There has been a bit of a buzz lately about T-shirts advocating domestic violence and relationship aggression. Before they disappeared altogether, I ripped a bunch of them and uploaded them to my Xanga photo gallery.
I do this to keep this transgression in front of Kohl's face. (Transgression is the word: this shirt is intentionally cool, and cool is inherently transgressive.) If we let Kohl's merely sweep these shirts under the rug, the conversation won't take place.
Kids will wear shirts like this precisely because of the reaction they get from adults. That's why we're adults: our job is to shape them into healthy, mature people, not perpetrators. So we can censor their jokes.
Kohl's is free to print whatever they want, of course, but - as Pamela Paul noted in her brilliant book Pornified - there is a third way between censorship and eternal tolerance. It's censure. It's shame. We need to shame those adults who tell kids it's ok to throw people out the window.
We can't uncool domestic violence. It's too late for that. We can only uncool ourselves. We can't uncool our children. We can only set models of compassion for them.
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