Monday 12 September 2011

JC Penney pulls 'I'm too pretty for homework' T-shirt

JCPenney Too Pretty Tshirt
JCPenney is feeling pretty stupid for selling a sexist shirt to young girls. The retailer came come under fire for selling a long-sleeved shirt with the words "I'm Too Pretty To Do Homework, So My Brother Has to Do it For Me."

The copy that accompanies the silly shirt continues to insult young girls as empty-headed little pop tartlets rather than serious students.

"Who has time to do homework when there's a new Justin Bieber album out," the ad copy for the silly shirt reads. "She'll love this shirt that's just as cute and sassy as she is."

Kate Coultas of JCPenney corporate communications told the Village Voice, "We are not happy about the shirt! We're looking into it right now, to find out how it happened. It was only online, not available in stores and we have removed it from the site."

Photos of the offensive shirt spread like wildfire on Twitter on Wednesday morning, with feminist voices like Nation essayist Katha Pollitt and television legal expert Lisa Bloom weighing in.

News that the department store took the shirt off its site and apologized won cheers. Coultas said that the department store is extremely upset about having sold the insulting garment online.

"One of the reasons we're so outraged is that this is not what we stand for," she said. "The most important thing was to pull it off the site. We want to make sure our customers know we are very, very sorry," she said.

Even before the online fury spread, the $16.99 garment wasn't too popular with shoppers. It had been slashed to $9.99 before it was yanked offline.

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