A subtle point here, although to be fair, I’m also pretty bad at seeing the offense of these types of things…
He didn’t insult Trump by simply saying he sucked dick.
He insulted Trump by saying he sucked PUTIN’S dick. That’s the key point.
It’s not really about Trump being GAY as much as it’s about him being Putin’s toy.
Well yeah I don’t agree with the assessment, but I don’t really care either way and am happy to empathize with people if they think the intent was poorly conceived.
If it were a female he was referring to (Hillary Clinton, for example), would the joke be considered heterophobic? The way the joke came across to me, it had nothing to do with sexual orientation.
I agree. I find it hard to believe that Colbert’s intent was to insult homosexuals, any more than the “Putin is a gay clown” bit was. I think the subjects of those sketches would find it insulting, which was the point. Still, as others have suggested, I bet he finds a way to make amends in a positive way.
In case you haven’t seen the other one:
Agreed. That said, it uses a term which some include in slurs toward homosexuals, so I can certainly understand sensitivity around it. But it 100% was not Colbert’s intent for anyone gay to be offended. He was, instead, making fun of the homophobia exhibited by some of the GOP and also in Russia while simultaneously calling out Trump and Putin’s “working relationship” which helped get The Orange One elected in addition to his fawning over autocrats.
Aw, man, I was going to write the same thing! Trump sucking Putin’s dick is an act of subservience, not sexuality. The term “holster” implies as much. It’s just the place Putin puts his dick when he’s not using it for something else.
-Tom
Level One: Steve Bannon
Good news, beginners: A Bannon quote is pretty easy to spot. When he’s on the record, Trump’s bellicose chief strategist speaks in jargon befitting a student of ancient martial historians and fascist philosophers. He has vowed to fight for “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” He has invoked “Judeo-Christian values” as the answer to a “metastasizing” “Islamic fascist” movement.
[…]
And who does somewhere around 98% of the dick-sucking in the world? Women and gay men. Who does very little dick-sucking? Straight men. I mean, some dick-sucking certainly, but they’re definitely not doing their fair share.
It’s maybe not such a great look to be equating subservience to dick-sucking.
Donald Trump
NSFW, but somewhat appropriate here:
That’s my generation, though. We used retard a lot as well. Doesn’t just give us the right to keep doing it.
I dunno. You can suck someone’s dick for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons, like any other sex act (i.e. act of love or profit vs act of ingratiation or submission*).
Like if we were to say that Trump was letting Putin fuck him in a non-specific way, would that be more or less problematic? Or that Trump slept his way in to the Oval Office?
I’m not really decided on the issue. I can see arguments both ways.
*submission outside the context of an understood dom/sub relationship.
I feel like I’m abusing the like system by liking your post.
-Tom
Ok, you have a point.
But I have to ask, would you have reacted any differently if he had called Trump “Putin’s bitch”? Have you reacted the same way when that kind of language was used in other contexts, e.g. John Romero?
Not excusing it or defending it by asking, just trying to see all sides.
Of course we would have reacted differently. That would be misogyny, not homophobia.
Well I don’t like gendered insults, but this is not that. But it is similar to “cocksucker” as a pejorative. So maybe not great.
That said, the art of the insult is to tailor your insult to do maximum psychological damage to your intended target, playing on their homophobia and pride is, I think, effective.
The better version of this is that great graffiti picture of Putin an Trump sharing a deep meaningful kiss. It’s just more positive since it implies true love and affection, and yet would still be just as insulting to the intended targets.
Colbert never said there was any sucking or tongue action occurring, simply that Putin was storing his cock in Trump’s mouth. I don’t know of any situation, gay or otherwise, in which this is a normal sexual act. It appears to be more of a storage solution than anything else.
Yes and no. It is, in a sense at least, insulting someone’s assumed sexual orientation by virtue of their gender, and as @charmtrap pointed out a term used to describe subservience. I was curious if people saw that differently, and if so, how/why.
I have a bunch of gay friends and a while back I went to jokingly insult one of them in the way you do when you hang out with your buds. As I rolled through all of my options, I realized just how homophobic our collective insult vocabulary is.
It went something like:
“That was totally gay.” (this one is actually a running joke, he likes to call things gay in an exaggerated way)
“Yep.”
“Man, you suck.”
“Yep.”
“Argh! Damn it, cocksucker.”
“Yep.”
“Cockgobbler?”
“Still yes.”
“Dick-sucking motherfucker?”
“That one doesn’t really work.”
“Whore?”
“Probably.”
“Cuntlicker?”
“EWWWWWWW”
Over time, I’ve tried to strike some of this from my vocabulary, but it’s hard to change. My wife, ever the social justice type, let me know the other day that I shouldn’t call things “crazy”. That’s crazy.
I’m starting to think almost every insult is rooted in either questioning someone’s manliness/sexuality, their mother, or link them to a disabled person. There are very few safe insults.
I like how Colbert reacted to the backlash. He stands behind the intent of his words - to insult the president and highlight his ties with Russia - but regrets the words that he chose.
Seems reasonable to me.
An insult is supposed to disparage the other person in a pointed way. They’re inherently offensive because they attack personal attributes usually via comparison to something or group society has decided is “lesser” than the ideal.
Take the other part of Colbert’s insult. “You talk like a sign language gorilla that got hit in the head.” It’s funny, creative, and evocative, but it’s also a teeny bit insulting to head-trauma victims. No one goes nuts about it because we all understand the target of the joke is Trump, not concussion sufferers, plus people with CTE aren’t historically victims of prejudice. It’s a “punch up” as the term goes.
The cockholster joke is less clear to people because we now understand that homosexuality has been a “punch down” for basically forever. The joke target is still Trump, and I think you’d have to search hard to find a gay man that actually took the joke as an attack on his sexuality, but we all know there’s an element of the joke that relies on the common perception that the person giving gay oral sex is subservient or “lesser” than the person getting the BJ.
I still don’t think Colbert’s joke is that big of a problem, but then again, I haven’t been fighting for my sexuality all my life, so I’ll defer to the people with a personal perspective.