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.

We produced a record for Adam Horovitz from the Beastie Boys called BS 2000 and as a gift to me he bought me a boombox with a cassette deck and a keyboard in it from a yard sale. That’s like a movie. Ad Rock from the Beastie Boys gave me a present, it’s a boombox with a keyboard and a beatbox in it. You can’t make that up. It had a beat already in it so I had an idea. I’m going to walk out, put that on a barstool, put a mike to it and just make s*** up to it. That’s what “Losing My Edge” was.
James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, telling maybe my favorite anecdote in the history of rock ‘n roll.

From my previous life

I wrote this for my blog in 2010. I didn’t publish it because I thought it sounded too Jew-y. Well I get my most Jewy-around death, so here it is:

Music for all and not just one people: The case for the Beastie Boys as Jewish American heores


My childhood milieu was enough to skew any perspective in the long term. I grew up Jewish and upper middle class in the Upper West Side in the 1990s, in the peak of political correctness, the dip in crime rate, and seeing firsthand the hypocrisy of progressive Jewish politics mixed with unbridled white privilege. My parents, who were more academic than many of my peers, gave me a sense of ethics that routinely conflicted with the people in our community, so much so that I completely renounced my heritage by the end of high school and submitted to the more humble attitudes of the Midwest in college. Of course, you can’t change who you are, and at the end of the day I’m still a loud New York Jew, cocky in public arenas, but still not as cocky as compared to my childhood peers. I’ll always be a loud, privileged New York Jew no matter where I end up living, and I constantly struggle with putting my most humble face forward. I’ve deserted most of my religious ties to Judaism, and while I still consider myself very Jewish, I don’t think I could ever be culturally Jewish, in that I do not like living surrounded by Jews. One thing my childhood instilled me with is the dangers of tribalism, and how even under the auspices of complete tolerance, tribalism inevitably leads to condescension, misunderstand, and reinforcing cultural divides. Of course, without tribalism, you can’t really have Judaism, either. jewish heroes
One particular example from my childhood was a book on Jewish heroes I read and did a book report on in Hebrew School. It’s pretty typical of Hebrew School curriculum in the past 20 years to teach Sandy Koufax and Steven Spielberg on the same platform as Anne Frank and Golda Meier; the pop culture references are supposed to draw kids in. The only problem: the people who design these books are usually pop culture references that no kid in Hebrew school would get (see what I said about assumptions and condescension?) Sandy Koufax had been retired for 30 years when I read the book, and I was too young at 10 years old to watch Jaws, let alone Schindler’s List. I encountered this book in 1998, right as I was starting to get into the “Intergalactic” single, one of the few songs from middle school I still listen to regularly. Little did I, or the curriculum designers know, the writers of that song would have been much more inspirational Jewish role models for me at that time.
Adam Horowitz, Adam Yauch, and Mike Diamond grew up in my neighborhood (Upper West Side, Park Slope, Greenwich Village.) They were roughly 20 years older than me, which made them 15 years younger than my parents. I know the Yeshivas where they went to school. I’ve seen plays written by Broadway playwright Israel Horowitz, Adam’s father. The Beastie Boys saw the rise of, and in many ways influenced, the culture that would become a given by the time I was a child. Living in the comfort of an urban Jewish community with no memory of either the Holocaust, the Six Day War, or Vietnam, there was little firsthand basis to judge the Jewish values that had been so hardened into previous generations. Instead, I saw the hypocrisy of the casual, and sometimes not so implicit racism that came out of the mouths of countless Jewish fathers and mothers in New York during the crime wave. Farrakhan and Jessie Jackson were being charged with Antisemitism at the same time as much more pervasive Jewish racism was being overlooked.
On Licensed To Ill, the Beastie Boys aimed to satirize that culture, and become rock stars out of the process. Before the culture of irony had become so pervasive, however, it was difficult to see just how literally their satire would be taken. The result was the best selling hip-hop album of the 1980s—and one the Beastie Boys would spend the next 20 years distancing themselves from.
The real artistic breakthrough came three years later, when a trip to the West Coast resulted in Paul’s Boutique, by now widely considered the band’s best album, an all-time classic of hip-hop, and the greatest use of sampling in the history of pop music. It understandably took a long time for Paul’s Boutique to be recognized as such; the fact that the Beastie Boys could be ingenious artists, and not just fake frat boys, would be a shock to just about anyone. Chuck D of Public Enemy, who’s career would take a slide when his band’s Farrakhan influence got the best of him, said that the “dirty secret” in the hip-hop community was that the Beastie Boys had the best beats. Paul’s Boutique was the only album by white rappers Chris Rock included in his list of favorite hip-hop albums. For all intensive purposes, The Beastie Boys were the Heschel to Public Enemy’s MLK.

