Not sure how he's positioned himself as anti-feminist and homophobic
he's publicly spoken out against homophobia and misogyny
he did play a homophobic and misogynistic character once, but that was a character
as for using the word 'gay' as a slur, he would argue that words can change in meaning, just like the word mong - which he also uses as a slur.
(, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 21:26, Share, Reply)
I couldn't give a fuck how he'd argue about words changing meaning
He seems happy to deliberately offend people by using 'gay' and 'cunt' (and, as you remind me, 'mong') as slurs then he blames the offended people for taking offence. He reminds me of the kind of people who say it is OK to call black people 'niggers' because "that's what they call each other".
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wakeupandsmellthebacon, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 21:41,
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I get the whole nigger thing, but...
Frankie Boyle uses that word (essentially calling black people niggers) in a joke about the ministry of war having a department of nigger-bombing. In that joke, the word is offensive (and is paraphrasing a historic person) but the use of it in that joke isn't.
Similarly with Dave Chappelle, he used that word alot in one of his performances, but he was expressing a truth about how some black people use that word.
And in Shaun of the Dead, the guy in it says 'whatssup ma niggers' to his white friends, and I can't see that as in anyway racist.
The problem with using words like 'nigger', 'gay', 'queer' (e.g. Queer Theory), 'mong', etc, in new ways, is that you run the risk of empowering those who use it in the old negative way. But that doesn't mean that language should not be played with and offensive language be reappropriated (much like how the punks tried to acquire nazi symbols and rob them of nazi ideology).
The problem with making the word nigger taboo is that you essentialise its meaning, that it is by its nature both a signifier of black people and a word to hurt people. The problem is that you ignore the social context of this speech act, and so end up demonizing the innocent, just like some blacking up was rightly denounced as racist, but then all black up was denounced as racist and so blacking-up with no racist basis (such as some Morris Dancing) came under attack - and we can imagine whiting up becoming a similar crime and thus the whiting up that happens in some African tribes being denounced.
(, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 22:08, Share, Reply)
But Gervais didn't use mong, cunt and gay in new ways.
He used them as slurs, as insults intended to cause offence. He is not reappropriating the words.
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wakeupandsmellthebacon, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 22:19,
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He does use mong as an insult, but not an insult of the mentally disabled.
I often use the word invalid as an insult, usually against someone who's lazy or who exaggerate their illness. I don't use it as a word for people who are physically disabled, because I don't think the word has any place describing them - I don't think its original medical usage should have any meaning or power in today's world.
As for the word cunt, Gervais is following the view of at least one major feminist.
zeezeescorner.tumblr.com/post/27342164977/germaine-greer-on-the-social-power-of-the-word-cunt
(, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 22:30, Share, Reply)
not only Germaine Greer, but the other highly intellectual feminist Judith Butler says the same thing
and you're calling them anti-feminists, you monster!
(, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 22:37, Share, Reply)
I've just read the piece you linked.
You and I seem to have understood it quite differently.
In the context Gervais uses cunt, he means a most awful person. That objectifies and diminishes women, as Greer says. If he used it to mean, for example, something powerful, exciting, hidden then I'd be agreeing with him.
Similarly for gay and mong. Using gay to insult someone simultaneously insults gays by implying that they are such awful people that they are synonymous with awfulness. [I seem to be channeling John Inman now].
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wakeupandsmellthebacon, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 22:54,
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just my opinion, but you're over thinking it
many people use words without thought, it's lazy abuse which should be corrected, especially when a public figure, but its not an intentional slight on a particular group.
Also words can be abstract. You can call someone a cunt in the same way you call them a shit. It's not specifically descriptive of a vagina or a stool sample, it's just a word, not deliberately negative toward women.
I'm not making excuses for Gervais, just my own interpretation of cunt as a swear. I personally love fannies so it would be silly to use them as an insult.
Sorry to post and run, I'm not ignoring any replies, just going offline now
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HappyToast Groat froth, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 23:03,
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I think you're actually agreeing that Gervais was/is wrong
just that the intention, the mens rea, is absent.
I would say that Gervais's intention is feminist, anti-homophobe, anti-racist, and anti-disabilist. That his intention is based on the evidence of linguistics and embedded in a method of emancipatory action that was most prominently used by feminists and the gay rights movement.
