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Yet again, homophobic bullshit directed at Zachary Quinto from his so-called fans on
ontd_startrek
It doesn't help that the majority of commenters there are children. I'm not exaggerating, they're under 18. So a lot of them genuinely don't know any better, and grew up in the age of Will and Grace where it's OK for gay people to exist as long as we're non-threatening and sexless and the butt of jokes.
I responded to some of the comments - a lot of them are defending it on the grounds of "we didn't mean it that way! It's just a joke!" No. This Shakesville post explains why not (well, the post is about sexism but the same argument applies to homophobia):
If a LGBT person says something is homophobic and a straight person says "it's just a harmless joke, get over it" who's right? Hint: not the one who belongs to the privileged group that systematically oppresses the other group!
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It doesn't help that the majority of commenters there are children. I'm not exaggerating, they're under 18. So a lot of them genuinely don't know any better, and grew up in the age of Will and Grace where it's OK for gay people to exist as long as we're non-threatening and sexless and the butt of jokes.
I responded to some of the comments - a lot of them are defending it on the grounds of "we didn't mean it that way! It's just a joke!" No. This Shakesville post explains why not (well, the post is about sexism but the same argument applies to homophobia):
There's a very common misperception that sexism is subjective—that any given incident identified by one person as sexist could be identified by another as not sexist, and either both of them are right, because the whole thing is just a matter of opinion anyway, or the latter is right, because if it's not equally obvious to everyone, it can't be sexist. It's this conventional wisdom about the subjectivity of sexism that underlies the ubiquitous "I don't see it" rejoinder, particularly recurrent in discussions of expressed sexism against women, on which this post will be focused.
If a LGBT person says something is homophobic and a straight person says "it's just a harmless joke, get over it" who's right? Hint: not the one who belongs to the privileged group that systematically oppresses the other group!