Normally I don't receive anything of value in my college mailbox. Aside from the occasional paycheck or letter from a relative, my mail generally consists of flyers from various student organizations that I don't plan to be involved with, advertisements telling me to support some political cause that I am either already for or horribly outraged by, and catalogs of expensive items that I don't particularly care for. However, today I came across something in my mailbox that fit into the last category, but that was simply in a league of its own. I went beyond merely not caring for this catalog's expensive items; this was a catalog displaying overpriced crap I would never, ever, ever want to buy. Which was ironic, considering its cover praised it as "The Catalog of Things You Never Knew Existed, and Other Items You Can't POSSIBLY Live Without."
You may think that I discarded this piece of rubbish even faster than I discard all the normal junk that accumulates in my box regularly. I actually did quite the opposite. Realizing that I had struck comedic and critical gold, I took this catalog to my room with the full intention of reading it cover to cover and marveling at all the bizarre oddities I found within its pages. At first I found it absolutely hilarious, but the more I read it the more disturbing it became. I'll go into this later; first let me highlight some of my favorite items from this catalog:
While everything else in this catalog is pointless, this one goes that extra mile by actually being an inconvenience to anyone who owns it, due obviously to its more than impractical size. But the makers of the catalog don't want you to think that. According to them, this "gift" is "Perfect... for the greatly endowed and the barely-there" (I'll address this obvious sexism later), and "Ideal for bachelorette parties, retiring co-workers, and moms-to-be." Perfect? Ideal? I must admit that these were not the first words that came to my mind when I saw this product, and there are better, more practical, less random gifts that I could think of for retiring co-workers and moms-to-be. Almost every item in the catalog is advertised in the same way though. Whoever came up with these product descriptions is greatly over-compensating for the sheer uselessness of these items by not just claiming that they have some purpose, but that they are ABSOLUTELY essential. This doesn't seem like the most convincing strategy; I mean, I'd like to think that I would feel complete as a person without a figurine of Santa mooning me. Which brings me to the next item on my list:
Apparently, this one is the "ultimate Christmas gag." There's really not much more that I can say about this one; I don't think I can make it sound more ridiculous than it actually is. There was one thing that confused me though. In the picture in the catalog, there's a speech bubble coming from Santa's mouth saying "Here's the gift that keeps on giving! Ho ho ho!" The only thing I was uncertain of was whether he was referring to his ass or to one of his turds. Anyway, on to the next item:
This one brings immature humor to a whole new level. I think this might be one of the least subtle items I've ever seen. However, there was one subtly funny aspect of the description. It censors the word "ass" for no apparent reason, since the catalog proudly displays the same word on 8 of its t-shirts. I wish I could show you all of them, but I only received five results when I did a search for "ass shirt" on their website.
Which brings me to the next group of items: shirts about being retired (one of which also says "ass" on it.) I don't know who's in this catalog's demographic, but it must contain either some old people or some people who want to get slightly offensive shirts for old people, because there were more shirts about being retired in this catalog than I expected. I was briefly tempted to get one just for irony's sake, but then I decided against it because I do not want the people selling these shirts to have any of my money. And here's why:
Remember how earlier I said I found some aspects of this catalog disturbing? Well now I'm going to talk about those aspects. Most of the items in this catalog are intended to be funny, and while some of them try to accomplish this by using oversized novelty gags or poo jokes, some are just flat-out offensive. There were two main categories of offensive humor I consistently found in this catalog, the first one being classist humor.
For some reason there's an abnormal amount of products making fun of "rednecks" in this catalog. These range from shirts directly making fun of poor people to other items that do so more indirectly, such as the "Billy Bob Pacifier" (now you can teach stereotypes about poor people to your kids starting when they're babies!) What amazed me the most was that the catalog featured not one, but TWO redneck themed Christmas CDs (one of which is called "White Trash Christmas") that feature songs such as "X-mas in Jail," "Leroy and The Redneck Reindeer," and "The Little Hooters Girl." Not only do these products perpetuate offensive stereotypes about poor people, they also tie into one of the catalog's other offensive recurring themes: misogyny!
