Was it the play on words that made all those marketing folk agree that this "Nudie Tee" was the perfect gift for golfers? How they must have congratulated themself that a "tee" was not just a tiny piece of plastic driven into the ground to support your balls but, you know, the last syllable of the word "nudi-ty".

Few products underline the fact that golf is still largely considered a man's game than a tee designed to look like a naked female torso. Such a small, insignificant thing that you can knock the head off it with just one swing of your big manly arms.

Joanna Sharpen was surprised that the image of the tiny packet of plastic torsos – available for just £2.99 from Amazon and Ebay – upset her so much. After all, her day job as project manager for charity AVA means that she has become pretty inured to examples of physical violence and abuse. As an adviser and moderator on the government's This Is Abuse campaign she has also spoken to some 3,000 young people, a third of whom reported being raped. Some, she says, were as young as 10 years old.

Trying to explain her visceral response to a "novelty gift", she points out that she saw it just after having read a list of the names of women recently killed by their partners. "The product resonated with me because of the fact that the bodies are headless and two women this year were decapitated," she says. "They have no arms, as if women are purely sexual objects and have no need of a head or arms. People see them as a gimmick, a novelty. But they do so much damage."

In response to the Dunlop tees, Karen Ingala Smith, whose website project Counting Dead Women marks murder victims, compiled a list of the six UK women who have been decapitated since January 2012 here.

Sharpen launched an online petition on Saturday in a bid to get the "nudie tees" withdrawn. She directly links the casual objectification and trivialisation of women's bodies with studies that prove it increases physical violence and abuse. "People turn a blind eye to it but, for me, it was the final straw," she says.

Having got nowhere trying to get a response from Dunlop UK – their website suggests writing a letter and gives a non-working phone number – Sharpen has written to the owner of its parent company, Mike Ashley.

The Guardian found a working PR number but is still waiting for a response. While we wait, I could use past experience to guess what it could be. When Mike Ashley was previously accused of sexism over a pink cleaning kit ("It's girls' stuff"), the controversial billionaire just seemed to have decided that ignoring the criticism would make it go away.

This sort of it's-a-silly-fuss-from-humourless-harpies-and-will-die-down attitude has probably helped in all sorts of corporate imbroglios, from the sale of novelty T-shirts that exhort men to Keep Calm and Hit Her and proclaim "I'm feeling rapey", to the case of Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the Premier League, using vile language to discuss women.

At first glance, I thought this was just another example of sexism in sport to add to the growing heap – the John Inverdale comments about Marion Bartoli, the Grey/Keys double-act; I could go on – but the online sale of such garbage is part of a larger picture, one in which sport is simply the easiest playing field for men to behave badly on. Just shut up, have a laugh, take the joke, stop moaning.

Or take a minute and sign this petition. No one is guaranteeing a proper response, but what's the alternative?

• This article was amended on 2 July 2014, to add the paragraph beginning: "In response to the Dunlop tees, Karen Ingala Smith, whose website project Counting Dead Women marks murder victims …" It also stated that Joanna Sharpen compiled the list of dead women. This has been changed.