Pessimistic Politics: I Beat My Girlfriend Because a T-Shirt Told Me To!

Here in America, we pride ourselves on being the land of the free, home of the brave, where as far as we’re concerned, you can give us liberty or give us death. We also consider all people (well, men, but the old phrasing is obsolete) to be created equal, and we pride ourselves on our strides towards equality. We routinely march into other people’s countries, whether as an army or as tourists, and brag about how equal everyone is, and how they should be equal too. Too bad we’re basically full of crap.

Not to undermine civil rights movements, which have taken great strides in making the playing field more level over the last century. The problem is, we still take some ideals from the old guard and apply them in more casual, yet still dangerous ways. We don’t hang black people because they’re black, but many of us white folk still feel a certain unease around those with dark skin, even though we know we shouldn’t. We don’t arrest people for being poor, but too many of us who are better off would rather pretend poor people simply aren’t there. We don’t treat women as property of men, but some men still consider women to be toys for their amusement.

And yet sometimes the discrimination goes the other way, a phenomenon sometimes known as reverse discrimination. This is when a minority does or says something that discriminates against the majority. As politically pleasing and ironic as this term may sound, there is no such thing as reverse discrimination. Even if you’re a poor, black, Islamic, teenage lesbian, if you make a crack at rich, white, Christian, middle-aged straights, you’re just as evil as any other prejudiced pig.

I just want to pause and point out how stupid the minority-majority term is. Women are considered a minority when compared to men, even though there are more women in the world. Black and Hispanic populations are on the rise, and the mixing of races will phase out the white man as we know him, as if that term really means anything, when you come right down to it. Therefore, since calling a larger group a minority is just stupid, the meaning I’m trying to convey is “power majority” and “power minority,” indicating which group has more political power. Of course, as we grow into a more PN (politically nervous) society, who can really say which group has the true power?

I believe it to be a sad state of affairs when the most minor of offensive imagery causes an outcry when applied to a minority group, but when the same imagery is reversed to apply to the majority, everyone seems to think it’s a cute joke. Now, I’m not exactly a PC freak that believes that children should be referred to as age-challenged and everyone should be referred to by their exact ancestral background (he’s a German, adopted Polish, possibly Native American-American). For example, I’ve long since abandoned the term “African American” and just use “black” because it’s convenient and closer to being correct, though I still use Native American, because it’s more accurate.

I also believe the idea of equality is a bunch of bull plop. While I’m all for striving for equal rights, I also realize that it’s a journey, not a destination. We can never achieve true equality because of one simple factor in the convoluted equation of human existence: humans.

Humans naturally find comfort in the familiar and fear anything that’s strange to them. If you try to tell me that you’ve never been nervous around someone from a different race, someone with a handicap, or even the opposite sex, I’d have to throw you in prison for perjury. That doesn’t mean that you’re not a decent human being, it just means that you’re, and there’s nothing wrong with this, a human being. And human beings tend to develop an eventual loathing towards the things that scare them, despite themselves.

Even if scientists engineered everybody to look exactly the same, dress the same way, and make them do all of the same things at the same time, and live in a big building several thousand miles in size, those people would still form cliques and divide themselves up on some moronically minor difference, like who sits closest to the windows at lunchtime and comes in direct contact with the sun’s rays.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t try, which is more or less the entire point of the civil rights movements. While we will never be equal, we can at least hope that one day we’ll treat everyone with respect. That means taking the good with the bad.

Back to the point at hand, which is about offensive imagery, we have reached a point in our society where we are deeply concerned about offending people, whether by offending their religious beliefs, racial identity, or any other such factors that people hold dear. Unfortunately, while we fight against certain things that offend the perceived minority, we don’t have any problems with ignoring the personal needs of the majority. In fact, we generally don’t even acknowledge such issues.

Such a politically unbalanced incident began at a Toledo K-Mart, where a grassroots group of protestors sprung up, picketing a single t-shirt the store was selling. The t-shirt, made by Route 66 and pictured below, features two stick figures, a boy and a girl. The girl is yelling and jumping up and down while the boy rolls his eyes. The caption under this panel reads “Problem.” The next panel has the boy, looking very satisfied with himself, pushing the girl through the panel border and down to her apparent death (or out of the confines of the shirt; who can say?). The caption here reads “Solved.”

The shirt drew a protest of about fifty people who claim that the shirt makes light of domestic violence. Protest organizer Pat Rizzi, a former employee of K-Mart, and the mother of a women who was killed in a domestic dispute, gathered together the protestors in an attempt to get the shirt off of store shelves. Protestors believe “people need to speak out about corporations selling violence” and claim “that shirt undoes everything” that violence prevention groups have accomplished. They conclude “No wonder kids do the things they do.”

With all due respect, this is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard. Don’t get me wrong, domestic violence in any form is unacceptable, and those who try to control their partner with threats of violence deserve swift persecution and punishment. I don’t mean to undermine the tragic reality of domestic abuse or the good intentions of these protestors, it’s just my opinion that they’re being shortsighted and overdramatic.

First of all, this t-shirt isn’t the cornerstone of domestic violence. It’s not even a mild suggestion. It’s a shirt featuring cartoon characters that are acting out what is know as “mild cartoon violence.” If you watch cartoons on television, shows marketed at children, you’ll see more violence than this, sometimes acted out against women. Frankly, I think there are better ways to protest against this issue.

