sevensneakyfoxes:

harriet-spy:

poetry-protest-pornography:

cobrilee:

madlori:

aboysbestfriendishismother:

Dustin Hoffman on playing a woman in Tootsie (1982)

“If I was going to be a woman, I would want to be as beautiful as possible. And they said to me, ‘Uh, that’s as beautiful as we can get you.’ And I went home and started crying to my wife, and I said, ‘I have to make this picture.’ And she said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Because I think I’m an interesting woman when I look at myself on screen, and I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character because she doesn’t fulfill, physically, the demands that we’re brought up to think that women have to have in order for us to ask them out.’ She says, ‘What are you saying?’ and I said, ‘There’s too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.’ It was not what it felt like to be a woman. It was what it felt like to be someone that people didn’t respect, for the wrong reasons. I know it’s a comedy. But comedy’s a serious business.”

This is a man in tears when he came up against the experience of being a woman in a misogynist society, and realizing what it means for them, and for him, too.

I’m now convinced that every man should have to live as a woman for a week. Maybe then we’d be able to kick this misogynistic bullshit in the ass and send it off to die.

I have always liked Dustin Hoffman. But this is like, next level social awareness and I am honestly floored by the depth of this response.

Patriarchy kills men’s souls, too.

What I have always particularly loved about this story was that Dustin not only acknowledged the injustice, but also realized the part that he had played in it in the past.  He didn’t posit it as something that other men did, but rather as something that he himself had done in the past.

That takes a lot of guts.