I can't believe that this is considered OK for a high school. It's really disturbing that these young students think it's OK to objectify and degrade females. I hope the school have taken action to ban this disgusting, offensive shirt.

Man I can't begin to say how messed up some stuff is. & if anyone says "It's just a joke!" & will probably flip my lid. Oh man did I just lay out the troll bait!?

I was looking at this and thinking "beastiality at its best".
it is just gross, take it down.

So they tidied up the "F" word, (for what, decency's sake?) and then depicted a woman being double-penetrated by animals. Niiiice.

Who in their right mind thought this shirt was a good idea? So many other ways they could've depicted towering over another school.

Sexual degradation. Bestiality. Cheerleaders as sex-object. Male gang-rape of female (including the congratulatory high-five). Facelessness of the cheerleader and the use of sexual position.

Wow, so many issues, all in one t-shirt. Heck, discussion could even be made of the skin tones involved (though I think that's entirely coincidental).

Wow. Just, wow.

It almost make me wonder if it's real. The density of "they did what?!" is just too high.

Looks more like "Raping Spartans since 1962" to me.

Fucking gross. And high school kids came up with this? Sounds like someones need to be monitored while on the computer...all I can say...because this shit doesn't just come out of the brains of kiddies...it had to be put there at some point...

And presumably, even though it's a male team playing a male team (unless, I don't know, is there co-ed football in Houston? It seems unlikely), the Spartan that the mustangs are "f'n up" is female. Done properly, the horses should be double-penetrating a *male* football player.

Not that I'd be especially OK with that image, but the Mustangs certainly weren't, 'cause, you know, that'd be *gay*.

As a followup: I was poking around Google to try to get a sense of what the local reaction had been. Some results:

The Houston Press reporting snarkily on the aftermath: http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2009/10/memorial_stratford_t-shirt.php

An MSNBC report: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33205575/ns/local_news-houston_tx/

And as a bonus, a shirt from a previous year, just to underscore what a proud tradition this is: http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/object/1461/29/n2219866040_35884.jpg

As an aside, the "Eiffel Tower" is the sex act referenced here (two men, high fiving over a woman they are both penetrating).

I'd like to know if they actually managed to get a company's approval to print up these shirts or if they had to make them at home. And if a company printed it up, did they have to get parental consent for this?

Okay,
1. Sexual degradation and rape are not the same thing.
2. Group sex and gang rape are not the same thing.
3. Sexual degradation is bad, rape is bad, but both of them being bad does not equate them.
Rape, and especially gang rape are horrible, violent acts of physical violation that should not be equated with any consentual activity. Sexual degradation can be part of rape, but is not the same thing as rape, as there are actually people that enjoy being sexually degraded as part of a consentual sexual activity.
Yes, this reflects horribly on the high school in which it was created.
Yes, as a graduate of Stratford, I can tell you that the football culture in the area encourages this kind of idiotic behavior.
Yes, I think we would all be better off if an action was taken by the national community at large to address this kind of idiocy.

But please stop calling this rape. Maybe socialogical images should run a story on the use of the concept of rape to police sexual activity- and there was a time in the United States when this was codified, when sodomy laws were justified by the ability they granted law enforcement to prosecute suspected rapists without a decent body of evidence; and you can bet that these sodomy laws in their connection with rape enforced our collective mindset as to what sorts of actions constitute rape.

As Not Amused mentions, horses are such very sought-after sex partners. Not to mention, considering the fact that these two teams are rivals, I'm sure this sexual act is meant to be interpreted in an entirely friendly and consensual way.

Oh no. There's nothing AT ALL about this shirt that suggests rape.

/snark

Also the statement fucking up the rival doesn't imply consent.

Sure, group sex can be consensual. Group sex and rape and not equivalent. But the connotations of this image are of forcible domination. This image is of group sex and of rape.

The image and message on that shirt is disgusting and wholly inappropriate. I'm not normally one to endorse a lot of banning and censorship (it frequently leads to miss-appropriated values, like the aforementioned censoring of the f-bomb on the shirt), but in this case I certainly do hope that this shirt was banned from both school grounds and school functions.

That said, I agree with Scott. It is irresponsible to start shouting rape. The ONLY thing that even vaguely implies the depicted sex act is non-consensual is that the two teams are rivals. I think the implication is much more geared towards "women as prizes". The one football team triumphs over the other and therefore gets to have their way with the women that "belong" to the other team. The consent or non-consent of the women is irrelevant because she is an object. (As far as the makers/wearers of the shirt are concerned.)
Disgusting? By most people's definition.
Degrading? Absolutely.
Rape? That's less certain and not really a strong implication on said t-shirt.

