Agree. It’s not saying there’s anything wrong with Trump giving Putin a bj in itself. It’s implying that Putin, despite being the leader of a smaller and weaker country, gets to receive sexual pleasure from Trump without giving anything in return. (since by implication, Trump owes Putin big time for both winning him the election and not releasing the blackmail, whatever it is)
I suppose you could say that this is a slur against bottoms, then. Though I think in most relationships, the bottom wants to be brought to orgasm - they just are a bottom because it’s easier to cum for them. Someone who likes being tied up will have a very powerful orgasm hopefully once they receive enough stimulation. (of either gender or pairing)
Well, I don’t know about “stupid, childish, or retarded”, but as for “completely unprofessional”, – Colbert’s a commedian. So in this context, it IS professional.
I don’t read it that way; to me, it’s like saying ‘the only thing your lips are good for, is kissing Putin’s ass’, only put more crassly. I.e. it’s not the fact that it’s a homosexual encounter that’s relevant, it’s the relative position of both parties—one receiving, the other giving out, which is generally the sort of relationship in which the party that is exclusively giving without receiving anything in return is termed a ‘sucker’.
It would’ve been homophobic if Trump and Putin had been depicted as being on equal footing in a gay relationship, with this nevertheless being intended to reflect poorly on Putin, but I don’t see that as being the intent.
Well, the general perception is that cocksucking simply is more pleasurable for the sucked than the suckee, across gender borders. So there just is a certain subservience, in that it implies an unequal relationship, but independently of whether it’s a homo- or heterosexual act.
At first, I thought it was kind of funny, and no big deal. But the more I think about it, the worse I feel about it. There’s a bit of a double standard here. If Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity said something about Obama sucking King Abdullah’s dick, I know for sure it would seriously piss me off.
In my opinion, if this comment had been made by a conservative about a liberal politician, many people would call it homophobic, and many of those same people are now defending this as not homophobic."
This is one of the more interesting themes of the thread IMO, in a couple of other posts too. OK there’s a blatant double standard wrt to the concept of what’s homophobic (or racist, sexist etc) speech. But there should be. It all depends who says it, and moreover what we say the people saying it believe.
But on that basis what double standard couldn’t be explained away? Why not just say, ‘double standards are fine as long as the people imposing them think so’.
For example, Trump’s flaws IMO would take up too much space to enumerate. But Trump isn’t particularly homophobic AFAICT, besides the blanket statement that anyone not on the PC/liberal team is homophobic, or has to absolutely prove they’re not. To establish Trump’s ‘homophobia’ one would have to lean heavily on guilt by association, or ‘you accept the support of’…but AFAIK Democratic politicians typically accept the support of devout African American evangelicals who might be called homophobic* also. Or that Trump is so ‘in love’ (in whatever sense) with Putin, who definitely does use anti-homosexual views popular in Russia as a rallying point.
But IMO your line of thinking can end up just using the accusation one wants to make (‘Trump is homophobic’) as the excuse for a double standard in using implied disparagement of men who fellate other men that would otherwise be called homophic itself. It seems to me to have a circular logic component.
*let’s use a broad definition here. I don’t personally think it’s a ‘phobia’ to accept Biblical injunctions against homosexual behavior, though one can disagree with it surely. But the term ‘homophobic’ is often used much more elastically, in the limit to denote any perceived less pro-gay rights view relative to any perceived more pro-gay rights view.
Well, here’s another test of the oppoiste. Bill Maher routinely implies that McCain and Graham have a gay relationship going. And it’s not meant as a compliment. Is that homophobic?
Comedian A, intending to criticize Male B, delivers a punchline that says that Male B fellates Male Putin. Is it a homophobic joke? Well, is the punchline intended to mean
[ol]
[li]Ewwww, Male B is gay[/li][li]Ewwww, Male Putin’s anatomy is disgusting[/li][li]Hahahahaha, Male B sucks or[/li][li]Hahahahaha, Male B only cares about pleasing Male Putin[/li][/ol]
?
If 1, then yep. Joke is homophobic. If 2-4, nope, not homophobic.
Colbert is not on record as thinking gay people are icky, so we can be fairly sure he didn’t intend 1. If Mike Enzi made the remark. . .yeah, he’d probably take more heat for it (per Bricker’s item 2), but I think that would be fair.
IMO that just gets back to what I said, ‘double standards are OK as long as the people imposing them say so’.
OK if the person making the joke was outspokenly anti-gay that would be a factor to take into account. But for plenty of conservative figures it would get into a debate about whether supporting a traditional definition of marriage (which many Democratic voters also support) made a person ‘anti-gay’. Which is why again IMO we apply rules of logic which give primacy to what a person says, and only secondarily if at all, if relevant, who they are.
Similarly for the targets. Again if the excuse is that Trump is a homophobe, who says? And that’s even a harder label to pin on McCain or Graham (in the case of Maher’s milder joke pointed out above) without the blanket, ‘all Republicans are homophobes, but Democrats aren’t even if devout traditionalist religious voters, voting Democratic absolves them’.
And that kind of thinking IMO is what’s ‘delaying’ the ‘inevitable’ political dominance of liberal Democrats. Yes a lot of people also hate when liberals go looking for PC controversies when there’s nothing, but here Colbert made a joke that is clearly fueled by the idea that men who give head to other men are weak and to be disparaged. That doesn’t sum up Colbert’s whole career (which I don’t think much of, but one statement still doesn’t negate a positive opinion of Colbert). But if that particular statement is homophobic for somebody else to say, then it’s homophobic for Colbert to say. Or it’s not for either, in general. With exceptional hypotheticals where they belong, at the margins, as exceptions.
I think what you are missing, Corry El, is that the thinking runs something along the lines of “It’s OK for Colbert to say this because he isn’t homophobic. It’s Trump/Trump Supporters problem if they find it insulting because they are homophobic. Besides, he was just joking.”
“living under a cave”, was verbiage, once used by an uppity hypocritical christian bigot, on the dope. It was great.
I figured that would be where brown simpletons lived, being all low en-stuff. Could be wrong, I donno.
Exactly. I could see the Far Left saying the exact same joke about a hypothetical HRC as president if she was perceived as “sucking up to” a Putin or an Assad, as RealPolitik instead of defending human rights, including free speech and the oppression of gays and of women. And yes I would see some labelling that same joke then as sexist and it would also not be.
To me it is not homophobic at all. It’s something worse. Just not funny, replacing crude for clever.
And yet one almost never actually sees a woman insulted by calling a c-cks-cker.* I don’t think we can ignore history and societal usage in construing Colbert’s remark. It’s almost always been a specifically gay-themed insult that relies on the message that gay sex = weakness.
Sorry; I’m at work and would prefer to be careful.