The #WarOnShirts: First They Went After that Rocket Scientist, Now They're Going After Target

So many shirts, so much rape culture.

The new Outrage -- and honestly, it's been days since the last one; weren't you getting a little bit itchy? -- concerns a shirt sold at Target department stores.

This t-shirt promotes, the Totalitarian Feminist Maenads insist, rape culture.

It promotes rape, suggests to men that rape is Just Fine, and also chills women from telling their narratives about rape.

Wow, you're thinking --that must be quite a shirt.

Indeed, it is.

Behold the Rape Garment:

You see, when a woman wears this t-shirt -- and, by the way, and I am being 100% honest here: I just saw a woman wearing this t-shirt two hours ago -- she is not just making a harmless little boast that she is eye-candy and the sort of hot young thing that makes men's eyes glitter with the desire to win her.

No, when a woman wears this t-shirt, she is saying Rape me, and she's also telling men Rape as many other people as you can, and she's telling rape victims Shut up with your stupid rape-shaming already.

Jen Groover, a motivational speak and author of, "What If? & Why Not," says the tees indeed depict women negatively.

"The general use of the term 'trophy wife' in our society, is meant as a demeaning term toward the woman and a symbolic ‘high-five’ toward the man for scoring outside of his zone," Groover told FOX411. "I would prefer seeing more positive statements that are empowering for myself, my daughters and all women."

So, she doesn't like how some women present themselves.

For my part, I would prefer it if some women did not perpetuate the image of women as excessively emotional and fascinated by vindictive little squabbles about petty little trivias in order to give some semblance of greater meaning to their empty (and empty-headed) lives; but so many women seem determined to wear the cultural markings that proclaim that women are just that.

There is a psychological condition that RD Brewer always talks about; it is the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks that are easy for them are also easy for others.

David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University have postulated that the effect is the result of internal illusion in the unskilled, and external misperception in the skilled: "The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

Dunning-Kruger syndrome has been understood largely as a workplace phenomenon, but let me posit that it is a powerful factor in politics:

Incompetent, low-value people constantly imagine themselves to be smarter than they are, and smarter than other people generally, and believe that other people require their (incompetent) guidance in a nearly limitless number of lifestyle choices.

In fact, the people who assert that they are smarter than others, and thus must lend their competency and intellect to others, are in fact among the stupidest, most incompetent, and least useful people in existence.

Let me point something out:

An expert is someone who gets called upon to offer his expertise. He is usually a highly paid person. His consultancy is highly sought-after.

If you are the sort of person who believes she has an "expertise" in an area, but, strangely enough, finds herself always having to force this expertise upon other people, rather than being approached by them for it: You are almost certainly an incompetent, useless, stupid person, who has very little actual value, but whose value has been inflated and overestimated by your own poorly-informed, low-competency ego.

Thus, even your estimation of self is, as is all other things about you, incompetent.

Women have many reasons for doing things. Among them might be a, get this, humorous sort of view of the world.

Stop looking at all these other people who you are so certain can learn from your immense, and yet completely unsought, expertise, and instead set about learning from the great mass of people, almost all of whom are more intelligent and higher-competency than you are.

The Idiot and the Expert have one thing in common: They both have lots and lots of opinions.

The easiest way to tell the Idiot from the Expert -- you don't even bother to have to listen to their opinions this way -- is to determine if anyone is seeking those opinions out, or if that person is contriving new ways to inflict those opinions upon unwilling strangers.

If you're pushing your unsolicited opinions on strangers, and have to resort to the tools of coercion to make yourself heard: Guess what, Idiot?

posted by Ace at 06:17 PM

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