Masculinity explained to feminists

So… as you may have guessed: I’m a feminist. And I will not go into detail now about the why’s and the because’s, but I guess my main character trait is in fact that I’m a feminist (anti TERF btw).

So it’s even funnier that I’ve recently been consuming so much male-related content (two podcasts, a tv show, and this movie). I guess most of it was realised using a feminist lens, but still. So many men.

Sacramento (2024) directed by Michael Angarano tells a very endearing story that toys with your expectations towards it, with stereotypes and exaggerated emotions and gender roles. It is essentially the story of two old friends who grew up to become apparently very different, but at their core were very similar. The serious one turns out to be a mess, and the messy one turns out to be a much tidier mess than expected.

“Anger is just sadness with nowhere to go”.

I have such a different perspective on anger than men do, I guess. Anger to me, as a woman, is something to get a hold on and use agains the patriarchy. And for these guys is something to avoid at all cost, cause the access to it is so easy for them. This movies shows beautifully how deeply men are affected by the patriarchal system, as well as every other gender, even if in a position of more privilege and power than the others. Kristen Stewart explicitly tells Michael Cera that she shouldn’t be caring for him in that moment, that as a father what is expected from his is to get it together.

I will never pity men, that’s simply outrageous to me even to think about. But I guess it’s interesting to see from their perspective in such an intimate unfiltered way. 

Sacramento is a comedy, it isn’t trying to teach you a lesson, or make a statement, it’s simply describing life whilst making fun of the absurdity of it.

This movie does a very good job at facing the difficult parts of lives and showing how ridiculous they can be.

As Agnes Varda perfectly said “I tried to be a joyful feminist, but I was very angry”. And so am I, Agnes. Very angry. Angry at the datas reporting every day that women keep dying killed by the men who were supposed to love them. And it’s normal, it happens so often that we are not even surprised anymore. We wake up, we see the news, another face, another name, another proof that the patriarchy exists and it’s fucking thriving. What more do we need? A movie about two men struggling to be there for the women who are giving birth to their children? Fuck off.

And yet… I found myself feeling for these protagonists. These two white boys. These two idiots. I understood them. It’s impressive how sometimes art does that do you, isn’t it?

Today I was listening to this podcast called “Les Couilles Sur La Table” (it translates to “balls on the table”). The episode was called “there isn’t any crisis of masculinity” and it talked about the importance of focusing on masculinity as something more abstract than its gender expression. They explained that in gender studies masculinity is actually a theme that not so many have explored: since the whole world is made for and by men, and even the neutral individual is built on males, it feels superfluous to be talking about masculinity. But masculinity is something that affects every gender.

I usually roll my eyes at discourse on male fragility, or the crisis of the white man, the whole topic surrounding boys’ drama honestly annoys - if not angers - me. But with this story, I felt something. The inaptitude to be a father figure in the way it was intended for men, the weight of masculinity in the building of hierarchies between men. The way these two friends - after not having seen each other in a long time - are almost compelled to do fucking push-ups. Or the struggle they go through to open up to each other, to stop fighting to be the alpha and actually be real and vulnerable and trusting.

All of this is saying something about our culture and masculinity. The patriarchy is a cage for everyone.

I mean, you all have watched Adolescence I think. This kid doesn’t even know why he hated women, he simply does, cause he was taught so. 

I’ve recently listened to an episode of @madelyneargy ’s podcast @prettylonesome called “male rage” which mainly focuses on gender roles and power dynamics but it also explains really well all the subtle details that Adolescence uses in portraying incel culture. Gender violence has many different faces: a family who seems disturbingly normal but where the role of the mother is so structurally diminished that the son almost never speaks of her, a father that bursts into rage as if it were the most mundane of acts, and so on.

So yeah, whatever masculinity is, it concerns women as well as cis men, it concerns trans people, bi-people, lesbians, gays, asexuals, fucking everyone.

In real life there’s no simple moral of the story at the end, but I guess that we can learn from this movie that we can help each other understand.

P.S.: Here's the story of how I got to watching Sacramento. I was scrolling on the homepage of my go-to pirate streaming site and I saw this title. My first thought was "that's Lady Bird's hometown". So I quickly went to see the trailer and found myself staring at the absolute craziest cast EVER. There's a pregnant Bella from Twilight who's apparently straight now (?) and married to fucking Scott pilgrim from - yeah you guessed it - Scott Pilgrim VS The World, who's friends with none other than Will from Sky High wearing white socks with sandals - abominable. So... obviously I had to press play and OHBOY am I glad!