Originally published December 17, 1993, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1048
Ooooh! Oooh! Hey everybody! Jo Duffy and Trina Robbins are having a catfight!
Can Catwoman’s breasts actually be milked for an entire column? No. But it’s a springboard for wider silliness, certainly.
Political correctness, as I discussed several weeks ago, is rearing its head everywhere. Even those worshippers of the whacked, the Addams Family—particularly the children—are treading ever so lightly in that direction. (No, this isn’t a movie review column; merely a further illustration of mindsets, that’s all.)
Granted, the kids are in top demonic form in the opening minutes of Addams Family Values. For example, in a sequence that would have made Galileo proud, Wednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) duplicate the legendary Tower of Pisa falling objects experiment. In this instance, though, the young Addamses elect to drop for comparison’s sake—not lead objects of varying weight—but rather a twenty pound cannonball and their newly acquired, greatly despised baby brother, Pubert.
There is not the slightest hesitation in Wednesday’s demeanor, as—in the name of science—she chucks the infant off the roof of the decrepit mansion. Only a fortunate catch by Gomez averts apparent catastrophe. (I say “apparent” because, later on in the film, Pubert gives indications of being indestructible: In one sequence, he’s hurled through—and shatters—a stained-glass skylight, rockets approximately 20,000 feet in the air, descends at, we assume, 32 feet per second/per second, lands back in the mansion on a hardwood floor—and giggles. Although it’s not implicitly stated at the end of the film, one would think that Wednesday and Pugsley won’t be bothering with further assassination attempts. Clearly such endeavors would be futile if Pubert could survive all that with nary a scratch.)
Nevertheless, Wednesday and Pugsley’s murderous endeavors are small change compared to what they do later in the film. The youngsters are unwillingly sent to summer camp, where all manner of cheery fun is inflicted on them at perky and upper-crust Camp Chippewa.
I’m sure I’m not ruining surprises for anyone when I indicate that Wednesday and Pugsley do not wind up leaving the camp in mint condition.
What’s curious is that, when the expected and inevitable destruction does occur, it’s the most politically correct vandalism in film history. Apparently the kids could not just trash the camp simply because they’re vindictive, amoral little monsters. No, the campers and administrators had to have it coming.
How so? Well, first, the camp is so saccharine that even movie goers were dying to take a machine gun to the place. And second, the kids’ actions are taken in the name of downtrodden Indians (Native Americans, whatever), not to mention Jews, Hispanics, paraplegics, and every other socioeconomic and/or ethnic group that could be tossed in.
It’s not simply mayhem. It’s righteous mayhem. Wednesday and Pugsley aren’t committing wanton assault and property damage; they’re making a political statement. Which makes it “OK.”
So if even the Addams Family is not immune from the needs and constraints of behaving in politically correct fashion, then how can anyone be safe?
Well, don’t worry, readers. I’m here to try to make things better. I will now present a guide for any future comic book writers out there (See? There’s this week’s requisite tie to comics—kind of like a gratuitous fight scene in a Marvel comic book) so that they will know precisely what to avoid.
After all, political correctness is little more than the term that computer board fans have coined for revising continuity to suit present day requirements: retcon (short for RETroactive CONtinuity). Being PC requires reordering history, and occasionally reality, to fit the utopian ideal. Ironically, if the absurdly perfect world of Star Trek ever comes about, it will be because political correctness has been elevated to the status of religion.
(And if you ever need proof that PC, taken to its ultimate conclusion, would result in a boring world, you need look no further than the recent Next Generation episode in which Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher developed the ability to read each other’s thoughts. Now, I’m sorry, but if I were stranded with a long-time female acquaintance—particularly if she looked like Gates McFadden—and she could read my mind, the first thing I’d be thinking is, “Oh, God, I’d better not picture her naked or I’ll never hear the end of it.” Which is, naturally, like being told not to think about pink elephants. And, equally naturally, that didn’t happen in the episode. It was, in fact, an amazingly boring installment considering the possibilities. It was, however, as pleasingly PC as Trek ever is.)
