In 1994, due to my mother's failing health, I left Cambridge, Massachusetts having lectured at Harvard for several years, and came back to my native North Wales. I was appointed warden of a student hall of residence and, after moving into my flat, went on some business to the porters' lodge. The halls of residence accommodate over 1,000 male and female undergraduates who visit the porters' lodge almost daily. They stand around, staring at the walls, while the porters find their mail. Up on one wall of the lodge was a large tits-and-ass poster of a woman of the same age as the students. Most of the men who work in the building are old enough to be their fathers. I thought this was creepy and, after some dithering, asked if they would remove the poster. They pointed out that first, I did not have the authority to tell them what to do; second, I was stepping on their private space; third, the poster was scarcely visible from outside; and fourth, where was my sense of humour? I backed off and the poster stayed up.
Months later there were rumours that one of the porters had been seen in a clinch with a woman while on duty in the building. Then he was no longer seen at work. He had been suspended pending possible dismissal following a complaint by a female student that he had touched her improperly. The general view was that "he was silly; he didn't know when to stop." Despite having battled against the excesses of political correctness during my stay in the US, it occurred to me then that PC does have a purpose. It cuts through confusion and tells people when to stop and when not even to start. In an age of confusion, we can no longer trust our "instincts" as guides to good behaviour. Ordinary, not bad people end up over-punished for acts of stupidity. Two cheers for PC, I thought. And a cheer for me for being able to change my mind. People need guidelines.
Well, to be precise, other people need guidelines. Suddenly, out of the blue, I got politically corrected myself. I had sent a paper-or "submitted" it in the S & M language of academia-to an obscure, new British journal. (Thankfully I had broken the rules and also sent it to a far more prestigious American journal, which accepted it-otherwise I could not bear to put into print what I am about to describe.) A polite letter of rejection from the British editor was accompanied by copies of two readers' reports. One, incomprehensibly, accused me of trying to justify male domestic violence, while the other accused me of "failure to use non-oppressive language." Annoyance notwithstanding, I read on to see what the bad words are on this side of the Atlantic. They turned out to be "denigrated" and "rule of thumb." I pondered. Is "denigrated" wrong because its Latin root is niger and it literally means "blackened"? Or is it wrong because it confuses the intention to diminish with the subjective acceptance of diminution (in the same way that we must say "battered woman" not "beaten woman")? My critic disdained explanation. As to "rule of thumb," all I could think of was that the reader thought I meant "rule by thumb"-as in "being under Mick Jagger's thumb."
We tend to treat such PC skirmishes as a joke, but there is very little that can get under your skin quite so effectively as being accused of "not being PC," or "being PC." Both can drive you crazy. I was not amused by the reports on my article: I was incandescent. Me, using oppressive language!
After my rage had turned grey and cold, I realised where these accusations came from. What maddened me was not the writer's assumption of moral authority as critic, but his/her evasion of the rules of evidence that an offence had been committed as alleged. My lapse was "symbolic" and required no indictment. This is nearly always the case with PC infractions: what is taken as offensive is a visual or verbal image, rarely the substance of a proposition about the nature of things. When ideas are denounced (such as Charles Murray's The Bell Curve), they are vigorously debated following the usual rules of argument. But when images and words are denounced as wrongful, there can be no argument. One is accused not of saying something about the world (something bad), but of insinuating or implying a point of view. What can you say back? You feel suffocated as the critic reaches down your throat to prune your language before you even have a chance to say something worthy of refutation. And you feel infantilised: Mother says you were rude, and that's that.
So I am back to hating the PC patrols. Please can we have a world where we can talk and write fearlessly, pausing often to ask each other "did I offend?" Then, if need be, apologise or explain, smile or scowl, but at any rate let us liberate ourselves from slaving away in the salt mines of symbolism. In the last analysis, what we say and do is far more important than how we say and do it. n
Nerys Patterson
