Matt Damon Used A Homophobic Slur Recently But Don’t Worry, He Won’t Anymore

The Academy-award-winning actor’s daughter had to help…

Sure, I’ll defend Matt Damon’s recent disclosure to The Sunday Times that he just recently stopped using a homophobic slur at the behest of his young daughter. It’s going to be a weak defense, mind you, but I feel like I should try. He’s a bro, after all.

I don’t really know what possessed Damon to ruin a friendly celebrity puff piece with the awkward admission that he was still using the ‘f-word’ as a grown adult in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-one but I can only guess he wanted to show off a recent personal growth journey.

Damon has been promoting his new fish-out-of-water thriller Stillwater, where he plays a working stiff with a goatee in France trying to save his daughter, imprisoned for a crime she didn’t commit. The movie has garnered mixed but mostly positive reviews.

During the interview, he said he used the ‘f’-word’ during a joke that offended his daughter, who got up and walked away. “She 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.

What a beautiful moment! A child taking the time to educate her father, a Hollywood superstar who has been rich and famous for his entire life. And all she had to do was write a ‘treatise’ instead of just saying “Dad, that’s a fucked-up word to use in any context don’t you work in entertainment?” Truly, there is hope for the future.

This episode taught him a lesson. He also talked about how the current cultural discourse and his choice to “shut the f*** up more.” I mean, thinking before you speak is a good thing to learn. One of the many perks of privilege is being able to speak without thinking and then never, ever worrying about whatever it was you just said.

Here’s my defense of Damon dropping the ‘f-word’ that rhymes with maggot: maybe, somewhere, some middle-aged gay-hatin’ shitkicker read about Damon retiring this awful smear and thinking “Well if Jason Bourne doesn’t use this word because it’s offensive then I won’t either” before spittin’ into an ol’ timey spittoon.

That’s all I got, honestly. There are still men in the world, far too many, who are thoughtless and small-minded who do not have the courage to become a better person and need permission from men they look up to. Or, at least, men who have more status.

Matt Damon says he’s changed and I guess better late than never. I know it’s shocking that a successful man of his vintage would require a heartfelt essay from his own flesh and blood to force him to realize even casual use of that word is both lazy and bigoted. But any positive change anyone goes through at any age is a good thing. And no one is above changing, even those who know not to use words designed to wound those who are different. There is always room to grow and improve and become better.

So good job, Matt Damon? And to any men Damon’s age, yours truly included, who throw the ‘f-word’ around because that’s what we did when we were young, you should ask yourself why you’d want to pollute the world with hate, there’s enough already. You pollute the world with barbecue or something harmless.

I stopped using that word a long time ago, back in high school, because I didn’t have many friends and one of them was gay, and he wasn’t going to spend any time with some drooling junior redneck homophobe. The guy was one of my best friends and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings and even if I hadn’t been friends with him, I knew this word was used to scare other human beings, to make them feel like shit.

The ‘f-word’ wasn’t just a hateful word for gay people back then. It was also used by straight boys to reinforce traditional gender norms. When I was called that word in high school it was always by bullies and jocks and angry teens who were already balding like daddy dearest.

The ‘f-word’ described gays and goths and freaks and theater kids and any boy who cried or made art or sucked on asthma inhalers. An ‘f-word’ couldn’t grow facial hair or get a girlfriend. He was weak and girly. The ‘f-word’ is both a cruel contemptuous word for homosexuals and an insult used to intimidate heterosexuals into performing the narrowest definition of masculinity possible.

It’s a terrible word and Damon’s admission that ever used it is sort of a tell that he grew up a cool, confidant dude and our society loves cool, confident dudes. When he used the word, he probably used it to make fun of other guys, which includes questioning sexuality because there is no more scared male pursuit than the pursuit of sex with women, as many as possible, all the time.

In his breakthrough movie Good Will Hunting, which he co-wrote to acclaim with Ben Affleck, Damon is a working-class Boston kid who happens to be a genius. In real life, Damon was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, surrounded by parents and a community of educated people. He knew better to use the ‘f-word’ in the 90s but he was probably just popular.