So, as you would-be writers prepare to enter the increasingly dangerous world of character portrayal, let us remember a few things:
1) A woman is always judged by her breast size. Always. If a woman has large breasts, that is insulting to other women. I’m not sure why, but it is. So all women should have small breasts. If, by some quirk, they have large breasts, then avoid perpetuating a stereotype by making sure they are very smart.
(This despite the fact that some women are so brain-dead that they have themselves surgically altered in order to have large breasts. Such self-mutilations are, of course, not their fault, but instead the fault of men who wanted women to have large breasts—except men shouldn’t have thought that way and shouldn’t have pressured women, who are to be absolved from it in case they caved in to the pressure.)
This, however, is not really good enough, because, if a woman is smart but has large breasts, then the only reason she has large breasts is in order to make her intelligence less threatening to men, and therefore they are, in fact, insulting, since men can’t deal with a smart woman unless she has big breasts. So big brain and small breasts is the way to go—except, of course, the implication is that no woman of any brains can possibly have large breasts, which is insulting to those smart women who might or might not wish they had large breasts, or who have large breasts but are afraid that people will think they are, in fact, stupid.
So, if you’re creating a comic book character who’s a woman, just always be sure she’s drawn with her back facing the reader.
2) No Italian has now, or ever has been, or ever will be, a member of any organized crime group. Ignore anomalies like the Gambino crime family. The concept of a gangster who’s Italian is clichéd, outmoded, and should be avoided. For that matter, any unflattering portrayal of any Italian person would be playing into that thuggish image, and should be avoided.
3) No Japanese person should be portrayed using a camera. We’ve been over this one at length, but it bears repeating. Furthermore, presenting any Japanese character in any sort of insulting fashion perpetuates Japan-bashing, and should be avoided, since it can lead to various unsavory consequences.
4) Never show siblings engaging in hostile relationships, as it may lead to imitative behavior. I guarantee that the very next instance of a brother injuring a baby brother will be blamed on Addams Family Values. No children were ever destructive or hostile prior to such portrayals in entertainment media, unless you count Cain and Abel.
5) Never show black people as thieves, rapists, gangsters, hitmen, pimps, or whørëš, since this perpetuates stereotypes. Blacks are permitted to be heroes (although constant elevation of blacks to hero status is putting them to a transparently heroic ideal, and hence is artificial) or funny (but not in a self-deprecating or racially insulting manner.) Also, they’re not black—they’re African-American. Yes, I know that term makes as much sense as my calling myself an Israeli-American. Doesn’t matter. You’re not talking about something making sense. You’re talking about American society in the 1990s.
6) You can have a character who is stupid, but he can’t be Polish. Polish people are not to be portrayed as stupid, since that’s a cliché. This, of course, sets them apart from the rest of humanity, who is allowed to be stupid except for the above conditions.
7) Jews can’t be cheap. Nor can Scotsmen, except for Scrooge McDuck, which is permissible since the Duck Lobby is really pretty pathetic right now, especially because their leader is Donald Duck and no one ever knows what he’s saying. Which brings us to:
8) No characters with speech impediments, and especially no characters with lisps. Not only is that insulting to people who lisp, but there’s also a direct insinuation that the character is gay, and since lisping gay characters are a stereotype, that should be avoided, as well.
9) Avoid depicting any of the following as having a drinking problem: Scotsmen, Irishmen, Hispanics, blacks, Native Americans. They can, however, all smoke—but only if they’re tough. Gay characters can drink, if they’re tragic about it. And speaking of:
10) Gay characters. Major hassle. Be conservative and the liberals will say you copped out (Example: In Hulk #413, I put across that the character of Hector was gay without coming right out and saying it. Bam. Readers jumped on me.) Be liberal and the censors will make your publisher’s life a living hëll. (Example: Justice League Taskforce #8, I had two women in a passionate kiss. Despite the fact that one of them happened to be a shape-shifted J’onn J’onzz, this was insufficient for the intrepid Comics Code Authority. Steadfastly serving the public good, the CCA registered objections with DC over the portrayal of homosexual behavior. The CCA eventually relented, after DC fought them on it.) I don’t know what to tell you folks about this one. Probably comics should take the lead of the military and institute a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
11) Arabs should not be depicted as savage or terrorists or in any way disreputable. Disney, the company that made the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences knuckle under and grovel when it came to tacky portrayals of Snow White, in turn redubbed opening lines from Aladdin so as not to offend Arab groups. Whether Disney did so out of sensitivity to a group’s concerns, or because the lessons of the World Trade Center bombing were not lost on them, remains unclear. Disney did, however, choose not to act upon the complaints that Aladdin himself did not speak with an Arabian accent.
