Killing Your Wife is the Best Gift You Can Give Yourself This Holiday Season

Brave Sir Robin emailed me this story about the "hilarious" ad the owner of a concrete company is running this Christmas:


Ha ha! Get it? Your wife needs concrete shoes this Christmas! Ha ha!

Richfield Street-based American Concrete had a new billboard erected Monday on West Avenue. Over the image of a wrapped gift, the solicitous catchline, "Wife need new shoes?" is accompanied by the American Concrete logo and a greeting, "Happy Holidays."

The humorous inference to "cement shoes" or "concrete shoes" as a method of doing away with one's wife is at the heart of the controversy.

What company owner Kevin McCabe sees as risqué spoof, YWCA Executive Director Kathleen Granchelli condemned as ignorant.

"I'm sure it was considered to be a joke, or something cute, but with the number of fatalities we see in the domestic violence field, it's not a joke," Granchelli said Thursday. "It's in very poor taste."

No, it's not, countered McCabe.

"I think the mainstream understands it," he said. "It's unfortunate that some people are reading much more into it than they should."

Yes, it's deeply unfortunate that there are uppity women ruining all the fun by pointing out that the ad turns domestic violence, which claims the lives of over a thousand women every year in America alone, into the butt of a joke.

McCabe's defense is that there are women who find it funny. Well, if Ann Coulter has made one contribution to the world, it's proof that just because someone is a woman doesn't mean she's not also astonishingly ignorant of, apathetic about, and/or hostile toward women and women's issues.

It's exceedingly easy for women to endear themselves to sexist men by laughing along at sexist jokes and particularly by demeaning the women who don't. There are a lot of rewards for being the woman who says, "Oh Christ, some women can't take a fucking joke." Their exasperation is well-compensated with adulation from the men whose virulent misogyny is so expediently excused.