Read Online The Inspector-General of Misconception by Frank Moorhouse - Free Book Online Page B

heresies . Yes, some jokesare belligerently ‘silencing’ but it is better to live in a robust world than in an atmosphere of inhibited blandness.
    We quote some other confusion in use of the word ‘sexism’.
    Example One: A professor of English introduces the wife and daughter of a friend, knowing that we know their husband and father as a writer (he is absent).
    He says, ‘Helen is Peter’s wife and Anna his daughter; I suppose that’s a sexist thing to say.’
    To find a point of common connection and to identify Helen and Anna in this way to us is not sexist.
    Example Two: A leading playwright is on stage as a member of a panel of other writers at an international writers’ festival. He asks permission to invite his wife to sit up on the panel with the others.
    He feels that this is demonstrating an anti-sexist attitude.
    Yet we see it as a sexist act. That is, giving his wife a privilege on the basis of her sexual role in his life.
    And we wish to stress that in suggesting that there is confusion and misuse of the word ‘sexism’, in no way do we wish to say that sexism does not exist and that it is not in every way demeaning. We believe it requires our vigilant and vigorous attention.
    But we need to be precise in our usage otherwise it kills conversation, especially about sexual matters.
    Compulsive Anti-Political Correctness
    Australians, in a healthy way – although also in aperversely unhealthy way – do have the tendency to buck Political Correctness but this has lead to another curious and infuriating phenomenon – even more mindless than Political Correctness – but perhaps more vicious. It is the posture of Anti-Political Correctness.
    We have observed a veritable appetite, say among some columnists, to oppose anything which sounds humanistic or what they consider to be held as politically correct by liberal-humanists – and Political Correctness, it has to be remembered, contains within its list many genuine virtues (it is the social implication that these virtues are beyond discussion which is the problem).
    It is a sure sign of political mindlessness to oppose all of the agenda of one’s opponent. ‘Oh, stop being Politically Correct,’ they will say, whenever a defence is mounted of a liberal-humanist position.
    We think Anti-Political Correctness is now the greater bane. A compulsive need to ridicule every humane or ‘softhearted’ impulse in areas of the indigenous people, illegal immigrants, feminism and so on.

THE MYTHICAL MIDDLE CLASS AND OTHER UNACCEPTABLE CATEGORIES OF CONTEMPT
    The Office wishes to clean up its desk by disposing, once and for all, of certain nuisance matters which buzz around our intellectual life like blowflies.
    We wish to come down on these as a brutal Lord Baygon in this Land of Flies.
    Firstly, Contemptuous Categories Without Useful Content.
    The Office does not wish to hear ever again the expressions ‘the middle class’ or ‘the bourgeoisie’ as in ‘a padded middle-class world’ and ‘I found it hard to get too perturbed about the anguishes of an inner-springed bourgeoisie’, both from excellent playwright Jack Hibberd in the Australian (‘bourgeoisie’, Jack? Ah, the vocabular dregs of our youth).
    Our Office was without explanation for the expression ‘inner-springed’ unless it refers to a bed mattress, and we suspect that in these days even Jack’s mythical Lower Classes would have sprung mattresses. Jack may be using it figuratively as in ‘well-sprung’?
    We have another example from the Sydney Morning Herald where a reviewer writes of a film that it is ‘a right wallow in middle-class angst’ and so on and so on; day in and day out, we find the term used, especially in arts criticism.
    We read a review in the Australian newspaper of a production of David Williamson’s play The Department by the excellent Rodney