This week, visitors to the J.C. Penney website could purchase a T-shirt that contained the following on the front: “I’m too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me.” The accompanying sales pitch on the website read, “Who has time for homework when there’s a new Justin Bieber album out? She’ll love this tee that’s just as cute and sassy as she is.”
An online petition was started at Change.org that called on J.C. Penney to remove the offensive shirt from its website. The petition read, “In a world where women are fighting for respect and equality, J.C. Penney is promoting a message in the vein of Mattel’s talking Barbie who bemoaned, ‘Math is hard, let’s go shopping.'”
Within one hour after the petition was established, 1,000 people had signed it. Two hours later, J.C. Penney pulled the shirt off its website and issued an apology.
