…But he meant to use “pansy” as a slur. Maybe not a homophobic slur, but that’s the only reason it works as a slur to begin with. Because it was a homophobic slur. Because it implies unmanliness.
Still no workable definition. Still no examples worth raging at. Plenty of examples of assholes trying to claim their innocence by invoking “PC”
I’m convinced. I used to believe PC gone mad was a thing. No longer.
Now I believe assholes being assholes is the problem.
This may be politically incorrect, but you’re completely right and I’m going to go get a sandwich.
In this example, Chessic Sense meant to use an insult that emasculated another poster outside of the Pit. His first choice was “pussy”–suggesting that the poster was, I dunno, weak like a vagina, not strong like a penis?–but he downgraded it to “pansy.” He didn’t choose “chrysanthemum” or “daffodil” or “azalea”, and it beggars imagination to this that this was coincidental, when “pansy” has a nearly century-long use as a homophobic slur.
So there’s no way we’re not looking at mens rea here. The dumbass knew what he was doing.
This is a great example of how political correctness in my life is worth raging at. I was one of the hundreds of tech workers fired for having referenced a Slave Drive in 2003. I had it much worse off than my cousin, whose only personal effect was that his BDSM fetish no longer got a little thrill from tech manuals–but was better off than my nephew, who disappeared into a reeducation camp and was never heard from again.
I’m curious, though, how you were personally affected by it–you left that part out of the example.
Because if it didn’t affect you, it seems like you’d treat it like one of the ten bajillion other small bureaucratic decisions from 2003 that you’d theoretically disagree with: you wouldn’t know it at all, much less remember it 15 years later. If this was a decision by a low-tier bureaucrat that had no deleterious effects on anyone’s lives, and maybe just made a few people happy by not referring to a piece of technology with the name of a heinous crime (note that we don’t call it the Rape Drive, for example), you’d think it’d go unnoticed.
Unless, of course, the problem with political correctness is the huge rightwing industry dedicated to blowing shit way the fuck out of proportion in order to whip up the frothing masses that pay attention to their dishonest and calculating infotainment. If that’s the case, I totally understand why this low-level bureaucratic decision would still rankle you fifteen years later.
I know, right? What’s next, we can’t refer to “male” and “female” connectors anymore?
I’m a (liberal) middle aged white man, and I was trying to think of examples where PC has actually impacted my life. The closest I remember is this: a (male) friend and coworker posted a meme on Facebook which was something like “remember, rape and having sex are two different things. If it’s rape, then it’s not having sex”. Which irritated me, because while I understand and appreciate the sentiment, that’s just not how the terms are used, and prefacing it with “Remember” is just obnoxious. So I disagreed, and argued back and forth for a bit, and then suddenly I realized that I was arguing on Facebook on a coworker’s page, presumably visible to large numbers of other coworkers, many of them female; and I was arguing on a side which, if you squinted a lot and didn’t think about it too much, might be seen as being a rape apologist of some sort.
And sure enough, a group of female employees reported me to HR and I was fired and blackballed from the industry. No, wait, they reported me to HR and I had to take a two week sensitivity training class. No, wait, that didn’t happen either. What DID happen is that I stopped posting in that thread and felt vaguely uncomfortable about the whole situation. Truly it is white men like me who are the real victims.
Just riffing on this a bit – sure, we don’t get raped as often, we don’t get followed around in stores as if we’re criminals, we’re not expected to apologize any time any white man does something wrong, we don’t get catcalled, we don’t get beat up because some anti-Muslim idiot doesn’t know Sikh from Muslim, we don’t get turned away at bake shops, etc. But, we have to think about what we say and try not to be assholes! Oh, the humanity!
I do have one example from personal experience that I’ll share:
About 15 years ago, a friend and I worked as contractors for a rather large firm. He was in a lower-level management position and had been in that position for over three years. One day he was in an office area staffed primarily by women and several of them were giving him a hard time. They weren’t being malicious, but they were picking on him for something that happened a few days earlier. As he turned to leave with a co-worker, he said, “Oh, don’t pay any attention to those cackling biddies.” (For anybody who doesn’t understand, this is a reference to young chickens complaining loudly. He is from rural West Virginia.)
Later in the day, when I was with him, he was summoned to our employer’s office. (This was NOT the office of the company we were contracted to, but the downtown office who actually paid us.) He was told that he was banned from the contract client’s site permanently and that his contract position was to be assigned to someone else. I was asked to go to his office at the client site and pack up his personal things for him.
Two of the women that had been giving him a hard time had filed a complaint about him for discrimination and inappropriate language, even though “cackling biddies” doesn’t seem to be either sexist or racist to me. There was no interview with him to get his side of the story and no other witnesses were interviewed. The client company just took the complaint and kicked him out.
