How To Make A Feminist T-Shirt Without Exploiting Women
By Sofi Thanhauser
In the summer of 2013, when news broke about women being crowd-raped in Tahrir Square, I started spray-painting “MATRIARCHY NOW” on T-shirts from the thrift store and distributing them to friends.
One of these friends happened to live in Los Angeles, and a friend of hers happened to run a small boutique in Echo Park called Otherwild. This friend of a friend requested a few of the shirts to carry in her store, and I began mailing batches to L.A., each time in an odd selection of colors and sizes. I started screen-printing rather than spray-painting the shirts, so the text wouldn’t fade. But other than that, my production method changed not at all: I kept printing on shirts from thrift stores. The whole affair was casual, fun, and free of incongruities.
Then, during a single week in October 2015, two things happened in swift succession. First, Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot posted a picture of herself on Instagram wearing one of my shirts. Later in the week, Lena Dunham posted a picture of her hot, male chiropractor friend in one of the tees. 17,019 likes and 266 comments later, I was left wondering if I needed…
