Everyone loves a tale of fall and redemption. Alcoholism, binge bingo, obsession with weird religion or even an addiction to Wagner, anything with a whiff of destructive self-abuse will do. So here is my confession: I am a recovering MCP, or Male Chauvinist Pig.
The rot began with prep school, an all-male institution to which I was sent at the age of eight. This was 1966, and there was not a single woman teacher. The kindly matron became an object of terror when, after a ski accident, my leg was put in plaster and she had to bathe me. I went on to a public school that was not just all-male, it was a monastery – several hundred adolescent boys and clever celibates locked away in the isolated Yorkshire valley of Ampleforth.
On top of all that Trinity, my Cambridge college, was girl-free for my first two years there. The pioneering group of women who arrived in 1978 were bafflingly boisterous. Like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, I had ground-floor rooms and watched in bewilderment with some of my more effete male friends as these young amazons staggered out of the college bar and threw one another into the fountain. “How sad,” we murmured to one another in a condescending manner, “they are trying to compensate for not being men.”
British newsroom culture provided my finishing school in chauvinism. I joined ITN in 1979, just after the company had recruited Anna Ford as the first woman newsreader of its flagship bulletin News at Ten. She seemed an impossibly exotic creature in a world where women made coffee, booked crews and rolled the autocue to match the rhythms of (usually) male voices.
My recovery began with a posting to Washington in the mid-1980s as the correspondent for Channel Four News. It is difficult today to grasp how far ahead of us the United States then was in the matter of relations between the sexes. The Iran-Contra affair – when various characters working for Ronald Reagan sold arms to Iran to provide illegal funding for anti-communist guerrillas in Central America – blew up during my tour of duty and it made a star of Fawn Hall, gorgeous secretary to Oliver North, that dashing marine-turned-White-House-conspirator. The first blast of US political correctness hit me when I remarked on Hall’s appearance; Marie, our office researcher, ticked me off quite sharply. After a couple of years of being brought up short about this kind of thing, a basic truth dawned: if Marie found what I was saying offensive, then it was, at the very least, bad manners to go on saying it. By the time I left Washington I was reformed.
The Famous Five take on the PC gang
Visit any children’s library or bookshop and you’ll find a whole range of bright “new” Enid Blyton books. The prolific writer, who died in 1968, was recently voted the UK’s favourite-ever author – just ahead of Roald Dahl and JK Rowling (the poll of 2,000 adults relegated Austen and Shakespeare to fourth and fifth position respectively), writes Isabel Berwick.
The Blyton renaissance includes new covers and new titles – Blyton keeps publishing beyond the grave – and lots of new marketing. The Disney Channel even has a cartoon show, Famous 5: On the Case, that features four mystery-solving cousins who are the offspring of Blyton’s adventurous Kirrin children. In the 2008 Disney version, tomboy George has a mixed-race daughter, Jyoti – who is a tomboy known as Jo; mousey Anne grew up to be an art dealer, and is the mother of shopaholic Californian Allie, while Anne’s brothers Julian and Dick are the fathers of adventurous Max and techno-boffin Dylan respectively.
As the Blyton books – her first novel was published in 1929 – are repackaged, names and language now considered archaic, racist or just plain odd have been cut. (The headlines have been predictably unkind. “Row Faster, George! The PC meddlers are chasing us!” ran one typical effort).
Some names have been changed to avoid sniggers or racist overtones – the characters originally named Fanny, Dick and Bessie in The Faraway Tree stories have become Frannie, Rick and Beth. In the Famous Five books, the boys now have to do household chores with the girls. And there’s not much left that’s “queer” or “gay”.
But dig about a bit and it’s clear that reports of wholesale PC changes have been exaggerated. Hachette, publisher of the very popular Famous Five, Secret Seven and Naughtiest Girl series, points out that it has changed none of its characters’ names. And it says claims that the important Blyton staple food of biscuits had been changed to American cookies were also inaccurate.
It’s also wrong to suggest that Blyton’s stories are full of entrenched sexist attitudes. The Naughtiest Girl series, first published in 1940, is set in a very progressive mixed boarding school, Whyteleafe, where the children make and enforce the school rules, and boys and girls form equal friendships.
