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...
“But isn’t it time we stopped accepting in film criticism an anti-emotional, phony rationalism which we know to be not just harmful, but absurd, in any other context? Isn’t it time we plucked up our courage and allowed our hearts as well as our heads to go the pictures?” Raymond Durgnat (Films and Feelings) 1971