Last week Esquire issued a lame non-apology for their "shit-sniffing faggot" comment. Now they've gone with a full-on mea culpa. Better late than never.
The article in question, you'll remember, was a lame piece called "How to Curse Well." After we sounded the alarm here -- brought to my attention by a listener to the show -- it was linked to by several other blogs and we had a long discussion about it on the show and lots of you were calling and emailing Esquire. Well, it worked.
Via Queerty we see that they have now admitted that it was an offensive joke and, well, not a joke at all to a lot of people:
The target of the parody was profanity itself and not the various people who might be its object, including gay people. But we used a particularly offensive phrase we shouldn't have. It certainly was not our intent to cause pain. Judging from the reaction, we did. For that we are sincerely sorry.
This was never about having a sense of humor and being edgy. Esquire, as we said, would not use the N-word because they don't want Al Sharpton breathing down their necks. If you want to be edgy then have some balls and go for the full thing. But don't be cowards, picking on homos and women for a few laughs, while leaving out all the other groups. That's just wimpy and shows that they're not about humor, sarcasm and free expression (as they'd like to believe), but rather about marketing. Well, we're tired of being sold as the group you can still defame.
I said they'd issue one of those non-apology apologies and I said on the show that that it wouldn't be adequate because people would call them on their not even thinking of using the N-word and they'd wind up making a fuller apology. Shouldn't they just listen to us from the beginning?
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