Many children read Blyton alone as a “gateway” to reading independently. The changes haven’t compromised the fun and adventure that still attract young readers to Blyton. And few, in 2008, would want their child to read that George emerges from a dark tunnel “as black as a nigger with soot”.
As fellow recovering MCPs will know, however, the danger of relapse is never far away. From Washington I joined the BBC in Paris, a city where the concept of political correctness was entirely unknown in the late 1980s (and largely remains so today – Nicolas Sarkozy called the rioters who wreaked havoc in France’s suburbs in 2005 racaille, or scum, who needed to be hosed off the streets, an un-PC moment that might have ruined a political career in Britain or America).
I fell victim to the more promiscuous ideological climate. A film we made for Newsnight about French cinema involved interviews with two beautiful stars – Mathilda May and Catherine Deneuve – and I regret to report that, over an evening of red wine, the producer (another male Brit) and I discussed them in terms that Marie would have found upsetting. Our conversation was overhead by Marie’s Parisian equivalent, a young woman called Brigitte. The following morning I came into the office to find that, thinking to please, she had found pictures of our heroines in lingerie and pinned them above my desk. It shocked me so much that I have – give or take – stayed on the PC wagon ever since.
I tell this humiliating tale because I suspect that almost everyone reading this – certainly if they are my age (50) or older – will, after an examination of conscience, admit that they have changed the way they speak and behave as a result of what we now call political correctness. We all do it, and I suspect most of us recognise we are the better for that. And yet we all harrumph like the grumpiest of old men (and women) when PC is mentioned in our hearing.
I have just finished a year writing a book about political correctness, and almost everyone I met during my research said something along the lines of, “About time too – hope you’re against it, obviously.” For a while I thought this was a depressing reflection of reaching an age when all my friends have fixed opinions but I found I was getting the same response chatting with interviewees on foreign assignments. An Israeli intellectual talked thoughtfully about the impact of the second intifada on the Jewish sense of identity and then, once the microphones were off, took off into something close to a rant when I mentioned the words political correctness.
When my publisher suggested the book, I was reluctant to join in the general ranting chorus. Two things in particular got me hooked on the subject. The first was the discovery that no one had attempted a proper account of where the term political correctness comes from or what the concept means – almost all the writing on the subject is polemic. When I investigated the history of PC I was drawn into an intriguing story. The first recorded modern use of the phrase is thought to be by the radical African-American writer Toni Cade in 1970. “Racism and chauvinism are anti-people”, she wrote, “and a man cannot be politically correct and a chauvinist too.” The far-left concept that there is always a “correct line” on any given subject helped nurture PC’s development on the radical American campuses of the 1970s. But by the end of the 1980s, the phrase was a term of abuse by the American right and in 1990 it really came of age when the US president George Bush Sr gave a famous speech in which he warned that “the notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land”.
In Britain PC made a similar (though slightly later) journey from ideological tool of the left to handy catch-all for rightwing indignation. In the 1980s it was associated with the “identity politics” that became an important channel for leftwing energies in Thatcherite Britain. But since New Labour came to power it has been a convenient Christmas tree on which to hang all sorts of things that make some people feel uneasy about Blair-Brown Britain – such as “nanny state” legislation in areas like smoking and drinking, or the much-derided “health and safety culture” and the “mollycoddling of children”. Unravelling the story of PC offered an unusual and illuminating angle on the intellectual history of our times.
The other thing that intrigued me was the suspicion there might be a germ of goodness in the PC “curse” that is so often condemned in our papers and our pubs. Will you, if you are a harrumpher, accept a challenge? Let me choose the most absurd example of PC language I can find – and then try to persuade you that it makes some kind of sense.
Examples of political correctness “gone mad” are not hard to come by. I greatly enjoyed, for example, the story that the California newspaper, The Fresno Bee, had got into a tangle by introducing an editing system with in-built political correctness – with the result that a report on efforts to reduce the budget deficit in Massachusetts emerged as “a plan for putting Massachusetts back into the African American” – instead of back into the black.
But eventually I found the prize-winning entry for the greatest PC absurdity in this story from the BBC website in 2002.
“Has political correctness gone mad?” ran the headline.
