Way back in my film school days, I had an interaction with a favorite cousin whom I had not seen in some time. This opportunity to reconnect saw our first interaction since I had been accepted as a film student, and so he asked me what basically everyone asks me right after I tell them I’m studying film, “So, like what’s your favorite movie, then?” When approached with this question, at least by associates who are not necessarily film buffs, my default response is usually something I know has been on Netflix in the last year. (Though if I had to pick an answer ... maybe Silver Linings Playbook .) I think this time I said James Cameron’s Titanic . He then had a sort of illuminated reaction and followed up with, “I see, so you like … old movies.” My response to this was something in the vein of, “Well, yes , but NOOOO …” Steven Spielberg being a 29-year-old on the set of Jaws In academic circles, t he demarcation between “c...
So … yeah, this is obviously an exaggeration. The thing we’d call toxic masculinity is, regrettably, still with us, like a fart that just won’t terminate. It is in the workplace. It is in elected positions of power in the United States and across the world. It is behind closed doors. It is out in the open. In the wake of certain recent events, some voices have expressed some opinion about whether the fight against toxic masculinity has died and whether we’d best just hang up our boots and return to our trash piles. I think such attitudes are certainly understandable, but not at all helpful. The attitudes that feed the parts of masculinity we might call toxic have been reinforced for centuries. Any such campaign to clean out that mess was going to have to persist for far longer than the life cycle of any one hashtag. The good news is that history shows us we are maybe a little further into this fight than we thought. And in our effort to und...