I’m slowly slogging through Jonathan Chait’s “Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say.” (Disclaimer — I’m a member of the Facebook group “Binders Full of Women” that is mentioned in the article.)
I am particularly fond of the P.C. term cis-gender. I had to google it a few months ago.
It’s a long article and there’s been a lot of commentary on it. I’ve largely been ignoring it, because I find PC criticism as tiring as political correctness itself.
I want to pull out one little small bit of the article, because it relates to something else that I’m writing. It’s the role of social media in creating a new political correct movement.
In a short period of time, the p.c. movement has assumed a towering presence in the psychic space of politically active people in general and the left in particular. “All over social media, there dwell armies of unpaid but widely read commentators, ready to launch hashtag campaigns and circulate Change.org petitions in response to the slightest of identity-politics missteps,” Rebecca Traister wrote recently in The New Republic.
Social media has created a new brand of journalism that specializes in click-bait. Tail wags the dog. This click-bait crap consists mostly of a SEO-friendly headline and an image. After the first sentence, the rest of the article could be in Latin, because nobody reads it. These click-bait articles published by slimy, journalism-ish companies are not only fueling PC nonsense. They are basically a wet dream for conspiracy theorists.
Apt. 11d 
Best response I’ve seen so far:
“…it reminded me of a thought I had after his anti-PC piece: this is going to be interesting just as a psychological study of one guy. He might end up backgrounding his redistributive, government-loving self and becoming by degrees indistinguishable from a lefty-attacking righty so that in twenty years one of today’s kindergartners will say to her friend, “Dude, did you know that Jonathan Chait used to be a liberal?” Or he might do the harder thing, and keep plugging away as one liberal writer among others, with the occasional defensive joke about those disagreements. It’s of no consequence, but I’ll be watching anyway.”
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I saw elsewhere the very interesting quote that all you have to do to be viewed as a conservative is to hold onto the liberalism of 20 years ago. If we were able to time machine JFK from 1962 to the present and give him a tour of the present, it’s very unlikely that he would be favorably impressed with the preoccupations of the boutique left (for insistence, insisting that a genitally very male person is actually a woman just because he says so).
Liberalism is a moving target and a rapidly moving target at that. It often looks (at least to an outsider) like a lot of the fun is changing the codes frequently to make sure that only the “cool kids” can keep up.
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” the p.c. movement has assumed”
There is no p.c. movement. There are kind people and unkind people. Kind people try to call people what they want to be called. They also are kind to those who don’t say the “right” things but are trying to do their best. Unkind people say whatever the hell they want because only their opinions matter. They also attack people who are trying to do their best and sometimes failing.
I will never stop calling out the unkind people. When I call them out for saying whatever they want because their opinions are the only ones that matter to them, I am grouped with those who attack people who are genuinely doing their best.
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Thank you, Wendy. Conservatives like to hark back to the mid-20th century and before to a Norman Rockwell-like society where we had… manners. Delightful, but many of these “manners” were (1) fairly useless and/or symbolic – pulling chairs out or opening car doors for women, wearing hats and gloves, and so on; (2) usually directed at members of the dominant class or race – you wouldn’t bother so much with “manners” with the “help”, or lower class people in general.
Now we have a genuine movement to change our behaviours towards marginalised groups. A new “manners”, if you like, which genuinely means something. But suddenly, to conservatives – who were fine with all the door opening and thank you note sending and glove wearing – thats all Verrrrrrrry Haaaaaaaaaaarrrrd…! And somehow bad!
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I don’t understand with Chait thinks he’s going to accomplish with this. What he calls the PC movement (widely read, politically engaged people, mostly on the left) is basically synonymous with anybody who might read him.
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If I understand our hostess, she is saying that she herself is a widely-read, politically engaged person on the left who is not politically correct. Mostly, however, I am inclined to agree with MH: as a widely-read (I hope), but not particularly political nor particularly leftist person, the issues Chait raises are irrelevant to my daily experience.
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Yes, being polite and kind is always a choice.
I am personally troubled by “Trigger warnings aren’t much help in actually overcoming trauma — an analysis by the Institute of Medicine has found that the best approach is controlled exposure to it, and experts say avoidance can reinforce suffering. ”
That can’t possibly be a settled question. There are too many kinds of trauma and too many different approaches and too many different individual reactions for there to be an authoritative determination on the topic.
