This reminds me of a talk that I attended once, given by a very successful female clothing designer. She said that people always asked her if she was a Feminist, and that her reply was that she was “a Feminist in the good way, not the bad way.”
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Because they either want to be hateful and mean without receiving any social consequences, are having issues navigating the nuance of identities not their own, or are taking after the South Park smug conservative “edgy” brand of humor where they consider themselves better through sarcasm than the sincere.
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Two key aspects, I think, are the belief that “Politically Correct” speech is disingenuous and that it is a form of manufactured cliquish exclusion. The first is the reason that is more explicitly expressed among anti-PC folks, as far as I can tell. It’s used to separate the “plain speakin’ 'murican” who says what they mean, and doesn’t pull punches, everyone else is just lying to protect fragile people. AS @LDoBe pointed out, this belief can only hold if one is ignorant of their own privilege, and believes that there any harm from their “plain” language is imagined, or invented just to win a political contest.
Then the second part, the cliquish exclusion, is an unspoken compliment to the first. It’s the feeling that the language people have grown accustomed to, that the lines they are comfortable with, have moved without them. In some ways, I think it’s just a cousin of how “kids and the noise they listen to/way they talk these days” talk is employed by olds to protect themselves from feeling irrelevant. This isn’t exclusive to the right, it’s just been adopted as a brand on the right. My mom, a dyed-in-the wool old-school leftist stumbled and started cranking out anti-PC rants after she and I got into it over some *ahem* outdated “positive” stereotypes she was tossing about while visiting my family in NYC. Her anti-PC rhetoric has a “I am woman, hear me roar” veneer to it, but can still be pretty regressive. Losing a position as the bleeding edge of progressiveness can actually be more painful, I think that being a right-wing crank. Conservatives embrace being called old-school, but to a left-winger, it really stings, and can lead to some real cognitive dissonance.
The funny thing to me about the marriage of the right and the anti-PC stance is the connection between the right wing and religion, the latter being the sourced of incredibly stifled language, buckets of taboos and inch-thick layers of euphamism. But as @anon3072533’s link pointed out the term was possibly coined on the left to poke fun at prior leftwing generations, or more stodgy ones. There’s certainly nothing restrained about gay pride parades or BLM protests, they are as plain-speaking and no-holds-barred as anti-PC crusaders claim they want to be allowed to be…
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Have you been online lately? Nerds have a caste system, and bullying happens all the time.
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Personally, as a fan of that show, I find that offensive. Yes they use stereotypes, and yes they use shock humor; but recently they became self aware of their use of the former while sticking to the latter (especially in season 19).
As for political correctness, I believed it was a term used mostly by bigoted politicians who don’t want to use taxpayer’s money to aid the underprivileged.
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I’m not at all surprised.
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History and common use of the term show this to not be the case. While those politicians may indeed use the phrase, they do not do so when trying to destroy social services unless they are being criticized for talking about “those people” or “strapping young bucks buying T-bone steaks”. Even still, that’s not directly relevant to politicians.
Great post, great point. The European analogy might be the apocryphal “bananas must not exceed x degrees in curvature” Brussels mandarins bogeyman. Anything that starts with the word “Political” is guaranteed to raise hackles.
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You’ve just described my Saturday.
It’s so draining. Why would people WANT to spend their social/mental/psychic energy like that?
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I read SUCH a great article on this this weekend:
The late Harvard professor Barbara Johnson explained this “self-reconstitution of patriarchal power” in her book The Feminist Difference: “[J]ust at the moment when women (and minorities) begin to have genuine power in the university, American culture responds by acting as though the university itself is of dubious value. The drain of resources away from the humanities (where women have more power) to the sciences (where women still have less power) has been rationalized in other ways, but it seems to me that sexual politics is central to this trend.”
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Well, this explains why engineers fall into the trap of anti-PC rants, then. It’s just applied Set Theory abuse…
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The problem isn’t “alpha males” though, it’s men in general who feel as if their “privileges” (whether or not they are putting it that way) are being eroded by the “PC” police. Being a nerd doesn’t magically free you from racist or sexist attitudes. Gamergaters most certainly count themselves as “nerds” (and in fact as the only “REAL” nerds) and members of that group certainly act in racist and sexist ways.
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I blame /pol/ for this; especially when it comes to the Anti-Sarkeesian hate mob on /v/.
