Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Paperchase: Now Catering for Sex Offenders?

[Image is a photograph of a greetings card taken in a shop. The card has multi-coloured text, saying "I'm already visualising the duct tape over your mouth".]

Oh Paperchase, what were you thinking? You stock birthday cards, Christmas cards, anniversary cards, every kind of card I could need. But this one, seen by @jocaulfield - really, what were you thinking?

I have no idea who the target audience is supposed to be, because all I can think of is that it's a perfect card for a stalker to send to their victim. Admittedly it could also be used by kinky folk planning their next play session, but other than that it just screams sex offender.

How would you feel, as a woman, to receive a card like that? What if it was anonymous? Or would it actually be worse if it was signed? If I got that in the post I'm just not sure I would see the funny side, if there even is one. I am pretty sure I'd feel scared and intimidated and threatened.

I can't find it for sale on their website. It might be there, but even working out which category of card it would come under is baffling me. Get well soon? Sympathy? Engagement and wedding?

The presence of this card means that Paperchase does not feel like a shop I want to go into any more. It does not feel like a safe place, nor a place that I would like to give money to. If you want to let them know what you think of this card, you can do so here.

Photograph by, and hat-tip to, Jo Caulfield.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Um, maybe it's just that I'm from a different sub-culture or something, but there's an old and well known joke about putting tape over someone's mouth as the only way to get them to shut up.

I think you've brought too much of your own context with you.

incurable hippie said...

Maybe. But if so, it's the context of me and about half of twitter!