I sent out an e-mail where I railed against political correctness. A friend responded with:

I’ll use women as an example. You don’t refer to adult women as girls, bitches, sluts, or other terms; you refer to them as women.

You are correct there and that’s not something I would call “political correctness”. That’s “not using language meant to offend”. Some words are designed with insult or denigration as their purpose. “Nigger” comes to mind. Why can blacks say it but not whites? Because of context. Or as Dave Chappelle says, we’ve “lost our nigger privileges.” Or “redskins”. Obviously a derogatory term, not that the fans of the football team mean to offend Native Americans. On the other hand, in context, “bitch” or “girl” is often used as a term of endearment.

(Naturally, I wouldn’t want to hear any of the above terms in a workplace or a public setting.)

What I’m talking about is the use of soft euphemisms to obscure language that was never offensive in the first place. “Blind” comes to mind. What’s wrong with “blind”? Now it’s “vision impaired”. Impaired? You can’t friggin’ see; there’s nothing to impair! Or “crippled”. What’s wrong with that? Simple, easy to understand language. Now we get crap like “handi-capable” or “differently abled”. Puh-leaze!

To quote George Carlin (from memory, so forgive me George): “Back in WWI when a person’s nervous system got too frazzled from the horrors of war, we called it ‘shell-shocked’. Two syllables. Simple, direct, and accurate. By WWII it became ‘combat fatigue’. By Vietnam it was ‘post traumatic stress disorder’. Adding more syllables doesn’t make it any better, in fact, it makes it worse by removing us from the reality of the situation.”

You recognize that, if you only use male pronouns to refer to certain occupations, then the message you are sending is that only men can, should or will have those jobs. You include the point of view of women into the planning of events, proposals, etc.

Bull puckey! I have no problem with the idea that the suffix “-man” or “-men” should refer to occupations in a gender-neutral way. If Nancy Pelosi were called the “congressman” from California, that in and of itself would be sending the message that women can and should run for office. In fact, I assert that by calling her “congresswoman” (or, shudder, “congressperson”) we are doing as much a disservice to the cause of women’s equality as using the terms “actress” or “comedienne”. We are highlighting the fact that a female is doing the job instead of a man. Can’t have it both ways. If Julia Roberts is an “actor” and Kathleen Madigan is a “comedian”, then Nancy Pelosi is a “congressman”.

Furthermore, what about the use of male pronouns to send a message that some jobs are reserved for women? How about “male nurse” and “male prostitute”? We don’t say “doctress” or “whoress”, do we? And what was wrong with “stewardess”? There were also “stewards”. There’s no shame in being a waitress or waiter in the sky. But to follow the “actor / comedian / congressman” rule, I’m willing to call female waiters-in-the-sky “stewards”. But “flight attendants”? Why not “airborne passenger service associates”?

There’s so many ridiculous examples of political correctness run amok. My latest favorite is on the grocery store aisle signs: “Hispanic Foods” when they mean “Mexican Foods”. As if Dominicans came up with salsa, Argentines invented enchiladas, or Spaniards created menudo. It’s food from Mexico, dammit! There’s nothing racist about referring to tacos as Mexican food any more than referring to jerk chicken as Jamaican food or hasenpfeffer as German food or curried rice as Indian food.

(OK, now someone’s going to tell me that Guatemalans enjoy tortillas, too, and they’re Hispanic, so we can’t call it just “Mexican” lest we offend the Guatemalans. But again, it’s context. If I’m in the US, where am I likely to have experienced tortillas, from a Mexican restaurant with Mexican cooks using Mexican recipes or from a Guatemalan… you get the drift.)

It’s nobody’s fault that our language evolved to reflect male dominance and therefore the gender-neutral pronoun does not exist. But rather than change the language to reflect a situation that doesn’t exist — equality of the sexes — change the paradigm so that the existing words do come to mean an equality of the sexes. In other words, if we call female representatives “congressman”, then the “-man” part no longer means “male”, it means “person”. Otherwise, we slide down a slippery slope into the verbal realm of “he/she”, “him/her”, “-person”, and the most abhorrent of all politically correct speech, “womyn”, “humyn”, and “personkind”.

“Radical” Russ — change the perception of the word, not the word itself. It worked for “gay”…

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