Political Correctness Gone Mad
Dec. 18th, 2007 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianOkay, look. There's a line, okay? There's a point at which political correctness goes totally and completely batshit, and all you get are a bunch of pencil-pushers dicking around with classics for totally inappropriate reasons and trying to make the world look like a fluffy-happy playground when it really is anything but.
Case in point: BBC Radio 1 censoring 'Fairytale of New York'.
Because, okay, you know what? Bite me. Two characters - characters, hello - swearing at each other in a screaming drunken Christmas bitch-fight. Please tell me what the censor-worthiness is here, because I'm not seeing it. This was not an incitement to kill all gay people or anything. This was nothing but an in-character reaction in a freakin' song. And while the four-letter words and almost every other insult remains, that one single word and the bit about 'junked-out old slut' get edited out because it's not 'appropriate' to use that kind of thing as an insult anymore.
Can I remind people that this thing was written in 1987? Can I also ask when the hell personal insults were meant to be appropriate anyway? Can I further ask why the hell the BBC is wasting its time and money hiring people to look at shit like this and censor it for 'appropriateness'? And then - and then, please, can I note that actually, there are homosexuals out there who are more offended about the song getting censored than they are about the word 'faggot' anyway?
It's like 'nigger'; it's just a word until you use it as something other than just a word. It's about intent. More to the point, if you start banning or censoring things for use of those words, you're highlighting them as 'bad' and turning them back into weapons. Dear gods, people, some common fucking sense, please! I can almost understand profanity being bleeped out of things, but it's not like people don't get exposed to this stuff in everyday life anyway. Kids hear words like this - and all the four-letter ones people find inappropriate for small children - all the time, and frankly, it's the ones who are informed calmly that "it's not really a big deal but some people tend not to like it when people your age - or people in general - use them so it's best to not" that are more likely to be less reliant on swearing as a means of expression in later life. Make a big deal of them, and they're going to get used offensively and inappropriately. Don't, and it's likely they won't, because the novelty value's gone.
Shit, fuck, arse, cunt, faggot, nigger, slut, whatever ... they are all. Just. WORDS. Bite me if words have to be erased from public consciousness just because some people find them offensive in certain circumstances. And the day that characters in stories or songs have to censor themselves for appropriateness should, by rights, be the day that real people do, because art imitates life, people use those words as weapons and bleeping those words out of poetry, prose and song will not make that less true. If you can't stop people from using those words that way, leave the art that imitates life alone.
Moroooooooooons.
Case in point: BBC Radio 1 censoring 'Fairytale of New York'.
Because, okay, you know what? Bite me. Two characters - characters, hello - swearing at each other in a screaming drunken Christmas bitch-fight. Please tell me what the censor-worthiness is here, because I'm not seeing it. This was not an incitement to kill all gay people or anything. This was nothing but an in-character reaction in a freakin' song. And while the four-letter words and almost every other insult remains, that one single word and the bit about 'junked-out old slut' get edited out because it's not 'appropriate' to use that kind of thing as an insult anymore.
Can I remind people that this thing was written in 1987? Can I also ask when the hell personal insults were meant to be appropriate anyway? Can I further ask why the hell the BBC is wasting its time and money hiring people to look at shit like this and censor it for 'appropriateness'? And then - and then, please, can I note that actually, there are homosexuals out there who are more offended about the song getting censored than they are about the word 'faggot' anyway?
It's like 'nigger'; it's just a word until you use it as something other than just a word. It's about intent. More to the point, if you start banning or censoring things for use of those words, you're highlighting them as 'bad' and turning them back into weapons. Dear gods, people, some common fucking sense, please! I can almost understand profanity being bleeped out of things, but it's not like people don't get exposed to this stuff in everyday life anyway. Kids hear words like this - and all the four-letter ones people find inappropriate for small children - all the time, and frankly, it's the ones who are informed calmly that "it's not really a big deal but some people tend not to like it when people your age - or people in general - use them so it's best to not" that are more likely to be less reliant on swearing as a means of expression in later life. Make a big deal of them, and they're going to get used offensively and inappropriately. Don't, and it's likely they won't, because the novelty value's gone.
Shit, fuck, arse, cunt, faggot, nigger, slut, whatever ... they are all. Just. WORDS. Bite me if words have to be erased from public consciousness just because some people find them offensive in certain circumstances. And the day that characters in stories or songs have to censor themselves for appropriateness should, by rights, be the day that real people do, because art imitates life, people use those words as weapons and bleeping those words out of poetry, prose and song will not make that less true. If you can't stop people from using those words that way, leave the art that imitates life alone.
Moroooooooooons.