He cannot thus be criticised specifically on what he says, but how successful he is in changing and escaping the oppressive relations that these words initially operated in. This is how we criticise those feminists and gay activists that sought to play with language, not by saying that they were essentially mysogynous (spelling?) and homophobic but that their theory of action, their praxis, was wrong.
(, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 23:21, Share, Reply)
yes and no
I can see it from both sides. We should have swears that can be said without offending other people by accident. But equally we should have some responsibility for things said in public.
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HappyToast Groat froth, Wed 17 Sep 2014, 11:14,
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yes, Greer is arguing something else.....I'll give you that...and I've actually never heard or read her argument....but I was just adding weight to the playing with language theme
as for when you say 'using gay to insult someone simultaneously insults gays....', I feel a bit unwell
yes, it works in the case of gays (if that's what their official and natural name is) but you can't say 'Using mong to insult someone simultaneously insults mongs...'.
Mongs are not mentally disabled people. Niggers are not black people. The linkage that these words made in the past should be attacked in every way in today's world. The insulting power of these words can be divorced from their original meanings.
As for the gay word, I personally dislike it being used as an insult, and its similar to when a man is called a girl, or he throws like a girl. This doesn't mean that a word cannot diverge into two distinct usages, which may well happen with the word gay, but I think that such a development is more difficult than words like mong and nigger and invalid and moron and ....
I would back up my argument that a word can be a powerful insult without referring to its original meaning and social act by providing some examples of words we use today as insults but that have no conscious or unconscious relation to its original meaning, but I can't be arsed to do the research.
(, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 23:12, Share, Reply)
Shut up Bert, or Ernie, or whatever. You're like The Guardian, wrong about everything, all of the time.
(, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 23:31, Share, Reply)
This is a really good thread and I want to read through what you linked
but I'd definitely disagree with the "Mongs are not mentally disabled people. Nigger's are not black people." part.
Those words do pick out sets of people, and it's very clear what set of people they pick out. Being slurs, there's an additional chunk of meaning carried along with their denotation, which is information about the speaker's attitudes towards the referent (and maybe the listener as well).
There's a real lack of good work on the linguistic properties of slurs, at least in part because of how hard it is to come up with tests that probe people's linguistic intuitions without dragging in their feelings about the world.
If you took out a picture of different ethnic groups and told people to circle all of the chinks or something, they might not do any circling because they don't share the implicit attitude that's packed into the slur's meaning, but it doesn't mean they don't know what group of people it refers to. In fact, if you didn't know what people the slur referred to, it would be harder to recognize that it was offensive to begin with.
It's a bit like giving someone a true or false test with sentences like "Albert Einstein, the horrid bell end that he was, was born in the German Empire."
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the prick of misery pierced my foot on a spiiiike on, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 23:57,
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No. This is not a really good thread. Next you'll be telling us that Bill Hicks was the greatest comedian that ever lived. Funny is funny. Cunts are cunts. Funny can be rude and offensive. But rude and offensive does not equal funny.
(, Wed 17 Sep 2014, 0:04, Share, Reply)
I definitely agree that things that are rude aren't automatically funny, if that's all you're saying.
But if a guy gets famous while saying homophobic and misogynistic stuff, and loads of people laugh at it and pay money to see it all the time, I think you're better off trying to figure out why that can happen than just asserting that it isn't funny after all.
Telling people that something's offensive just makes it more funny when a famous guy gets up on stage and gets away with telling jokes about it to his audience. I don't like it, but I'm pretty sure that's the point of those kinds of jokes.
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the prick of misery pierced my foot on a spiiiike on, Wed 17 Sep 2014, 0:45,
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re: the last bit of your post *Bono alert*
I think you're totally right.
I know someone who was interviewed back when the FFC was trying to decide whether Bono was describing a sexual act when he said "really, really fucking brilliant" at the 2003 Golden Globe awards.
I think he makes a pretty good case that "fucking" as an intensifier isn't referring to sex stuff.
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=801
I think you could probably show the same thing with a number of insults, but not all of them.
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the prick of misery pierced my foot on a spiiiike on, Wed 17 Sep 2014, 0:28,
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