On not wearing a t-shirt - an open letter to Topatoco

Hi Topatoco,

This is the first time I ordered stuff from you, and the stuff I bought knowing what it was came swiftly and is awesome! I’m glad there’s this forum for some of my favourite independent creators to sell stuff and get support for their work. However, I wanted to tell you why I won’t ever be wearing my special discount “mystery you don't know what you'll get end-of-line” t-shirt in public, ever.

Problematic

I don’t want a refund or anything, and I certainly am not going to ship it back (I’m in the UK. Shipping costs are totally not worth it!), I just want to maybe influence you slightly to not stock this line again.

Short reason: It’s sexist.
Longer reason: It’s subtly sexist.
I got the mystery shirt 3 days ago. It’s a nice colour, and it presents the message “I like books” – no problems so far. It even pretty much fits. So, why did I feel a bit uncomfortable? Why was I reluctant to actually wear the shirt? Well, it’s taken me time to parse this out, but here goes (and for those of you who instantly knew why it was bad, feel free to skip the rest):

There’s a theory of humour that says some jokes are about resolving the incongruous – you expect something but get something else, and reconcile the discrepancy. This shirt is meant to be funny in that sense. Specifically, the humour that the shirt evokes relies on the viewer’s having knowledge of the usual (expected) context of “I would hit that” – a reference by a heterosexual male to an attractive female person and his desire/willingness to have sexual relations with that person (see Urban Dictionary, if you really want to). The incongruity lies in the fact that on the shirt the “that” is referring instead to a (presumably attractive) book, with which the wearer, it is implied, would like to have some sort of closer relationship.

In the expectation lies the problem. It’s fairly clear that any male seriously using “I would hit that” to refer to a female, is objectifying her and seeing her as a target. It would not be acceptable to me to wear a shirt saying “I would hit that” where the “that” is a human being (of any gender). However, the shirt you sent relies for its impact on people having enough knowledge of the objectifying usage to derive humour from identifying and resolving the incongruity. If I wear this shirt, it is dependent upon an objectification of women being commonplace enough to be ‘expected’. If that expected usage is removed, ie if "I would hit that" becomes unacceptable and unused, the  meaning of my shirt is destroyed. And that means that logically, wearing this shirt and wanting people to understand it is implicitly assuming, and requiring, sufficient continued usage of the phrase in its expected context. I do not want to require that, implicitly or otherwise. And so the shirt is not on - in any sense.

Apart from the logical problem, it's risking setting up a subtle negative association with both yourself as wearer and with books: the message is not so much "I like books", as "I like books - and hey, you should briefly think about how guys commenting on a woman's body in an objectifying fashion is still a thing. yaaay, books?"
I mean, reminding people of the imperfect state of the world is fine but it should probably be a little more coherent.

I would, naturally, support other pro-reading merch that does not have these issues. And look, it’s possible the whole reason this is a mystery shirt is that you’ve realised the problem yourselves and are never going to make this product again and are getting rid of remaining stock (I couldn't find who the original creator was btw). In which case, no problem! But in case you wanted to know why i won't be walking around as an advertisement for your stuff quite so often, this is why.

All the best - and thanks for reading.

I'm writing this post so I can post the next one

I've wanted to start blogging for some time. There's a lot of stuff on the internet and in real life that is interesting and that I could be a part of. Plus, creative outlet, trying something new, writing experience, Amanda Fucking Palmer says to try to make art, etc.
But there's also barriers, the practical "think of a name that isn't taken and choose a platform and do i need a pseudonym" type ones and the "do i need a defined topic"/"fear of failure"/"other people already say everything great" biggies.
It turns out that what has really driven me to it is the need to process why something was bugging me - to "analyse my own impressions" to paraphrase G.K.Chesterton (and in no other way do I compare myself to a fictional Catholic priest).
So, I do not know what this blog will define itself as - hopefully some sort of curation and some sort of thinking and writing about original stuff, too. I don't want to constrain subject matter, because where would be the fun and learning in that? Let diversity of interests rule. 

[Sidenote: This first post-intro post feels like it's way too trivial and slight to really be the first content post of a blog, but think of it as the straw for the camel. I did try the non-committal way of Facebook Notes, but found that "public" does not actually mean public but "we only count people with a Facebook account as the public", so had to move to a proper blogspace. Hence, this is all somewhat basic and rushed and a Friday afternoon job.]