Rape couture. NOT COOL.

I’m the first to laugh at slogan merchandise – I’m still desperate for a ‘Nobody knows I’m a lesbian’ tee (no really, where can I buy one) and I love anything branded with LOL, YOLO, TMI, WTF, or OMG. But when ‘Keep Calm and Rape’ t-shirts were being sold on Amazon last week I was outraged like the rest of you. 

What kind of sick f*ck would design this? Who signed it off? Is it supposed to be funny, offensive, deliberately provocative? Who thought this would be OK? What about the children, think of the children! 

But before you rally the mob and reach for your pitchfork, it’s all a big mistake. A big, stupid blunder. 

The t-shirt designs were created by an algorithm. That’s right, a computer programme. Not a designer, or a creative team, or even someone who thinks rape is something to joke about.

The retailer (a US company called Solid Gold Bomb) is huge and sells half a million products on Amazon and other sites. To meet demand they have a complex algorithm in place – it throws out designs and if you buy one, it gets made. Effectively, it doesn't cost anything to design, nothing to submit to Amazon, and nothing for them to host it. It’s cost-effective, and many businesses are run this way. 

The algorithm takes a template t-shirt (Keep Calm and...), auto-generates a verb from a list of thousands, and puts the design straight up on Amazon. 

After reading Michael Fowler’s (CEO of Solid Gold Bomb) heart-felt apology, you can see that it's a massive oversight. And it does make sense for a large organisation to use an algorithm to create products. But it's clearly not regulated closely enough - they're were also selling t-shirts with other horrendous, violent slogans, such as 'Grope on', 'Boil her', 'Drill her', 'Hit her'.

So, do you think Solid Gold Bomb should be penalised? Should they abandon this algorithm as a business model? Would you boycott them? Are you outraged?