I’m with you on this. When I read that post, my first thought was “that teacher doesn’t have a clue what the term means”. Next, I thought it reminded me of the silly game where people were making fun of racists who use the term “I’m not racist, but…” followed by a racist comment; here’s an example of the joke: “I’m not racist, but it’s 4:40 p.m.”. The teacher’s usage of the term actually puts her square in the camp of “anti-PCers” even if she doesn’t really belong there.
By the way, I, personally, am happy with whatever (legal) career field any of my students, male or female, wishes to enter, regardless of the near unanimous position of the student body’s parents (business).
Given that the definition is pretty much “Don’t be an asshole for intrinsic traits”, why do you have to come up with a more convoluted meaning? If you know something is offensive to certain groups, especially minorities, why do you feel the need to say it anyway? And why get pissy when people call you an asshole for doing so? If you’re gonna act like an asshole, nobody’s gonna call you a rose.
That is a good test. I clicked the first link. All those examples are people or groups acting in fear of PC. They are seeking to avoid the unpleasant coercion they associate with the phenomenon. The fact that they are doing so, shows that it can be an effective and powerful propaganda tool.
We talk about PC in a wide variety of contexts, and have yet to find an acceptable definition. I’ve tried to find the essential nut of it by seeking out what they all have in common. It is this coercion that I’ve described.
The second example fits as well. Again, we have a company reacting before criticism in order to avoid the negative consequences of it. More likely, Starbucks received complaints that it’s Christmas advertising was not inclusive, and/or discriminatory against Christians in years past.
No, I don’t think that’s it. Your definition is simply courtesy or politeness. I thought about this, but it doesn’t work.
For example, the right is being politically correct against Colin Kapernick, and trying to hold him to the standard of their belief system in insisting he stand. He is under no obligation to accept that.
PC is really a form of propaganda, which is a tool, like a hammer. You can use it to hit a baby, or you can use it to hit a nail.
Your definition includes a justification which is not inherent in PC itself.
Your definition also assumes that all PC is correct and justified. That it is only used to defend minorities from oppression. This is not true.
Actually I think I get it: the teacher is worried that saying “I’m so glad your girl is into science” will elicit the reaction *“What do you mean? So it’s unusual? So you didn’t EXPECT girls to be into science? Tells me a lot about you!” *
Sort of like Obama being described as “articulate” back when he was getting started. Perceived as revealing an underlying lower expectation.
And I would not mind adopting this definition, BUT, you see, you are seeking to bring back to the use of the term Political Correctness as an actually useful descriptor of a political phenomenon, 30 years after it was weaponized for use in the Culture War.
The term originated within the Left, in reference to debates and power struggles between ideological factions and between pragmatists and purists. By the timw I was in college it was being used to describe those who cared more about using the proper ideological terminology and expressing the “right” supports and objections, rather than about effective changes that the people could feel. e.g. people who would go around hammering about language inclusiveness, while their group (and the whole class) was still mostly made up of white trust fund babies.
This was seized upon in the Reagan Era by people like Dinesh d’Souza in the upper circles and Rush Limbaugh among the masses, to recast the whole notion of inclusivity and sensitivity as just “PC” imposition from the left – in a caricatured form by which anything neutral or inclusive was portrayed as leftist eggheads trying to change the language to erase what is the “normal” way to be, talk or behave and to prevent discussion of “realism” about group differences. That effort was evidently succesful.
Political correctness is courtesy and politeness. That is exactly all that it is.
The people who take exception to “PC” are those who do not wish to be courteous or polite, and call the trappings of being a decent person “just being PC”
PC is a snarl word, used to justify being rude and insulting,and claiming that anyone offended by bigoted, misogynistic, or homophobic speech is just being PC.
