[Old article but one well worth reading]
> Speaking in Code
>
> By Stephanie Herman
>
> Adapted for pinc from an article published in the SAVE Letter
> (Students Advocating Valid Education), Dec. '96
>
> In 1970, Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch, the final
> chapter of which suggested the elocutionary course second-wave
> feminism needed to pursue: "The key to the strategy of liberation
> lies in exposing the situation, and the simplest way to do it is
> to outrage the pundits and the experts by sheer impudence of
> speech and gesture, the exploitation of cliche 'feminine logic' to
> expose masculine pomposity, absurdity and injustice." Greer was
> granting her sisters nothing less than license to speak freely,
> adding that, "Women's weapons are traditionally their tongues..."
>
> In addition to this plan of offense, feminism also needed an
> indefatigable defense against those members of the opposition
> articulate enough to attempt argument. Enter Karen DeCrow,
> president of the National Organization for Women from 1974 to
> 1977, who is credited with coining the term "political
> correctness" in 1975 (ironically, the same year the Freedom of
> Information Act was passed). Once ignited, its flames were
> hysterically fanned on college campuses, even more so in women's
> studies departments. In fact, it's because liberal groups such as
> NOW, women's studies "professors" and left-wing feminists at large
> espouse PC that Living Marxism was compelled to print this warning
> to its readers in 1994: "The danger of PC is that it lends some
> liberal legitimacy to authoritarianism."
>
> To protect their own from the authoritarian doctrine of political
> correctness, feminist censors adopted the caveat that within their
> campus oasis -- the women's studies department -- adherence to the
> rules of PC would be unnecessary. Those rules were really for
> other people to obey -- people more likely to rape women, make fun
> of art majors, mock homosexuality with limp-wrist gestures -- in
> short, people more likely to oppress. Because they consider
> themselves genetically free of this nasty tendency to oppress,
> feminists can be creatively subjective in interpreting the fuzzy
> prescripts of political correctness.
>
> Textbooks hastily compiled into women's studies reading lists were
> similarly exempt from such prescripts. The *most* exempt was
> probably the Sisterhood is Powerful anthology, clutched to the
> bosom of campus feminists for most of the enlightened 1970s. On
> Page 514 the young gender warrioresse/nurturer could read excerpts
> from the infamous SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) manifesto,
> explaining away the male gender as "a biological accident." Its
> author, Valerie Solanis (often praised for her brutal honesty),
> believed and suggested that any man found unwilling to adhere to
> SCUM's ideology should be killed.
>
> During the following decade (of "greed" and other mean-spirited
> Republican policies), Mary Daly, associate professor at Boston
> College, published her Wickedary, a feminist lexicon,
> incorporating the wicca point of view, that defines all men as
> "cockocrats" and all priests as sadists. But rather than
> describing Daly's compilation as mean-spirited, most feminists
> were content with simply "spirited." Ten years later, her book is
> still widely referenced in women's studies departments at many of
> our country's institutions of higher learning. At UC Berkeley, for
> example, the Wickedary is not only on the reading list for the
> women's studies department; it's also required reading for a
> second-year french class, "Sexual Difference, Gender, and the
> French Language," as well.
>
> The focus of many women's studies courses is often in direct
> violation to the prescripts of PC, as well. The professors of
> "Feminist Literary Theory" at the University of Western Ontario,
> are permitted to address "the issues important to the development
> of feminist literary studies, among them questions relating to the
> race, class and gender of authors and readers." And at Emory
> College, the professors of the course "Feminist Theory" are in the
> morally elevated position to pay "particular attention... to the
> influence of the triumvirate of race, class, and sexual
> identity..." while professors of another Emory course, "The
> History of Women's Movements," are free to emphasize "feminist
> politics at the intersection of race, gender, class and
> sexuality."
>
> But while feminists are allowed to freely express and emphasize
> such politically incorrect demarcations, those outside the
> feminist academy simply can't be trusted with the same freedoms.
> When the Connecticut College summer reading list included "Sexual
> Personae" by Camilla Paglia, an outspoken critic of present-day
> feminism, the Women's Studies Committee and other campus feminists
> attempted to ban the book from the list for what they perceived as
> its "offensive" ideology. The book was removed from the reading
> list, but the committee was forced to reinstate it after students
> protested (on the condition that Susan Faludi's angry treatise
> against men, Backlash, be read in conjunction with Paglia).
