A General Theory of Offensiveness

Apparently Mitt Romney recently acquired a new Head PR Guy, who promptly tweeted various offensive things, including that Rachel Maddow looks like a man and needs to put on a necklace. Like I said, offensive. But this actually puts me in mind of my recently-formulated general theory of offensiveness: things are directly offensive to a person insofar as they deny the reality or legitimacy of their existence or their experiences. I say "directly offensive" because, if people have a general level of empathy and kindness/decency, something that's directly offensive to one person/group will also be offensive to other people not in that group, but not because their existence has been denied etc. So in that quote from the Romney guy, the offensive part is that he's denying that Rachel Maddow has a legitimate right to exist independent of how well she satisfies this guy's notion of what women should be like.

This theory helps explain why I find a certain kind of anti-internet thinking distinctly offensive. Specifically I mean the strain of thought that says interactions on the internet don't count, or aren't really real, or don't involve genuine connections between people. As someone who's pretty sure he routinely uses the internet in ways that are distinctly real, and do involve actual human connection, I tend to feel like these claims are simply denying that experiences like mine could exist. And that's offensive.

I'm not certain, obviously, but I have a hunch that one would find that nearly every instance of something's being offensive could be rather neatly explained under this framework.