Many people detest political correctness, but there have not been enough credible arguments made against it. I have given thought to the matter and came up with rational refutations of some of their central claims. I do so as someone who fully supports women's rights - both to safety at home and a fulfilling life outside the home - but recognizes that, in order to regain viability, feminism needs to change course from political correctness and into a movement that actually benefits women. And this means: Improving their lives at home and outside the home.
Claim: Domestic violence is done by people with personality disorders.
Answer: In socially liberal cultures, where abuse against women is against the norm, the people who do it are people who are in violation of social norms - who, by definition, are possessing of personality disorders. The problem is, that's not where most abuse against women occurs; and in much of the world (and many parts of Western countries) abuse against women is the social norm. Which means that, in the places where abuse against women is most severe, it is done not by sociopaths, narcissists or borderlines but by your average Joe, Abdul, Praveem, Igor or Jamaal. And in those places, it is the men who do not practice abuse against women who are in violation of the social norm - meaning that, according to the logic of personality disorders, in much of the world one would have to have a personality disorder not to abuse women. I doubt this is a conclusion with which the politically correct would be comfortable.
Claim: Sex industry leads men to see women as sex objects and causes rape.
Answer: The places where rape is the worst are places that don't have a sex industry. Congo, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Bosnia do not have a sex industry, and rapes there far exceed those of Netherlands or California. Rape pre-exists sex industry by thousands if not millions of years and is in no way a result of the sex industry.
Claim: Beauty is a patriarchial institution that destroys women's self-esteem.
Answer: By that standard so is intelligence. Yet we do not see feminists claiming that school students cannot get A's because some students get D's, or that them doing so destroys the D students' self-esteem. As with intelligence, some are more gifted with beauty than others, and some do more to work to develop their beauty than others. This is not patriarchial anything. This is reality.
Claim: Love is a patriarchial racket that leads women into situations of abuse.
Answer: The worst abuses take place not in situations based on love, but in situations of either arranged marriages, rape or false advertising. Afghanistan and rural India have far worse abuses against women than does Paris or San Francisco, and in Afghanistan and rural India the marriages are arranged. In rural Ethiopia, the favorite way to get a wife is to rape a teenage girl - and violence in such matches is also extreme. In places where partners choose one another, most of the men who become abusers are the ones who have put on a false front, misrepresenting themselves to the woman as nice people and springing the abuse on the woman once she is theirs. In none of these cases, which comprise the bulk of abuse situations, is love at fault.
Claim: Beauty is only culturally construed or socially dependent and is shallow or trivial.
Answer: Go to Yosemite Park or listen to Incan music and tell me that again. As for women's beauty, Professor Judith Langlois ran a study that showed that a face with particular proportions will be recognized as beautiful everywhere in the world. And while there are any number of women who will be seen as beautiful by some and not beautiful by others, this study proves that, in addition to relative beauty, there is also absolute beauty. And that shows that beauty has a reality outside of cultural dependency and appeals to something universal in human beings and is as such a profound and important reality.
Claim: Masculine perspective is by nature destructive.
Answer: John Muir, Mohandas Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Earl Warren, Nikolai Tesla, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Robert Frost and Steven Jobs were all men. And there are many, many other men who have done highly constructive things in the world.
Besides these problems, political correctness has motivated the women who listened to it to become horrible harpies and to abuse the women who did not buy into political correctness along with the men who loved these women. It has also attacked the good qualities that are more natural to women than to men - qualities such as beauty, warmth, compassion and tenderness - and put women into a race where they can only be second while denying them the place in which they are first. Some of them really think that beauty is incompatible with intelligence - they have obviously not known enough Jewish or Russian women, who are by and large more educated and more intelligent than they are, and who also tend to be very beautiful. All in all, they destroyed the best feminine qualities in the women who listened to them and reduced them to being the worst women in the world.
The practitioners of political correctness have focused on minor causes such as sexual harassment and wrong causes such as prosecution of love and beauty while failing to correct the worst wrong facing women worldwide - domestic violence. They have been all too happy to get people fired for telling a co-worker that she is pretty, while failing to aid the women living in daily horror. Instead they have been looking down on these women and blaming them for what was happening to them while seeing themselves as being better than them.
I've got the news for the politically correct women. They are not better than women living in domestic violence. They have shown themselves to be far worse than women living in domestic violence. They have shown themselves to be mean, shrill, nasty, abusive, poisonous and power-hungry. They are the worst in womanhood claiming wrongfully to speak for 50% of the population who are women, while using that power grab to coerce other women to be as venal as themselves. And womanhood of America - like womanhood of the world - is ill served by being represented by such women. In the same way as it is ill served by being told by such women what to be like.
A distinction therefore must be drawn between real feminism and political correctness. One is a noble and rightful cause; the other is a wrongful and poisonous misdirection. For as long as there are men who believe it their right or their duty to beat up or beat down on women, there is a need for a strong feminism. But it has to be a feminism based on truthful analysis and one that actually benefits the women of the world.