Two stories involving T shirt slogans and the readiness of the perpetually offended to satisfy their deep desire to be insulted so that they can complain about it. First up, Jemima Lewis in the Telegraph complains about suggestive slogans and doesn’t like them.
On my way to work last week, I saw a man wearing a T-shirt with the slogan: “IF YOU’RE HAPPY AND YOU KNOW IT… get your ***s out”. He was strolling along with a friend, not looking particularly like a danger to womankind. I suppose he thought it was a tremendous joke; or perhaps he didn’t speak English, and had no idea that he had turned himself into a sartorial sex pest.
Bit of a dick, maybe, but sex pest? No, of course not. Ms Lewis has lost sight of her sense of perspective. The message is not intended for Ms Lewis personally and most people would walk past without batting an eyelid. It is just a T shirt after all. I saw one last week that suggested the owner had given up booze, fags and sex and it was the worst hour of his life. Oh how I laughed. I nearly wet myself right there in the High Street, so incisive was the wit portrayed. I don’t suppose that the slogan was a reflection of reality any more than the one Jemima Lewis observed.
And therein lies the problem with such items of attire – the joke, funny possibly when shopping for clothes in a souvenir shop through beer goggles, is less amusing after a few wearings and certainly when less lubricated with Sangria or whatever. Slogan T shirts with such jokes on are rarely funny and even more rarely, clever. Best left hanging on the display rack, frankly.
It’s why, some years ago, I had a big turning out of such items in my wardrobe. If it had a slogan on or a picture of somewhere I once visited, out it went (lots of various IOMTT stuff). I do still wear T shirts from time to time, but they are plain; not a logo or slogan to be seen – and generally better quality than the cheap and nasty fabric used to convey some message that really only means anything to the wearer.
The second story comes to us courtesy of Trooper Thompson. And, this being the Guardian, it has all the right elements – gayers, Stonewall and offence-taking in dollops.
The president of the English Chess Federation says he was barred from presenting prizes at the British chess championships in Sheffield because he was wearing a gay rights T-shirt.
CJ de Mooi, an actor and a regular on the BBC quiz show Eggheads, said he was left “shaking with fury” over objections to the shirt, which bore the slogan “Some people are gay, get over it”, used by gay rights group Stonewall.
Shaking with fury, eh? Except that he wasn’t barred at all. He was asked if he would wear a suit and tie for the prize-giving. A perfectly reasonable request, I’d have thought. After all, it shows some respect to the people running the event and to the winners of the prizes. Ah, but, this is Stonewall we are talking about here. This is an organisation that is effectively redundant as no one cares about people being homosexual anymore and it is no longer a criminal offence. Here’s a slogan for you guys; “Some people are gay. Most of us don’t give a damn”. As a consequence of most of us not giving a damn, Stonewall and its followers must justify their ongoing existence by keeping their heat seeking offence missiles on constant alert and what do we have here? That’s right, an opportunity to cry “foul!” and get the T shirt slogan in the papers and the Groan is all too ready to oblige.
Yet the slogan T shirt is so passé. TT reckons that would make a good slogan on a T shirt. Maybe he has a point.
I once saw someone walking down the street with a yellow sweatshirt with “Lemsip” printed on it.
Thanks for the H/T, but I must confess to liking t-shirts with slogans, at least insofar as I like the slogans or whatnot. Joke slogans are indeed almost always crap, mainly because a joke needs the element of surprise, in which case once past the immediate moment of reading it, it ceases to be funny, although I do recall one that made me laugh, which was a mock-up of the WWI Kitchener recruitment poster, saying YOU in very big letters, and twat underneath much smaller.
In any case, I’m keeping my Culpepper Minutemen t-shirt.
Oh, yes, I’ve smiled at a few of them in my time. If you go back far enough, during the nineteen seventies, motorcycle magazines had whole page adverts devoted to joke T shirts and some of them made me chuckle. But as I said, a joke wears thin and the fabric of the shirt is likely to wear thin too – it is usually cheap, low grade stuff over priced due to a printed transfer. Rip off city.
It’s a taste thing. I like plain clothing without words or pictures.
Exactly. I was in Blackpool yesterday and I saw someone with a “Have a nice day!” T-shirt with an up-yours hand on it. I nearly had a heart attack from laughing so much. Not. I thought to myself that the wearer was a bit of a twat and moved on.
These T-shirts say far more about the wearer than anyone else. Most of them are tossers anyway.
How typical of the gay rights crowd to try to politicise everything, even a chess evening.
