For a long time, political correctness has dominated academia and the media, pushing aggressive and heavy-handed party line in a manner quite reminiscent of fascism and Communism. It is time that there be a real challenge to political correctness - a challenge that is intellectually valid and that addresses their arguments at the core.
One core claim of political correctness is that beauty is in all cases a product of social norms. Want to know how to strike a body blow to this argument? It is as follows. In a recent experiment, a psychologist named Judith Langlois - a woman - showed that a face with certain proportions will be regarded as beautiful by people from all around the world. What this shows is that there is such a thing as beauty that is not culturally relative or taste-dependent and that all "beholders" recognize as beauty. Which not only refutes the politically correct claims on the subject but also supports a strong argument that true beauty is universal to all humanity, possibly even to all of life.
Another refutation of the political correct claims on this subject is the behavior of the politically correct. If beauty really were relative, then they would be attacking all women, however attractive or unattractive they happen to be. And yet the politically correct attack beautiful women and leave the ugly women alone or enlist them as their soldiers. What this shows is that the politically correct, like everyone else, know what beauty is and what it isn't. And their claims on the subject is inconsistent with their own behavior, which makes them hypocrites.
Another core claim of political correctness is that sex is exploitation of women or degradation of women. By that standard, all economic activity is exploitative; yet none of them are advocating unemployment. By that standard, the practicioners of political correctness themselves owe their lives to exploitation and degradation of their mothers; yet none of them are committing suicide.
A further claim of political correctness is that there are no inherent differences between men and women. This is where they confuse two concepts: Similitude and equality. Equality does not mean being the same, it means having equal rights and equal powers. And in pushing similitude with the worst of men as key to personal advancement, the practicioners of political correctness destroy good and valuable qualities - such as compassion, warmth, beauty, and ability to produce and nurture life - that are more common to women than they are to man (or, in case of ability to produce life, uniquely feminine). The result is womanhood eviscerated and robbed of the wonderful qualities that are distinctly feminine and pressed into behaving like the worst of men. This does not benefit women, and it doesn't help women to get ahead. This makes the women who have believed political correctness the worst women to be found.
Perhaps the most outrageous claim to have come out of political correctness has been the idea that the politically correct speak for women, and that anyone who argues with any of their claims is a misogynist or a chauvenist. There are two main problems with this argument. One is that other women have not voted for the practicioners of political correctness to speak for them, and their claims that they do is a vast and illegitimate grab for power. Another is that the practicioners of political correctness are the worst women in known history, and the
worst elements of a type have no right to speak for the type. A good woman will want to be good to men in her life, in the same way that a good man will want to be good to women in his. Both the politically correct women, who preach nastiness, and the fathers' movement, which preaches violence and oppression, are the worst elements in their gender; and in each case 50% of humanity is ill-served through representation by such elements.
It is wrong for political correctness to claim that it speaks for women's advancement, or social progress, or anything along the same line. What we see here is a product of an academic groupthink in which a bunch of cold, mean-spirited, hateful harpies have decided that they speak for all women without other women having voted for them as their spokespeople. It's not progress, it is a digression. It's not women's empowerment, it's harpies' empowerment. Women, for the most part, have not benefited one bit from political correctness, and many have lost much as a result of it as they were robbed of their right to be beautiful, their right to be warm and loving, and their right to be loved by a man.
Most demonstrative of the wrongness of political correctness has been the fact that in countries where women actually hold advanced status - such as Sweden and France - the women are not under pressure to be ugly, mean or asexual. Women there are free to be the best of what they are; and they also have rights and powers that in most cases exceed those of the American women. Political correctness is not women's rights, and it's not social progress. Political correctness is a historical error; and it has only gotten as far as it has because not enough people have had the intellectual courage to confront it.
With many men howling that women should obey them and that they should have right to batter them, clearly there is a need for feminism; but it has to be a better construed feminism. It has to be a feminism that recognizes that women have qualities that are different from those of men, and that many of these qualities are good. It has to be a feminism that recognizes that equality is not sameness, and that a cat does not need to be a dog in order to have an equal value with the dog. It has to be a feminism that accepts and values beauty, love, romance and sexuality and allows these beautiful qualities to live and grow. And it has to be a feminism that is represented by the best among women and not by the worst women in history.
Feminism, as such, is a rightful, even a noble, cause, and one that should have the support of people of goodwill and people of intellect in both genders. But required on the part of feminism itself is movement away from grievous errors, such as ones I've described. Women benefit from thought that affirms instead of negating the feminine, and they also benefit from better representation than is afforded them by political correctness. Moving toward feminism that allows the woman to be the woman while protecting her from ill-treatment would actually benefit the lot of women in the world.