When everyone and everything is called racist and sexist, no-one and nothing is

Feb 1, 2018 by Jill

by Daniel Hannan, Conservative Home:

What was the first word that came into your mind when you read about the Presidents Club dinner at the Dorchester? Seedy? Sleazy? Gross?

If you’re a journalist, you won’t have hesitated. The only word to use in such a situation is “sexist”. It appeared in almost every report. Columnists from the Sun to the Guardian agreed that the revolting event was somehow comparable to a dinner at White’s, part of a seamless system designed to demean women.

I suspect this is one of the occasions where there is a divergence between how pundits and politicians talk, and how almost everyone else talks. While both groups are disapproving, the reasons for their disapproval differ. Most people object to vulgar, paunchy, middle-aged men groping waitresses, not because they represent the patriarchy, but because they are behaving squalidly.

That, though, is not the approved way of signalling disapprobation in the present age. We are uncomfortable with words like “ungallant”, “lewd”, “faithless”, “sordid”, “ungentlemanly”, “louche” and “dissipated”. We retain the moral code of past generations, but no longer feel able to express it. So we use “sexist” as our all-purpose boo-word.

Words are funny like that. Once they take on positive or negative connotations, their precise meaning becomes almost irrelevant. “Democracy”, for example, is a hurrah-word. When people say “private schools are undemocratic”, they don’t mean that only Etonians have the vote. They mean “I disapprove of private schools”.

“Empowering” is another hurrah-word. When Lisa Simpson tells Marge that dyeing her hair is empowering, a startled Marge reminds her that she said the same thing about not dyeing it. Lisa smiles indulgently: “Well as a feminist, virtually anything a woman does is empowering.”

We have likewise elevated a series of boo-words, verbal Swiss Army knives that can signal our censure of almost anything. At the top of the list are “racist” and “sexist”, with “homophobic” a little further behind. George Orwell observed the phenomenon three quarters of a century ago. When someone says “Jones is a fascist”, Orwell wrote, all he really means is “I don’t like Jones”.

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