{"id":57840,"date":"2016-02-29T08:02:38","date_gmt":"2016-02-29T14:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=57840"},"modified":"2016-02-29T08:02:38","modified_gmt":"2016-02-29T14:02:38","slug":"yet-another-sign-pc-has-run-amok","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=57840","title":{"rendered":"Yet Another Sign PC Has Run Amok"},"content":{"rendered":"

The TV sitcom “Friends” was…unPC (PunC?)<\/a><\/p>\n

…\u201cFriends\u2019\u201d has been the main lightning rod for such perceived shortcomings, especially since it became available on Netflix in January 2015. Right after that, Slate ran a piece that called Chandler Bing \u201cagonizingly obsolete. .\u2009.\u2009. Once he may have seemed coolly sarcastic, the gang\u2019s designated \u2018funny one.\u2019 But through the eyes of a 2015 viewer even vaguely cognizant of modern gender politics, he\u2019s also the cringe-worthy one.\u201d The piece referenced a YouTube video called \u201cHomophobic Friends<\/a>,\u201d a montage of the show\u2019s male characters engaging in \u201cgay panic\u201d \u2014 where the implication that one of them might be gay is the joke. The concern has cropped up in other online think pieces, listicles and forums, including one Reddit thread<\/a> that asks: \u201cWas \u2018Friends\u2019 really as homophobic as the Internet seems to think it was?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve seen a grand total of maybe 20 minutes of “Friends” – it came out at a time when I wasn’t watching a lot of TV, and for a while didn’t own one.<\/p>\n

But the article does include one quote that needs to be pasted into just about every discussion about revisionist PC; Ray Bradford of the gay activist group GLAAD, noted:<\/p>\n

\u201cImages don\u2019t exist in a vacuum \u2014 you look at where they were at that time of progression of TV and our country, and also where we are now and the standard,\u201d Bradford said. \u201cWhen I looked at Kathleen Turner\u2019s character [apparently, Turner played Chandler’s trans-gendered father], there was nothing tragic about it. It was not a story line depicting her as a killer or a psychopath or a sex worker 0r anything like that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whenever I hear people retroactively picking over the political incorrectnesses of the past, I say to myself – and, not infrequently, to others – “God save us, meaning mainly you, from the opinions of our descendents; we have no idea what’s going to set them off”.<\/p>\n

And this article is proof…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The TV sitcom “Friends” was…unPC (PunC?) …\u201cFriends\u2019\u201d has been the main lightning rod for such perceived shortcomings, especially since it became available on Netflix in January 2015. Right after that, Slate ran a piece that called Chandler Bing \u201cagonizingly obsolete. .\u2009.\u2009. Once he may have seemed coolly sarcastic, the gang\u2019s designated \u2018funny one.\u2019 But through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57840"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57841,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57840\/revisions\/57841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}