Over the weekend, local writer and humorist Mary Numair took to Twitter to alert Portland that Spencer’s gift store in the Lloyd Center Mall was proudly displaying Trump shirts—including a pro-sexual assault example that read, “Grab America By the Pussy.”
In case anyone still needed a reason to never walk into a @Spencers again, this is proudly being displayed in the front of their PDX store. pic.twitter.com/jalMio7i9P
— Mary Numair (@MaryNumair) January 15, 2017
The internet rightly blew up, and a protest against the store was in the works. The Oregonian reported that Spencer’s corporate office consider the shirts “satire” (which is a cowardly bullshit response, but not surprising coming from them), but the local Spencer’s management pulled them from prominent view anyway, relocating them to the back, facing the wall. Now, according to Mary’s latest tweet, it seems that the Lloyd Center mall management had a lot to do with the shirts going away.
Thank you, @ShopLloydCenter. And thank you to the people who relentlessly pushed back. We will not normalize sexual assault pic.twitter.com/OkdPMXf4md
— Mary Numair (@MaryNumair) January 17, 2017
Kudos to Lloyd Center Mall management and the local Spencer’s staff for realizing that profiting from rape culture is a fucking terrible way to live one’s life.
If you’d like to remind Spencer’s corporate office of that, feel free to do so here or here.
Let me just preempt all the people who are going to comment about “free speech”.
Free speech is about government control. It does not mean that citizens cannot react to your speech. In this instance, citizens reacted. Then the store made their decision, which they were free to do or not. That is all. No one lost their free speech.
Spencer’s exercised their “free speech,” and consumers did, too.