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What is it they want from a woman? Are they at fault? Are they perpetrating this man-woman situation? Are they oppressors?Īlthough the narrative devices used in the essay could be construed as sensationalist, the overall message is, in fact, feminist. Political satire often uses otherwise damaging rhetoric as a means to expose the absurdity of certain arguments and attitudes, and it’s considered acceptable, so long as the caricatural villain spouting the vitriol is played for laughs.īut what happens when bigotry is coded not as comedy, but tragedy? And not just for the oppressed, but for the oppressor? This is a much thinner tightrope to walk, as Bernie Sanders discovered recently when Mother Jones unearthed his brazen and controversial essay about gender roles from the seventies, which graphically depicts a fictional couple indulging in rape fantasies-the woman imagining herself as the victim and the man projecting himself as the perpetrator-and then turns into an explicit lament of normative gender roles and their deleterious psychological impact on individuals of both genders.Īnd men. The only venue in which politically incorrect language gets a free pass, so to speak, is humor. Language shapes our culture, society, and schema for thinking about different groups, and so can never be considered harmless.

In social justice activism, offensive rhetoric is considered a form of toxic pollution.