These Memes Won't Turn Anyone On

I'm kind if surprised that people are still using homosexuality as a putdown.  For instance, I've seen a few variations on the graphic to the right.

As you can see, it makes pronouncements about how various musical jobs will affect a man's ability to attract women.  For the most part it shows the hierarchy we'd expect, putting the singer and guitarist at the top.  Although in my experience, people are quicker to slag the drummer than the bassist, but either way, neither gets the respect they deserve.

But it's disappointing that they use the implication of gay men to deliver the ultimate put down to the keyboardist.  Yes, I know, homosexuality has been devalued forever, this shouldn't be news.  But with its increasing acceptance in society, you'd think the people who still see it as an insult would be aging legislators who don't know how to use the Internet.

So it worries me that a lot of the acceptance of homosexuals may be shallower than we think.  People have gotten to the point of accepting their existence, or their lack of evilness at least. But perhaps they still haven't gotten to the point of seeing it as equal to any other sexuality.

Like I said, I've seen a few variations on it.  One was to insult different types of cars.  Unfortunately I couldn't find it when I just went looking, but the same point can be made with these graphics that reflect demonizing of gay men, or possibly straight women:

And of course it reasserts my point that the Chevy/Ford rivalry is just a meaningless lobbing of the same insults back and forth.

But the breaking point that prompted me to write this was when I saw the meme applied to programming languages:

I assume that if you aren't familiar with programming, then this looks rather surreal, a bunch of unfamiliar names arbitrarily assigned to implications of virility. Well let me reassure you that even if you are familiar with all these languages, it looks about the same.  I really have no idea how they decided on these, other than that it was obviously put together by a PHP programmer. As the oldest and least-forgiving language there, one would think that C will make you attractive to others. Maybe Perl if you're looking for someone particularly kinky. But the point is, that shows how silly this all is. People are just flinging outdated insults at others, but all they're doing is exposing their own bigotry .