Archer: How did you know what he said?
Pam: It was an 8 hour flight.
Archer: Wow, did you learn Romansh?
Pam: Who am I, Cypher? The gayest X-Man?
Archer: I don't know, Gambit looks like he knows his way around a pair of—
To my dismay, when I googled the term "gayest xmen," all of the returns replace the word "gayest" with "worst." And as it happens that is entirely the word play the Archer joke relies on.
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While I understand that Google isn't the language police, and they use complex algorithms to map out how language is actually used, it is still frustrating to see systematic homophobia laid out so neatly.
Based off of this search, Google list the following words as synonymous with gay:
Worst
Pointless
Lamest
Awful
Obnoxious
And let's not forget what lives at the bottom of the page:
Searches related to gayest x-men
What really annoys me about the google search is that there are scores of gay X-Men, who should have been displayed instead of the 10 most hated X-Men. In the main timeline Northstar is gay and Mystic is often depicted as bisexual. In alternate universes prominent X-Men such as Bobby Drake, Wolverine, and Colossus are gay. Not to mention from the film series Ellen Page, who plays Kitty Pride, has come out, and director Bryan Singer inspired a character in the American version of Queer as Folk (the director of the blockbuster film V-Men.)
Once again my frustration is neither with Google nor Archer. Archer is a offensive show that not only backs it up with humor, but frequently subverts the negative stereotypes. For example in the clip Pam (an open bisexual) uses the term "gayest" to mean "worst," while Arch corrects Pam, be it in an offensive manner, by using the main denotation of the word. By doing so, Archer points out the disparaging tone Pam uses in reference to gay people.
My frustration lies in that it's the combination of society's bigoted use of language and matching that up with the X-Men, the champions of tolerance and diversity. This was just a reminder, that even though we have made tremendous gains in the last few years, we have so much further to go.
Liam '15
***
It looks like the folks at BuzzFeed have discovered this years ago (2013): http://www.buzzfeed.com/louispeitzman/google-search-equates-gayest-with-worst#.ktdqqPwQ4
Google responded with:
Google’s results, including when a search term is synonymized [sic] with another, are a reflection of content on the web and how people search. These results are determined by algorithms and we don’t manually correct this process, but we are always looking at how we can improve our algorithms.So to paraphrase, 'we're not going to do anything, but we totally could.' How 'bout next time you leave off the bolded part, it's insulting if you don't mean it.
