release of her documentary to make a political statement about abortion rights, Heather aimed to bring worldwide attention to the plight of rape victims.

Last year the supermarket giant ASDA banned the sale of a t-shirt from all their UK stores featuring the slogan “If at first you don’t succeed, buy her another beerÔøΩ” – which I myself would find offensive and I’m pretty open-minded in general. The vast difference between the ASDA t-shirt and Heather’s and Jennifer’s is their positioning amongst a generation of political awareness and social change.

I believe the age of “political correctness” is in the midst of rewriting its rulebook, I can understand how all three of these t-shirts could offend some, if not the moral majority as a whole.However I do believe it is vital to make a distinction between those that use “shock tactics” to forward a valid argument or social comment, and those that merely shock for the sake of it. If you want offensive t-shirts there are plenty of t-shirt stores doing their utmost to shock and sicken you, TShirtHell.com being at the top of the hit list for the family friendly lobbyists, (incidentally T-Shirt Hell had tried to place a “political statement” advertisement in Rolling Stone magazine in 2004 but were refused.)

The point is the USA has a real constitution (unlike the United Kingdom), it provides the right to free speech for every USA citizen, I am not quite sure where the rest of us in the “Free World” stands on this, I’m sure it all depends on what you say, who you know, how much money and influence you have, and your lawyer, or am I simply being cynical? Whatever my rights, I am sure I have the freedom to condone the rights of all people to draw attention to the plights of minorities; the dispossessed, the suffering, the poor, the physically disabled and many more worthy causes. For all their talk, for all the promises of politicians and short-term frenzies by the media, this is democracy in action -a slow and steady viral campaign, from the ground up. One person after another buying a t-shirt for more than the sake of style and fashion, for a change in the way society thinks, and ultimately behaves.

A true democracy must at least have tolerance for a variety of different views, tastes and opinions. However I can understand how many communities will have a terrible time accepting this, this is not a family friendly society but a society of individuals, many of whom with vastly different perspectives on life and how we should live it. Political, sexual, class and age differences can weigh down any debate with a stream of misconceptions and cultural misnomers, a torrent of “isms” and a long period of begrudging diplomacy to at the very least undo the damage done by those involved. Hence most communities cannot solve their problems only ignore them and hope they go away. It maybe upsetting for the children, the religious, the highly-sensitive and the elderly, however I suggest that Heather and Jennifer have suffered far more in comparison. I’m not a religious man, however I am sure there’s probably quite a lot of texts in the Bible suggesting showing compassion to the sufferances of others – or am I wildly off tack there? If the moral majority cannot show compassion I can understand why those who feel wronged, misunderstood, or neglected by society, would be angry enough to try and shock their contemporaries.

There is a grand tradition of politically charged imagery, it’s called ART! From the moment man/woman picked up a piece of chalk and scribbled on a cave wall, we, society at large, became witness to the graphic and painful truth that is the human experience. If we don’t share we can’t learn, if we can’t learn we cannot progress, if we can’t do that we will regress back to a puritanical time of misinformation and religious dogma. The choice is simple really, learn not to be offended by others’ suffering and even show compassion and possibly offer a positive contribution, or shutdown society now, turn off the lights and hope all our problems will go away. We need to face the truth, even if it does hurt, we don’t have to wear it, but we can’t expect those who have suffered to stay silent, this is the information age, no one stays silent unless it’s enforced by an undemocratic government. The worlds’ history shows a silent deference to the upper classes, the powers that be, monarchy, military leadership, political masters, cruel dictators and tin-pot despots.

We can’t turn back, we have to understand that this world is getting smaller everyday (6,677,602,292 humans by my last count), to avoid more and more war, and to react to natural disaster quickly and effectively, to ensure that we will still be able to trade globally in the future, to bridge cultural divides, we all have to learn more tolerance. This isn’t Burma, this is the Western World, we should know better. If we keep censoring everything, art, information, belief systems themselves will go the same way as personal privacy, consumer rights, and the power of the voter. Most of us are currently experiencing a glut in democracy, if the masses rose now, the governments would fall to their knees and do whatever we asked. But in all honesty we’re a completely different race than a few hundred years ago, people hardly muster up a march let alone revolt against their oppressors, besides we’ve seen what a mess that can get you in. As an old and wise man from Ireland once told me “Evolution not Revolution.” Evolution is natural, yes it is messy, but it works after a lot of trial and error. Revolution, well it’s practically a big fight and whoever wins can have a go and running things for a while, and if they’re no good they’ll have another and another until someone has the bright idea of bringing in military rule, and then everyone has to shut up. No more offensive t-shirts true, but then again no more free speech whatsoever, no more Church on Sundays for those who didn’t like the t-shirts, no more freedom of any kind.