Trigger warning maybe?!!! Maybe put the image after the jump?!!! Seriously. I was just looking for my sociology fix today; not a fucking panic attack.

Trigger warning maybe?!!! Maybe put the image after the jump?!!! Seriously. I was just looking for my sociology fix today; not a fucking panic attack.

sorry about the double post.

Ug, that other shirt design, the one with the bag, is even worse.
That one I certainly won't argue about whether or not it depicts rape. I suspect that's why it bothers me even more than the "tower" shirt.

You think fuck is a bad double meaning? Cut, beating and tearing is way worse.

Lil Scrappy - Some Cut Chorus:

What it is is ho?, ah what's up (what's up)
Can a nigga get in them guts (them guts)
Cut you up like you ain't been cut (been cut)
Show your ass how to really catch a nut (oh yeah yeah)
Well give me you number and I'll call (I'll call)
And I'll follow that ass in the mall (in the mall)
Take you home, let you juggle my balls (my balls)
While I'm beatin and tearin down your walls (oh yeah)

Thaddeus, your comment about "The one football team triumphs over the other and therefore gets to have their way with the women that 'belong' to the other team" shows exactly why this is rape. Treating women like they are the spoils of war IS rape. Women aren't prizes to be won. Making the consent of the woman irrelevant doesn't make it less a depiction of rape. It makes it more an image of rape. It makes me sick to think that somehow if she's just a spoil of war than it's not rape to some people.

I think what Scott said applies quite well to a lot of recent commentary about imagery that suggests (to some, at least) rape/sexual assault. But I can't come up with a reading of the t-shirt in which the woman is not being sexually humiliated. The implication seems to be that she - representing the "enemy" - is such a low and dirty creature that she easily yields to the whims of the powerful high-fiving horses. It's not the same thing as rape, nor is the term "fucking up" and explicit rape reference, but it's still a deeply disturbing message to endorse for any age group, let alone teenagers.

I seriously doubt that the creators of this shirt gave much thought to whether the woman was a spoil of war or merely a symbol of weakness and defeat. I suspect that they sought to demean the opposition by feminizing them in the crudest way they knew, and found images of sexual humiliation too ubiquitous and "normal" to understand why they're so offensive. Rape may be the wrong word for the implication, but that's not to say that the more accurate terms make the artist come out looking like any less of an asshat.

I think that it trivializes rape to refer to any degrading sex act as such.
Rape is an extremely serious matter and I don't think that the term should be bandied about lightly.

PLEASE put put this after a jump and put a trigger warning on this. This image can be seriously triggering to may readers and, particularly in keeping with the ethos of this site, such triggering potential needs to be considered, respected, and acted upon ASAP.

Not to mention that it's NSFW!

considering the seriousness of the arguments here, this is quite trivial, but being a graduate of another school in the district, one of the first things i caught is that it would have been impossible for them to have been f'n the spartans up since 1962, since Stratford High School didn't exist until 1974 . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratford_High_School_(Houston,_Texas)

Glad to see that the moderators have totally ignored *multiple* requests for trigger warnings. I guess the visceral, often traumatic, reactions that this post has triggered in a number of its viewers, isn't serious enough to warrant any action (a better question: how did the moderators not see, and deal with, the triggering potential in the first place?)

Way to go for being a "safe space," Sociological Images.

I am dumbfounded. That people weren't suspended over this - and what seems to be an ongoing trend, given the previous design - is beyond my understanding.

So like, black is sometimes associated with badness, dominance, and negativity where white is sometimes associated with purity, goodness, blahblahblah, ect. Knowing that, I think its interesting that its the white sheep thats buttsmexing the black sheep. Maybe its the logo for the fraternities or colleges or whatever the shirt is for, but that just seemed like something worth mentioning.

So this is a little late to comment on, but I found the site and have been 'thumbing through' (if that phrase could be used with this technology. But anyhoo, I really REALLY with I could find a picture of a t-shirt from Monmouth College When I was an undergrad there I heard a story from a few students and profs of an epic shirt created by some students about a year or two before my freshman year there. You see, Monmouth College and the neighboring Knox College have one of the oldest rivalries in the nation and we duke it out every fall at the Turkey Bowl. (a testosterone driven football game full of drunken vulgar exclamations of superiority) One year students designed and printed a shirt depicted Monmouth's Fighting Scot standing proudly and manly as a Knox cheerleader figure was bent on her knees in front of him. The students swore it was only a bow of submission...which was exactly what it was, only with some other extracurricular actives going on as well. Well, long story short, no student faced discipline, but the shirts were banned from Monmouth's campus and the Turkey Bowl game.