Charles Brown wrote:
>
> When it comes to sex, don't you think that legitimate ,left concerns about
> male supremacy can impinge, and therefore men's sex talk must be examined
> for sexism ? That's what Carrol is getting at.
>
> Charles
Back in the '60s hip liberals would show how unracist they were by using racist language; it was supposed to show that they were so far above such things that racist language from _them_ wasn't racist.
Remembered news item. Someplace in the south a young black man pulled into a gas station (this was before the days of serve-yourself), and the station attendant used the term "boy." The black man went home, got his .22 rifle, came back and shot the station attendant in the head. (I also once saw a student from the University High School here call a Black Panther from Peoria "boy": A century of cultural shock in about 30 seconds.) There were huge wrangles in public schools about principals using he/she rather than he to refer to the collective faculty. Was all this blood (and lost jobs & other costs) silly?
And Brian is a strange person to complain about discussion of demeaning language, given the large representation of gay-baiting in such language.
I really thought that all this had been settled by the early '70s at the latest. I am puzzled that it should be a matter of any debate at all on a left list.
Does anyone seriously wish to contest the proposition that denying bigots their language does make bigotry more difficult? No one, certainly not I, wishes to give predominant emphasis to questions of vocabulary, but are they really utterly insignificant. Are we all too hip to be bothered by such questions?
Carrol