Why not a Pandora's Box? I'd rather wear a t-shirt that says "No Means No" or "I'm With Stupid" than "I was raped."

I'm not a fan of the shirt in question, but I agree with you that it is no one's business telling a rape victim how she or he should cope with it.

However, that's not what your first post said. That's the problem with message boards: you have to be clear in what you are trying to say.

From a purely aesthetic perspective, though, I will say that the safe is badly designed. It looks like a microwave, not a safe. To be visually less confusing, it should be taller than it is wide, like a classic Acme safe.

I can't imagine anything I have less of an opinion on than how someone who's been raped should deal with what happened to her. That is the most acutely personal subject I can possibly imagine, and I am totally unqualified to hold any opinion whatsoever. Gee, why don't I start lecturing rape victims on how they should feel and express themselves? There's a thought!

It may be none of your business what other people wear (maybe), but you have no opinions on this shirt?

What if people were selling shirts with big swastikas on them, or shirts urging the repeal of a woman's right to vote, and so on. You would have no opinions on these shirts, even if it was none of your fucking business that people chose to wear them? How about "Hillary is a cunt" t-shirts? Would you make that your business?

People have the right to wear what they want, but the rest of us have our right to our opinions on that, and if necessary, the right to voice our opinions.

The first thought that springs to mind is that it's none of my fucking business what clothes other people wear. None of yours, either.

I sat on the board of the local Rape Crisis Center. The statistics, true or not, show that only 10% of the rapes are reported. The women, those reporting and those not reporting, all share that secret locked in a "safe" deep inside them. I think they are a great idea . . . public therapy.

If medium is message and t-shirt is medium, what does that do to message? Unfortunate, it reduce message to been there, done that.

Good idea, noble intent, but very bad implements.

Svutlana

Am I the only one that sees a wee note inside a microwave oven?

"I was baked".

Also, "I was raped; I am now open, come (!) give me a healing fuck!" (You don't think this is real? O yes it is!)

NOT a good tee-message.

My thoughts are as chaotic and conflicted as Tracy's about this.

When you wear a button, or a saying on a T-shirt, it becomes a message to everyone who sees it. A woman wearing this "I was raped" T-shirt is telling me, "I was raped". Just passing by me, a complete stranger, she is telling me, "I was raped". Talking with me about something mundane and unrelated, she is still telling me, "I was raped". Well -- I didn't ask you!

It also has the effect of trivializing rape. How can she chat, work, play, laugh, when she is saying all the time, "I was raped"? She can't, of course.

My very first thought, though, was that someone who really has been raped would never advertise it like that. Then I read one of the comments here that confirmed that thought.

As a rape survivor I would never in a million years wear such a t-shirt. My sexual and personal privacy was already violated by the rapist; I'm not going to give complete strangers the right to know about the most intimate details of my life.

I'm not ashamed of being a rape survivor (though I do rather hate the trendiness of the word "survivor"), nor am I unwilling to speak about it in an *appropriate* situation -- including in places where it might serve to educate someone and disabuse them of misinformation about the subject. But announcing it to all and sundry would feel like a gross violation of my personal boundaries. Which, having already been through the experience of rape, are all the more important to me.

Frankly, if my house had been torched by an arsonist or my mother had just been murdered, I wouldn't want those crimes that had touched my life emblazoned across my chest either. My European friends are right: Americans have a weird habit of "over-sharing," handing out intimate details of their lives to casual acquaintances and complete strangers. It's...undignified. And dignity is the very first thing a rapist strips you off.

Furthermore, I shudder to think what kind of comments I'd have to endure on the street if I wore such a thing. As women, we already have to deal with a barrage of unwelcome sexually-tinged remarks from strangers when we walk the streets -- particularly those of us who live in large, crowded cities ("hey baby, do you like to S*** d***, hey baby is your p*ssy hair that blonde too?, etc. etc. etc.). Just imagine what kind of comments you'd hear wearing a shirt like that -- the tone of them varying depending on whether the commenters find you pretty enough to contemplate raping themselves or ugly enough that they wouldn't bother. Believe me, you'd hear about it. What are we supposed to do, start conversations with these kind of trolls? Yeah, like that ever works.

Ugh, ugh, ugh, these shirts are a b-a-d idea.

I understand the intentions behind the shirt, but I think they do more harm then good.

is that I'm not sure I'd think it meant what it said. I'd probably wonder if it was a joke. Kind of like the I'VE BEEN MUGGED by reality (with reality in really small print so that you have to squint at the wearer's chest, something that is generally rude to do when the wearer is a woman.)