On "Political Correctness" and Being a Dick

I meant to share this the other day - but instead just shared my comment! Anyway- great piece by my friend, Bill Taverner - an extraordinary health educator, leader, and community organizer. He discusses language, communication, and makes all the points I would like to make were I a better writer! Agree 100%. Specifically, I invite challenging language, ideas, and POVs - I only ask that you are able to explain your POV and that you own the impact of your words.

How do you deal with clients, colleagues, friends, and family that use words that make you deeply uncomfortable?

On “Political Correctness” and Being a Dick

By Bill Taverner

I might be the last person you’d expect to write an essay criticizing “political correctness”. I hate the term. I think it is usually used to demean people who are legitimately looking out for people who have been treated unjustly. That said, I recently had an encounter that made me stop in my tracks and think about political correctness from the perspective of people who vilify it.

I was talking with a colleague about someone whom I thought had behaved in a mean-spirited way. I was pretty upset about what this person had said, and so I told my colleague, “Well, he didn’t have to be a dick about it.”

This is not a word I use in my everyday communication --- certainly not professionally. In this instance, however, to apply the most accurate representation for how I was feeling, I reverted to my childhood vocabulary, where “dick,” “prick” and “asshole” were common epithets to describe a person who was hurting you in some way.

I am a pretty good writer, so surely I could’ve come up with a more mature word than “dick” to describe this person. But for better or worse, “dick” is where I landed, and in the moment it was the best word to capture my feelings.

My colleague reprimanded me, explaining that she did not agree he was a dick. She said she did not think that sexual body parts should be used in a pejorative way.

I was stuck. On one hand, I agreed with her on an intellectual level. As a sexuality educator, I recognize that too often people use sexual language to describe negative feelings. No one ever says “dick,” “prick,” “pussy,” “cunt,” etc. in a positive way, particularly when referring to another person. I was contributing to socially reinforced negative language about sexuality. I should know better.

On the other hand, dammit, I thought the guy was being a dick, and by policing my language, my colleague was depriving me of my means of venting. She thought she knew better than me, and she suggested alternate words that would be better for me to use.

I started thinking about times when I’ve policed other people's language. For example, my mom likes to call her 70+ year-old friends “the girls”. It makes me cringe when I hear her say that because I think that using “girls” to refer to grown women is insulting and condescending. I usually respond by trying to teach my mom the correct words. One time she said, “I was playing cards with the girls,” and I asked which young children had visited. Upon reflection, who am I to insist that she uses MY preferred language to describe HER friends?!

Now I think of the millions and millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump. One thing they have in common is their disdain for political correctness. I would probably disagree with them in most instances of how they characterize political correctness. But my recent experience made me think about how progressives lose – I mean completely lose – an entire swath of Americans when we seek to correct their language. 

No one likes to be told that they are wrong, especially when their thoughts are emotionally driven. I am not saying that I will avoid speaking up when someone says something hurtful. I am going to continue to be the first one, and perhaps the only one, to speak up whenever I hear one of the Boy Scouts say "that's so gay". But short of hate speech, I am going to be more judicious when I do speak up. I am going to allow others space for language that works for them, even if I need to make a mental note that the language doesn’t work for me. My mom can hang out with “the girls,” who, by the way, also think of themselves as “the girls”. I am not going to be a dick about it.