With all of the foregoing to consider, who, then, becomes fair game? Who can you do whatever you want to, and depict in whatever manner you choose, without possible offense?
1) White people, particularly White Incredibly Moneyed People. (WIMPS, for short. Safer than WASPs. Why annoy Protestants?) WIMPs were the prime targets of Wednesday and Pugsley’s wrath in Addams Family Values. In general, white people who are not beholden to any single group are nothing to worry about. Not for one microsecond did anyone think that an acquittal of Reginald Denny’s assailants would result in hordes of marauding white people stampeding in the streets.
2) French people, Brits, and people from the Netherlands. Witness Disney: Consider that neither Belle nor Gaston spoke with a French accent in Beauty and the Beast, and Snow White and Cinderella did not speak like denizens of the Netherlands (although they did sport wooden shoes). Nor did Winnie the Pooh have a British accent. Insult a Frog. Be snide about a Limey. It’s OK. What’re they gonna do? Be snooty? They do that anyway. Better yet, take potshots at the Swiss. They’re neutral, for God’s sake! Can’t ask for a better target.
3) You can insult Native Americans but, if you apologize while you’re doing it, you can get away with it. Just ask the Atlanta Braves. The fans intone war chants and do the tomahawk chop. Native American spokesmen crabbed about it. The Braves management said, in essence, “Sorry you’re upset.” And then it was back to business as usual. Nothing short of a few flaming arrows through Ted Turner’s office window was going to change things. (And he’s married to the former epitome of liberal sensitivity. I love it.)
4) I think you can do anything you want with Greeks. I’m not sure about this. I think that’s unexplored territory, but I could be wrong. There’s only one way to find out:
Hey! In Greece, how do they separate the men from the boys?
With a crowbar!
There. If we get angry letters from a PC Greek group, I’ll let you know immediately and you can cross them off your list.
If you’re daring, you might also try to mix and match. New combinations of stereotypes might serve to confuse people and buy you some time until they can regroup and form a new protest branch. So you might try, for example:
1) A Terrorist Scotswoman
2) An Alcoholic Jewish pimp
3) A Black Mafioso
4) An Arab who was so dumb, he thought a dromedary was a theatrical milk store.
5) A closet gay man with big breasts.
There’s five characters right there. Make them mutants, you’re all set. And even more important: You’ll be safe. Which is better than being sorry.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, has heard and read the word “pëņìš”—courtesy of the Bobbitts—more times in the past three months than he had in the previous three decades combined. And yet, not a single televised news report led with what he would have considered the ideal intro: Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, deadpanning, “It’s true. This man has no dìçk.”)
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As true now as it was then. Worse, the internet has made fact what was once a funny line from Mark Twain: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”. Break any of the rules of PC and you’ll likely find yourself on a boycott list of People Who Are Not To Be read By All Right Thinking Folk, alongside such infamous racists as Harlan Ellison. Better to keep things safe and dull (which is, in my opinion, a pretty accurate appraisal of the qualities displayed by writers who are big on making lists like the one mentioned.)
I’d have to agree. The list above is still entirely accurate after nearly 17 years, and if anything the stranglehold toward “PC” has only gotten worse due to the internet. I know I can find examples of a couple of the above from the last few months.
I write role playing games in a historical setting. Specifically in 1905-1915. So, I have to walk the line between historical accuracy in people’s attitudes and modern sensitivity.
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For example, I introduced a character who was a tribeless Native American. This man wandered Arizona Territory, and avoided white civilization. His only companion was a coyote. So, the white men started calling him “Indian With Coyote,” not being interested enough in him to actually, you know, talk to him and find out his name.
