Genderless Grammar

A bit of history

In 2011, in the parallel universe of the Ultimate series, a new Spider Man was launched by Marvel Comics. Miles Morales, whose features are a mix of Afro-American and Hispanic, replaced Peter Parker, who died at the hands of the Green Goblin; he follows in the footsteps of another half-Hispanic in the role of the superhero, Miguel O’Hara, the protagonist of a series created in 1992 and set in the future (Spider-Man 2099). Meanwhile, Thor has become a woman, in a series that landed on the market in 2015 (taking on the role of the Goddess of Thunder, Jane Foster, his historical girlfriend), and that smoker, drinker and great fornicator who was Wolverine, the mutant of the X-Men sporting adamantium, no longer smokes, hardly ever touches liquor and – out of respect for the female gender – indulges much less often than before in sex. These are some harmless examples of a politically correct reworking, characterized, in the most striking cases, by an egalitarian extremism, a normalizing puritanism, and a sugarcoating uniformity that drive us to act retroactively, even altering the imagination of children and young people. In Italian reprints of old Walt Disney comics, references to the fishing hobby of Goofy and Mickey have disappeared, and in no. 47 (January 1997) of the magazine Comic Art, a reader, Daniele Danese, pointed out that in another re-edition of a Disney comic (published in 1974) it was specified that the beer drunk by Mickey Mouse was non-alcoholic even though in Italy, at the time the original came out, there was still no mention of non-alcoholic beer.

Political correctness was born in the 1930s in the United States, within a Communist Left-wing that was concerned with recording and analyzing the behavior of party members and militants, particularly regimented and misaligned people, with respect to the positions dictated by Stalinism. Assimilated in the 1960s by certain fringes of the New Left, it arrived in Italy on the wave of the 1968 protests; subsequently, it rapidly took hold and assumed larger and larger dimensions. The late 1980s was decisive: at this time, in some of the most prestigious North ←9 | 10→American universities, starting with that of Michigan (1988), precise regulations (speech codes) began to spread. The intent was to regulate the verbal behavior among the residents on the various campuses, applying administrative sanctions to anyone who indulged in racist, sexist or homophobic language.

The spread of the first speech codes, in the late 1980s, had gone hand in hand with the propagation of a critical, polemical, and sarcastic use of the expression politically correct (and political correctness). A considerable part of public opinion had begun to distance itself sharply from the absolute and unassailable values embraced by those codes – values imposed by a cultural orthodoxy suspected of wanting to drag American society back into the past. With the excuse of inclusion and self-determination, the aspiration to a civilizing universal equality, the unstoppable achievement of equal rights between men and women, and compensation for the sufferings and injustices suffered by millions humiliated and subjected for centuries to the colonialist, white and western male, a bourgeois-born neo-progressivism had returned to spread the creed of communist totalitarianism of half a century before, accentuating its moralizing demands and aiming at achieving a much more ambitious ultimate goal. The abolition of the economic disparities produced by capitalism gave way to the delegitimization and cultural dismantling of Western civilization in the name of a catechetical and radical ethical relativism, with the proletariat replaced by the excluded, the marginalized, the oppressed, the “different” of all possible species: sexual, ethnic, religious, cultural. ←10 | 11→And starting in the early seventies, with the rise of environmental movements, even plants and animals.