A friend shared a story on Facebook this morning about Kleenex changing their “Mansize” tissues to “Extra Large”. Now, why a company rebranding a product in the UK should upset a woman in North Texas I don’t know, but she was pretty upset about it so I think I can safely say this is one example of political correctness that was worth raging about. Apparently.
So, maybe that’s political correctness. Or maybe he misrepresented the story to you. Or maybe the women felt like a contractor shouldn’t be dismissively comparing them to farm animals at their place of employment. Or maybe they weren’t playfully teasing him, maybe they were genuinely irritated at his behavior from a few days earlier and were pissed that when they confronted him they were totally dismissed.
In any case, this Appalachian boy is perfectly familiar with the word “biddy” and knows that it is a derogatory term for a woman. I have never in my life heard it applied to a man; it is categorically not a gender-neutral insult.
The best possible interpretation–in which the third-hand account is taken at face value, even though two of the links in the tale (you and your friend) have an interest in representing the alleged offender’s words in the best possible light–is that the contracting company overreacted slightly in order to protect their bottom line. It seems far more likely that your friend acted a bit like an asshole, using a gendered insult for folks at the place he was contracted, and his employer decided not to send an insulting, dismissive contractor to that place any more, in the interest of keeping the peace.
I’m not seeing this as PC run amok.
There was a band til last year called Audioslave. The singer hanged himself. If he did it for PC then that might be the best example I can think of for the OP. But it wasn’t. I think they still sell the records.
“How do you handle a hungry man! The Man Handlers!!!” - Campbells soup ad.
He shouldn’t expect to be able to insult the people he’s working for. He needed to improve his skills at passive aggressive retaliation, or be better at badinage.
This is the case for a lot of PC issues. Someone will make an offensive statment and then deny knowing the meaning of it, and they retreat behind a “You don’t know what’s in my mind!” defense. “So this is thought crime now!”
I think people who say that would be very surprised at how transparent their minds really are.
A lot of this stuff, from hatey breitboys, and proud boys, all the way up to Yertle the Senator are simply keeping a straight face while you do shit. Emphasis on shit.
PC? BS! Kleenex probably thought the name change would encourage more women to buy larger tissues who might otherwise be put off, thus doubling their potential market. Why anyone would be upset about this is beyond me. Maybe she thinks the new name is size-shaming?
PJ Harvey fan?
Yup. It’s also a (likely deliberate) misunderstanding of how communication works. Communication doesn’t mean that whatever thoughts are in your head are sacrosanct, and if your audience doesn’t get your meaning you’re blameless. Communication is a way to convey the thoughts in your head into someone else’s.
If you have lovely thoughts in your head, but your form of communication puts shitty thoughts in other people’s heads, you suck at communication.
Circling back around, if you mean something totally non-homophobic by calling someone a pansy in an emasculating way, the fact that you chose a traditional homophobic slur to insult them with means you suck at communication. It’s on you, not on the audience, that you chose your words so poorly.
Here is an example from my past, though it did not affect me. In the 70s I was going to college at one the most left wing campuses in the US. I went from being pegged as a left wing radical in HS to being seen as dangerously close to conservative.
After a long search for a new college president, a British man was selected. He had run the gauntlet to show his liberal credentials and survived intact. During his first few weeks on the job he made a speech that included the term “woolly headed intellectual”.
This was before Twitter, but the outrage spread just as fast through mimeographed pamphlets. The comment was taken as a reference at black people’s hair. People did not stop to think why a liberal educator would publicly use the phrase in that sense.
It turned out that in Britain woolly-headed means muddled or unclear and its origin has nothing to do with African’s hair.
This could have been a great moment to discuss cultural differences, how what we say and what people hear can differ, the importance of a diverse student body so that we can learn from each other, etc. I had not heard the term before in either sense. Instead, it took on the trappings of a witch hunt. The president resigned a few months later, though I’m not sure if it was a direct result of that incident.
This is the problem I have with safe spaces and trigger warnings and cyber justice.
If people are truly interested in raising awareness and mutual understanding, they wouldn’t demand that someone’s life be ruined for a misstep. Maybe sensitivity training is in order. But demanding that someone lose their job over an occasional off-handed remark or bad deed doesn’t make someone less racist; it almost certainly makes them even more resentful.
I have a buddy whose parents are from Pakistan. In private he can do a deadly impersonation of my Scottish mother and I can do a dead on and hilarious impersonation of his father. In public his impersonation of my mother is welcomed, as it should be- it is hilarious. There is no f in way that I will do my impersonation of his father in public. This example sadly is lacking in rage so does not qualify for the op. But I am damn good at accents but am limited to England Scotland Germany and Sweden (which usually winds up sounding Jamaican) because of our PC world. Not a big deal.