Those f**kin' spastics took our jobs!

On British Television at the moment is a series called 'Beauty and the Beast: The Ugly Face of Prejudice.' Much like everything else it has annoyed me. The premise of the show is to get people with a range of facial disfigurements to spend a couple of days with a beauty obsessive. The advertised ethos is outwardly for two people at opposite ends of the beauty spectrum to spend time together: they argue, they fall out, but eventually they each learn something from the other. Much like my fat-people stories, the actual purpose of the show is to let normal people (and I use the word 'normal' very much deliberately) have a good ol' look at some more ol' fashioned freaks. I believe it does however fulfil a valuable public service. It might be 'freakshowish' but televising these sorts of people highlights not only society's unhealthy obsession with beauty, but also it broadens understanding of facial deformity. I'm sure we've all been guilty at some time of unfounded assumptions about a disfigured person's mental faculties. Channel 4 have very cleverly chosen to feature people who, on first sight, one would assume 'aren't all there', but who are in fact far more intelligent that the 'beauty' they are paired with.

This is all lovely stuff; well done channel 4, we're all very impressed. However, this show has annoyed me in two respects.

First off, all these deformed and disfigured people have been sensitively labelled by channel 4 as 'visually different people.' Political correctness annoys me a lot. I have no problem with language being updated and overhauled.  Within the gamut of the English language there are hundreds of words which have been phased out, replaced or simply abandoned for the sake of preserving people's feelings. 'Spastic', for example, in days gone by was a perfectly acceptable word. After being hijacked by kids on the school playground (by the way, if there's one thing I like about children it's their never-ending capacity to come up with ever new and imaginative words to hurt people's feelings) it was swiftly phased out by the respectable members of society without official intervention. Goodbye Spastic Society, hello Scope.

Political correctness, as I understand it, is the name the powers that be gave to their endeavour to force us all into being pleasant and inoffensive citizens. It is the establishment's attempt to second guess the terms which groups or people might take offence to. Society, however, is clever enough to recognise linguistic anachronisms when they arise and capable enough to adapt appropriately. In theory, political correctness is a fantastic idea, unfortunately it ends up being over-thought, over-analysed and as a result, they get most of it horribly wrong . That's exactly what has happened here with 'visually different.' That label tells us absolutely nothing about the people in question; it's less precise than the words it's replacing and as a result all people with any kind of facial disfigurement or deformity fall under the same generic umbrella. In reality, every person on Earth could be described as being 'visually different' from any other. It may not be a pleasant thing to point out, but disfigurements and deformities are aesthetically displeasing features, which are accidentally or incidentally acquired and (given the choice) are unwanted. Everyone is visually different; these people are disfigured, and re-branding them under a different name is not going to make their disfigurement invisible to those without them. No term or word will ever be semantically perfect – you could, for example, using my definition above describe moles or crooked noses as 'disfigurements' – but I can't see how moving away from fairly accurate terms to a generalised one is in any way helpful or progressive. A shovel isn't a differently-abled pitch-fork – for goodness sake, just call a spade a spade.

Second, there's a segment in this show presented by this guy called Adam Pearson. He has a severe facial disfigurement called Neurofibromatosis; a disorder which it's speculated that the Elephant man may have had and a word which you could only be bothered to skim-read.  In this segment he goes around and challenges society's preconceptions and discriminatory tendencies against disfigured people. He goes to places such as advertising agencies, fashion shows and casting agents and then publicly critisises their policies.

What I don't like is his aggressive finger-pointing; going around attributing blame to these institutions for not being more open and inclusive of disfigured people. He was, for example, told by numerous public service employers (restaurants, shops, etc.) that they had no job vacancies minutes after the fairly attractive control subject was told jobs were available. Obviously, that's not a pleasant thing to have happened to anyone, and it does, of course, highlight a significant degree of prejudice in these industries. I don't like it, but that's not to say that I don't agree with it. Prejudice is often used as a byword for what is actually just unfair. There comes a point where limitations have to be adhered to in spite of those limitation being unearned or undeserved. I could train all day every day for the rest of my life but I am never going to be able to become a professional jockey. I'm too tall and too heavy. I'm not going to cry 'discrimination!' when I'm turned down to be a rider in the grand national. Given the choice, I'd rather not be served by 'Elephant Man 2K' if I go out to eat somewhere, and restaurant owners know this.  It's not fair, but at the same time it's no-one's fault - there is no blame here.

I don't think I'm saying anything particularly outrageous here, although if you haven't fully understood what I've said you may think I am. I don't like inequality – if I had it my way I'd be the tallest, fastest, and generally the best at everything (and to be fair I'm not a million miles away from that) – but unless you'd prefer to live in a world where every race ends in a dead heat, everyone scores the same on every test, and every photo that you see is full of people that look just like you, then we really need to learn to accept and celebrate our differences, however unfair or unjustified, not ignore them on the fallacious pretence that they don't or shouldn't matter.