Does it offend you, yeah?
For many of us, the answer is yes, frequently, and very much so. In recent times, and certainly since the advent of social media, taking offence has become the new competitive sport, the default mode of public discourse.
It is no longer enough to dislike what someone has said, or simply to disagree with it. Instead, you must draw yourself up to your full height, stick your nose in the air and declare – “that offends me”.
These are the magic words that instantly confer superior status, transforming lowly personal opinion into a matter of urgent public morality.
From “I am offended” it is only a short hop to “it is self-evidently offensive”, and then you’re away on your caper of Enjoyable outrage. Great fun – especially if you can persuade a spittle-flecked Twitter mob to accompany you. And ecause it is so much fun – or at least because it ameliorates the drudge, pain or disappointments of everyday life – many people seem to search out opportunities to take offence.
The recent unholy row over British writer Suzanne Moore’s use of the word “transsexual” is a case in point. In an essay about women’s rage, she wrote: “the cliche is that female anger is always turned inwards rather than outwards into despair. We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual”.
Moore was taken to task for this perceived crime by transgender activists, who said that calling someone a transsexual is like calling someone “a gay – really creepy . . . Trans women deserve solidarity, not implicit shaming”.
Soon she was being widely accused of transphobia and incitement to hate transsexual people, and this quickly degenerated into appalling abuse of Moore herself. Some of the attacks were so threatening that she reported them to the police.
Then the whole thing kicked off again when Moore’s friend, Julie Burchill, wrote a flaming zinger of an article in which she claimed that “a gaggle of transsexuals telling Suzanne Moore how to write looks a lot like how I’d imagine the Black White Minstrels telling Usain Bolt how to run would look”. You can imagine how well that went down.
Now, I sympathise with the frustrations of trans people in a society that routinely either ignores or lampoons them. In an open letter to Moore, trans woman Paris Lees spoke about “the ever-present knowledge that trans people are objects of ridicule in public life, things to be referred to and smirked at, not real, valid living human beings with fears and weaknesses and hopes and dreams”. I have spent time with trans people here in Ireland, listening to their stories, writing about their experiences, and I have been moved by their courage in the face of heartless ignorance and terrible cruelty.
But leaping to extreme offence over Moore’s fairly innocuous original comment, which was almost certainly not intended to be inflammatory, is both unnecessary and damaging.
In fact, it looks very much like the small-minded intolerance it purports to oppose, and it speaks of a deeply unattractive desire to vanquish and control. Besides, obsessing about the obscure niceties, or non-niceties, of language seems petty in the face of much larger iniquities.
I have encountered similarly overeager political correctness myself. On one occasion, I received a rather patronising letter from a London-based group called Trans Media Watch, taking me to task for my “flawed” language – I think I used the word “transgendered” rather than “transgender” – and enclosing a style sheet so that I could improve myself in future.
Such overzealous behaviour alienates interested supporters (it certainly antagonised me) and leaves the wider general public mystified as to what all the fuss is about in the first place. The right to offend is more important than the right not to be offended, because it is bound up with vital political freedoms.
That’s not to excuse deliberate hate-mongering. But even Burchill’s piece – laced as it was with gratuitous jibes, some of which were truly reprehensible – was at least bursting with scabrous life. Reading it felt like sledging fast down a bumpy hill, knowing you were going to crash into a tree at the end.
This enabling principle is tested to its limits, of course, by the eye-wateringly vicious abuse doled out on a second-by-second basis on the internet.
So we have the contradictory situation where we are at once highly restricted in what may be said, subject to the hair-trigger reactions of patrolling offence-addicts, and at the same time we can spew out any hateful old tripe that we like.
Either way, it often seems to end with women, in particular, under attack, whether for not using the right words, or for not looking the right way.
And the answer to that is not in less speech – the policing of what is sayable or unsayable – but in more and more and more speech, in the hope that sweet reason will eventually prevail.