I've seen some sick and hateful things in my time, and I will see more. But this is peculiarly disgusting.
Etsy, an online vendor of greeting cards, has a new card offering.* I won't download and display the picture, but it's worse than you think, depicting a naked woman huddled in the shower with the tagline, "Congratulations, you got bad touched."
If you really want to take a look, go ahead, just be warned.
The vendor says of the card:
Get creeped on, go through a heavy pat down at the airport, go through a colonoscopy and embarrassed? Know someone that has? Then this card could be for them.
Yeah, right, bullshit. This is a card to further terrorize and harass a rape victim. Here are the tags for the card:
paper goods / card / greeting card / rape / touched / creeped / raped
And one of the "materials" listings:
a girl likes a guy with skills
Let's stop this in its tracks.
*see update
I learned about this from an email I received from Change.org, who wants us to tell Etsy to scrap the card. But we can go farther. You can contact the shop owner here, and I suggest you do. I imagine the usual caveats of being polite and so forth should apply, but damned if I was polite, and I won't blame you for not being polite, either.
Card owner, who names himself "youstupidbitch":
Careful, people might not have the same sense of humor as you. You're living on the edge giving this card. Be warned. Several thousand people sent me angry emails because of this.
Let's make it a hell of a lot more than several thousand. And since the little bastard is a hateful, rape-celebrating cretin, let's find a way to pressure Etsy also. If they won't run the card owner off, maybe we can run Etsy off. (Edit: Okay, Etsy is a worthy site serving a larger community of artists. Be that as it may, they need to get this the hell off their site.)
Update: The card owner also sells cards that "congratulate" breast cancer patients and mock mothers of special needs children. Absolutely sick.
Update 2: Thanks for recommending this, folks. It has nothing to do with me, it's all about addressing this sickness. There's the usual lively discussion about the parameters of free speech in the comments.
*from the top: some posters are noting that Etsy is a third-party provider that allows independent artists to sell their wares through their site, much like CafePress, I suppose. All well and good. They're still responsible for hosting it and promulgating it on their site, and they have a responsibility to get it down. It's the same as if I saw a poster on the window of the local bookstore promoting Nazi skinhead rallies. I'd ask the manager to take it down, and if he refused, I'd have nothing more to do with his shop. You want to feel Etsy's pain? Try feeling the pain of all the rape victims who are being brutalized by this card.