Here’s just another example of political correctness being taken to a silly extreme. Jane Fonda was recently on The View and was talking about The Vagina Monologues. At one point, she referred to a section of the show by it’s name – “Cunt”. Shortly after this happened, Meredith Vierra decided to issue an apology on behalf of Fonda, The View, and NBC. All sorts of other people also got up in arms, including the Parents Television Council, calling Fonda’s utterance, and NBC allowing it to be broadcast, an “outrage”.

So, it’s okay for the Bush administration to defend the torture of alleged terrorists by snowboarding, to attack other countries on suspicion of harbouring weapons of mass destruction, to have no problem with blood, mutilation, and other graphic violence in mainstream movies, and to reap the profits of the exploitation of society by oil companies while at the same time denying or not acting on global warming – because this would impact their bottom line. But, apparently, despite this, it’s not okay for somebody to appear on a supposedly educational adult talk show where the subject is a respected and critically acclaimed play whose purpose is to encourage the open discussion of human sexuality, and to show that the repression and fear of words that describe these things hurt us rather than help us. How ironic, then, that Fonda was hypocritically censored for the very thing that The Vagina Monologues argues against.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Fonda said the word on purpose. Not in a hostile way, or because she was swearing or trying to put somebody else down, but because she was hoping to get exactly this kind of reaction and point out the continuing stupidity of American culture. She was, after all, one of the vocal opponents of the Vietnam war, so she’s no stranger to this kind of thing.

If NBC didn’t want such a thing to be expressed on air, maybe they should have decided not to talk about The Vagina Monologues in the first place? Oh, but wait. If they start not talking about anything that might lead to something “inappropriate” I guess that means that they might as well not be on the air at all…