Shifting Standards of What Offends — and Should Offend

Conservative pundit Mona Charen recently wrote a column decrying T-shirts with sexy slogans emblazoned on them that are marketed for teenagers and even pre-teens. She noted that both parents and school officials are often uncertain about how to deal with shirts saying things like “Behind every great girl is a guy checking her out” and “I know what boys want.” However, she rhetorically asks, “Are we in any doubt about what would happen to a kid who wore a T-shirt that said, ‘Girls can’t do math?’” Then she concludes, “It’s not that these people are impossible to offend, it’s that the wrong things offend them.”

Charen’s observation – “these people” apparently being liberals – got me to thinking about how the standards for acceptable conversation and sloganeering have indeed changed during the past several decades. My father, a member of the “Greatest Generation” who served in World War II, told me that he and other men were expected to “clean up” their language around women. However, the “cleaning up” was about terms rooted in meanings about sexual or bodily functions. Men would use dirty words for ethnic groups around women and women would use them just as freely as men although racial and ethnic slurs were not supposed to be used when members of the insulted ethnicity were present.

As a Baby Boomer growing up in the 1970s, I can recall the N-word used freely, without any self-consciousness, by conservative Caucasian ladies who would undoubtedly have gasped and blanched at the F-word. Today, the N-word is generally regarded as far dirtier (at least when used by those who are not black) than any other.

I’d call that progress. That doesn’t mean I applaud the general use of vulgar terms but it is an improvement that terms slandering ethnic and racial groups are found more offensive than those denoting functions of the body.

Decades ago, not much was made of sexist put-downs. The fact that many people today would be appalled by a T-shirt dismissing girls’ math talents is a good sign. However, it seems that we have made progress only regarding misogynistic slurs but not misandrist ones.

“Girls can’t do math” rightly causes offense but less is made of prejudiced slogans that target males such as “men are pigs” or “men are only after one thing.” The root of this difference, I believe, is the false perception that society has historically been a patriarchy rather than the more correct perception as formulated by author Warren Farrell that it has been “bisexist” with both patriarchal and matriarchal elements.

Which brings us back to the sexy T-shirts decried by Mona Charen. In truth, those who would remonstrate with the wearer of a “Girls can’t do math” shirt ought to be offended by a sexy sexism that reduces females to their ability to arouse lust and males to creatures of lust. Such slogans degrade both sexes and deny us our wholeness as full human beings.