>
> "Every educational system," wrote Allan Bloom in The Closing of
> the American Mind, "has a moral goal that it tries to attain and
> that informs its curriculum." For women's studies, this moral goal
> doesn't seem to be a universal (albeit artificial and coerced)
> attitude of tolerance. Instead, it's more a curriculum of
> incremental domination. By injecting the word "correctness" into
> their now-famous locution, early radical feminists hoped to
> linguistically situate men (who exhibit a tendency toward
> vulgarisms as well as oppression) on the "incorrect" side of
> personal, political, and -- the feminist synthesis of these two
> antithetical realms -- *gender* issues.
>
> Feminists soon realized they could linguistically intimidate
> almost anyone in the world of academia whose ideology differed
> from their own. Today, the PC conceived within NOW and suckled at
> the breast of women's studies departments has evolved into
> feminism's most lethal weapon -- a vehicle to protect their
> ideology from both banal and constructive criticism.
>
> Initially, feminist censorship involved only offensive labels such
> as "chick," "babe," or "toots." Proponents argued that one should
> avoid judgmental or demeaning descriptions regarding her
> character, behavior or appearance, when simply referring to a
> person that is female. This all seemed harmless enough, and most
> college students, still too young to fully grasp the concept of a
> slippery slope, nodded in agreement and began to glare and growl
> at anyone not willing to conform to the new speech codes.
>
> To linguistically unseat the enemy, however, feminists had to
> strenuously corrupt the very rules of linguistics, the most basic
> of which holds that all communication consists of a sender, a
> receiver, and a relationship between the two. Political
> correctness, in constricting the ability of the sender to
> communicate fully and for the receiver to comprehend fully, became
> the classic feminist castration metaphor.
>
> The scope of PC was then rapidly expanded from eliminating slurs
> to eliminating all terms describing individuals who are
> traditionally viewed as outside the norm. To acknowledge a
> deficiency, abnormality or illness (in addition to race, gender,
> nationality, etc.), was now defined as offensive in itself. Twenty
> years later, one is wary of describing a sightless person as
> "blind." Because the word describes an infirmity, PC-pushers have
> labeled it discriminatory and negative. The term "visually
> impaired" has been offered up as one of a few viable substitutes,
> although the word "impaired" is not a particularly positive term,
> either. Of course, to choose a term such as "visually impaired" to
> connote what the word "blind" has for centuries, is the epitome of
> a non-necessity. By replacing one with the other, the PC
> advocates, themselves, are applying identical meaning -- the same
> meaning that offended in the first instance, but somehow doesn't
> offend in the second. To subjectively dictate, then, that one term
> has merit over the other is to ignore and subvert the role of
> semantics entirely. What a word means becomes less important than
> how that word makes you feel.
>
> An equally corpulent violation of the laws of linguistics is found
> in the double-bind nature of the promotion of political
> correctness. A double-bind is a message that makes one assertion
> and deduces from that a second assertion, resulting in the pairing
> of two assertions that are mutually exclusive. In attempting to
> censor interpersonal communication via political correctness,
> feminists have asserted that (a) women deserve equality, and that
> (b) because women deserve equality, they must be granted a
> protected status by censoring all that is communicated to or about
> them. These two assertions, however, are mutually exclusive, for
> it is illogical to demand equality via the mechanism of
> favoritism. For its inherent illogicality, true double-binds can
> only be described as pathogenic communications.
>
> Regarding the behavioral effects of a pathogenic double-bind upon
> individual receivers, several members of the Mental Research
> Institute of Palo Alto noted three possible outcomes. First, the
> receiver might become obsessed with finding a way to resolve the
> conflict -- an impossibility in a true double-bind. Secondly, the
> receiver may entirely withdraw from human involvement. But in the
> third, and most disturbing result, the receiver may determine to
> "comply with any and all injunctions with complete literalness and
> to abstain overtly from any independent thinking." Many critics of
> PC would argue that is exactly the destructive result our society
> is now experiencing.
>
> Human communication is, by its nature, self-limiting, as "...every
> exchange of messages in a communicational sequence narrows the
> number of possible next moves," (The Pragmatics of Human
> Communication, p.183). To further restrain the ability of the
> sender and receiver to communicate is seen as a trifling but
> necessary evil to those feminists busily eradicating gender
> inequality tooth and nail. But rather than an attempt to
> *equalize* the genders, the inherent constraints of PC were so
> developed to allow feminists to *dominate* in human discourse --
> another chapter in the never-ending paradox of designating
> inequality as the solution to alleviating inequality. If feminists
> can ultimately win the communication war -- have the last word, so
> to speak -- they believe they will have won the ideological war,
> as well. Of course, you don't depend on equality to win wars --
> you fight for the dominant position, even when the war is
> innocuous enough to pit Humpty Dumpty against Alice:
>
> "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful
> tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more
> nor less."
>
> "The question is," said Alice, "whether you *can* make words
> mean so many different things."
>
> "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master --
> that's all."
