There is a lot of talk about what is politically correct, but is it possible today to give it a unique definition? When is it needed and when does it exceed the limits?
One of the greatest and most widespread tendencies of the human being is to catalog and divide all the things that are in the world into opposing categories, often seen as non-communicating, black and white, good and evil, there is always a right side and a wrong one.
In a complex (and messed up, I would add) world like ours, sometimes giving a single definition of a concept is difficult. Because it seems to contain a series of contradictions, because it’s possible to examine it from different points of view and with different points of view.
Let's take for example a very current topic, that makes many people's heads spin: politically correctness. A thorny affair that contains many interpretations. Everyone uses it, everyone mentions it, but how?
Let's talk about the most striking and most banal case in which surely all of us have stumbled upon, hanging out in the fabulous world of social media comments: a TV series/film features, for example, a female protagonist (scandalous), a POC cast or LGBT + characters.
Among the most popular comments we can find some written by very angry people (often akin to the lovely incel variety) who feel threatened by these changes and reduce them to a question of "politically correctness".
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In this case the reasoning is very veeery clear: the “right” world order is the one of a patriarchal society, where everything is immobile and must remain immobile. The fact that we want to represent a more complex and varied universe (which exists and has always existed) appears to them simply as a pressure from the evil politically correct feminists. And even in this case, if we turn the question from our point of view, it is not a matter of politically correctness, it is simply an evolution, a change, a rereading of a canon.
Certain choices can be shared or not, but this type of "politically correctness" often does more good than harm.
Now let's turn the question from another point of view. The intentions are good. How many times have we seen public figures expressing themselves on controversial issues, with all the best intentions in the world, but falling victim to the so-called cancel culture, because they say something wrong? And here the situation becomes decidedly complicated.
It doesn’t matter how much we try, we will always be, in a sense, bad feminists. Even if we are part of a minority, we cannot humanly understand all the points of view that exist in the world and it is inevitable that sooner or later, even inadvertently, with our words, we end up offending someone.
The important thing is to recognize our mistakes and always carry an open mind. In this case, the politically correctness must not turn into a weapon that destroys those who make mistakes, because we are all wrong and there are no perfect activists (not even those who proclaim themselves as such).
This discourse can be extended to satire. The purpose of satire is to be irreverent and caustic towards various and common themes. In recent years, in the wake of movements such as #metoo and #blacklivesmatter, satire has come under attack in a certain sense, for jokes that are judged full of bad taste and offensive. Also in this case the discourse is complex.
A series of factors come into play, from the tone of the intervention, from the identity of the person who does it (whether or not a person belongs to the category he/she/them is/are denigrating), to the identity of the listener that can perceive a joke more or less offensive. I would say that it's all a matter of common sense, but again, often distinguishing what is right and what is wrong is not easy. It is about evaluating the nuances and perhaps thinking that our value system is slowly changing.
Perhaps from a certain point of view it is not possible to reconcile the genre of satire with politically correctness. Or maybe someone will create a new type of satire, more akin to the mood of the times. Only time will tell.
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To reach a conclusion, we can say that there are two sides of politically correctness: one that leads to a greater sensitivity and to bring into the spotlight voices that were previously silenced, therefore more inclusiveness; on the other hand we must not fall into the error of becoming censors and condemning a priori those who express apparently controversial opinions.
It's all a matter of intentions and knowing how to listen.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
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