The phrase "political correctness" implies that there is a correct way to go about being political. There is, of course, no such way, and it is the high and time-honored duty of the academic to solemnly deconstruct the ideological fundament behind every political endeavor attempted by members of the human race. The phrase "political correctness" owes its history to the very academic tradition which deconstructs the notion that anything done politically can also be done correctly.

Politically correct language has an entire discourse hanging around its existence. Popular perception of politically correct language is that it is a set of value-neutral words imposed on public speakers by some form of liberal cultural hegemony. In other words, if Politician X utilizes the word "broad" when describing a female, even if that is how he or she learned to describe females when she or he grew up in Town Y in Region-of-the-Country X, he or she will feel the hegemonic wrath of the enforcers of political correctness. Many, many journalistic articles have spent their brief existences crying out against this hegemony, and many public figures have spent a great deal of effort blatantly and pointedly flying in the face of political correctness. Why should Politician X not deploy the word "broad" if that is how he or she has learned to describe women? Isn’t the liberal hegemony’s very attempt to change the politician’s mode of speech an act of cultural domination? The word "broad" is not harmful in and of itself. Only when it is meant to be harmful does the word become hurtful. When we criticize Politician X, who has a stellar history of supporting feminist movements and being an all-around nice girl or guy, for using the word "broad," we are deflecting attention from the more pressing issue of the actual physical violence which is a part of many women’s lives. Politician X does not harm anyone by calling women "broads," and there are, in fact, many people who do harm women while at the same time utilizing "respectful" modes of speech.

This is one of the arguments against political correctness, and it is a sound argument if one does not also subscribe to the notion that words themselves can be harmful, and that the way in which a person speaks has a strong impact on the people who hear. Modes of speech reflect the cultural traditions they arise from, and if one utilizes inherited speech patterns without analysis one could very well fall into the trap of propagating cultural norms one does not fully agree with. For instance, let us take up the cause of gender pronouns. The world of the gender pronoun is pretty ugly for those of us who are literature aesthetes.

A socially conscious individual who writes in the current academic tradition must torture his or her language around awkward grammatical constructions in order to avoid pronouns, or he or she must deploy the rhythmically repulsive "he or she." No writer wants to compromise the beauty of his or her writing in such a way, so the act of rendering gender pronouns neutral often becomes the focus of attack for those who wish to subvert the mythical hegemony of political correctness.

Yet the act of using "man" and "his" for both male and female subjects is not harmless. Those who defend this traditional usage do so for several reasons. They contend that in a situation where gender has not been specified, such as when the subject of a sentence is "a writer," the male pronoun loses its masculinity and assumes a universal character. For example, "A good writer structures his plot after the Melbourne school." A traditionalist believes that the "his" in this sentence refers to both males and females.

My contention is that this is wishful thinking. If one looks for supposedly "universal" usages of gender pronouns in the history of literature, one will find that the whole argument has been changed around. Yes, male universals such as "man" and "mankind" were seen as universally applicable, and yes, the word "his" could be applied universally to the unspecified subject "writer," but that does not mean that the pronouns were gender neutral.

Instead, the universalized masculine pronoun meant that most universals could only be applied to men because men were the only people who were fully human. "A writer has Providence as his guide," refers to the masculine field of writing. Yes, the writer of such a statement would have been aware of women writers, but they were the exception, not the rule. When Thomas Jefferson said that "all men are created equal," he was saying just that. All men are created equal. Not women.

It is not by accident that when one writes in the traditional mode one utilizes male pronouns for active agents such as "murderers," "adventurers," or "artists," while one utilizes female pronouns for passive objects such as "ship." The idea of the male pronoun as universal is a myth. The male pronoun never has been universal, and by proxy it never will be, because the argument of those who continue in their attempts to apply it universally is based on a supposed history of it doing so.

The magical jump of the male pronoun from the specifically male ("Mr. Jones dropped his watch.") to the universally inclusive ("A writer of fiction necessarily has his quirks.") has never truly existed. The utilization of the male universal pronoun maintains the traditional exclusion of women from roles of active involvement in society by excluding their presence from action-oriented linguistic categories.

Language has a history, and that history reflects cultural standards. If you refer to women as "broads," your word choice reflects a linguistic history of women as objects of the male sexual gaze.

Using "politically correct," or, more accurately, "self- conscious" language means that you understand the power of language and take responsibility for the language you use. You can still use "broad" self-consciously and thereby attempt to undermine its negative connotations, but you must do so with the understanding that such an effort might very well feed back into the system you attempt to undermine. Or, you can reject the idea of politically correct language and maintain your standard usage without self- critique, but by doing so you are not fighting some sort of mythic liberal hegemony. Instead, you are maintaining cultural standards which act to exclude people based on their race, class, gender, and sexuality. Yes, you will not necessarily be including women in your discourse by paying lip service to politically correct language, and politically correct language is itself not necessarily value-neutral (many people do not fit into traditional categories of "he" and "she"), but you will be taking an important step, for you will be moving into a mental framework in which you self-analyze your ways of speaking and thinking. For example, when I switched from using the masculine universal "A citizen has his rights" to the gender-inclusive usage "A citizen has his or her rights," I began to catch myself unconsciously assigning gender pronouns to stereotypically male or female categories. I wrote an article recently in which I discussed prisoners’ rights, and I self-consciously used gender-neutral pronouns throughout the piece. Whenever I was about to write "his" I instead wrote "his or her." Or so I thought. When I revised my article, I found that I had, without even noticing, assigned the pronoun "his" in all of my references to "prisoner." So I had sentences like, "The victim feels he or she has an entitlement to restitution," next to sentences like, "The prisoner also has his right to fair treatment." Is it by accident that I unconsciously assigned the male pronoun to the word "prisoner?" I think not. By using what is termed "politically correct" language, we can set ourselves up for such moments of realization. If we are thinking about religion, we can take Jerry Irish’s suggestion and see what happens to our conception of "God" by referring to "God" as "she" rather than the traditional "he." There are so many ways in which understanding how you deploy language helps you to understand how you deploy stereotypes, how you relate to people and ideas, and how you relate to people traditionally excluded from language.