Male ballerinas, disabled fire alarms? Political correctness is often very wrong
Political correctness is denounced mainly by men who are forbidden to say pooftah any more or when confronting a woman in their favourite club chair. But it's not without its confusions. "Disabled" is OK, not "handicapped"; yet a handicap is only something that makes it harder to do something ? as in a race handicap ? whereas "disabled" implies it can't be done at all, like a disabled fire alarm or gun. Banning female forms of job descriptions is misleading, too. Calling a female bus driver a driveress would sound patronising, but calling an actress "actor" implies the male form is superior; you might just as well call Rupert Pennefather a ballerina since "ballet" makes us think of tutus, not tights. Newspapers call women by their surnames, but few women think of themselves that way, and when it's a famous name it's worse: if they print "Freud" meaning Esther the novelist or "Clinton" meaning Hillary, tiresomely we have mentally to delete Sigmund and Bill. And anyway, what has actually been correct, politically in Britain from Mrs Thatcher to Tony Blair? Not an insistence on equality, just an insistence on the efficacy of profit and competition ? not public service or honour or professionalism ? to cure any failing or inefficiency in anything.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/may/22/katherine-whitehorn-political-correctness
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