Matt Damon apparently only just realized he shouldn’t use the antigay “f-slur”
Damon said his daughter urged him to stop saying f****t only "months ago"
Matt Damon was apparently comfortable using an antigay slur until this year, when his daughter responded with a “treatise” telling him why he shouldn’t say it.
Discussing “changes in modern masculinity” and shifting attitudes in Hollywood with Britain’s Sunday Times, Damon seemed to suggest he was comfortable using “faggot” despite it being a homophobic slur.
“The word that my daughter calls the ‘f-slur for a homosexual’ was commonly used when I was a kid, with a different application,” Damon, 50, said.
“I made a joke, months ago, and got a treatise from my daughter,” the Stillwater star said. “She left the table. I said, ‘Come on, that’s a joke! I say it in the movie Stuck on You!’”
Damon’s daughter went to her room and “wrote a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous. I said, ‘I retire the f-slur!’ I understood.”
Elsewhere in his interview, Damon said the shifting nature of the media industry meant he had learned to “shut the fuck up more,” but reaction to his interview on Twitter suggested he should have remained silent about using the “f-slur” in 2021.
Writer and comedian Travon Free highlighted that Damon “just figured out ‘months ago’…that he’s not supposed to say the word f*ggot. Months ago. Months ago.”
So Matt Damon just figured out “months ago”, by way of a “treatise” from a child, that he’s not supposed to say the word f*ggot.
Months ago.
Months ago. pic.twitter.com/g8MRR39yVR
— Travon Free (@Travon) August 1, 2021
“I’m sorry, but did Matt Damon just say he be in his home calling people a faggot or am I losing my grip on reality,” author Brandon Taylor tweeted.
“So Matt Damon has just been walking around his mansion casually saying faggot in front of his daughters? In 2021?” artist Adam Ellis wrote.
Some asked why Damon thought his recent use of “faggot” would be a good story to tell in an interview.
Deven Green, tweeting from her Mrs. Betty Bowers account, said she had lost respect for Damon for “being foolish enough to think that was a cute story he should share with the world.”
I’ve lost some respect for Matt Damon for two reasons:
1. Being a 51-year-old Harvard-educated person who only realized using homophobic slurs was a bad thing *months* ago; and
2. Being foolish enough to think that was a cute story he should share with the world. pic.twitter.com/WtudX2fGtb
— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) August 1, 2021
“As a member of the press, I like when celebrities talk to the press, but it’s always illuminating to hear the stories that folks like Liam Neeson or Matt Damon think are humanizing and charming, but actually reveal insulation and isolation (among other unsavory stuff) instead,” Daniel Fienberg, chief television critic for the Hollywood Reporter, tweeted.
“Do celebrities not realize they are not legally required to speak to the press?” writer and critic Jordan Hoffman asked.
While Damon has said he’ll stop using the “f-slur,” actor and comedian Billy Eichner said he wants to “know what word Matt Damon has replaced f****t with.”
I want to know what word Matt Damon has replaced f****t with.
— billy eichner (@billyeichner) August 1, 2021
Remember when the joke was that Ben Affleck was the dumb one and Matt Damon was the smart one? Because one is dating J-Lo and the other is spending the year of our lord Dolly Parton 2021 bragging about how he just stopped saying "fag."
— Jaclyn Moore (@JaclynPMoore) August 1, 2021
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