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7/31/2008
Wigderson: Political correctness gone awry
I pity the fool that’s politically incorrect. The Mars Candy Company learned the hard way that men can no longer be accused of being unmanly without being insulting to homosexuals. A recent commercial aired in Great Britain featuring Mr. T. atop a military-style truck chasing a male speed walker armed with a large caliber machine gun that fires Snickers bars.
To get the speed walker to run, Mr. T starts by taunting the man. "You a disgrace to the man race! It's time to run like a real man!" The commercial ends with the tagline, “Get some nuts!” The horror, the horror.
Gay activists complained and the ad was withdrawn even though there was no indication the speed-walking man was gay. At worst, given the tagline perhaps he was castrated. Perhaps lactose-intolerant, diabetic, castrated men with peanut allergies might be offended to discover Mr. T thinks they would become real men if they only ate a Snickers candy bar.
I have a hard time finding where a gay man might have a complaint. However, they claim that not only did it badly reinforce stereotypes of gay men, it actually encouraged violence against homosexuals.
Don’t blame British standards of political correctness. The complaints came from this side of the pond.
Bob Garfield, writing in Advertising Age, even accused the ad of being an offense to the parents of Matthew Shepherd,
My guess is that the parents of Matthew Shepard, the Wyoming college student beaten to death for being too effeminate to suit his killers, would take a different view. Because your commercial is just a cartoonish recapitulation of their son's brutal murder.
I remember the murder of Matthew Shephard as a horrific crime, not just a symbol to be dragged out and devalued anytime the politically correct want to score some cheap points against a big, bad corporation.
What’s sadly missing in this story is the recognition that in order for the ad to be offensive, the stereotype they claim is being unfairly reinforced would have to be true. Yet we know the stereotype does not hold and that there are masculine and effeminate homosexual men, athletic and non-athletic homosexual men, homosexual men of all kinds. Some of them may even eat Snickers candy bars while watching reruns of the A-Team.
But the real tragedy is when forces of political correctness resort to overwrought rhetoric such as the terribly misapplied analogy to the Matthew Shepard murder, they dull the very sting of the charges they bring. By crying foul over the inconsequential and the inoffensive, they dull the community’s sensitivity to the very real sounds of intolerance and bigotry.
When it comes time to confront real evil, one wonders if they’ll have the words to do it.
James Wigderson blogs regularly at Wigderson Library & Pub.
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