Mom Says No f****in' Messages On My T-Shirt

For a long time I held a view; a view which thankfully, I no longer subscribe to, that you only ever truly come of age the day you go out wearing a T-shirt with provocative written all over it: for the most part, these happen to be politically in-appropriate one liners (in these our most over- the- top- politically correct of times) and that may not necessarily scream for the attention of the opposite sex only.In college,it used to be a rite of passage for my fraternity to wear our "shock and awe" credentials on our sleeves, or should that read T-shirts, I am no longer sure. As the male of the species, we are not exactly what you might call'very receptive to the power of expression' and certainly, we do not come into our own with word-play anymore than we do with foreplay which must also, partly explain why we like to let our T-shirts do most of our 'witty' talking for us. On any given day, or make that an evening out, you will find twice as many men as there are women in T-shirts with messages scrawled on them; declaring this that or the other.Messenger T-shirts or "mShirts" as we like to call them have been around longer than have Grandpa's LP gramophone or his electric kettle,and yet we never seem to tire of them - such is the lure of dry wit and black humor that, on some level, even we men seem to 'get it,' and keep coming back for more.Sadly, however; what's definitely become retro-cool with today's Generation 'Full Monty' is the power of suggestion, subtlety and euphemisms - a point that hit home painfully, when I caught up with an old friend from school over lemon souffle the other day, when Ms." Don't Know What Subtle Is" came out wearing this hideous see-through strapless shirt with the words "Too Hot to Touch" emblazoned right across the front. Needless to say, the souffle went cold even as I sat there sore-eyed ruminating over whom it was who said, "When hot is just not so cool, anymore"! A fortnight back I happened to run into this Bedouin gentleman at the haberdashery in the Central Souk in Kuwait; a RhodesScholar himself, he was moaning to me about a palpable lack of imagination and contextualization with T-shirt designers who cater to the local youth market. Not that I mean to begrudge any lad or lass their choice of mShirts but having on something that says - 'Will buy Drinks for Sex' isabsurd in a dry country and perhaps, and with all due respect; it is more fitting to wear something along the lines of, say, 'Will Have Sex to buy Drinks' rendering it a tad relevant to a more or less puritanical, though, by no means purist society, such as Kuwait's.Now I am about to let you in on a little secret of mine- although I may be a Ph.D and all, EVEN I am not that stupid to think these shirt logos are created in Kuwait but the trouble is people would actually buy them thinking that they are, and will bring them overnight cachet on their home turf .Incidentally, for those of you who must know; Mr Bedouin was in a T-shirt yelling : 'Give us Statehood or Give us Our Bukhour'. Not bad for originality; I should think.