Saturday, December 23, 2006

Wife beating, Its a dirty job but somebody has to it

Well, imagine my surprise to learn when reading a reader's comment that someone must undertake the dirty job of wife beating. It's almost enough to make me stop reading the "Readers Respond" columns under the stories published in 4 out of the 5 daily papers in Maine about the Kmart Attitude 66 tshirt Hardy Girls and Boys to Men teens asked Kmart to remove from its shelves. While it was painful enough to learn that Kmart and its parent company Sears Holdings Corp. thought the t-shirt's message "light-hearted" even though it was clearly a depiction of violence against a young girl, it's deeply troubling to read the blogs. Clearly they are written by angry men. But why? These men all had mothers and grandmothers and, many no doubt have sisters, aunts and daughters. Do they think that's what those women deserve or is it just that misogyny is so mainstream that they don't even question what they are writing/saying/thinking.

I'll stop now because I really hope that you will follow the link to Bob Herbert's Why Arent' We Shocked and then start to think, especially if you are male, what you can do to reverse this attitude. After all, when you come right down to it, it's really only men who can stop violence against women and children.

2 comments:

hrdygrlz said...

Here's my letter to Sears Holdings Corp.

As a long-time Sears customer, I urge you to stop selling the
"problem solved" shirt in which a man pushes a woman out of the
cartoon frame and she lands on her head, or any other item that
trivializes or makes light of mens' violence toward women.

Removing this shirt from your stores will lead me and many others to return as your customers. More importantly, it will diminish the very real
chance that your daughters will be the victims of violence from men.
Humor and popular culture teach durable lessons- and so do
courageous visible acts by businesses like yours.

Please tell me what choice you make about this issue.
Thank you.
Stan Davis
stan@stopbullyingnow.com
409 North Wayne Road, Wayne ME 04284 USA
http://www.stopbullyingnow.com

hrdygrlz said...

We're new at this blogging/commenting stuff so that comment that seems to come from Hardy Girls actually came to us as an email -- while we posted it with permission, it kind of looks like it was our own post.