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So, naturally, we got letters from players “correcting” us by saying that no mother would name her child that. To which, I responded, “She didn’t. That is what the white people call him.” I had planned for him to refer to the PCs on their next meeting in similar fashion such as, “White Man With Rifle.” But, because of the complaints the character disappeared into limbo.
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Also, we had to edit the event for future purchases to say, “The indian with a coyote.” Thereby meaning that the ignorant miners were sensitive to his feelings even when he wasn’t around.
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I’m getting ready to test the PC line, though. Next month, I will introduce an Irish ship captain whose crew call him “The Teague.” My thought is that maybe historically accurate cultural insensitivity is OK if none of today’s players know what the word means.
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Theno
I suddenly want to write a short story called “The teague among extraordinary gentlemen”
What a coincidence. Now that you’ve mentioned it, I want to read it.
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🙂
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Theno
Did Jo Duffy and Trina Robbins have a catfight over Catwoman? It’s been so long, I don’t remember. I’m assuming it was over the “Jim Balent run” on Catwoman. I seem to vaguely recall some furor over Balent’s design of Catwoman, which speaking strictly from an artistic viewpoint was a pretty stupid design. Why would someone go to the trouble of designing a body for Selina that was actually long, sleek and feline, and then stick two basketballs in her shirt is beyond me – – unless it was an adjustment for the artist’s personal fantasies? Good thing Ed Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke came along and proved that Catwoman could be smart, sexy AND well-designed.
I remember when they were wanting to take out Chief Illiniwek, I want to say it was late 2000 or early 2001. I think it was my history class that had to write a paper either for or against this idea. I brought up that as a quasi-Irish person (well, my left pinky toe is Irish) that I was offended by the fighting Irish of Notre Dame being all short, angry, and pasty.
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But really, I could care less about it. Probably due to my upbringing in the late 90s, I really don’t think about any stereotypes. When thinking about characters I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve got a list of physical traits and mental traits that I kind of pick, choose, throw together, and hope that it works.
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In fact I can’t say that in America stereotypes stand anymore. Too many people are too many ancestries. I’m aware that I’m mostly Austrian but the borders changed so much in the last century that there’s a chance I may not be all that Austrian (one branch in my family moved around and were originally Greek but settled in Northern Italy but were considered Austrian).
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But there is one thing–as a 25% Pol, I don’t really get why they say the Polish are dumb. Was there a specific event that lead to this conclusion?
I may be wrong, but I heard somewhere that the stupid Pole stereotype comes from Poles being the least-educated major immigrant group in the early 20th Century, and the fact that they were concentrated in the worst-paid occupations, at least in the Great Lakes area (which is where most Poles lived in the US). People at the bottom rung of every society tend to get stereotyped as ignorant or stupid. So I guess jokes about stupid Poles were kind of a tradition in that part of the country, and then by the 1970s, when Black or Jewish jokes became Politically Incorrect, the Polish jokes were still more acceptable since Poles were not widely discriminated against by this point. And so the jokes became extremely popular in the ’70s (I can remember hearing them a lot, and there were several top-selling books of Polish jokes at that time).
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9) Avoid depicting any of the following as having a drinking problem: Scotsmen, Irishmen, Hispanics, blacks, Native Americans. They can, however, all smoke—but only if they’re tough. Gay characters can drink, if they’re tragic about it. And speaking of:
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Well, time and stupidity caught up to that one and trampled it to death. Wolverine and Nick Fury have to be seen on in movies and TV questioning or giving up their smoking. Hëll, have a major lead as a smoker and people will flip their lids about it.
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Although the highlight of PC stupidity about smoking for me came about two years ago thanks to the Sci-Fi channel and a film they aired called Legion of the Dead. I got get less than ten minutes into it before wanting to throw a brick at the TV screen.
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There’s a scene where a guy lifts his cigarette to his mouth three times in a short timespan and each time they blurred his hand and mouth so that you couldn’t actually see the cigarette in his mouth. 60 seconds later he gets a metal spike through the chin and up into his cranium. Oh, and a guy is killed by having the skin burn/melt off of his skull later. These they showed it in all their glory. All the violence is there as well.
