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South Park Tackles "The F Word," Calls Everyone Over 20 Lame
Before I start this, I feel I should mention that every time I try and provide commentary on a Comedy Central program, you guys tell me I have no sense of humor. You’re probably about to do it again. Keyboards ready? Good. Last night South Park attempted to take on, in their own way, changing connotations for words like "faggot" and "gay." I agree their intent was noble. Execution, well, at least we can agree that Harley riders are annoying. The general premise is a group of Harley riders goes around the town ruining everyone’s moments with their loud bikes. It comes out that the riders are really more into being the center of attention than anything else, to the point they start making the throbbing sounds, much like “motorboating” when they’re not riding in order to maintain the focus on them.
Excessively loud exhaust, either on bikes or cars, is a personal pet peeve. The boys make it their personal mission to stop the bikers by repeatedly calling them fags in public to demean them. They mocking them as attention whores. And the word they choose to use for "attention whore" is “faggots.”
Cartman crapping on their seats was typical. Adding the flags was inspired. The come up to the bikers wherever they are and call them fags. They paint “FAGS GET OUT” across buildings downtown. The gay population, led by Big Gay Al and Slave, are mortified. But the boys own up to the graffiti, and make a case that “fags” isn’t demeaning to homosexuals, bu demeaning to the people it’s directed at. In fact, it now has a meaning all its own according to them and they’re actually horrified that anybody thinks that they could be homophobic.
A world where this isn't homophobic is an interesting concept. Eventually, the whole town signs on to the new use of the word, even the gays, but national gay groups say that since the dictionary doesn’t agree with the new use, it’s still offensive. So the boys get the keepers of the dictionary, led by Emmanuel Lewis in a monocle, to come to town so they can present a case for changing the formal meaning. After some violence, things are suitably resolved.
Why the dictionary editor is Emmanuel Lewis in a monocle, I have no idea. But it's inspired. It’s really, truly impressive how many times they manage to fit “fag” and "faggot” into the script. Indeed, it harkens back to the uncensored “sh*t” episode they did in Season Five with the onscreen counter reaching 162 times. And this is in the same vein. Once I was over the shock factor, I realized there was nothing offensive at all about the episode and that they were making a point.
The point actually was punctuated everywhere in the episode. Words evolve. Their usage evolves. I don’t actually agree that we’re at that point with gay slurs like “fag” or “that’s so gay,” but I can recognize that it’s coming. If you talk to the average 15-year-old using those terms to denote something “lame”, they’re most likely very gay supportive. They’d actually be offended that you think they were homophobic. The word just doesn’t mean the same to them as it does to many adults. We have to realize that “faggot” only loosely connects in my generation to the times when it was about burning us alive, like bundles of wood, or “faggots.” I’m not onboard with where we are on the evolution of the language. I’ve had “F**king Faggot!” screamed at me while I walked down the street holding hands with a boyfriend and felt physically threatened by it. Those words are still used to wound, but by the time the eternally 8-years-old boys of South Park have grown up, that may not be the case.
They played "Identify the faggot" with children on the street who got it, even when adults didn't. The whole episode is viewable online here, which is much better than me trying recap satire. What did you guys think?
Submitted by on Thu, 2009-11-05 15:12. |
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really?
Those faggots Parker and Stone ...
... and I'm using the term "faggot" here in their sense.
I'm not bothered by the show, which I've watched and generally enjoyed for years, nor am I offended by the use of the word "faggot." I am offended by the stupidity of Parker and Stone's lame-ass premise. There's nothing new or thoughtful or particularly interesting about it. I've often run across similar rationales by white racists who claim that they use "nigger" to refer only to low-class, lazy, drug-using blacks who don't want to work. (It's not only whites who do this: it was a major theme of The Boondocks' infamous Martin Luther King Jr. episode a couple of years back.) They have nothing against African-Americans in general, these fat shit-eating racist faggots claim -- only against lazy criminal "niggers." I've never found this sort of thing convincing.
The same goes for those nominally straight males who claim that "faggot" does not refer to men who take it up the ass, but rather to weak, despicable pansies who can't control their women, who aren't real manly men. I doubt that any gay man, like myself, who's seen nominally straight men shrieking "faggot" from the safety of their passing car will take this sort of claim seriously, if only because in these closet cases' minds, any man who has sex with another man is automatically a weak, despicable pansy who can't control his woman and isn't a real manly man. (Similar worthless claims have been made about the Spanish equivalent term maricon.)
In C. J. Pascoe's excellent book Dude, You're a Fag, she reports that most of the straight high school boys she observed and interviewed claimed that they didn't dislike gays and didn't use fag or gay to refer to actual gay guys. She quickly found this to be a lie -- the same guys harassed, verbally and physically, the gay boys in the school. (I'd also argue that such boys are not entitled to harass, verbally or physically, non-gay boys either.)
Maybe you could argue that straight guys came up with words like "faggot", and so are entitled to use it as they wish. This might persuade me if they hadn't also appropriated "gay" as a synonym for "faggot" over the past couple of decades. They did this so quickly and successfully that now many younger gay people, and some straights, think that "gay" was always derogatory. They can't understand why we older queers would use a word that is so negative, and refuse to believe that it wasn't always negative. This is what Boy Culture will do to any word, because Boy Culture believes that being penetrated is inherently degrading (which is why Boy Culture hates women, except for Moms, who gave birth them by immaculate conception), so any man who is penetrated is degraded, but more important, any male a Boy wants to degrade will be taunted as if he were or had been penetrated.
If those faggots Parker and Stone really wanted to be witty, daring, and cutting-edge they could have come up with another term to reclaim in this episode. Nigger, maybe -- it's fun to speculate what sort of reaction they'd have gotten. Or how about Republican? But I feel sure they'd have considered Republican to be going too far. I mean, satire is all very well, but there's no need to be offensive, or to pick on an oppressed minority that has harmed no one.