Reef Beach Shop

The “Reef Beach Shop” is another souvenir shop in Holden Beach, NC. These pictures were taken in July, 2008. In front of this store are several large signs proclaiming “50% OFF EVERYTHING! NO GIMMICKS!” It carries shirts, wind chimes, children’s toys, and a collection of horrible racist and sexist items that have to be seen to be believed.

As you pass the great whites, you are greeted with this banner in the front window:

Pirate things are even more popular than usual at the beach because of the recent Johnny Depp movies. This flag is a clever play on the word “Booty” which in pirate-speak means “treasure,” and in hate-speak means simply “sex” or “vagina.” The imperative is basically a declaration of intent to rape.

In case that sentiment might seem too subtle, peruse some of the following T-shirts that were available:

First, the ever-popular “Fucking Bozo Inside” shirt. Oops, we mean, “Female Body Inspector.” We didn’t get a chance to take a picture of the version behind the counter that added the line “Lie on the ground and spread your legs,” you will just have to take our word for it. The bold sans-serif declaration of intent to ogle and sexually harass has the added feature of being an easy-to-read aid for identifying bozos at a distance.

The first of many shirts that conflate hunting animals with guns and hunting women with … penises presumably. It also conflates women’s breasts and the trophy parts of deer’s bodies, and sex and taxidermy. It’s so humorous to imply you would like have sex with and then kill and stuff a woman and hang her on your wall! Your friends will chuckle for weeks at this amazing play on words!

The “woman-as-prey-to-my-big-gun” theme was so thrilling it was used in many different shirts, with varied degrading images of women.

I am sure if you had the temerity to suggest this shirt might be offensive, the wearer would tell you sincerely that he just really loves hunting raccoons! What’s so horrible about that?

In case you can’t read it, the punch line of this shirt is in the small text under “YOU CAN’T TAKE MY GUNS, MY DOG OR MY FLAG.” It reads “BUT FOR A SIX PACK YOU CAN BORROW MY WIFE” and then in another font concludes “A SOUTHERN TRADITION SINCE 1861″ 1861 is the year the 11 slave states seceded from the United States and the American Civil War began. From the use of this date, we are led to believe that “traditional” southern men have been enslaving their wives and pimping them out for a measly bit of beer for almost 150 years. But it’s just a joke, right? A real “southern gentleman” loves his woman, right? He’d only wear this shirt on vacation.

We’ll finish this post off with another clever conflation, this time of a woman and cooked chicken. This woman is for sale, just like chicken! She has legs, breast, [sic] and thighs just like a chicken. “Eat” has the clever double meaning of “devour food” and “have oral sex with.” Oral sex typically isn’t limited to “legs, breast, and thighs” but we can’t expect the creators of this shirt to actually know anything about that. The “with gravy” is probably a reference to male ejaculate. This shirt makes crystal clear the attitude that women are interchangeable, faceless body parts, meant only for consumption by men. The conflation with food doesn’t even register as cannibalism, because women clearly are not human to the people that create and wear items like these.