Photo: TikTok
Two donuts on a t-shirt landed this teen in the dean's office for an inappropriate innuendo.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Mar 24, 2023
A mom on TikTok is being criticized for the shirt that she bought her son for Christmas after the teachers at school said it was a dress code violation.
In the very first video she posted about it, she made sure to leave out the shirt that he was wearing until he was well into his story and let people figure it out for themselves before he told everyone what exactly the shirt was supposed to mean.
Her son wore a donut shirt to school and was dress coded for it.
They weren’t just any combination of donut and hand, however, the donuts were pink and brown and the hand was holding out specific fingers to reinforce an old, sexual innuendo.
“So I went to school with my donut shirt that you got me for Christmas,” her son starts his story and goes on to explain how the dean of his school had liked it.
“I had brought it up, I was like ‘people are all looking at my shirt, looking at me all weird and whatnot, do you like my shirt?’” he said, to which the dean replied “Yeah, it’s just donuts.”
The teen, however, was not going to get away with it that easily as his trip to another office had gone a little less smoothly than the first visit.
He was told to “get the f--k out” by one of the administrators, and when they showed another one of the deans, they immediately recognized the innuendo.
“Ohhhhh, two in the pink, one in the stink!” he said, causing the young teen to laugh. He said that later on, for a wall that housed a bunch of “inside jokes” that teachers had with students, one of the teachers asked for a picture of a couple of donuts that would read “It’s just donuts - Bryce,” referring to the shirt that he wore to school that day.
People found it weird that a mom would buy her son a sexual innuendo t-shirt.
One commenter wrote “why [are we] acting like it’s just a donut shirt? Literally everyone knows it’s not just a donut shirt. Parents like you are the problem.”
Someone else had less of a problem with the shirt and more of a problem with the fact that she let him go to school wearing it, saying “a mom allowing her son to wear it to school shows questionable parenting.”
“It’s crazy how everyone is saying it’s harmless but it’s literally normalizing sexual content on younger kids every day,” a third user wrote, and he’s right about one thing — there are many people in the comments that are laughing at the shirt and at the prospect of his teachers reacting in this way.
However, there’s nothing wrong with introducing the concept of sex or even joking about it with your children. As with anything, there are lines and boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed, and educating your children on all of these things is important.
Children should be educated about sex early on in life.
According to Cory Silverberg, a sex educator and author of “Sex Is A Funny Word” via Today's Parent, “The process of talking about sex should start before [kids are] verbal.”
First, it begins with anatomy and treating the body parts equally, and then once they’re in preschool and grow curious about where they came from, be honest about the act and everything that comes along with it — including what is and isn’t okay and things like consent.
“The amount of detail one goes into really depends on how much you think your child can comprehend,” Silverberg says, but you should always feel comfortable when talking to your children about it as sex is a completely natural, biological thing.
As for allowing your teen to wear a “two in the pink one in the stink” t-shirt to school, maybe that isn’t the best idea, but getting him the shirt itself isn’t necessarily a bad move on the mom’s part.
It’s a funny shirt, and clearly, the mom and her son are comfortable talking about it and are close enough with each other to broach the subject — next time, she should just make sure he wears it at home.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.