When a writer like New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait feels it necessary to whine in print about his and other (mostly well-remunerated) writers’ inability to write offensive tripe without consequence, I think: Boo-fucking-hoo. Get a real problem.
A man in the UK tried to kill three women because he was a virgin and thought of them “as a more weaker part of the human breed”. Another man who gave a thumbs up to the camera as he sexually assaulted Canadian teen Rehteah Parson – who later killed herself – was given probation. And here in the US, Republicans tried to pass a 20-week abortion ban that would only allow for rape and incest victims to access abortion services if they had first reported the crimes to police. And that’s just this month, and just about women, off the top of my head.
It is in that environment that Chait wants us to take seriously and without any offense his weighty, serious mind-baubles on everything from race relations to his frustration that rape laws are supposedly too strict and now his hand-wringing over imaginary affronts to white liberal men’s ability to speak freely (by which he means “without women or people of color getting mad at him”). Feminism might be dominating many conversations, but sexism is still horrific and, while there is a good conversation to be had over how ideological one-upmanship and “call out culture” impacts rigorous debate, that is not the conversation Chait is starting.
Chait conflates real incursions on speech – a University of Michigan student who was harassed and intimidated after he published what was seen as an offensive newspaper column, for example – and simple forms of activism like signing a petition to keep a speaker off campus. Most of the acts that Chait says are “perverting liberalism” are acts of free speech themselves: discussions of racial microaggressions, hashtag campaigns, and even complaints from women of color about racism on a Facebook group. It seems the only kind of speech Chait thinks should be “free” is the kind he agrees with.
He also paints proponents of this “PCness” as hysterical over-reactors while simultaneously misrepresenting and hyping up his own examples of free speech supposedly under attack. (It would be ironic if it wasn’t so intellectually dishonest.) Chait, for example, cites #RIPpatriarchy as a hashtag created by kneejerk feminists in response to Hanna Rosin’s book to “lampoon her thesis.” In fact, the hashtag was directly responsive to an excerpt of her book on Slate entitled, “The Patriarchy is Dead: Feminists, accept it” – she rhetorically killed it off, so the lampooners mourned its death.
Rosin – an author, writer at The Atlantic, and a host of one of Slate’s popular GabFest podcasts who has appeared The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and given a TED Talk – told Chait for his article, “The price is too high; you feel like there might be banishment waiting for you.” If only everyone using hashtags to make fun of her had access to such banishment!
Chait’s real problem, it seems, is that he doesn’t understand why his privilege – or anyone else’s – should impact how people perceive what he says. “Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing,” he writes.
Well, yes! Context matters, and it’s no secret that a man using a word like “cunt”, for example, often has a completely different resonance than when a woman uses it. His willful ignorance about why he (a white, hetero, cisgender man) might not be able to use all the words or claim authority on every single topic is also why his, er, mansplanation of “mansplaining” – “all-purpose term of abuse that can be used to discredit any argument by any man” – falls flatter than his argument that it would be more equitable for women to live in squalor than demand that their husbands do a fair share of the housework.
If the worst thing that Chait’s version of “PCness” has wrought is that folks occasionally feel uncomfortable when they do and say terrible things, I can live with that and he should, too.
We are finally approaching a critical mass of interest in ending racism, misogyny and transphobia and the ways they are ingrained into our institutions. Instead of rolling our eyes at the intensity of the feelings people have over these issues, we should be grateful that they care so much, because racism, misogyny and transphobia can and do kill people. If the price we all pay for progress for the less privileged is that someone who is more privileged gets their feelings hurt sometimes – or that they might have to think twice before opening their mouths or putting their fingers to keyboards – that’s a small damn price to pay. That’s not stopping free speech; it’s making our speech better.