Often here I read questions like "Should professors intervene if a student is wearing offensive clothing in their classroom?" and I don't understand why such things happen so often.
While I did my A-levels, I often wore "offensive" T-Shirts (maybe just to get some attention by moral-hypocrites [which rarely happened] as a teen, but what does it matter?), and right now, I still like band-t-shirts which happen to have offensive contents, just because I like the bands and the images. I was kind of a creep as a person, but still, I was quite popular and noone ever talked to anyone about offensive stuff. Not to me, and not to the teachers or the principial, with which I had quite a good friendship. And still now, in university, nobody ever came to me saying anything about that, neither teachers nor students, feeling offended.
Sure, if they don't tell me doesn't mean they are not, but I believe then they decided they can live with ignoring it.
So, my question is: why are academians so easily offended by just a t-shirt or such things. These are easy to ignore and there are way more important things. Academians should be intelligent enough to understand this, I believe.
(I certainly understand why sexism, racism, violence etc. in action are detested. In any way, I would try to stop everything of these (and other) things if I ever were to see them! But just an image is not an action and, in my experience, often people wear these things as "shadows" of their personality (i. e. the subconsciousness of what they aren't, just to put attention on those problems.)
It might be neccessary to say that I grep up and still live in germany; the extreme "political correctness" positions may be attributed to this. But the question still stays.