A screenshot of a Facebook joke about Barbie dolls has raised a ruckus in Reddit’s r/gay community, with commenters saying it’s barbed with misogyny.
The joke in dispute:
If my son was gay, I still wouldn’t buy him a Barbie! We raising tops over here!
How about we take this to the next level?
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Understandably, Reddit users recoiled. “Man, this isn’t funny at all,” one person wrote on the thread.
“It’s toxic masculinity, is what it is,” another said.
Not everyone was on the same page, however.
“It’s a joke about toxic masculinity,” one Reddit user wrote. “It’s not serious. Touch some grass.”
Another person said, “OK, I laughed, it’s funny, but we agree that’s still homophobia, right? Soft tops are a thing more mainstream nowadays.”
Other users contended that, satirical or not, the joke still perpetuates the idea that the top is more masculine and thus, somehow, superior.
“Honestly, I get that it’s meant as a joke, but lately, there’s a shit-ton of these jokes about tops being better or more manly and bottoms being somehow less,” one commenter wrote. “At some point, it stops being a joke. Especially when you consider that plenty of cultures around this world genuinely view homosexuality this way. When I was in college a decade ago, the straights kept telling me ‘it’s just a joke’ whenever they reinforced or expressed the same s***ty stereotypes about being gay for the umpteenth time. Now they’ve shifted to doing the same thing with the same stereotypes, except it’s only for some gays, so it’s not homophobic anymore.” Someone else commented, “Yeah, this is giving both toxic masculinity and bottom discrimination.” And in a comment tagged with “/s” for sarcasm, a Redditor wrote, “Gay misogyny. So funny.” Believe it or not, this “daddy” Ken doll was the real deal. Speaking of sarcasm, another Redditor commented, “Yes, tops = manly, masculine, the men of the relationship. Bottoms = feminine girly men and the women of the relationships. Nothing like reinforcement of misogynistic ideas and heterosexual dynamics in queer relationships.” Another commenter said, “Society is dumb, social constructs are random and useless, and internalized misogyny is not a quality. Some people are top, bottom, or both, or neither. Some people are fem, masc, both, or neither. None is shameful.” A few Redditors on the thread, meanwhile, said that they — or partners of theirs — are tops who played with Barbie. “And a lot of my bottom partners over the years were raised to be dumb and macho or just preferred ‘manly’ activities, and yet they still ride d*cks today,” one added. And someone else had a three-word rejoinder to the Facebook post: “Fem tops: Exist.” Is bigger always better?
Related*
The little-known, real-life backstory behind the Barbie movie’s very funny gay Ken joke
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This bottom’s message to less-endowed tops has the gays raving
inbama
We joke like this all the time, but let anyone else say it and h a t e s p e e c h.