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DAPHNE MERKIN
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graphic opportunity for exp loitation by new magazines aimed at parents
of "advanced maternal age" and by ever-proliferating children's stores)
and a writer. She went ambling through the world, lonely as a
Wordsworthian cloud, in search of company to pass the hours when she
was not either staring at a blank piece of paper until the drops of blood
formed on her forehead (an appealingly dramatic definition of her cho–
sen vocation which she has pasted up on her computer screen), or wor–
rying whether her child wa developmentally abreast - if not ahead - of
her peers.
She happened to come upon a group of women sitting under a tree ,
their heads bent together in discussion. She approached them shyly, as
befits a newcomer. One of them , evidently the leader, turned to her and
asked her whether she had ever explored her bisexuality. Being an honest
sort, she shook her head "no." The leader stared at her sternly. "Don't
you read
New York
magazine?" Eager to belong, she answered truthfully
in the affirmative. (Although she subscribed to a number of more de–
manding and less trendy magazines,
New York
was the one she took to
her bed when it arrived, happy to graze upon its smoothly-ingestible
smorgasbord of gossip, reviews, listings, and soft "hard" articles.) Didn't
she know, then, that lesbianism was chic, the leader asked her. She al–
lowed that she did, but no one could hear her answer above the din.
The leader's voice had risen to a shout: "AND WHAT ABOUT YOUR
SELF-ESTEEM, WHAT ARE YOU PLANNING TO DO ABOUT
THAT?"
I will here without further ado abandon my lonely white woman to
her symbolic predicament - which is in some way the predicament of
being a complex person in an age of cultural revanchism - and turn to
the underlying problem behind this predicament, which is the problem of
"political correctness ." I must say right off that although I see "political
correctness" as a continuing and pervasive problem, both in and out of
the academy,
to
expand upon the dilemma in a forum such as this one
strikes me as the intellectual equivalent of bringing coals to Newcastle.
What I mean by this is that a large part of the world goes about its
business without any awareness that the term has come into being, or if
they have heard of the term, they remain uncertain as to what it signifies.
Oust as the term "multi culturalism" is commonly misunderstood to stand
for an o ld-fashioned "melting-pot" approach to different cultures, rather
than the newfangled compensatory approach which looks upon all cul–
tures as either privileged - and therefore inherently bad - or marginalized
- and therefore inherently valuable.) This part of the world is privy to
political correctness, if at all, in its most watered-down, generalized form
- that is, as a form of keeping up, culturally speaking, with the Joneses.
