London Fidgets in the Culture Wars as Buenos Aires Reframes the Game

Is there any cultural kerfuffle that the venerable British Museum cannot escape? Last month it was a packed fashion show in front of ancient Greek sculptures that touched off a firestorm. This week it is a collision of ancient Roman soldiers with the humorless hordes of Instagram, and results are not pretty. To promote its new exhibition, “Legion,” museum marketers posted a message that read in part, “Girlies, if you’re single and looking for a man, this is your sign to go to the British Museum’s new exhibition, Life in the Roman Army, and walk around looking confused. You’re welcome.” Ha ha, maybe.As if the mere use of the word “girlies” by one of the world’s preeminent cultural institutions was not enough to get the ranks of academics and humorless Zoomers crying sexism, the cheeky suggestion that female museum-goers could be looking for something other than historical edification was enough to get them strenuously clutching at their pearls. London’s Telegraph newspaper reported that the post was simply meant to poke fun at last year’s TikTok trend wherein, as the Daily Mail reported, women “shared clips of themselves expressing bewilderment at how often the men in their lives think about the Roman Empire — in some cases, more often than sex.” Yet not everybody found it funny, though — and (mercifully) not everyone uses TikTok. A visiting research fellow at King’s College London, Claire Millington, commented on social media, “Unrelenting fascist imagery and sexism dolloped on top.”The British Museum, recognizing a bad publicity move when it sees one, deleted the post and apologized: “We are not actually suggesting that women need to look for dates or pretend to be stupid. Apologies to anyone who wasn’t aware of the wider context who felt offended by this meme,” a museum representative said.That is something it did not do for what many consider to be a much greater cultural faux pas — staging a fashion show in front of the Elgin Marbles, which Greek officials lambasted as demonstrating “zero respect” for Greek culture. The Instagram post teasingly conflating Roman warriors with romance has as yet provoked no similar ire from Rome. Under the stewardship of George Osbourne, a former chancellor of the Exchequer, the British Museum has been no stranger to controversy. Last year, say, the museum was found to have lost 2,000 items in its inventory. Mr. Osbourne has also come under fire for discussing a possible return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens — discussions that apparently transpired without the sanction of Downing Street. What in the world was he thinking?In respect of the outrage over the marketing of the ancient Roman show, should the scions of British culture really care? They might have no choice. A student at London’s prestigious Saint Martin’s School of Art told this correspondent: “You would not believe the level of political correctness in this country right now, and it’s not only about what you can say or write. We are even coached on how we should frame sociologically the way we express ourselves artistically.”Freedom of expression appears to be having a better run in sunnier climes. The University of Florida has shuttered its chief diversity office and halted DEI-focused vendor contracts.Far from Britain and a growing number of European countries that are flirting with the imposition of new rules on use of language in the name of gender equality, Argentina is pushing back against an overdose of political correctness as it applies to the Spanish lexicon. Last week the Argentine president, Javier Milei, ordered the prohibition of so-called inclusive language by the national government. At a press conference his spokesman, Manuel Adorni, said that steps will be taken “to prohibit inclusive language and everything related to gender perspective throughout the national public administration.” He specified that “the letter ‘e,’ the ‘@,’ and ‘x’ will not be used along with the unnecessary inclusion of the feminine variation of a word in all public administration documents.”All nouns in Spanish have a gender, typically designated by the “-o” ending for masculine and the “-a” ending for feminine. Advocates of language “inclusivity” have concocted gender-neutral endings to make masculine words cover both sexes — for example, todos (a masculine generic meaning “everyone”) would be made by such advocates into the gender neutral “todxs,” “todes,” or “tod@s.” Mr. Milei will be having none of it. Last month, the ministry of defense stated that the use of “so-called ‘inclusive language’” did not correspond to the linguistic rules of Royal Spanish Academy and the Argentine Academy of Letters.What do creeping curbs on truly free speech in Britain — or for that matter, America — have to do with the winds of change in Argentina? Not enough, at least not at present, boys and girlies.

London Fidgets in the Culture Wars as Buenos Aires Reframes the Game

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