A Funny Sort of Oppression
NEW FOR TOPMAN WINTER ’11 FASHION COMES ‘MISOGYNY CHIC’, PLUM SHADES SLOTTING between the heady glamour of wife beating and comparing your girlfriend to a dog.
To many, the concern is how clothing with unapologetically misogynistic branding had ever been put on sale. To Brendan O’Neill, it is that removing them from the hangers is an act that sees the “controlling and censoring of men”.
Faced with the selling of t-shirts with the slogans “You provoked me” or “What breed is she?”, what really matters is over-sensitive women robbing a man of his freedom to dress like a fool.
“The dumping ground for society’s killjoys and miserabilists”, feminists, according to O’Neill, just didn’t get the wit, willfully refusing to find the funny side of trivializing domestic violence or being dubbed less than human.
In doing so, he reaffirmed women’s place as the only group to suffer harassment whilst being told it is their fault for not getting the joke. We were pressed, not for the first time, to ‘stop going on’ about it, to attempt to overcome the sense of humour bypass that comes with having breasts.
More than one in four women will be abused by a partner at some point in their life. 100 women will be murdered this year, by someone that sleeps in their bed.
The men that come home to punch, ridicule, or rape don’t do so because of what’s sitting in their wardrobe. And contrary to O’Neill’s distortions, no one is claiming that they do.
Adorning a hateful t-shirt does not transform a boy into an abuser. As the top snakes over his head, his mind is not in an instant contaminated by the slogan’s stain. He is though given yet one more societal hint that these are crimes to be trivialised – as the young girl next to him is given another to teach her these are not matters over which she should make a fuss.
There is something deeply disturbing in taking the abuse of women – prevalent, and growing, and real – and making it into something consumable, to produce a profit and a self-congratulatory laddish laugh.
This is the problem, despite what O’Neill states – not that women aren’t able to see the lighter side of domestic violence, but that we exist in a culture that would dare suggest we should. It’s a warped hatefulness littered through O’Neill’s own reasoning, never more prevalent than when finding hypocrisy in feminists who have campaigned for permission to dress like “slags.”
His choice of words says plenty, as does comparing a woman’s fight for the right to dress as she wants without risk of rape to a man’s right to dress in a way that takes the same crime and makes it a joke.
Women hating clothes aren’t the direct cause of a misogynistic society, but they are without doubt one of the many symptoms of the disease. To the outrage of some, this particular symptom has been quashed.
O’Neill really needn’t panic over not having a t-shirt to announce he’s full of anti-woman bile. He can do that all on his own.
