West Indian Cricketer Chis Gayle got fined $10,000 and was asked to apologize to the female interviewer. His responses were construed as sexual harassment. Is this a political correctness gone too far? Or could it be a compliment viewed through an incorrect lenses? Or a simple joke taken out of context?
There is a possibility where a compliment can be construed as harassment when cultures clash. A joke can be viewed as racist or sexist when taken out of context. Is this slicing and dicing making us dangerously more civilized or less?
Is it not that harassment is some unwanted or undesirable act or activity happening repeatedly? In case of Chris Gayle, complimenting a person how beautiful her eyes are by saying ‘you have the most beautiful eyes’ can become harassment if the same thing is said slightly differently as ‘came to see your beautiful eyes’.
Many times over, I have been corrected by my kids and others to say the things in a manner that is not construed as offensive. The words I chose to dismiss what the other person had said or to brush off the comments as not their worth in gold were incorrect. When there exist a thesaurus to provide many similar words for a word of your choice, it could be anyone’s guess that a non-English speaking person like me could have chosen a word out of many having similar meanings, but ended up incorrect in usage of that word depending on the context.
Add to that the grammatical absurdity that plays a role while translating a full sentence from one language to the other. While we can take a humorous dig at that through movies like ‘Lost in Translation’ and ‘Spanglish’, is it also not necessary for us to forgive such errors attributing them to cultural differences as contributors of such errors?
Fantasizing your own weird scenarios is ok as long as it remains private, but can bite you to death if it becomes public accidentally. Such errors have happened on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and on few such social media, forcing the person to apologize publicly and in some extreme cases making the person to lose a job that is near and dear to him or her. It has painted a person as a monster on many occasions and in most other occasions as a uncivilized or rude.
In an open society that we live nowadays or our kids have accustomed to live nowadays, this type of political correctness or witch-hunt necessary? A very few of those who have ignored this line have gained popularity unexpectedly on the world stage, while in most cases it has pulled them down either as bullies or bad-mannered.
As one primate to the other, can I say ‘Come on, take a break (hike)’? Harassment is harassment only when one establishes ‘repeated-ness’; assault is assault only when one establishes an act of violence or an act that has tormented a person as act of violence. When there are 50 shades of gray between a simple innocent spectrum of sexual harassment or an assault on one end to the other end of spectrum which is significantly different, aren’t we civilized enough to see that and not make a mountain of the mole hill each and every time?
How we deal with these shades of gray, while trying to bring back sanity in an open society of the 21st century, will be the essence of decent living without the drudgery of making it stick in the arena of political correctness.