Britain is one of the most homogeneous, culturally and ethnically diverse countries in the world, if not the most. We are a small island, only around 850 miles long, there’s over 60 million of us now, and that’s rather crowded. Most of us live in or near London, its the one city most American’s have heard of, it’s a second home to Aussie backpackers looking for bar work, it’s a financial powerhouse of the world (or rather it used to be), and all in all it’s a tolerable place to live (especially if you’re rich). The point is London has seen it all and then some, we’ve had punk, we’ve had riots, we’ve had the GLC and Thatcher in our time, it is a place of extremities of all genre. An offensive t-shirt in London would hardly lift an eyebrow, Londoners will walk past bank robberies, dead bodies, burning buildings, they won’t stop, unless to join the “staring competition” or take a photo for FaceBook. They don’t care. I know that most of New York wouldn’t care either. Most Western cities have a far more tolerant attitude towards shock tactics, mainly because the advertisers, the filmmakers, the pop stars, and the government have been there first.

If the Government commissioned a poster campaign to raise awareness of women’s rights and included “I’ve had an abortion” and “I’ve been raped” in their slogans, the media would jump on it for a few days, a lot of highly moralized people who’ve never seen the posters or read the literature would vociferously write in letters of complaints, perhaps the government would even withdraw them. But in most modern western progressive cities, most inhabitants would hardly notice the campaign. We are numb, that is the truth, our culture has been bombarded with everything under the sun these last few decades. TV has exploded, the Internet, drugs, music, film, massive collective events, political change, technological advance, environmental deterioration. We can’t help it, we’ve been overloaded with choice and bloated with opinion, we can’t take anymore, so we’re shutting down our public receptiveness.

When you’re young you want to stand out, but when you get older you just want to maintain the status quo. If we marked it on the evolutionary ladder, our race is a child, but as far as our instincts are concerned, society moves forward at the speed of a beached whale, its sick of conjecture, its immune to shock and horror, it simply wants to move to a gated community and watch cable and play golf all day. Soon those who have ruled the moral majority, those with economic power, those who have insisted on keep the social and economic models of our society “post-war” – even though we have entered a new century – these will meet their mortal end. However much power and status can make a person believe they are immortal, or at least their ideas and teachings are, they haven’t factored in the current and ongoing cultural malaise of a selection of generations with little more to identify with than politicians, celebrities and sports stars.

I was born in the late 60’s, I saw through the tail-end of an age of hippies turning into punks and skinheads that finished the decade with race riots and mass strikes. I’m sure every waking moment of my childhood would’ve seemed offensive to many parents today, I wasn’t sheltered from the facts, people suffer, people get angry, people want justice. It is the inalienable right of every free citizen (I am no subject of the Queen whatever she may believe) to protest. International anti-terror laws have been the undoing of many of our individual rights for privacy, congregation, behaviour and protest. We can either continue to encourage our governments to censor the world and his wife, or create a civilized debate without resorting to prejudice or in some circumstances, war. The power of image and text is as abundant today as it ever was, it has created religion, history, governments, even countries, but it is simply the instigator for debate, not the cause of a problem in society (which will always reverberate far deeper than fashion and politics), and it is certainly not the solution, but it is a vital bridge.

Most people in Europe, excepting the predominantly Catholic states, are humanists first, human rights are sacrosanct, and even though pro-lifers can debate the moment of consciousness in a foetus, the majority accept the human rights of women over their own bodies. For the main part religion doesn’t even enter the debate, or rather it does and is finally ignored. Religious beliefs are a personal system, the system of law is public, those who have suffered must be given the opportunity to seek justice, those in crisis must be given a supportive environment in which to make their own life-changing decisions. What we can’t do is tell people what to do with bodies, with their minds, with themselves, if they truly believe it has a positive effect on their lives. We can only protest, when the words or actions of that individual, public body, or corporation affects others physically and to their detriment.