I wonder if gays ever reflect on the possibility that when they encounter hostility it is not because of ‘homophobia’ (ridiculous word, fear of the same?) but because they are irritatingly boring, utterly predictable and have terrible dress sense.
On the shirt issue I did have a T in the seventies though that had a picture of a militiaman dressed in comat geat, body armour military helmet and shades holding an automatic rifle across his chest.
The slogan was “You must never question authority.”
It was ahead of its time.
“Ms Lewis has lost sight of her sense of perspective.”
Can’t lose what you never had…
‘CJ’ (Chess and BBC2 Egghead) doesn’t wear his “Some people are gay’ T-shirt on the programme. Perhaps he should?
And the presenter could have one that says “Some people aren’t gay”?
Most of my T-shirts commemorate some Beer-festival or other I’ve been to, or worked at ……
Do you think rabid teetotallers would be “offended” by that?
PLEASE, PRETTY PLEASE?
I love the comment on gay rights by Ed Butt.
I’ve got a soft spot for slogan t-shirts. My brother in law has a whole collection of them and they’re usually really funny. I’ve only got a couple but one I have that I really like has a picture of a toucan, a chimp and a koala popping their heads out of a cooking pot. The slogan reads: For every animal you don’t eat, I’m going to eat three. I like to wear it at rock gigs and the like to antagonize militant vegans
My wife likes Eggheads but I can’t watch because of CJ de Mooi, not because he is gay, I didn’y know he was until now, but the bloke is so unbelievably up himself it is massively cringeworthy. The programme, apparently, is there for the sole purpose of letting the world know how incredibly intelligent CJ de Mooi is. He clearly is not stupid, but he does not seem to have grasped that a little humility is a laudable quality in those whom fate has blessed with above average intelligence.
as no one cares about people being homosexual anymore
You only have to read the Conservative home journal, the Daily Mail, to realise that millions of our more unintelligent, knuckle dragging citizens do care, and would cheerfully exterminate Britain’s entire homosexual community if they could get their hands on enough Zyklon B. Just because nice reasonable liberal chaps like you don’t have any problems with it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a mass of brainless scum that do.
and it is no longer a criminal offence
But quite a few people act as though it still is.
My favourite T shirt has a cartoon of a Japanese bobtail cat on it holding an AK-47. Kalashnikitty, it’s called. I wear it to the range but I am sure that if I wore it in the High Street in poor little spineless hoplophobic Britain, someone would feign upset and the police would arrest me for a ‘frearms offence’ of indeterminate kind.
I’m sure there are plenty of people who dislike homosexuals – but opinions are free. Providing they don’t actually commit violence against them – which is a criminal act anyway – then so what? If they want to make comments about what they would want to do, again, they are just opinions. So what? Yes, I realise we now have hate speech laws, but we shouldn’t. People should be free to express opinions openly – even nasty ones. I would suggest that these people are still in the minority. Most of us just don’t care.
DocBud, I’d never heard of CJ de Mooi before. Now all I know about him is that he’s a bit of a tit.
Providing they don’t actually commit violence against them – which is a criminal act anyway – then so what?
Or incite violence then yes I agree. However we should not think that anti-gay prejudice is extinct or that it doesn’t have ramifications on the lives of homosexuals.
I wouldn’t disagree. However, nothing organisations such as Stonewall can do will change any of that. And, this story in particular tends to have the opposite effect to that intended – it irritates those of us who are more liberal in our outlook. Not that this was Stonewall’s fault, rather the idiotic behaviour of one individual boor.
The best slogan T-shirts are the ones you see in Asia with garbled grammar and / or spelling mistakes. I saw quite a few on other people in the street, but search as I might, could never find one to buy. The other good slogan T is the totally inappropriate one in English worn by someone who hasn’t a clue what it means. (A bit like those tattoos in Chinese / Japanese characters people have done, not knowing that they mean “I am a dickhead”) I saw a photo of a young (six or so) Asian lad wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “Too drunk to fuck”… Had to chuckle. It was amongst this little collection.
A couple of goodies amongst them that even you might be tempted to wear LR! 😉 I know I would!
Hmm. Hotlink doesn’t seem to be working. Here it is in longhand:
http://www.weirdasianews.com/2009/06/07/engrish-shirts/
Today was the first time in years I saw a slogan T-shirt that made me laugh.
It said ‘Sex and drugs and sausage rolls’.
I’m trying to think of a blog post that could use it as a title.