I do think the question of avoiding versus tackling difficulties (i.e. the “zone of proximal development”, in learning theory) is one that discovers further discussion. I’m a believer that it is while doing the hard problems that the most learning occurs and that learning is associated with a certain level of stress. But Alfie Cohn certainly doesn’t agree with me.
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I am not sure what it would mean to say that one is not “politically correct.” Does it mean that one uses words other people don’t like to refer to them? Does it mean that you reserve the right to use words that refer to groups of people as slurs in general conversation?
Does it mean you oppose identifying pictures with labels (an accommodation for the blind, commonly appearing in disability related sites)? Or that you think you shouldn’t have to do so?
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As an example, a person who is not politically correct would think it is is funny to identify yourself as a gluten-free Jewish woman, which is failing to “check your privilege” by mocking, e.g., transsexuals of color or others whose identity is a constant source of oppression and marginalization.
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What if you like gluten? It really does make baked goods better.
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MH, you seem to be suggesting that you find the woman who identified herself as a gluten-free Jewish woman funny, rather than offensive. That is a good example for bj of what it means to be politically incorrect.
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No. I was baffled by the example. I’m wondering if it isn’t really hard to come up with a joke that is somehow Not PC and also not just plain offensive. Try religion.
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I try pretty hard to not be offensive by using language that others find offensive (i.e. many would consider me politically correct), but I don’t see why anyone would see “guten-free jewish woman” as politically incorrect.
A word I am finding difficult not to use, though I’ve been told that it is found offensive by some is “crazy” as in “that’s a crazy idea.” But, I’d try not to use it if I was talking to someone who found it offensive and I wouldn’t fight, say, the sibling of a schizophrenic man on my need to use “crazy”.
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bj: Did you read the Chait piece? (I only skimmed it.) I think I explained why it is offensive to describe oneself as a “gluten-free Jewish woman”: it mocks and trivializes the identity characteristics of others, implying that being transgender is equivalent to being Jewish (or gluten-free) in its meaning and experience of oppression. Check your privilege, dudette!
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PS: I also googled what cis-gender meant when I first saw it. And, I still have to think about phrases like gay, trasngender woman as a logic puzzle.
I do occasionally feel a need to remind my children that most women are biologically women and that most men marry women, and that most children are born because their parents had sex and their mother gave birth to them, because the inclusive conversations they hear leave them wondering how babies, for example, are made and born. They hear so many different options that they leave the conversations thinking that they are all equally likely.
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But confused thinking about the sexual process has been a given for children since time immemorial. They have always picked up ridiculous just-so stories in the school yard. Kids tell other kids that babies get born through the belly button. Why should we continue to treat LGBTI as a scary other just because adults are bad at explaining?
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In first grade, one of my classmates gave me a correct and reasonably detailed account of where babies come from. Two years later, this same kid went crying to the teacher because we all were laughing at him for thinking that Santa was real.
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Oh, I don’t find it at all scary, and neither do my children. It’s been fascinating to see how much the world has changed, by seeing through my children’s eyes on the issue. To them, it’s perfectly ordinary that a man might marry a man, or that a child might have two moms. The marriage is something they’ve seen change, and supported, but the family with two moms, two moms and a dad, . . . has been a part of their world since pre school. So ordinary in fact, that they consider the probabilities equal. I would correct their confused thinking on the sexual process, too.
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Interesting. Do people really talk about where babies come from that much around kids?
This reminds me of a story by Dan Savage about explaining to his son that he most likely would not be gay like his dads. His son thought being gay just meant marrying his best friend, and Savage had to explain the whole fall in love thing, and that it was more likely his son would fall in love with a woman.
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I think that the best things that I read on Chait were the first two of Fredrik DeBoer’s three contributions, “I don’t know what to do, you guys” and “don’t be an accellerant”
His points about the difference in stakes in the middle of that second piece were especially good.
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I have problems with extreme sensitivity to others when it starts to interfere with a sense of humor. I have a strong interest in people being sensitive to those with neurological differences. I want teachers and institutions to use the right words for things. I want people with neurological differences to have equal access to jobs and education. But I also want to occasionally call my kid, The Mute Kid. (He’s not really mute.) When we meet adults who fall somewhere on the spectrum, Steve and I will turn to each other and say “Five mInutes until Wopner.” Whatever.
