Hear Me Roar - my brush 😾🙀 with PC Police

Adventures in Political Correctness

I ran across the above picture one day -- I think in the NY Times -- and imagined this ridiculous-looking woman singing our National Anthem. So I saved it and began looking for similar shots – eventually coming up with 4 more over the course of about a year – all from either the Times or the Washington Post. I was planning on doing a silly collage having each shot singing one word -- “Oh”, “say”, “can”, “you”, ”see “. I was not – you’ll have to take my word on this – looking only for shots of women, but that’s what I came up with. (I have since accumulated a few similar shots of men for another such bit of humor down the line.)

Anyway, killing time one afternoon while on vacation, I started putting the shots together and had the apparently evil idea that I’d switch the “lyric” from "Oh say can you see" to “I am woman, hear me roar”. I then emailed the creation out to my friends with the caption: "Examples of today's assertive, strong women". Below is the result.

I AM

HEAR!

ME!

ROAR!

Here are some of the reactions I got – and these are from my good friends:

“Such venomous sputum from such an otherwise sweet and lovely guy. . . I think it says something about you that you're perhaps not even aware of. You seem to have a problem with women of some sort. . . . some deep-seated, subconscious, fear of womankind in general.”

“What you sent out was tasteless and mean . . . at the end of the day, it's just mean no matter how you slice it.”

“A picture says a thousand words and the artist who assembled this had a message and it's not funny or sensitive to women. The comedy of this would work if we were laughing with these gals, not at them. . . . So there's this undercurrent of women bashing here. . . . anyone who is feeling sympathy and understands this issue would know better than to put this combination of pictures with that title as a joke . . . I don’t think this would be funny to those that feel for women deeply. Some could take this as an insult. I bet you got some a bunch of hate mail from this one, pal.”

“VERY mean spirited, nothing about that was humorous -- it was a sad and sorry statement to send that around -- tasteless, even -- i can't imagine any person of true substance would find that email the least bit "funny". you're slipping my friend”

So, reader, I’ll let you decide whether or not I stand convicted of mean-spirited female-bashing. I will, however, close with this quote:

It is frightening to see a society unleash against its own citizens codes of speech and behavior that can ensnare just about anyone and that have as their rational underpinning nothing more than a woman’s sense of “discomfort” around certain phrases or deeds. To conflate this with serous acts of sexual harassment and abuse is to invite totalitarianism – the heavy hand of authority everywhere in the private sphere . . . The burgeoning sexual harassment industry . . . has made it clear that micromanaging men’s behavior and attitudes is its major goal and women’s “comfort” level its main criterion for intervention.” -- Daphne Patai – "What Price Utopia?"