I don’t consider the shirt to be that funny, and I doubt anyone would even pay it much mind if it weren’t for the protests, who have inadvertently erected a big sign over the shirt that says “Look at me! I’m bad! You have to have me!” Now I sort of want one…

Which leads me to my main point: why is it that a cartoon depicting men-on-women violence considered absolutely morally reprehensible, but a shirt depicting women-on-men violence is a cute little joke to casually flaunt grrl power?

The very day this story broke, I happened to notice a similar shirt at my local Wal-Mart. After the story aired, I immediately recalled the shirt I saw, so the next day, I marched into Wal-Mart, camera phone at ready, and snapped a shot of not one, but two anti-men shirts, which I left prominently displayed in hopes someone would say something about the similarities and start a protest. Or not, since men really don’t care because they know it’s a JOKE. Anyway, check out these babies:

The one on the left is more of a male-submission fantasy, but you can tell that the poor guy in this picture is not a willing participant, and may, in fact, be worried that the girl is going to smash his skull.

The one on the right, the one I originally spotted, is a bit more telling. It’s very similar to the offending shirt, with the panel and stick figure format, with the roles reversed. In fact, the guy in this one doesn’t seem to be doing anything at all, just standing around, in awe that he could be sexually interested in an organism that deeply detests violence against its own kind, but is more than willing to inflict it on other beings for no apparent reason. In fact, this t-shirt seems to be more violent, because the girl is actually punching the guy out, whereas the guy in the evil t-shirt is just pushing the girl through a cartoon panel, a scenario that statistics show is rather uncommon in domestic violence situations.

So the lesson here is that it’s okay to beat up men because they’re annoying (or just standing there, it seems), but beating up women is equal to four mortal sins. This kind of mentality pretty much spells doom for the equality civil rights groups believe they are fighting for. Double standards like this that guarantee equal rights are a pipe dream. If we want to be equal in this case, then any depiction of violence against anyone or anything must be eliminated.

Frankly, I’m not willing to make this shift into this humorless, manically PN universe where no one talks or even moves because they’re afraid of making an offensive remark or gesture. As for now, we seem content to dwell in our hypocrisy, living in a world where those classed as “minorities,” are vindicated from insensitive pigs, and anyone who is white, middle-class (or upper-class), straight, or male is the enemy, and God help you if you happen to be all four.

There are far too many examples of such double standards in pop culture American than I care to research, and you can definitely expect an article about some of those in the future. The point is, to put it into pathetically simple terms, you can’t logically condemn one concept that pits majority-against-minority, but celebrate a concept of minority-against-majority, and expect it to equal equality. Either allow both offenses or neither, and you already know where I stand on that one.

Now I am willing to concede that women are the victim of domestic violence far more often than men, so the issue is clearly more sensitive to them. However, the shift from the culture of public dirty jokes and casual flirtation to abject paranoia and fear of sexual harassment lawsuits should, ideally, come with it a sustained general respect for men as people, not proportionately lower respect for those who happen to be male as general respect for women continues to rise.

I, of course, am aware that in some ways, women still aren’t treated as well as men. This has always perplexed me. I can’t honestly remember any time in my life where I thought poorly of a person because they happened to be female. If someone irritates me, I never attribute it to their gender. I just consider them to be jerks.

And don’t try to play the ogling card. Yes, I enjoy looking at pretty girls, especially the parts they would probably rather not have me look at. Yes, I like seeing girls without clothes on. So what? Welcome to Human Condition 101, wherein people have SEXUAL ATTRACTIONS TOWARD EACH OTHER. If a girl has a genuine interest in seeing my parts, even when I don’t have clothes on, I would be flattered. And on a personal note, just because I have sexual interests in my girlfriend doesn’t mean I don’t respect her and think of her as a normal human being. That’s where the trick lies: even if men occasionally (and I use this in the loosest sense of the word) want to climb on top of our mates, grunt a few times, roll off, and fall asleep, any decent man is still fully capable of respecting their partners.

We’re all human, and we should treat each other as fairly as we can. I’m not saying that we can’t make fun of one another, because, let’s face it, things would be pretty boring that way. To that end, we can’t regard one gender or race as an endangered species, protected from the playful assaults of others and expect everyone to be on an even playing field.

My suggestion is this: lighten up and stop looking for scapegoats. I can’t possibly imagine the pain of losing a child or loved one to domestic violence, or any violent act, but just because a t-shirt pokes fun at nagging women and the casual dream of men to just make them go away instead of dealing with them doesn’t mean men are going to suddenly decide that’ it's a good idea. That’s kind of like banning the Bible because someone takes offense to the parts about people being nailed to trees or tossed into the sea, because their loved ones were killed that way.

So instead of pretending the problem isn’t there, let’s make fun of it (not the victims, you cad) and create an open dialogue to help prevent the problem from spreading. And let’s come to the realization that normal, rational people are not going to justify their actions because a shirt told them to. I should know, because my “Go Away, Moron!” t-shirt has yet to repel any actual moron.

I can’t state this enough: we may have our differences, but just because someone has a different skin color or gender doesn’t automatically make them superior or inferior to anyone else. While I believe we can make fun of our differences in order to downplay them, we have to make sure the mockery is dished out in a balanced way, because the moment the scales are tipped too far one away, the other side gets thrown off, and that’s when the problems begin. Everyone has a right to be on that scale. Thank you.