British national treasure Stephen Fry once said that the best response to killjoys who cry, “I’m offended by that!” is to reply: “Well, so fucking what?”

To make a public spectacle of your offended feelings, to declare how rattled you feel by something you saw or heard, is “no more than a whine,” Fry said. And therefore, “it has no meaning.”

He’s right. Today’s battalions of offense-takers are just glorified crybabies. They simply do in public what those always-offended old ladies with blue rinses used to do in private.

In the pre-internet era, when tweeting was something only birds did, elderly offense-takers would post irate letters to some TV station or newspaper that pissed them off. Now, courtesy of the internet, everyone with a gripe, no matter their age, whatever their political bent, can splutter their outrage online.

It’s a veritable outrage industry. From Twittermobs that condemn anyone who says something shocking, to super-sensitive students who ban adult mags, Dukes of Hazard, and phrases that they judge to be “microaggressions,” everyone’s taking offense. And everyone’s insisting that the thing that offended them be squashed.

It’s like we all think we should be protected by our own personal blasphemy law. Once, it was only the likes of Christ who was guarded from “scurrilous, reviling, or contemptuous” material; now we’re all little Jesuses, demanding: “That thing made me feel bad — destroy it!”

“Both giving offense and receiving offense are wonderful things.”

Such endless confected fury, such nonstop churn of personal outrage, isn’t only grating — it’s a barrier to free thought, and even progress.

It invites social paralysis, encouraging us all to obsessively edit our thoughts and police our blather, lest we unwittingly affront someone who has their offense antenna turned up to ten.

Worse, it acts like deadweight on the ankle of artistic experimentation and intellectual daring.

If everything from a saucy music video (like Rihanna’s sexy/violent “Bitch Better Have My Money”) to the arguments of libertarian feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers (who is booed off college campuses for her “different but equal” views on equity feminism) can crank up the outrage machine, then people will think, I better not express that risky thought lurking in my head. I’ll just leave it there, to gather dust. So I’d go further than Fry. The fashion for wailing “I’m offended!” is more than an irritant. It’s the enemy of cultural, political, and personal freedom. It nurtures a climate of “You Can’t Say That!” It gives rise to self-silencing, making people hold back the edgy stuff in their minds, most of which will be nonsense, yeah, but some of which just might be era-shakingly interesting.

We shouldn’t only tell the easily-offended to quit their whimpering. We should also tell them that being offended is good. Far from harming us, it helps us. It forces us to think; it toughens us up; it builds our backbone.

Both giving offense and receiving offense are wonderful things. Indeed, all the freedoms we cherish, all the tech and comforts we enjoy, are the gift of people who gave offense.

If Copernicus hadn’t offended priests with his insistence that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the solar system, we wouldn’t live in such a scientifically savvy world. If the suffragettes hadn’t offended  the natural order, and demanded that women have the same political say as men, we’d still be living in an unequal world. If the publishers of men’s mags — like this one — hadn’t offended the bejesus out of the buttoned-up brigade in the 1950s and 60s, then the sexual revolution might never have happened and many of us would be stuck in a loveless, sexless rut.

The “offensiveness” of earlier generations, their willingness to rail against orthodoxies, made our lives freer, happier, more fulfilling.

Then there’s taking offense. Everyone should open themselves up to offense. You should feel shaken to your core at least once a day. It’s good for you. Don’t stamp out things that offend you; cherish them, embrace them.

The greatest liberal, John Stuart Mill, argued in 1859 that we must allow our beliefs to be “fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed,” because otherwise those beliefs become “dead dogmas.”

In other words, if you cut yourself off from ridicule, and dodge public debate, you become a robot, thinking in a fixed, rigid, dogmatic way. It is only by opening ourselves up to the possibility of being offended that we can give our brain cells a workout and our imagination a spring cleaning.

Living in an offense-free bubble will turn you into a bore and a tyrant. Burst out of it. Today, go out and offend someone, and let someone offend you. You’ll both benefit.

PHOTO: iStock