You do realize this is entirely conjecture on your part, right? Like, in at least one case, we even know this conjecture is wrong - “The club, however, decided that celery could result in health and safety issues inside the ground.” Here’s an important possibility left out: they did it because they thought it was the right thing to do. Or they did it because they wanted to. Or is that political correctness as well? Because, like you, a whole bunch of people assert that that’s political correctness as well.
What they all have in common is that it’s a snarl word. You’re trying to nail down a definition of a word which exists first and foremost as a way for shitlords to label and denigrate something they don’t like. That’s the way the term gets used. That’s why defining it as something reasonable, then looking at how it actually gets used, is such a difficult task - you’re starting on the wrong end. The way the term gets used is most emphatically not reasonable.
You can play the same game with another very related term, “SJW”. You can spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out, “Well, what is an SJW”, but no matter how you define it, you’re inevitably going to run into the fact that “SJW” just basically means “A term reactionary assholes on the internet call someone they don’t like who has an opinion that is left of center”. Because that’s what it is! It’s a snarl word. A thought-stopper. A way to say, “You are not part of my tribe, therefore you are bad”. That’s what it means.
Why do you say this? Why couldn’t it be that Starbucks didn’t feel like explicitly celebrating christian iconography? Why couldn’t it be that Starbucks thought its bottom line would be helped more by inclusivity than pandering to Christians? Why couldn’t it be that Starbucks thought that it would enjoy the free publicity that comes from pissing off loudmouthed moral-majority types? I have no idea how you reached this conclusion, and it’s completely unsupportable.
Too broad. What you’ve described is social rules, which arise whenever anyone has to interact with anyone else.
You’re required to shower periodically, even if you believe soap is unnatural and flies are lucky. You can’t talk to yourself on the bus, even if you believe that’s the best way to get intelligent conversation. You may be required to leave the toilet seat down, even if you believe it’s better to leave it up. If you were a hermit, you could be filthy, talk to yourself, and leave the seat any damned way you wanted. Since you’re not, you have to deal with coercive rules.
P.C. is a well-intentioned attempt to change the rules. This is annoying and confusing to some people who learned a different set of rules as children. I thought about the O.P.'s question and did a search for “politically correct” and “political correctness gone mad”, and I couldn’t come up with much worth raging at. On the other hand, as others have said, a lot of P.C. is just politeness. Also, no idea is so good that a fool can’t screw it up. This makes me think we’re better off with P.C. than without it. Show me enough examples of harmful P.C. and I’ll change my mind, just like if you show me enough people in intensive care for sandy underwear, I’ll help nuke the beach. I haven’t seen them yet.
But it’s a teachers actual business to know that girls need to be encouraged in the field, if they do, and they do. Saying it out loud was her job and had no shame attached to it. She drew it in from elsewhere.
This is the heart of the matter. The definition of “Political Correctness” is “a term that is used to devalue somebody’s attempt not to offend somebody.” Definitions that focus on the “trying not to offend somebody” part omit the largest part of the word’s meaning, which is that the attempt in question is bad.
Do the examples have to be big deals? Because I’ve got plenty of small, petty examples. Mostly to do with language.
I wanted to call someone a pussy on this board. Y’know, weak and fragile. I decided, since it wasn’t the Pit, to tone it down and go with the softer, gentler “pansy.” I still got shit for it, apparently because gay people were called pansies, and that hurt their feelings, so now I can’t use the word.
But the whole point was to insult someone. That’s why I called them a pansy. I wanted to hurt their feelings. I wasn’t even doing it in a homophobic way, just trying to do a run-of-the-mill, average, everyday emasculation. Y’know, likeyado. ANd apparently that’s frowned upon.
That’s PC run amok. It’s not really worth “raging about,” but I don’t have to like it.
That means it’s not intrinsically possible to call somebody a “pansy” in a non-homophobic way, any more than it is to call somebody a “kike” in a non-antisemitic way, for example.
