Someone Get This Woman a “Stupid” T-Shirt

Photo: spreadshirt.com

I have no patience with stupidity.

Ignorance I can tolerate to a certain degree. It comes from lack of education, and it doesn’t tend to occur to uneducated people to look things up. Especially because many uneducated people don’t realize they are. And so they can remain relatively ignorant the rest of their lives. I get that.

But stupidity!

Stupidity is just brain laziness. It relates to actions that require neither the awareness that one has a lack of knowledge, n0r a certain IQ.

Actually, I take it back. I don’t get angry at stupidity in itself. If people do stupid things that affect no one but themselves, I couldn’t care less. But what really gets me is when people commit stupid acts that affect kids. And when it’s the kids’ own parents that are being that stupid, it infuriates me.

I was in a convenience store in south Texas yesterday, and my twelve-year-old daughter pointed out a little girl–she can’t have been older than five–wearing a t-shirt that said Sexy 4. A moment later I saw her sister, who was at the most eleven, with a similar t-shirt that said Sexy 3. So I assume that somewhere there were two teenage girls wearing t-shirts that said Sexy 2 and Sexy 1.

It takes me only a split second to think of all the implications of dressing a five-year-old and an eleven-year-old in clothes like that.

1. What kind of people would agree that five- and eleven-year-old girls are sexy? Pedophiles. And only pedophiles.

2. Dressing a child in a “Sexy” t-shirt is like putting a big, fat sign on her that says Welcome pedophiles. Have a good look. Tempting, isn’t she?

3. What is their mother teaching her girls by literally labeling them as sexy? At a way too young age, they are being given the message–by their mother, whose messages are the strongest in the world–that being considered sexy is good (at age five), and that walking around with a label that claims you are (at age five) is totally okay, or at the very least funny and cool.

4. If a mother is giving her five-year-old the above-mentioned messages, how is she going to prevent her daughter from having sex and getting pregnant when she’s a teenager?

It might take some people more than a split second to think of these things, but if your IQ is high enough to enable you to get dressed in the morning, drive a car, buy things at a store with money, then these things can occur to you at some point.

Somewhere along the line of seeing the t-shirts in a store, thinking that they would look good on her daughters, getting them off the rack, going to the checkout counter, waiting in line, paying for them, and driving home, these things should have come up in this mother’s thoughts.

But even if they didn’t in that pretty long period of time, she still had a chance. When she put the t-shirt on her five-year-old daughter–when she actually saw it on her. If not before, that would definitely have been the moment to put two and two together.

Clearly she didn’t, and that’s just plain stupid. And infuriating. Unless she’s not stupid, and she did think of all these things, and did it anyway, on purpose. But I don’t even want to go there.