5 Favorite Male Feminists in Pop Culture

As a straight dude who is generally down with respecting women, and thinks people of every gender and walk of life should be down with it too too, it can get frustrating to see the lack of similar minded people in pop culture. Recent feuds between comedians and women have created a feeling of natural opposition that’s mostly imagined. Nonetheless, pop culture’s tendency to treat women as entities related to men can be so overwhelming that it’s difficult to see anything that doesn’t perpetuate that. For guys like me, who have their desire to respect women complicated by their desire to constantly have sex with them, this gets extra dicey. If you’re in the same boat, here are 5 dudes in pop culture who I generally see as inspirational in their ability to do so (only two of whom are dead).

Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain’s struggles with fame, and the role they played in his eventual suicide, have been well documented. After playing Rock for Choice, and generally associating himself with (and dating women within) the riot grrrl movement, Cobain’s conscience came into conflict with his ambiguous, disturbingly casual depiction of a rapist in “Polly.” The accidental positive acceptance of what was supposed to be a cautionary tale was one of the main inspirations for the crisis of faith that is In Utero; ”Rape Me” was more or less himself taking the blame. But more interesting to me as I get older was how this struggle affected his love life. Knowing that women have it bad, but also knowing he loved the culture that produced that shittiness, Cobain struggled to find a way to reconcile those two feelings, without any real role models to do so. Both his art and personal life showed a tendency, common among straight dude feminists, to get involved in sympathetic but toxic romantic entanglements He showed there was a way to navigate that tight rope, offed himself before he found out how.

Adam Yauch

Adam Yauch, who eventually died a feminist hero, was, at the peak of his power, famous for shooting a shook up beer from his cock onto adoring fratty fans with women in go-go cages and giant inflatable penises in the background. The 3 years between Licensed to Ill and Paul’s Boutique were the most turbulent in the Beastie Boys’ adult lives. Yauch, who of the three Beastie Boys most embodied their conscience, was rumored to, shoot guns in an underpass in Central Park in a post-fame fury. When Paul’s Boutique took down wife beaters and corrected the punks who took “Beat on the Brat” too literally, it was a significant step for a musician who rose to fame on the back of “The New Style,” “Girls,” and “Paul Revere.” The BBoy’s work in the next 20 years made them the first rappers to directly address the growing misogyny that major labels were demanding for hip hop (Kanye West, who could also be on this list if he cleaned up his ego a bit, would later perfect it). It’s what makes the un-poetic but direct verse in “Sure Shot” appear in just about every tribute after Yauch died.

Martin McDonagh

The Beauty Queen of Leenane, McDonagh’s breakthrough play, openly broke the Bechdel test. In addition to introducing the most daring writer of his generation, the play showed that McDonagh had a knack for writing dynamic female characters like few men have ever done. In his mostly criminal dominated world, McDonagh’s female characters, from the Lieutenant of Inishmore, Cripple of Inishmaan, In Bruges and beyond, have always played a crucial part. His women are tough, inspirational to the male characters, but providing a moral compass that puts everyone in their place. Women play a less prominent, less dynamic role in Seven Psychopaths, but as McDonagh’s most self-referential work, he shows his ability to openly criticize himself for writing weaker female characters, and showing violence to women at all (he nearly gave up on the film after a CBS executive condoned his depiction of violence to women but not his violence to dogs). It was rare, and it was ballsy, and it showed he understands the difference between violence in general and violence against women, which is pretty rare for dudes.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore: A Scene (ROUGH CUT) from Nichol Lovett on Vimeo.

Dave Foley

In Improv 101 at UCB, I was taught, when you’re playing someone a different gender in comedy, never to ham up the craziness of “I’m a dude playig a woman, isn’t that crazy!”The main example we were given was Dave Foley, wit-in-chief of Kids in the Hall (by my count the best sketch comedy group that ever existed), who played woman casually, with an innate sense that it had to be a complete character. Kids in the Hall sketches were full of feminism, with Foley’s creepy monologue openly declaring his good attitude towards menstruation (my go-to comedy monologue for auditions), and Cabbage Head, which Foley would state directly came from his observation of faux-sensitive abusive boyfriends. Foley’s Marc Maron interview exposed his devastating relationship problems that came from his feminism (a cautionary tale to everyone like me), but I never question his ethics, in comedy or anywhere else.

Joss Whedon


This list is not ranked (that’s a dudely thing to do), but if one was to rank it, it’d be hard not to put Whedon at the top of this list. From Buffy to Firefly to Angel to Avengers, Whedon’s female charactes have been among the most inspiring and multidimensional ever depicted. Taking inspiration from his mother and his own traumatic experiences, he came up with the kind of female characters that are vulnerable, flawed, but still tough, with a spirit of perseverence, drive and power that had never really been depicted in teleivision before or since. Some say his depiction of violence against women is exhausting, but I feel his refusal to sugar coat a very real phenomenon in the world is about as brave as it gets, and the fact that he’s able to draw metaphors with vampires, demons, and goblins makes it easier to take and less Lifetime-ish. And those characters, omg. Truly, if you’re a dude who likes it when dudes depict women well, Whedon is pretty much as good as it gets.

