Damon says the word was ”commonly used when I was a kid“
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Matt Damon bizarrely admitted in a new interview that he only recently stopped using the “the f-slur for a homosexual” after his daughter wrote a “treatise” on why using the word to refer to people, gay or otherwise, is unacceptable.
After confessing this in an interview with the U.K.’s Sunday Times to promote his new movie “Stillwater,” Damon was the target of many memes as well as pointed criticism as many people online questioned both why he decided to share this information — and also why he was still using such a derogatory term in 2021.
The Boston-born leading man said the “f-slur for a homosexual” was “commonly used when I was a kid, with a different application.”
The word has always been a slur and unacceptable to use even in a joking fashion, but it’s definitely odd that Damon decided to own up to his apparently frequent use of it in private. Damon told the Sunday Times he made a “joke” with the word, and then his daughter called him out in a “a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous.”
“I made a joke, months ago, and got a treatise from my daughter. She left the table,” Damon told the Sunday Times; he did not identify which of his four daughters with wife Luciana Barroso called him out. (They range in age from 22 to 10.) “I said, ‘Come on, that’s a joke! I say it in the movie ‘Stuck on You!’ 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.”
Damon continued, “I understand. It’s a fair point. Anybody should be offended by that behavior.”
There were no shortage of people just unsure of why it took the 50-year-old “Jason Bourne” star so long to catch on that this word had a strong negative connotation, and some wondered if he’d been using the word around people on sets throughout his career.
Damon’s admitting that he used the word frequently and thought it was OK to joke around with the slur certainly begs the question of who else heard it and didn’t take it as a joke. “Matt Damon is a whole grown 51 year old man,: political strategist Atima Omara noted (he actually turns 51 in October). “And his Gen Z baby told him a homophobic slur is not okay. Like was he just walking around dropping this on sets or whatever prior?”
Openly gay comedian Billy Eichner joked that he wants to know which word Damon is using now instead of the f-slur. “I want to know what word Matt Damon has replaced f****t with,” Eichner tweeted Sunday.
Check out more reactions to Damon’s comments below.
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