Even if you personally didn’t mean anything anti-gay or anti-semitic by the word in question, it is still going to come across that way. You can’t just unilaterally decree, Humpty-Dumpty style, that when you use a commonly recognized homophobic insult your listeners are allowed to recognize the insult part but not the homophobic part.
No, that’s just you not being aware of the standard meaning of this particular slur. If you’re going to insult people (not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that; this entire forum is reserved for that purpose, for instance), then it’s on you to be reasonably well informed about the commonly accepted meaning of the insults you use.
You wanted to insult someone outside of the pit. You wanted to insult someone where insulting other posters is not allowed. You called someone a pansy for the purpose of hurting their feelings, outside of the pit.
You used a different insult than the misogynistic one that you first thought of, and are upset that you accidently used a homophobic insult instead.
Did you get into trouble for using “pansy”, or did you get into trouble for insulting another poster outside of the pit?
I would agree that this is an example of PC’ness, as you were in the wrong, but are trying to make yourself in the right by claiming that you just weren’t being PC enough to no offend delicate sensibilities.
Eh, ya fuckin shitstain, if you’re wanting to hurt dudes’ feelings by implying that they don’t fit your mold of masculinity, that they’re too much like inferior women, then you’re a loathsome little creep, and I’m happy to call you on it.
And yeah, you don’t have to like it. That’s kind of the point. If calling you a dumbshit loser is PC, I don’t wanna be un-PC.
It is pretty funny, though, that you wanted to call someone else fragile, but when you got called out for it, you were so hurt that you remember the incident all this time later. Maybe being a man isn’t enough to make a person tough after all.
When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, my fellow Marxist students and I thought of “politically correct,” if we thought of it at all, as a mild joke with which to make fun of ourselves. It wasn’t a big deal. It was only years later that right-wing propagandists decided to weaponize it against liberals. Pretty stupid.
When the “American Renaissance” creeps planned a conference in my town, I joined in plans to protest them, to demonstrate that hate wasn’t welcome in my town. I posted the information to a local message board to alert others to oppose racism. So somebody asked “Is this for political correctness?” as though that were what it was about. I answered, man, these are neo-Nazis and Klan, the scum of the earth, and he was like OK, guess that’s no good.
So yeah, here are my two beefs with it:
Dumbshits who didn’t get the joke and tried to turn it into something it never was.
Republican assholes using it to make excuses for the spread of virulent hate.
Yes, but it makes you come across as trying to be prescriptivist about the meaning of the term when not only has the horse fled the barn but he took the door and the lock with him.
(And yes* if you use the variant on the old meaning *there *is *such a thing as left-PC and right-PC. )
And “2” can happen because the dumbshits in “1” not only tried but were succesful. To a great extent because the notion was already being used derisively (see the scene in Life of Brian where the People’s Front gets tied up in knots over gender terms in their manifesto) so nobody reacted in time to say, “no, wait, going out of your way to avoid hurting feelings is NOT what we are referring to!”
This is what the problem, IMO, with Political Correctness is. Well, one of the main problems anyway.
It’s irrational, a form of magical thinking; treating words as if they have power by themselves, and it doesn’t matter whether the person saying the words has mens rea or not, the person is guilty. So anyone who wants to paint themselves a crusader for justice doing that crap can get stuffed because chastising or persecuting people whether they are guilty of a transgression or not is the exact opposite of justice.
Just like in the Jehova sketch in Life of Brian, you say something and it doesn’t matter the context or intent, it’s taken as evil and acted upon as such.
This is the type of PC I believe most people dislike.
And that’s just the Correctness part, the Political aspect is when it really gets insidious because it all boils down to not what people said, meant, knew or didn’t, it’s all about how it’s interpreted and how that interpretation can be wielded for political gains.
Insert here example of group redefining something as no longer acceptable and those doing that something as being evil people who need to be either reeducated in alignment with the ideology of the group or replaced with a member of that group.
I think the same twisted brain circuitry expresses itself in other ways, for instance it’s what drives people to murder each other over religion.
