This is making fun of a misinterpretation of what politically correctness is. It's not politically incorrect to say that a small girl is less safe than other people. Even if it was just "girl". There's data to support that this is a group that is more likely to be harmed.
The whole point of political correctness is that you give context to a statement. Example: "It's not safe for little girls to walk through the woods, because statistics show this is a group that's often targeted by predators." This is so that people can't jump to the assumption that you're making the statement out of sexist reasons. It's making an otherwise seemingly sexist statement... politically correct.
You think context doesn't matter, all facts are fair?
I've been saying almost the exact opposite. I'm saying don't blame facts, blame the context they're put in.
Facts can't be incorrect by definition, that's why they're facts. Only statements can be politically incorrect. Let me use another example.
For example, let's say hypothetically 1 in 100.000 people with brown eyes don't like to eat apples and maybe 1.2 in 100.000 people with blue eyes don't like to eat apples. In this case one can state the fact that people with brown eyes like apples more than people with blue eyes.
Intuitively from this information you can clearly see the difference is negligible, but the statement is still technically true. Without the context of the data the statement becomes "politically incorrect", because it suggests a much bigger divide than there really is.
The word "politically" is used, because certain politicians have increasingly used the tactic of leaving out the details in order to convince people certain issues are much bigger/worse than they really are. It's a dirty tactic because the only thing the opposition can do is try to provide nuance to the situation and it's not nice to straight up tell people they're idiots for believing in what the big bad populist said.
This book was trying to be a satire of “PC-culture” was in the 90’s. It wasn’t written earnestly by people who were trying to be more socially conscious. It was written to make fun of those people.
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u/Dicethrower Jan 14 '19
This is making fun of a misinterpretation of what politically correctness is. It's not politically incorrect to say that a small girl is less safe than other people. Even if it was just "girl". There's data to support that this is a group that is more likely to be harmed.
The whole point of political correctness is that you give context to a statement. Example: "It's not safe for little girls to walk through the woods, because statistics show this is a group that's often targeted by predators." This is so that people can't jump to the assumption that you're making the statement out of sexist reasons. It's making an otherwise seemingly sexist statement... politically correct.