28 Jul 2008
PC POLICE OUT OF CONTROL?
There are two stories on GCN.ie today about
companies pulling advertisements because of complaints that they are
homophobic.
Mars have pulled Snickers ads featuring The
A Team’s Mr T encouraging a speed walker to "run like a real man,”
while Nike have promised to pull ads that feature a basketball player with his
head inadvertently in the crotch of another male basketball player, with the
tag-line “That ’aint right”.
I can’t tell you how many times I have heard people of a certain ilk
about how freedom of speech is being hampered by excessive political
correctness. To these people PC is a dirty word, and they haul it out at any
opportunity to tell us the world has gone mad and that no-one is able to speak
their mind anymore.
I lived in London in the early ’90s, a time when the PC police were
heavily targeting racist representations and language and the complaints from
taxi drivers and the like were similar to what I hear today about pro-gay
political correctness.
However the drive for racial political correctness worked wonders.
Nowadays, across Britain and the rest of Europe, it is utterly unacceptable to
use the ‘N’ word. So unacceptable that last year a white Big Brother contestant
was expelled for using it as a collective gasp of disbelief went up.
In the same series of Big Brother another contestant, talking to a gay
man, compared homosexuality to paedophillia. She got off with a light rap on
the knuckles and nobody mentioned it much in the media outside the house.
My belief is that the more stringent the PC Police become about anti-gay
representations and language, the more ingrained society will become with the
understanding that anti-gay language is utterly unacceptable and does actual
damage to people.
The trouble is that the underlying feelings have to catch up too, and
that’s not easy. People who wouldn’t dare use the ‘N’ word, often think it
nonetheless. So, how do we change what people think about gay people at the same time
as changing what they say about us?