e Beckwith and Bauman, 1993, p. 9). It is probably no accident that both the debate over political correctness and the term PC itself arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s, at a time when American public life as a whole was dominated by an agenda associated with the political right, and particularly with the Reagan Administration and (to a lesser degree) with its successor, the Bush Administration.
It will be argued in the following discussion that PC arose essentially as a defensive reaction on the part of those groups which had established a position for themselves and their values on college campuses in the wake of the social and academic changes of the late 1960s and the 1970s and which found themselves under threat by the resurgent conservatism of the 1980s. It will also be suggested that the PC language debate has been largely counterproductive. On the one hand, criticism of PC has become a potent tool in the hands of conservatives; on the other, it has become an object of mirth, not unmixed with derision, in the popular culture as a whole.
Thus, for example, the phrase "vertically challenged" is coupled, in the above reference (Beckwith & Bauman, 1993, p. 12 n. 3), with the jocular proposition that impotent males ought therefore to be characterized as "horizontally challenged." The joke is obviously barbed; sexual impotence is presumably a humiliating state of affairs for those who suffer from it and is likely to be an embarrassing subject even to think about (at least for males). Simply by bringing the subject of impotence into the question, the authors of the above quote have effectively stigmatized the entire concept of PC language.
Popular-culture backlash against PC is visible in other forms as well. A number of advertising campaigns have made a deliberate point of being offensive in PC terms; thus, for example, the Hooters restaurant chain runs ads alluding to its exploitation of women (Levine, 1993)...