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There was a time, many years ago, when I somewhat believed it kind of did. My friends were mostly geeks and nerds, socially progressive, LGBTQ or at least strongly allied, etc. At conventions, the usual social reaction to someone different, even if you personally didn’t share that difference, was “not my thing, but you go you!” It was a good time, but eventually I came to realize I was only seeing a select portion of fandom. Nerds can absolutely be as sexist (bigoted, homo-/trans-/etc-phobic) as the general population. Once I really started seeing a larger sampling, I actually started wondering if they weren’t more so, to some degree. Perhaps it’s a social reaction to finding someone with less social credit or maybe that sort of thing just doesn’t care about your geeky obsessions.
These days, I’m back to thinking it’s not more common, but that it’s certainly just as common in the geeky subset. It is, however, perhaps more noticeable, since so many more of us speak up when we see something wrong, which perhaps doesn’t happen quite as much in the general population. (Or maybe I’m just cynical.)
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While I’m generally in favor of Politeness, and please forgive me here because I’m about to go against the thread’s grain and say there can be too much political correctness.
Having those in authority and general jackasery have to be polite to traditionally disenfranchised groups is one thing, and it’s a damned good thing. Using political correctness itself as a tool of harassment… not so cool.
IE getting deep into SJW tumblrina territory ‘OH your’e a MAN what the fuck could you possibly know?’ territory.
I’ve experienced some of this, but never enough to mistake the concept of general correctness/politeness for what the incident itself actually was, somebody going ‘oh hey I have a new tool to be a total and complete jackass to somebody.’
No matter what ‘system’ or societal rules you come up with and agree to… there will be someone that abuses it for the sake of putting people down. It’s just a matter of which groups and how pretty the words used are.
Edit: Basically Political Correctness can be used to say fuck you in the sweetest most polite voice possible, but that doesn’t negate what’s actually being said.
I am also fully aware that I’ve put a giant target on my chest but eh. I’ve had my say here. Later guys.
Hi, I’m a white guy and I’m standing right here. Mind toning the sexist stereotyping down a little? It’d be like me going ‘well it’s not their fault that they’re bad drivers. they’re JUST women…’ You would be insanely offended, and rightly so, at something like that being uttered.
So… uh… Hi. I get the whole ‘I hate backassward dipshits shoving back when you ask for a bit of courtesy’ but… can you kinda… not… lump me in with them?
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Sometimes it’s the people near the bottom of the social ladder who cling to it the hardest just because they are reassured by the knowledge that someone else is below them.
If you were a dirt-poor white sharecropper in the late 19th Century then at least you could derive some solace from knowing you weren’t a dirt-poor black sharecropper. If you’re an underemployed, emasculated 21st century heteronormative male then at least you can derive some solace from knowing you’re not a woman or a “f*ggot.”
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Strangely and sadly, cons back in the 1970s[quote=“singletona082, post:37, topic:77773”]
IE getting deep into SJW tumblrina territory ‘OH your’e a MAN what the fuck could you possibly know?’ territory.
[/quote]
How many times a day do you “Well, ACTUALLY” a person?
It’s not like there’s a paucity of the opinions of “white guys” on any particular topic, perhaps you may with to examine the topics and contexts you’re placing yourself in.
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That was actually part of @anon61221983’s comment, not mine. But I notice that you conveniently edited the part of that sentence which provided critical context. (IE “the problem isn’t not Alpha Males, it’s men who feel/act a certain way”…)
I’m a white guy and I wasn’t offended by anything written in this forum. If you are so easily offended then maybe you shouldn’t be so critical of the “PC police.” Throwing stones in glass houses and whatnot.
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And that mindset can be exploited, of course.
But it’s still a case of making a conscious choice to take one’s anger at how society is structured out of someone with less social capital.
Add to that, I don’t think you can make a correlation between working class white sharecroppers and the modern heteronormative male of today, especially those who are well-versed in modern technologies - which is precisely who are talking about. In many ways, they have more opportunities than ever before to move up the economic ladder.
To bring it back to “PC” issues, they want the ability to deploy racist and sexist language while playing video games or at work, without fear of being “retaliated” against. Women not wanting to be constantly subjected to either sexual harrassment or be constantly passed over for promotions, etc are deemed a threat, because no matter how talented, they “don’t deserve it”.
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