The examples are all over the map from complaints about blackface, sensitivity about terrorism or murder of politicians, abortion, teenage sexuality (and toddler sexuality!??), drugs in high school.
FTR, I believe that many of those things are genuinely offensive to a lot of people but not OMG! society will end if my kids see a teenage Brook Shields naked offensive (feel free to substitute white man in blackface if that touches closer to your sensitivities).
Who do we blame for this?
Received wisdom in the comments section of certain conservative blogs blames political correctness on libruls-run-wild. On liberal blogs they’ll blame the Moral Majority and other right-leaning groups. No doubt hollywood lawyers (or accountants?) deserve a big chunk of blame.
How about you personally? Are you politically correct? Or are you politically correct with an *asterisk?
I hate political correctness but making jokes about gays/christians/muslims/fat people/downs children/Jesus/orientals/3 year old strippers/the holocaust…that’s just going too far!!!
Those of us who are not polically correct, can we ever stem the tide? Is there some grand compromise? We agree to acknowledge that it’s offensive to laugh about donkeys taking cocaine if you agree to let us laugh about it anyway? or We’ll let you laugh at our sacred cows, if we can laugh at yours?
Where do we start? Or is the whole project doomed?
Huh? The OP strikes me as weird. I’d say that it’s the other way round. What sort of reaction would a movie like “Tropic Thunder” have had a decade ago? It’s got extreme violence, cannibalism, lots of homosexual stuff, drugs etc etc and is still considered a pretty mainstream (good) comedy. Oh, and an actual “blackface”. And that’s just one example of many that spring to mind.
“Political correctness” isn’t really a bad thing. It just means that some things are so incredibly stupid and offensive that if you say them without joking you will be labelled as an idiot.
This is a strawman. You can be offended by something or object to it without treating it as the downfall of society.
Nobody identifies as politically correct. Lots of people proudly identify as “politically incorrect,” but that’s often cover for being a jerk. When you say you’re being politically incorrect, what you are really saying is that everybody knows you are right that some people don’t have the guts to admit it. It’s a way of smearing your opponents in an argument by saying they are intellectually dishonest cowards instead of saying they are simply wrong.
This whole thing is badly out of date. The idea of political correctness has been a caricature for decades. Some formal terms have been updated (chairperson for chairman, flight attendant for stewardess, etc.), but that’s pretty much it. So there is no tide to stem. And everyone - not just the alleged PC types - engages in bullshitting and objects to being called on it.
The basic premise is flawed. People who complain about political correctness nearly always say: “You can’t do __________ today!” Actually you can do __________ (unless ___________ is a sex scene involving a child). It’s just that if ___________ is something offensive, then you face the consequences of it. Nonetheless, if you want a movie with a white person in blackface, all you need is a camera and some face paint and you can have it.
Now in England, Canada, and a few other countries, there may be legitimate reasons to complain about censorship based on various sensitivities.
I’ll confess to hyperbole. But i think you knew that already.
The consensus in the other thread appears to be that many ideas are unthinkable today. You’d never be able to make a movie about a bunch of three year olds in a burlesque show for example.
I’m not sure. Something like Blazing Saddles, is still shocking to me now, more than 30 years later, because of how “politically incorrect” parts of it seem now, but I don’t think that was supposed to be the main thrust of the humor when it was released.
I may be wrong, but it’s my gut feeling that if it was released now-a-days, there would be more controversy that it received back then. (Threats of studio boycotts, demands of job terminations, for example.)
Many ideas were unthinkable “then,” too. This is probably a minor example, but Away We Go is a movie about an interracial couple where, unless my memory is failing me, race isn’t even mentioned or hinted at. Do you think that would have happened if the movie had been made when interracial marriages were against the law, or during the days of the civil righst movement? Perhaps you’ve heard of the Tragic Mulatto archetype?
There aren’t really any child stars today. There’s no one comparable to Shirley Temple at all. And burlesque has had a little revival in popularity after many decades, so maybe all you need to do is wait a while.
Blazing Saddles is the most common example of a movie that ‘couldn’t be made today’ in these kinds of discussions, and I admit it gives me pause. I think the truth is that you just wouldn’t make a movie like that today. It’s not because people would boycott the movie over the racial humor, it’s because our society sees racism differently and from a greater distance. A movie that makes fun of racism the way Blazing Saddles does would be pretty dated.
“Political correctness” is just another way of saying something is taboo in polite society. And that changes over time. I would agree that there were more taboo subjects in the early days of movie making, but there were also some things that were OK then, but wouldn’t be OK today-- ie, Blackface. You could Blachface today, but only if you were clearly making fun of it. You couldn’t do it seriously.
Remember Midnight Cowboy? That movie was rated “X”. It certainly wouldn’t be “X” today, and you could never get an “X” rated movie into the Oscars.
ETA: I’m sure I’m not the only one who saw this thread title and thought for sure it was in response to Dio, over in the Major Hasan thread, declaring that there is no such thing as political correctness.
No I think the scope of what is “politically incorrect” is wider nowadays. Many opinions have just been shown to be too stupid for it to be ok for people to have them publically. And I think that is a good thing.
The idiot running Italy said “It’s better to be a paedophile than a homosexual” when he got caught with an under age girl. In a modern society, that would be so politically incorrect that he would be forced to resign.
