I remember these times well: taking women’s studies classes and being told what was “offensive”; wanting to buy Camille Paglia’s smoulderingly awful and incredible book Sexual Personae only to find it banned it at the Toronto’s Women’s Bookstore; saying, myself, of the actually funny Clay, whose material I had not yet even heard, “Oh, I hate him.”
(…)
And I said this while never thinking I might want to challenge the term “offensive” as lacking in criticality or meaning.
Calling something offensive is like, as reported by Martin Amis, Truman Capote gossiping aimlessly of someone: “Oh, her, she’s a real throw-up number.” It is an opinion, and an oppressive one at that.
