Matt Damon's Daughter Got Him To Stop Using 'F-Slur' For LGBTQ+ People

At least Matt Damon’s daughter understands why the “f-slur” for LGBTQ+ people has been retired

While promoting his new movie Stillwater, Matt Damon is giving a lot of interviews. That’s pretty standard celebrity stuff — you talk to a lot of reporters when you have a big movie coming out soon. But usually, you have a set of talking points approved by a publicist that can keep you from putting a giant foot in your mouth, like Matt Damon did when he told what he apparently thought was a charming story of how his daughter had to stop him from using a homophobic slur in 2021.

In an article published in the Sunday Times, Damon was discussing “changes in modern masculinity” when he launched into a weird story, seemingly out of nowhere, about how he stopped using the “f-slur” to refer to LGBTQ+ people.

“I made a joke, months ago, and got a treatise from my daughter,” Damon said. “She left the table. 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.”

Oh boy. There’s just a whole lot to unpack here. First of all, the fact that Damon used that word in Stuck on You, a 2003 movie that has a 35 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating, isn’t really relevant to anything, especially whether it’s OK to refer to a marginalized group of people by a dehumanizing slur. And while it’s obviously good that Damon isn’t using that word anymore, why the hell did it take him this long, and what does he expect, a golf clap for taking the tiniest step toward not being a homophobic asshole, and only because his daughter told him to?

Damon also said that word “was commonly used when I was a kid, with a different application.” Which, no it wasn’t. It was still a slur, it was just more commonly used as an insult because homophobia wasn’t something that got you canceled 40 years ago. Luckily for everyone in the entire world except Matt Damon, homophobia will definitely get you canceled now.

Needless to say, Twitter wasn’t impressed by any of this.

Anyway, hope Matt Damon’s daughter is having a great day! There’s one hero in this story, and it is definitely her.