Wow! A sale! I need to stock up!
Posted on 02/23/2006 3:38:31 AM PST by ShadowDancer
Store Flier Describes T-Shirts As 'Wife-Beaters'
Company Apologizes, Plans Retraction
POSTED: 9:58 am EST February 22, 2006
UPDATED: 11:24 am EST February 22, 2006
BOSTON -- Building 19, a Massachusetts-based discount store known for its quirky sales circulars, described a package of sleeveless T-shirts as "wife-beaters" in a recent sales flier.
WCVB-TV reported Tuesday that even store officials admitted that the flier went too far. It upset advocates for domestic violence victims.
"I can't say what I thought. I know what I thought, but I can't say out loud what I thought," Jane Doe Inc. spokeswoman Mary Lauby said.
The flier advertised a three-pack of men's undershirts as "wife-beaters."
"That does, you know, go to numbing and dumbing down and normalizing and suggesting that battering is a normal behavior," Lauby said.
Building 19 spokesman Jerry Ellis took the criticism seriously.
"They were right. It was awful and I am sorry it happened," Ellis said.
E-mails came into the discount store's Hingham headquarters where everyone was apologetic.
"It's a slang expression, a street expression, but we should have known better not to use it. I am supposed to read every word. Sometimes it's busy or I am lazy. We are working on a retraction," Ellis said.
No because when women wear them men usually call them hot...and women usually call them slutty...
snort!
They would have been better off advertising them as 'Dago Tees' which is what we called them when I was a kid.
Yep, Hollywood...and TV. TV show "COPS" is full of domestic violence calls with someone wearing one of those.
Well, I'm 44 and have almost exclusively only heard them called either one of two things in conversation, "wifebeaters" or "Guinea-t's".
(Maybe a New York thing, however.)
Wow! A sale! I need to stock up!
LOL - you are right.
if i was the store owner, my answer would be simple...don't like the name, don't buy the shirts....don't like the ad, don't patronize my store.............now, GET OUT!!!!
"If you're asking me if he would have been perfectly within his rights to allow the ad to run like that the answer is yes. Just as the group who complained about the ad were well within their rights to do so. They voiced a complaint and he agreed and retracted. I don't see a Freedom of Speech issue here."
The free speech issue is that he was intimidated into making an apology when he was within his rights in the first place. Why does he have to apologize for doing something he had a right to do?
When they voiced a complaint, he should have said, "Look, honey, get out of my office, go home, and cook dinner for your husband. And remember, always remember these two words: SHUT UP."
Ha! In California during the sixties, they were called "Wop t-shirts".
Yep, that's what I always called him too, only because that's what they were always called by everybody where I grew up.
Oh please. Not everyone steadfastly refuses to see another's point of view. That does not make him weak or mean he was intimidated and it certainly has nothing to do with the First Amendment. If he were sued for the ad then you could make that case.
Show me the phrase where the 1st demands that the speech be intelligent or non-offensive to be protected.
"Oh please. Not everyone steadfastly refuses to see another's point of view."
Have you read "Slouching Toward Gommorrah" by Robert Bork? Great book.
Until fairly recently, it was quite common to refuse to pretend that whacko nonsense was worthy of respect. I see their point of view; I see that it is stupid and intellectually bankrupt; and I steadfastly refuse to pretend otherwise.
"That does not make him weak or mean he was intimidated"
Yes, it does.
"and it certainly has nothing to do with the First Amendment."
Sure it does.
"If he were sued for the ad then you could make that case."
You can make the case simply by pointing out that it was fear of being sued and harrassed that made him pussy out.
You are completely over the top. In your world, any man that doesn't stand up and say "F You" to everyone that disagrees with him is a pussy. While I have no problem with the wife-beater term for those t-shirts and refer to them as that myself, I am not so narrow minded as to not see how it could bother women who have been beat by their husbands. Given that refering to them as just t-shirts would not hurt his business at all, it becomes a matter of not making this the hill you die on.
Why it's got to be like that? /ebonics
You really have to be out of the loop to not know that this is what this type of T-shirt has been called since forever.
Ugh...
In Alabama, we called them "pea-shelling t-shirts", the shirts men would wear on the front porch when their wives made them shell peas. I don't like the term "wife-beater", but I believe they have the right to call them that.
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