We’ve got an interesting one for you all.
We’ve talked about the Cut YouTube channel before. It’s a studio that celebrates diversity by having people of varying backgrounds participate in games, experiences, and social experiments. But their latest video has us tilting our heads.
This past week, Cut released a video of gay men judging other gay men on how gay they looked. Each participant had to look at a line of 10 gay men and rate their gayness on a scale of 1 (being the least gay) to 10.
As far as social experiments go, this one as the most questionable premise. Having gay men judge others isn’t a good look. That’s especially true when the parameters of what makes others gay were so all over the place. Some of the men judged others based on flamboyance. Meanwhile, others judged on clothing choices and attractiveness. There were, in fact, very few questions being asked to gauge a man’s homosexual tendencies.
But near the end of the video, three of the participating men discussed how this setup is not a good example of how to treat others.
“I don’t think there should be a spectrum of being gay,” said one man who was judged by others.
“No, I think you’re right. And I think outside of the sake of this exercise, we’re all just f***ing gay people,” responded one of the contestants.
“I don’t think there’s anything gayer than, like, a dude liking d***,” stated the judged participant.
Perhaps the premise of this video is too broad and judgmental in its approach. By having men rate others on “gayness” it inherently appeals to stereotypes. That said, is there shame in that? We all judge, despite believing that we shouldn’t, and we certainly use social and exterior clues to pick up on strangers’ gayness in real life. So, using a social experiment video to represent that is not as offensive as we may initially think.
But still, perhaps Cut’s other videos of LGBTQ-inclusivity had better approaches. Folding gay life into other games like Truth or Drink with exs or a line-up of “who’s slept with the most people” seems to be a more palatable approach.
Cut’s older video, for instance, of trying to guess other people’s sexual orientation, though slightly judge-y, seemed like a slightly more acceptable form of the above exercise. You check out the video below and let us know your thoughts.
At the end of the day, each video and exercise are simply videos and exercises. To be offended or nitpick about whether one video is palatable or not is ineffective. The point is to entertain and also likely touch on societal norms and expectations. And judgey or not, they definitely do all of the above.
This struck me as done in good fun. The men being rated were game for being evaluated and the guys giving ratings were mostly sensitive in stating their reasoning. No one seems to think lesser of someone for not being ‘gay enough’.