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It was made even more ridicules by the fact that in the course of the day they had been showing a series of horror films that included full on blood and guts and even an attempted rape scene. You also had several movies and shows where characters were drinking and driving, an illegal act, or even getting stoned, a very illegal act, and those acts were shown on the screen.
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But we have to blur out that evil cigarette.
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They must have gotten more complaints about the stupidity of the cigarette Nazis than just mine since they seem to have backed off of that idiocy a bit, but it just amazes me how cluelessly stupid and totally random the PC Police are.
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Great, so the fact that my character in the movie we’re shooting smokes a pipe has now reduced it’s chances (already slim) of being on the Scyfy channel to “negative never”.
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But I could probably show him shooting up smack and it would be ok. Crazy, crazy world.
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No. you got your shot reduced to “negative never” by at least trying to tell a reasonably coherent story, not having your lead actress show as much skin as possible and failing to have the words “Mega,” “Shark,” “Octopus” or “Sharktopus” in your film’s title.
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Although you do basically have lots of drug use so you still might have a shot.
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You know what… I know it’s “ridiculous” and I’ve made and then caught that typo after the fact so many times now that it’s not funny, but I still get screwed up on that one when typing too fast.
Awesome. This is probably my favorite of these columns, and I think it’s actually more pertinent now than it was when it was written.
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I especially liked the part about breast size. I’ve read way too many comic book reviews in which the breast size of the female characters is used as a point of criticism and a factor in determining the book’s quality. And god forbid any female character should be killed, because clearly that’s a sign of the writer’s misogyny. Please.
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I wasn’t aware that there were complaints that Aladdin didn’t speak with an Arabian accent. That’s just stupid. It’s not like he was actually speaking English. It always annoys me in movies when characters in non-English speaking countries speak to each other in accented English. Either have them speaking in their native language, with sub-titles, or (since this is not always feasible, especially if the entire movie would have to be sub-titled) have them speaking English with no accent, and then trust that the audience will understand that they aren’t really speaking English, but we simply hear English (which audiences generally do understand, and if they don’t, it doesn’t matter).
“Milking Catwoman’s breasts” is a whole different area you probably don’t want to explore.
“I had no idea you could milk a cat!”
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“Oh, you can milk just about anything with nipples.”
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“I have nipples, Greg, could you milk me?”
Am I a horrible person for saying yes, I DO want to explore those areas? XD
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““Milking Catwoman’s breasts” is a whole different area you probably don’t want to explore.”
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Depends on who’s playing her.
I always thought Snow White was German.
All I have to say is thank god for MAD MEN on AMC! Last night’s episode they had a black mugger and a stutterer. Recent episodes contained slurs against Japanese, Blacks and Jews and one of the main characters is a woman with HUGE breasts and is smart.
Christina Hendricks, i.e. Saffron from Firefly. Never have watched Mad Men, but I do know me some Firefly cast.
Peter David: Can Catwoman’s breasts actually be milked for an entire column?
Luigi Novi: No, but you just gave Adam Hughes the idea for his next con sketch.
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Like he didn’t already have that one in his sketchbook years ago now…
During the initial volleys of the “Catwoman’s breasts” debate in the CBG letters column, didn’t one of Trina Robbins’ letters say something like “…Jo Duffy…whoever HE is…”?
I didn’t want to play Devil’s Advocate, but I suppose I should, because someone has to.
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It’s not like we had a lot of great minority characters in pop fiction, and then PC came in vogue and ruined it all. Most pop fiction isn’t daring, and has never been. It’s people’s nature that most want to play safe. Before, we had minorities as caricatures in bad fiction (when we had them at all), now we have them as sanitized cyphers.
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But the daring fiction, the kind that is remembered and talked about? I don’t think PC has restricted it in these past decades.
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Italian mafiosi? Someone has heard of the SOPRANOS?
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Muslim terrorists? Someone has heard of 24?
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Blacks as thugs and criminals? There were several of them in OZ, and TRUE BLOOD had, among its 4 black characters, one former criminal, one drunk, and one drug dealer.