I also have problems when I have to be sensitive and nice to ALL people. Do I have to be nice to extreme Islamics who blow up people? Do I have to be nice to pedophiles, because they are born that way? Do I have to be nice to stupid people who believe conspiracy theories? I’m far too grouchy to be nice to all people.
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So, you don’t see any connection between your joke about “Five minutes to Wopner” and society’s failure to invest in equal access to jobs and education for people with neurological differences?
I also didn’t say you have to be nice; I think that people should be *kind*. There is a difference.
As an aside re bj’s comment on the word “crazy”: Orange Is the New Black has done the most amazing work with the word/concept in its portrayal of Suzanne, originally known as “Crazy Eyes.” Beautiful writing, and Uzo Aduba has been very worthy of the awards she has won.
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Just happened to run across this while looking for something else:
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It’s one thing to deal with a problem you yourselves are having by joking about it. I had a colleague who died of ALS and he and his wife used to have some very dark jokes about it that were hilarious to them. But I wouldn’t go around joking about it myself, except with someone I knew well. I imagine if people who didn’t know him started writing Ian off as “The Mute Kid” or saying “Five minutes to Wopner” every time they saw him, you’d be pretty angry.
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When I was young, if we were being rowdy my grandmother would tell us we were running around like “wild little Lapp children.” Then at some point “Laplander” became a slur and the ethnonym Sami became the proper term to refer to Scandinavia’s indigenous people, so my grandmother switched to telling us we were running around like “wild little Sami children.” If anyone used the term “Lapp” or “Laplander” in front of my grandmother she would tell them off for being culturally insensitive. I’ve always thought that was an interesting example of both trying to do the right thing on some level and also completely missing the point on another more important level.
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I’ve written and not posted many different responses.
The movement to declare an ever-changing yet growing list of common expressions as insensitive and forbidden is a sort of self-created isolation on the part of those who go whole-hog on it. Is it a positive thing to criticize others for not understanding your phobias? In many ways it reminds me of the mean girls in high school. I don’t know about your school, but we had a group who wrote new rules of behavior for their peers; if you transgressed their (nonsensical) rules, you were fair game.
The only way I can deal it all is by ignoring it. I do not have the energy to keep up with the term-of-the-moment.
On the positive side, Neil Gaiman just released a new book, Trigger Warnings.
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Which terms have changed that fast? Aside from the already mentioned cis-gender, I can’t think of any.
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Well, we did careen wildly over 100 years from “Colored” (Pauline Hopkins et al, Colored American Magazine, 1900-1909) to Negro (“The New Negro,” Alain Locke, 1925; “Myth of the Negro Past,” Melville Herskovits, 1941) to black/Black (late ’60s) to Afro-American (’60s/’70s) to African-American (’80s) to people of color (more encompassing of other races) to even “ethnic” (a term Rashida Jones recently referred to herself as).
Just an FYI from the PhD in late 19th/early 20th century AfrAm Lit. 🙂
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Here’s one list: inthesetimes.com/article/3027/a_politically_correct_lexicon.
I’m not going to pull one term out, because some of the terms this source claims are now pc were not pc not long ago.
Although this list is from 2007, which means it’s 8 years ago.
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And from a different universe, here’s a list of terms to avoid in the software realm (according to its author): https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html.
At some point, you reach Humpty Dumpty status.
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I don’t think those lists exist outside of people looking for something to complain about. They pull up one example of somebody using or complaining about a term and act like it’s a great movement to crush people to don’t know what ‘ze’ means.
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“retarded” and “gay” used as slurs are the two that I know of, around which there have been active campaigns. I do not believe I ever used those words as slurs, so I can’t remember my changing usage, but I know there has been an active campaign to shame those who do use those words as slurs.
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Right, but campaigning to stop people from using a slur that they were using because it was a slur is very different from a changing “term of the moment.”
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Also, I’ve noted the use of the word cis-gendered (and, just the other day, nautistic) to refer to not being something (trans-gendered or autistic) without suing the word “typical” or “normal” or “regular”. I’m happy with that when the goal is to avoid value judgements (normal v abnormal) but less so when the word usage hides the statistics (i.e. normal as in the normal distribution).
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