Post: So… T-shirts
I’ll let you all into a little secret – I have a rather twisted sense of humour.
What? You already knew that? Oh, ok. I just thought I’d mention it, because of my recent experiences with T-shirts. Over the summer, I decided to indulge myself and buy a t-shirt featuring the deeply misunderstood Mr Stabby. I felt this would be suitably humorous without being so offensive as to get the lynch mob coming around with pitchforks. Having had this t-shirt for a few months, I’m very tempted to go one step further and purchase some merchandise from T-shirt Hell, who specialise in twisted and offensive t-shirts. (Warning: portions may be unsafe for work and/or generally offensive)
The three t-shirts I find fairly interesting are as follows: laughter, Jesus and babies.
As you can see, the first one is a touch strange, and the other two are potentially rather offensive to the staunchly religious and to babies respectively. Here we come to my dilemma: do any of these cross my personal boundary of tastelessness? Here is what I think:
- The first design is fairly benign and clearly inoffensive (except possibly to those who have had friends chopped up by a cleaver-wielding maniac, who I expect number few). So no problem there.
- The second, despite being in the site’s “Do not buy these unless you really want to piss people off” section, I don’t think is that bad at all. Alright, so it may put the backs up of the more ardent Christians, but I feel that if they cannot stand up to some light-hearted criticism of their religion, then that is very much their problem. Perhaps if I actually believed that Jesus died on the cross that our souls might be allowed into heaven, I might feel a little differently, but there we go. We differ: that’s life.
- The third one, however, I think I may have to pass on buying. This isn’t on the grounds that it would be offensive (although it no doubt would) but because I feel it trivialises the immensely important issue of stem cell research, and that I would be giving entirely the wrong opinion of my stance on this matter by wearing it. It would no doubt provoke some very stimulating discussions with people seeing the t-shirt, but there are better ways to broach the subject, I feel.
I’m not entirely sure why it took a whole blog post to figure this out for myself, nor entirely why I’ve got such a long post about items of clothing, but then again what are blogs for (other than external memory)?
Writes a letter to the Daily Mail. Subject, the youth of today … 😉
The idea of what the Daily Mail would do if given a link to T-Shirt Hell is highly amusing. I imagine Simon Heffer would explode… excellent.