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Gay characters? DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES has them, and they’re not one iota better or more virtuous than the other characters in the show. Andrew van de Kamp has a nasty side that is considerable.
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PC has only restricted things in mediocre fiction that would’ve probably sucked anyway.
Well, we can’t really know for sure if anything that would have been produced wasn’t, out of fear or whatever. How can we possibly know? And the fact that some good things have been made despite the PC police is not evidence that they have not not been effective. The fact that some African-Americans were able to succeed during the worst of the Jim Crow laws should not be taken as any kind of proof that those laws had no effect.
As a general rule, it’s simply a matter of looking at pop fiction produced before PC came into vogue. 90% is crap today, 90% was crap then. And also look at minority characters in pre-PC fiction. Most of them were bad before, most are bad now, though in different ways.
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The PC police has been effective, yes. It’s just that that people who are mostly easily swayed by then probably didn’t have strong voices in the first place.
I would further note that the storyline on “Desperate Housewives” involving Alfre Woodard was extremely unpopular, and one of the aspects that drew particular ire was that she had one of her sons chained up in the basement. If it had been a white family, that engenders no criticism whatsoever; as it was, the imagery of a black man in chains drew a ton of fire that caught the producers flatfooted.
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PAD
I think there were multiple reasons why the black family storyline in DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES’s 2nd season wasn’t popular.
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Many shows that are explosive hits in the 1st season disappoint in the 2nd, with a feeling that the creators didn’t know how to top such a successful run. It happened to LOST, to HEROES (and how!), and to DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES too.
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And in such situations, the fans love to blame the new characters, make them symbols of everything that went wrong with the show. The black family was in that position, and suffered even more from a lack of strong connections with the established families.
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In following seasons they’ve corrected it, making the “mystery” character more connected to a protagonist, so he or she didn’t look like an interloper that is taking precious screen time from peoples’s favorites.
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That the storyline was very un-PC was just the icing in the cake that soured people even more. I think most people are willing to take something un-PC, as long as it’s good enough.
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Hey, TRUE BLOOD had a black man chained in the basement on the 2nd season (a GAY black man chained in the basement by white vampires), and it was a success.
If TV were to be believed, the kind of person MOST likely to commit a murder would be the white, middle aged CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Arabs are the number 1 victims of religiously motivated hate crimes, and the first person arrested for a crime is NEVER the actual perp. That would be the aforementioned CEO. Who probably did it to frame an Arab.
Yes, if I were a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I’m sure I would lose sleep because some TV show is portraying my kind negatively. Perhaps I would even stop the trio of expensive call girls from servicing me in my private jet to cry on their slim shoulders over how those TV shows are demonizing me yet again. 🙂
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Seriously, it’s not like PC people caused formerly brave entertainment industries to become neutered creatively. They were always afraid of the wrong kind of controversy, always afraid of challenging the status quo. It’s only that PC people want to make PC behaviour part of the status quo. But if they weren’t, we still would have 90% of big entertainment scared of doing anything brave.
I’m not suggesting that CEOs are losing sleep or weeping into their diamond encrusted goblets while they toast another day of coming up with some new way to stick it to the common man. I am selfishly just complaining that the sheer predictability of it has ruined my enjoyment of most detective dramas. If you can’t predict who the bad guy is you aren’t paying attention. The only “twist’ they might throw in is to have the businessman be shown to be utterly corrupt and evil but NOT the killer, who turns out to be the nice guy who seemed so helpful earlier on.
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Snooooooze. Look, I don’t expect reality, which in most murder cases is small and sad, and it can get ridiculous when CSI tries to come up with some insane “never done before” premise…just write some interesting characters and have bad things happen to them. It isn’t easy but that’s why they get the big bucks.
I make it a point not to watch CSI and stuff like that. You’ve reminded me of another reason why.
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It would be cool to have a show that focused on the super-rich with a more nuanced eye. With all the power, politics, romance, and social commentary, I always thought ultra-rich CEOS have the potential to be more interesting as gray anti-heroes than outright villains.
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There are still some vestigial libertarian economics in me that lament the fact that successful entrepreuners are almost universally reviled in pop culture of the last 30 years.