The tricky thing about all this is that I have a lot of trouble with a lot of t-shirts, t-shirts that reduce us all to a common denominator so low, so bereft of compassion or understanding, it really does make me wonder what will become of us all in the years to come. Rather than censor this information, I am including links to t-shirts that offend me, not for the purposes of public titillation, but to show others that the only way to change the opinions of others, is to treat them as intelligent human beings with the capability to make their own moral choices.

Abercrombie & Fitch – Racist Asian T-Shirts

In 2002 thousands of complaints were sent to Abercrombie & Fitch over their racist t-shirts (largely from Asian-American college students, who were ironically one of Abercrombie & Fitch’s primary target groups for these products). By April that year A&F withdrew the items from their stores nationwide and discontinued all sales.

Abercrombie & Fitch justifications were scant. It used the argument that it had already had great success with sexist and Irish-American humor t-shirts in the past with no complaint. I think this is exactly where Political Correctness begins to stumble. You can easily as well find sexist t-shirts aimed at women that are “technically” denigrating men. The same goes for a long tradition of t-shirts poking fun at the British in both Ireland and America! The point is if there is a tradition of toleration, even friendly rivalry, there is probably a lot more common ground than say the English and the French would like to admit. At the other end of the spectrum you have incidents like Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published 12 Muhammad cartoons in September 2005. A clear case of cultural divide, we have a tradition of lampooning religion, whilst Muslims and Buddhists don’t. The older the religion the more likely that the congregation will find humour in their own beliefs, I doubt that comedy would’ve ever been created without the enormous assistance of the Jewish faith and culture. Putting it as bluntly as possible, many Western cultures see everything as everyone as a target, if there’s a joke to be made, we make it.

Members of the Asian-American community offered a variety of reasons why they found the shirts offensive:

• The shirts “trivialize an entire religion and philosophy.”
• The shirts portrayed “Asian Americans doing menial work, something that early immigrants had no choice over.”
• The shirts used racist imagery from a newspaper published a century before.
• The shirts’ use of Buddhist iconography is an insult to the central Asian culture and belief system.
• The shirts employed negative stereotyping, i.e Charlie Chan and other Western stereotypes.

Nonetheless it took a long time for all the stores to pull their stock, in the meantime the public furore hit the media and 1000’s of Americans rushed out to buy the last remaining t-shirts. Many citing that they couldn’t see the problem with them, simply that they were “funny t-shirts”. There’s a distinct lack of cultural or even individual empathy in society today, perhaps there never was any, I just hope one day that the majority can begin to picture the other side of any arguments dear to their social consciousness’s heart.

Abercrombie & Fitch probably lost more customers than they gained, I doubt they would ever publicly attribute any corporate losses to the debacle, and besides the consumer has a very short memory, far less than any voter, a few snazzy ad campaigns and I’m sure A&F were back on track as usual.

Here’s another poorly thought out design… The Controversy over UK Football T-shirt slogan

A sports store has been criticised for selling a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Always Kick Ahead – Any Head” alongside England football strips.

In 2006 the Sports Soccer store in the Chequers shopping centre in Maidstone, Kent UK began selling this. Now I know Kent pretty well and there are plenty of people there who wouldn’t even need the encouragement, but there’s a long tradition in the UK for football hooliganism. sure it has vastly improved since the authorities banned those convicted of football violence from travelling to foreign games. (Although football violence has now caught on in Russia in a big way).

The store insisted the item was available nationwide and intended for rugby players (although it was displayed right next to the England Football Strip at the time). This is an example of reckless t-shirt design with no regards to the consequences, but I bet my bottom dollar that most of the world wouldn’t see a problem with it. It is a cultural divide, if your country has a history of violence in sport you can envision the problems it causes. It isn’t offensive until there’s blood running down the streets of the next European city to host the Cup.

Then of course there’s the recent Obama/Curious George t-shirt controversy, you can read the post here

I’d hate a world of earnest yet unyielding political correctness, silence isn’t some golden cure to the troubles of our times, we have to look at the root cause of the problem, cultural indifference, lack of empathy and sympathy for the common man, misunderstandings in history as well as political differences of the present. We really have to learn to tolerate each other, and if it means making t-shirts to test those boundaries, then I’m all up for it.

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