The only things that are “politically incorrect” that I happen to believe in is state takeover of the drug industry (yes, I mean heroin, coke, the works) and that all cultures aren’t equally “good”*. And I think (of course) that I will be proven right in the long run.
Ok. I read the OP as in “who decides on how we see “x” (racism, in the case of Blazing Saddles) differently?”.
Some folks think that this drift in our perceptions as being directed somehow, and end up crediting this group, or that group, with having that kind of influence.
I think that the drift (change) in a society’s perceptions and values is predominately a largely unconcious/undirected one, but there are (there must be) underlying causes for the change to come about.
There was no direct “war” on blackface in the entertainment industry, but I think the conscious efforts in the (racial) civil rights arena influenced a change in the perception of that style.
There was no deliberate “war” on the word stewardess, but I think the changing views on gender equality also had some fallout on colloquial English in this case. Will it stick? Who knows? Who cares?
Asterisk. I am politically correct in the areas I desire to be, indifferent to others.
As I grow older, I notice more that opinions are like butts…
I don’t think that the American society will ever be homogenous to the extent that we all share the same sense of humor, or taste in music, or whatever. Why do you care that someone is offended by you laughing at a cocaine snorting donkey?
What? As far as I know, the term didn’t even exist 30 years ago, and it is pretty much empty of meaning anyway. I’ve never heard of a single person who self-identified as ‘politically correct’, much less claimed that ‘political correctness’ was anything different from or more desirable than ‘tact’.
What little meaning the term does seem to have is as an accusation that people are saying one thing but believing another, apparently because it’s kind of difficult to accuse political opponents of being excessively tactful and make it sound really really bad. Even there, we’ve already got the term ‘hypocricy’ if we really need to slur someone.
People might be interested in reading the history of the term here. There is a cite from 1790. I first heard of it inside left wing organizations as a delimiter of proper views. While there were certainly a few radical groups who objected to the wrong type of people invited to give lectures, I never heard of cases where the term was applied outside the in-group. As a Republican Vietnam war supporter in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1970, I would have.
The right wing adoption of the term was clearly meant to criticize anyone objecting to anything vocally. I suspect plenty of people objected to stereotypes all through the last century, but it was only later that they could say so without calling attention to themselves. Those who enjoy such things could respond with charges of political correctness. Now the term is nearly useless. Which is more politically incorrect - Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays?
BTW, Blazing Saddles could certainly be made today - though with rewritten jokes. It, and All in The Family, were accepted as satires on racism. There is a big difference between knowing use of racism in order to show how wrong it is and unthinking use of stereotypes. Which is not to say that there weren’t plenty of people who watched it and thought “Go, Archie, go.”
On the contrary, i think it was one battle in a well-coordinated war on sexist language.
I’m painfully aware of my own hypocrisy on this front. I’m glad that many of those battles happened and i think the right side won. I blush at some the racist jokes that i laughed at in my youth and I think the world is a better place without them.
I phrased my OP the way I did because part of me wonders if the people complain most loudly about PC are aware of their own hypocrisy.
I don’t want it to be homogenized. It’s not that people are offended…it’s that their being offended gives them the right and ability to surpress ideas that they don’t like. PC attitudes are homogenizing.
The most glaring examples to me are the differences in attitudes to sexuality in Europe versus the US. Over there, they behave as though sexuality is almost a normal part of everyone’s life. A slipped nipple over here and the country is up in arms for weeks. Where does that come from? Why? Are the people offended by nipples in a majority? If not, why do they have so much influence?
As I said, opinions are like butts… everyone has one, and some of them stink. I wasn’t offended by nipplegate, I just thought it was a little “tacky” for the superbowl.
Did some folks over react (in my opinion)? Sure. But I also support the right of those folks to voice their opinion. Society naturally evolves itself in this way. I see that that is how the civil rights movement eventually got legs. Enough people were swayed by the opinions of others to change their attitudes on a particular topic. With nipplegate, if there isn’t enough folks who agree that the stunt was offensive, the “movement” will eventually die out.
I see the US as becoming more permissive, not less, in the sexual imagery arena. (Sex sells. Consider the Calvin Klien (I think) billboard ads with teen looking models in various states of undress. Not much happened after the initial shock wore off.) I believe that as the US moves more in the direction permissiveness, the more die-hard socially conservative types will become even more strident. But that stridency lends a little false impression of “numbers”, making the opinion seem as if it is more popular than it might be in reality. (Those not offended, like me, did not bother calling the FCC during nipplegate.) Those folks have influence because thats all the policy makers hear from.
I do not feel it is proper (as in, I have a right, or duty) for me to tell a soccer mom that she has no standing to be offended by a slipped nipple on broadcast TV. I can tell her I don’t agree, but for me to tell her that she should just shut up and grow up makes me no different than her (in trying to impose my values over the top of hers). YMMD
What if, rather than imposing our values on her and telling her to grow up, we agree with her that we have different values and that neither of us should impose our values on the other. Part of our compromise would be that we’ll both acknowledge that sometimes we’ll be offended but that we won’t try to shut down views that we disagree with.
When you say you’re being politically incorrect, what you are really saying is that everybody knows you are right that some people don’t have the guts to admit it. It’s a way of smearing your opponents in an argument by saying they are intellectually dishonest cowards instead of saying they are simply wrong.