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The real dangers of political correctness

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Anjoo Mohun
Anjoo MohunAug 16, 2017 | 15:02

The real dangers of political correctness

I read yesterday that female motorcycle enthusiasts refused to be clubbed as "female bikers", the argument being that they were just bike crazy and gender didn’t come into play at all, revving up their acceleration into a select club who love their powerful machines.

Now, I have ridden pillion on the Bullet all the way yonder in the Himalayas feeling the power of the motor beneath my lovely posterior and I agree with the women - how does gender define the sheer pleasure of taking a turn at 40 degrees at 80 miles an hour, the wind blowing your hair and despite the goggles, letting your eyes water?

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This can make us ponder. Have we taken political correctness to such extremes that it is easier to use the correct language as evidence of propriety without actually implementing it?

It started with us females of course, the movement for equality, of opportunity, payment, rights and anything we chose to do.

Israel regularly sends women into its armed forces, the Sabras remained as deadly as ever and we don’t think of them as male or female. India is taking baby steps as we worry about "combat conditions". Any company which advertises a job vacancy and then posts at the bottom in an eight-point font that they are equal opportunity employers, dusts its hand off its responsibility, though there is global news that corporate management teams hardly have any women at the top.

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Image: PC Watch Blog

Next thing I am sure is that they will connect it to PMS or something that women become moody at critical junctures of decision-making. Okay, that was meant as a joke.

Still why did we insist on an actress being called an actor? Or a chairwoman/chairperson? So, if I was a rich man’s mistress would I still be mister? Men really have a neutral prefix. The Mr could be single, married, divorced or just nothing. He will give nothing away about himself with this word. And that is the first rule of gender neutral naming. When we go from Miss/Mrs/Ms, we have already categorised ourselves.

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Why couldn’t we just let it be at Ms? Female. Full stop.

Why is sexual orientation at all important? If I ticked heterosexual, would it clarify better who I am especially because "not-getting-any-action", doesn’t seem to be an option, despite being the actual truth and a better insight into the state of my mind? And married-but-bored but could do with a distraction – be off the books of course?

So ticking female, heterosexual is just that: a categorisation which adds or subtracts nothing from a persona. Then why bother?

That brings us to that big debate which crops us on and off in bloody battles: Race and colour. Once upon a time when our Father of the Nation was thrown out of a South African first-class compartment, we were all "coloured". But so were the whites… white being a colour, duh?

The rest were black, brown, yellow or red – the only colour the Western world united to fight against. Red was worse than the rest of us, enough to get thrown into a prison for life.

However, getting back to the main subject of colour, the brilliant idea to use ethnicity was supposed to make us more comfortable with nomenclature. So blacks became African-Americans, and this assuming that all of Africa is black. Notwithstanding the white Zimbabweans (previously Rhodesians) or Afrikaans who have called Africa their home for centuries, transplanted or not.

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Would Ethiopian Africans be called black?

Which brings it to further segmentation: African-Australian, African-French-American and my favourite: African-Portuguese-Brazilian. And calling a wax procedure, a Brazilian is not being a racist? Maybe it should be a fascist term since it comes to, what should actually be described as, a close shave?

What is the politically correct term for being white? Caucasian? Would all of Europe and America be content with that?

From Kiev and Moscow to Marseille and Glasgow? And the Turks. I don’t even know the answer to that one. The fact that they have been kept out of the EU should give us a clue. The Greeks are there but just about. And Brexit has already proved that there is no United Europe. Neither can all of the West Asia be called Arab.

Given the kind merger-marriages happening these days, who remains what in ethnic terms is completely up to the person. You could be a Navajo-Canadian-Chinese-American hanging out with a Shakira-like Lebanese-South-American-LA bombshell and would need to give that person an entire page to fit in the antecedents.

I mean there may be some merit in clubbing people on the basis of colour just to ease out the confusion. We Indians do it all the time, especially when it comes to our girls: Fair to wheatish, light brown to dark.

Religion is even tougher. You could run a Google search and I got 1.2 million hits in less than a second when I tried "Christian denominations". Try designing a passport application drop down around that one? Okay, we are officially getting ahead of ourselves.

And the Hindus, who are new to this supremacy game have no clue themselves and would need to debate hotly what constitutes the true Hindu, but I believe hoisting the national flag in barefeet qualifies you as one. Why not do it while standing up to your ankles in cow dung? It could purify the Hindu further.

Aren’t we getting too caught up in saying the right terminology instead of doing the right thing?

As long as I am left alone to lead my life on my terms, I wouldn’t mind at all, if I was called Ms Mud. Brown or dark, take your pick.

Last updated: August 16, 2017 | 15:08
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