The story? “Home Office minister John Denham has been criticised by the police for using the phrase ‘nitty gritty’ because of race relations rules. Mr Denham used the phrase during a debate at the Police Federation conference in Bournemouth. He was told that police officers could face disciplinary charges for saying ‘nitty gritty’ because it dates from the slavery era.”
The theory, it transpired, was that the phrase had originally been used to describe the debris in the hold of a slaving ship at the end of a journey to the Americas – a dreadful thing to imagine. The problem is that there is no written record of the phrase “nitty gritty” before the 1950s. Could the term really have survived all that time since the abolition of the slave trade without being written down? Of course not. But a perfectly good phrase is condemned as un-sayable on the basis of a groundless piece of revisionist history.
The example has become a favourite among anti-PC campaigners and features in a number of polemics on this subject. But as I encountered it again and again in my book research, there was a stirring at the back of my mind. I realised that I had once seen “nitty gritty” – or at least something very like the substance the phrase allegedly described.
As a teenager I lived – when I was not with matron and the monks – in the west African state of Ghana and I was taken by my parents to visit the slave-trading fort of Cape Coast. There was no sanitation for the cargo of humans who waited – sometimes for several weeks and in tropical heat – in its dungeons. Their faeces formed a crust that, over time, raised the floor level. When someone died, and many did, the slave traders did not generally trouble to remove the corpse, so the mix was joined by human remains. The authorities have hacked through to the original floor, leaving an exposed slice on view. I have a vivid memory of how shocking I found this sight – packed and congealed human misery some 18in deep.
What was this dreadful substance called? Almost certainly not “nitty gritty”. But the substance and the word are linked in my mind and I shall be just that little bit more reluctant to use it than I was before. It will be very difficult to “un-think” that connection because the thing-that-is-probably-not-called-nitty-gritty had such a strong impact on me.
The incident is a reminder of the often unpredictable power of words. They can act like an unstable chemical mix or a cluster bomb – innocent expressions can be full of associations and meanings liable to blow up when you least expect it. And when that happens, when some incident brings a hidden meaning alive, it can and should change the way we speak. Anyone who thinks seriously about language has to be alert to the impact of words on those who hear or read them – and if you are addressing anyone beyond your immediate social environment there is always a possibility that your words will do things you do not expect.
Even words that are well known in this context can carry more meanings than we imagine. We all know that the sensitivity about the “n-word” derives from its links with slavery. But Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang lists no less than 95 compounds and phrases formed from the nigger root. Thus “niggamation; n (19C) the speeding up of automobile production lines, on which the bulk of workers are African Americans, which gets more cars built but does not require the company to pay any more wages”. And “nigger and halitosis” to mean liver and onions – that one was coined as recently as the 1940s. So it goes on – a verbal constellation of nastiness built around that single word. None of us should object that PC has banished it from our vocabulary.
The difficulty arises because too much sensitivity to this kind of thing can result in creative paralysis – as I wrote the first paragraph of this article I found myself wondering whether it might be judged offensive to alcoholics, gamblers, cultists and Wagner enthusiasts.
. . .
I talked, during the research for my book, to Peter White, the BBC’s disability affairs correspondent. He has been blind since birth and, as a disabled person in the public eye, is acutely aware of the nuances implied by the way people talk about one another. He does not, for example, like the phrase “the disabled” because it “makes us sound as if we have all been delivered in some vast pantechnicon”.
But White is insistent that he “would never pick you up on a phrase I didn’t like” because he believes that over-sensitivity about language can stop people talking about complex subjects that need to be addressed.
As an example of the issue we tend to avoid through PC squeamishness, he offered the question of whether people with a low mental age should be allowed to have sex. Would I, as a presenter on the Today radio programme, enjoy finding my name next to a discussion on that subject? No, I confessed, I would not.
But the really big news I brought back from my journey through our PC world is that because of political correctness, most of us have now learnt that very basic lesson that Marie taught me in Washington – that people should have the right to to decide for themselves how they want to be described and addressed.
The PC war has been won even if we may not have not noticed, or appreciated, it.
Edward Stourton is a presenter on Radio 4’s ‘Today’. His new book, ‘It’s a PC World’, is published by Hodder & Stoughton on November 13, £14.99. To buy the book for £11.99 plus p&p, call the FT ordering service on 0870 429 5884 or go to www.ft.com/bookshop
