David and Goliath, maker of obnoxious tees mostly for teens, recently had to pull this gem from their website:
It reads: “No means no - Well, maybe if I’m drunk.”
And, upon looking at it, you wonder why any woman would wear it. You kind of start to think a man might wear it with a sense of rife irony that is only kind of funny, and even if you do think it’s funny you start to wonder how the hell it ever cleared Legal or PR unless maybe someone in PR thought any publicity is good publicity and so kind of sneaked it past Legal… and then you wonder if they’ll print something this bad, what the hell are they leaving on their cutting room floor, and is that how the stupid shirt with Blame The Dog and a drawing of a dog ripping a fart got made, then you realize you’re wasting precious verbiage on something that is at best braindead and at worst a lame we-wish-we-were-controversial because-controversial-is-edgy stunt and it’s Friday night and why the hell are you on the internet.
Anyway. Weaksauce, David and Goliath. Weak. Sauce.
April 1st, 2008 at 4:01 am
I believe that people have genuinly missed the point of the shirt. It’s not that the shirt promotes rape but in fact quite the opposite.
The humour, such as it is, in the shirt comes from the fact that people recognise the second statement to be false. Those who think about it further realise that rather a strong point is being made about the nature of rape and exactly what is deemed to be rape by our society. Rape is a crime which is rarely spoken about and one of those reasons is because the young victim is often drunk or otherwise compromised. By making the shirt D&G have drawn attention to the problem and gotten people speaking about it. Does this sound anti-feminist or even pro-rape? I doubt it.