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At least we have Tony Stark and a few other pre-1980s characters that are rich industrialists without being utter scumbags (Civil War-era Tony nonetheless).
I think that it has become way to easy to blame things on Political Correctness (in one class I was in years ago, our assignment was to categorize things that were PC, I realized that bashing Political Correctness was Politically Correct.)
Personally I think that Peter David’s mock rules make some sense in avoiding cliches, which tend to produce boring writing. We’ve had decades of evil terrorist Arabs (I didn’t watch 24 or lost but I’m told it had the type) black pimps, swishy gays, etc. and no one stopped “The Sopranos” from airing, even if a bunch of people complained that Italian mobsters are a huge cliche by now. I see The Merchant of Venice put on every now and then and I haven’t seen groups trying to shut it down.
Even during the so-called PC 90’s we had Pulp Fiction with black criminal characters, and X-force with the oh-so-original Irish character with a drinking problem (which I didn’t think was too out of line, given what the character had suffered, but given how many other characters had been through what had driven her to drink (possession by the shadow king) I thought that it was pretty unoriginal and uninteresting.) And hëll, when did South Park start? Or the Show Politically Incorrect? I’m starting to think that complaints about political correctness are overblown by people who need an easy target.
Again though, I could come up with many many examples of women and minorities who did great works of art during the worst times of segregation and oppression. That would NOT be evidence of any lack of said oppression.
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Perhaps, as some have suggested, those who ignore the PC edicts are more likely to be the sort of people who will produce worthwhile art. Having guts counts for something.
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I would not say that Lost was being cliched in having Arab terrorists. It would have required them to rewrite history to have a character who was a former member of the Iraqi republican Guard and have him not be complicit in some pretty bad stuff. Despite that, I would not call the character evil. What if they had listened to the “no Arab terrorists” line? We would have lost a good character, a good storyline and another actor of middle eastern descent would have lost a job. Thanks, PC!
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But i agree that PC has become amusingly incorrect and largely laughed at, even though some have not gotten the memo and can still do harm to people who do not deserve it.
I agree with Bill. Sayid (the Arab guy from Lost) wasn’t cliched. Actually, he was pretty much a repudiation of the cliche. For one, he wasn’t overly religious, and he wasn’t a believer that the West was “decadent.”
I’m just speculating that if Norman Lear tried to pitch “All in the Family” to CBS nowadays, the prospect of finding humor in a funny bigot would fall absolutely flat and the series never gets on the air.
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PAD
And if Mel Brooks tried to do Blazing Saddles…yeah. Despite the fact that movies like Lottery Ticket often portray black people in a way that almost makes Steppen Fetchet look dignified.
Fox did that with the show “Titus” awhile back and Peter Griffen and Homer Simpson have gotten some “funny bigot” moments even though that isn’t the main thrust of either character. South Park may be cable, but it’s pretty pervasive, and Sarah Silverman’s career hasn’t been hurt by it.
Quoted: “1) A woman is always judged by her breast size. Always. If a woman has large breasts, that is insulting to other women. I’m not sure why, but it is. So all women should have small breasts. If, by some quirk, they have large breasts, then avoid perpetuating a stereotype by making sure they are very smart.
(This despite the fact that some women are so brain-dead that they have themselves surgically altered in order to have large breasts. Such self-mutilations are, of course, not their fault, but instead the fault of men who wanted women to have large breasts—except men shouldn’t have thought that way and shouldn’t have pressured women, who are to be absolved from it in case they caved in to the pressure.)”
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Actually, according to the truly politically correct, no men are ever to be absolved of the crime of the “male gaze”, save of course exclusively homosexual men who parrot a Marxist feminist agenda. Whenever in doubt, consult Adrienne Rich on what she calls “compulsory heterosexuality”. Men can never, ever be heterosexual and politically correct at the same time.
Some radical feminists are totally neurotic, no doubt about it. Then again, lots of radical “ists” are totally neurotic.
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It’s just in men’s nature to look, as our attraction is so linked to the visual. I am fairly feminist in most issues, but hëll, I can’t help myself with THAT. If some feminists don’t like it, tough.