Rise of the Supernanny Feminists

Article here. Excerpt:

'Describing the words someone uses as ‘unacceptable’ can appear politically neutral, unemotive and simply commonsense. It allows the speaker to take the moral highground by suggesting there are ways of speaking and behaving that all right-thinking people agree upon. Those whose words are labelled ‘unacceptable’ are deemed to have crossed a line and committed a transgression against such normal codes of decency and politeness. As we have seen with Charlotte Proudman’s calling-out of the supposedly sexist barrister, and all those who rushed to decry Tim Hunt’s joke, the biggest infringement against the acceptable is to commit speech crimes against feminism. The feminist war on unacceptable language now encompasses everything from jokes and compliments to mildly flirtatious comments.

The roots of this obsession with policing language began at least as far back as the 1980s. A social constructionist view of gender as performative rather than biological met an emerging postmodernism that assumed discourse constructs not just perceptions of reality but reality itself. This led feminist theorists, such as Julia Kristeva, to argue that it is language that constructs power relations and the conditions for oppression. According to this view, women’s oppression could be challenged by changing the language and images through which people constructed the world. Today, when young women are seemingly quicker than ever to declare themselves victims of everyday sexism and casual misogyny, the notion that words are pre-eminently important in shaping reality has remained. Only now it has been joined by the notion that language can inflict mental harm on women, who are seen as vulnerable to everything from adverts on the Tube to clapping.

Offending words are now found everywhere. According to modern feminists, exposing them simultaneously challenges sexism and, perhaps more importantly, confirms that it still exists. The importance of language is overstated at the same time as the capacity of women, as autonomous individuals capable of taking responsibility and making independent choices about their own lives, is played down. This leads to an increase in what Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, writing in Professing Feminism, have termed ‘ideological policing’, both inside and outside of universities. Modern-day feminists have much in common with their bourgeois Victorian fore-sisters, whom Patai and Koertge suggest saw it as their job ‘to monitor language and enforce norms’ of what was socially acceptable. 

Today’s constant calling-out of what is considered unacceptable to feminist sensibilities is a demand to censor language deemed threatening to women – who are presented as a homogenous and vulnerable group. It is a patronising way for a recently emergent social elite to dictate who gets to be heard as they enforce new values, social norms and codes of conduct. This is why the cry of ‘unacceptable’ is most often used against a generation of older white men whose very existence is a sin against the new etiquette.'