MoonlessNight
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- Sep 16, 2003
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Did I not already agree that this is the case with those who embrace a PC stance that says "we want to progress via our use of this word and not this other word (or whatever), as a means of being more inclusive than people were in the past"? I'm not sure why this is showing up in reply to my post as though I didn't already state that. Yes, I agree that the idea that such changes can be socially progressive is at the heart of this ideology.
I think where our point of contention may lie is that I see absolutely no benefit to be gained by changing terms for this purpose, and damage to be done to our understanding of the past. If "he" instead of "he or she" is not sexist, then there is no gain in changing uses of "he" to "he or she." If someone thinks that there is a gain, it is because he thinks that those who do not use "he or she" are sexist, and thus convicts people of crimes that they did not commit.
Obviously this wasn't a conclusion that I came to based on a poster, it is a larger cultural issue. Mike wanted an example of someone supporting that usage and denigrating those who do not use it, so I came up with one. But as I have mentioned there are many other things from work of the same nature, and innumerable examples from the larger culture.
Certainly, but my point was that nobody is immune from seeing themselves as somehow more enlightened than those who came before them, and that this isn't in itself 'slanderous', so that can't be the problem unless you intend to say that we ought not to have changed as societies at all since ____ (whatever indeterminate point in the past when everything was supposedly good and in order), because it's more important that we preserve the honor afforded to dead people (which using the generic 'he' does, somehow?) than to treat living people in a certain way. But I suspect that your criticism is for those who take these things too far, which I doubt anyone here realistically has a problem with or denies the existence of (I too have met people who make it impossible to enjoy an old movie or whatever because "look at how they're treating the women/the Indians/the children" or whatever...well, yeah, duh...that's the point; it's the old west, and this is how white guys treated those people back then).
The purpose of political correctness is to make the past seem irredeemably racist, which does cause great fallout in how people reject older works out of hand.
I am an enthusiast of speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror) and I have met many people who do not read older authors, because they are convinced that they are too racist or otherwise impure to have anything of worth to say. I have seen people reject Robert E. Howard due to the claim that his stories are nothing more than glorification of the power of white men over all other races. This despite his character Solomon Kane in his world travels repeatedly saving Africans without hesitation, and working with an African who was shown as noble, more intelligent than Kane and who served Kane partially for his own purposes (and partially out of a sense of friendship).
I have seen the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs dismissed in the same way. Most commonly, it is assumed that since the main character of the Barsoom books was a cavalryman for the Confederacy, that the books must be nothing but racist screeds. And yet John Carter treats all the races that he meets on Mars with respect, gaining great friends with all different sorts of skin color, and longing for the day when conflict between the races will cease. (Also, interestingly, the first group of people that he meets on Mars with a similar color of skin to his own are unambiguously villains).
Hell, I have even seen people say that they cannot read the works of Robert A. Heinlein because they are too sexually prudish. This is the man who did much inspire the hippie movement towards "free love."
As a result there are many in the speculative fiction community currently who are completely cut off from the history of the genre. They have not read older works, and they do not care to read older works since they already know that they are too "problematic" to be worth considering. They believe lies like the idea that women were somehow not allowed to write science fiction until the past couple of decades (which would have been a great surprise to CL Moore among, others). They have been robbed of much that is good and given only sermonizing stories of political correctness in return.
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