katherine st asaph: AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF THE PEOPLE AND ENTITIES WHO BENEFIT FROM A SYSTEMATICALLY ACCELERATED CONSUMPTION OF MUSIC...

entergodmode:

AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF THE PEOPLE AND ENTITIES WHO BENEFIT FROM A SYSTEMATICALLY ACCELERATED CONSUMPTION OF SUPPOSEDLY INDEPENDENT MUSIC (THEORETICALLY SPEAKING)


1. music playback hardware manufacturers such as apple and beats by dre (e.g. iphone, beats headphones)

2. music…

Jesus Christ this is depressingly accurate

Source: entergodmode

What’s the Matter with Kids

I haven’t seen Spring Breakers, and I never will. I have not seen any movie directed by Harmony Korine, and I probably never will either. There’s no way I can see me doing so producing any kind of joy, for me or anyone who’s interested in me enough to ask if I’ve seen it. That’s because Kids still trumps Garden State and A Clockwork Orange as the most nauseating, loathsome, worthless  “good movie” I’ve ever seen that people still insist on talking about.

As a 19 year old, self-romanticizing NYU film school dropout, Harmony Korine had zero understanding of how NYC natives actually talked, so he used badly translated ebonics and meshed it with the Nashville hoodrat dialect he grew up with. He put that dialogue in a screenplay with zero plot development, abhorrent and uninteresting characters. The film’s real time-ish structure would seemed interesting and novel if you hadn’t seen any other indie or foreign film in the past 40 years. The film is ill-informed, clunky, and pretentious in spite of itself, clearly written by someone who thinks they’re way more important than they actually are but without anything interesting to say. Someone, like, say, a student film written by a 19 year old NYU film school with an attitude problem who knows how to market himself..

The worst part of it all, though, was that people ATE IT UP. I have no idea what the film establishment or young adults in other parts of the country thought of it at the time. Maybe it was just that native NY kids hadn’t seen any other movie about them yet. Maybe teenagers and film critics weren’t used to seeing non-sanitized depictions of themselves. I don’t know, and even if I did, I’ll never understand it.

In my world, when the movie came out, the prep school monsters I grew up with were just starting to realize how much shit they could get away with. Virtually overnight, after this film’s release, people starting talking about the film, and worse, they started talking like the film. I remember one after-school program I went to, which at first I thought was an inner city school that our rich liberal parents were meshing us with in a token nod to diversity. These events were not out of the ordinary in the Upper West Side at the height of the political correctness era, and they were as forced and condescending as they sound. I couldn’t believe that it was another $20,000/year tuition, 90% Jewish private school. As it turned out, they had just seen Kids before us. I was 9 years old. By the time I began bar mitzvah lessons, lines and cadences from this movie were so commonplace that had basically become synonymous with blowing a 12 year old and shooting heroin.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, it’s not. By the time my brother and sister had their bar and bat mitzvah in 2004, 11-12 year old girls being peer pressured into giving blowjobs were so commonplace, our rabbi asked my brother and sister to leave the room before warning me and my parents about their prevalence (why I was in the room for this I will never understand). Several of my elementary school classmates were in and out of rehab three times by the time they were 16, and those are just the ones whose parents my parents kept in touch with. And because this was the 1990s and the kids involved were predominantly Jewish, parents who were new to privilege but understood how to threaten lawsuits and still saw themselves as part of a persecuted group protected their children from anything resembling consequences for their actions. “Sociopath” seems like too kind of a word for some of them.

From a young age, for whatever reason, I knew this world wasn’t for me. I was a mess in middle school, and was “asked to leave” two schools and three summer camps between the ages of 10-13. I didn’t know what straight edge was at the time, but I had the straight edge rant. I wished I had; by high school, when I’d finally worked my way to a functional mental health state and a better school, I almost never went out of the apartment for my personal life until my senior year. I still saw drug use and meaningless sex with people I hated as my only outlet for social activity (in hindsight, the sex would’ve been alright). So instead, I spent most weekends in high school alone at home, renting movies and watching TV, and getting into arguments with my parents who begged me not to spend another Saturday night at home by myself.

Eventually, on one of these countless Saturday nights, I decided to rent Kids. After years of hearing the movie quoted and referenced, I finally decided to see what the fuss was about, and if the movie raved about by the people I was avoiding was worth my inherent mistrust. An hour and a half later, with utter bafflement as to why the fuck anyone thought that movie was worth talking about, let alone celebrating, I concluded that the movie was even worse than I had feared. My blood is boiling even thinking about the time I watched this. I’ve had to cut out several paragraphs of unrelated rants about my childhood out of this draft.

I’m working on getting over my resentment and living with the scars of my childhood. It’s a tall order, and it’s one of the major reasons I’m leaving NYC, but I have faith that I’ll get over it all some day. But even if I stop actively hating my childhood, I don’t think there’s ever a chance for me to approach any work by Harmony Korine with a clear enough head to give it its due and enjoy it on any level. I hear his movies have evolved since Kids. I’ll never know.