One of the aforementioned shirts perfectly highlights everything that is classist and sexist in the catalog. Countless products in the catalog make jokes out of the idea that women should simply be used for pleasure because their feelings don't matter in any way. Some shirts in the catalog display such unabashedly misogynistic phrases as "Let's Play Carpenter! First we get hammered, then I nail you," "Be a flirt, lift your shirt," and "I'm not a gynecologist, but I'll take a look." The t-shirt section is mainly where all this misogyny occurs, but the fact that anyone would proudly walk around with these phrases across their chest makes me lose a little bit of faith in humanity. Don't worry though; if you feel like being a jerk but don't want to be misogynistic, there are plenty of shirts that make fun of mental disorders, and others that are just plain rude and unfunny.
Aside from all the offensive "humor" featured in the catalog, there are other, more... um... serious (?) items that are also troublesome. Some of these fall under the category of army memorabilia. While some pieces of army memorabilia are in decent taste, such as shirts praising the memories of dead soldiers, I really don't think that anyone gave their life in a war to be remembered in a catalog that also sells fake cat poo. In addition, the catalog's apparent reverence for life is undermined by another shirt for the national guard that proclaims "One Shot, One Kill." Other items in this category that annoyed me were hats proclaiming "Vietnam Veteran" or "Iraq - Afghanistan Veteran." Um, so does that mean that now anyone can claim to be a veteran?
Still, my opinions about selling army memorabilia are just opinions. I'm not trying to present unproven claims as fact. I don't need to, since the Catalog of Things You Never Knew Existed is already presenting countless unproven, unprovable claims as fact, in the section of the catalog that sells pseudo-science books and DVDs. Some of them have titles such as "Forbidden Science" and "Antigravity Secrets." I admit, I don't know enough about "gravity controlling technologies" or "the ability to harness free energy from space" to claim that these books are full of lies, but I am led to believe this by the fact that they are positioned next to a DVD titled "Evidence of Life On Mars?" Since the title is written as a question, I hope that the answer is "no," otherwise there is absolutely no valuable information in the DVD. Pseudo-scientific theories about the existence of intelligent life on Mars have been proven wrong time and again, from the idea that canals existed on Mars to the excitement over the "face on Mars." The description of the DVD cites information about "remarkable monuments, T shaped craters, gigantic glass tube systems..." etc. They don't even mention one of the only theories that supports the existence of life on Mars, which is the possibility of liquid water existing on Mars. Even still, this theory in no way supports the idea of intelligent life on Mars, which this DVD claims is the truth.
Then there are all the books and DVD's about "Evidence of Alien Contact," which use personal stories of alien abductions as their proof. Anyone who knows anything about science knows that you can't use personal anecdotes as scientific proof for anything; extensive psychological research has been done into alien abduction cases, and a lot of it has proven that, well, alien abductions DON'T HAPPEN (when people are hypnotized, and even sometimes when they are not, they can be lead to genuinely believe that impossible things happened to them; then when they are placed in situations with people who have had similar experiences, they gain validation for their stories. This is also why some people experience past lives while under hypnosis, which is very unreliable.) Finally, there are all the government conspiracy theories, claims about psychic powers, one DVD trying to prove the existence of Bigfoot, and the most outrageous one, a book that claims that the earth is hollow and houses a secret Nazi base with UFOs. Yes, you read that right. If real science were as popular as pseudo-science, I would be happy. But then again, real science is not always as interesting as being told that Nazis and aliens live inside the earth.
What annoys me the most about the catalog in general is that it constitutes exploitation. Yes, exploitation, simply for the fact that it creates an entire business off of making people pay for things they absolutely don't need. What's even worse is that the things people merely don't need are the BEST things the catalog has to offer, the worst being the aforementioned ones that are actually harmful, perpetuating prejudiced attitudes and teaching horrendous fallacies as fact while giving both science and humor bad names. Certainly there are way worse problems out there, but the Catalog of Things You Never Knew Existed is symptomatic of so many things wrong with society. Personally, I almost wish that I never knew any of these things existed.
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