beastie boys creative commons

So how does that make the Beastie Boys Jewish heroes? For one, they struggled mightily with the ethical values of their craft, and surpassed all odds in producing their magnum opus, which utilized the literary culture of their heritage mixed with their own self-educated world of pop culture. They have spend most of their adult life committed to social justice, using the MTV Video Music Awards—their largest public venue—as a vehicle for discussing social issues, first through the intolerance of Muslims in 1998, and then a call for justice following the mass sexual assaults at Woodstock ‘99. To The 5 Boroughs, while by no means their best album, was an impassioned plea for peace and an affirmation of their love for New York City in the wake of 9/11. And they have openly and repeatedly acknowledged the errors in their earlier ways, publicly denouncing the bigotry, however feigned, in their earlier work, and supporting artists who they ignored on their path to success.

It’s still a shock to many that Horowitz, who wrote the notoriously sexist “Girls” on Licensed to Ill, could currently be married to Kathleen Hanna, the riot grrl pioneer and one of the most influential feminists of the past quarter century. That wouldn’t have happened without the commitment to social justice that Horowitz and all of the Beastie Boys have spent their adult life pursuing.

Even as far back as Paul’s Boutique, you could see elements the band’s vision of social justice, inspired by and directly in line with the Jewish traditional commitment that was beginning to lose its sway by the 90s. Opening track “To All The Girls,” rather than continue the sexist motifs of Licensed to Ill, recognizes females from every walk of like, including the “Upper East Side nubiles” that were mostly likely the inspiration for “Girls.” “Johnny Ryall” acknowledges the travesties of the appropriation of African American music that the Beastie Boys were accused of on arrival, acknowledging a fallen Nashville singer with a “platinum voice, but only gold records.” “Egg Man” acknowledged the embarrassment and humiliation that can come out of false assumptions. (“You made the mistake you judge a man by his race/ You go through life with egg on your face.”) “The Sounds of Science” acknowledged the concerns of the misuse of science in the 1980s, but did not abandon it’s teachings like so many on both the left and the right were doing during this time (and continue to do). The song that legitimately stakes the claim for the Beastie Boys as Jewish American heroes, however, is “Shadrach,” the album’s second single. The song’s title directly alludes to the book of Daniel, and in the chorus, Horowitz, Yauch, and Diamond compare themselves, rather appropriately, to to Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego.
In what is perhaps the Hebrew Bible’s most famed exploration of Jewish diaspora, Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, while exalting the values of Daniel and fellow Canaanites, still misappropriates and abuses their culture, forcing them to worship a graven image of himself under the guise of dedication to the Jews. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, refusing to sacrifice their believes even in the face of death when thrown in the fiery furnace of Babylon. Upon being thrown into that furnace, however, a fourth man, largely believed to be a divine figure, emerges from the fire, and the three men (in the Beastie Boys’ version, “three MCs on the go,”) are pulled out of the furnace. The comparison works remarkably well for the Beastie Boys, Paul’s Boutique, and Jewish American life circa 1989. Like the Beastie Boys were during the recording of Paul’s Boutique, S, M & A were thrust into a great unknown area of uncharted and exceedingly dangerous territory, only to emerge with a product that had never been experienced in the mortal realm (in the Beastie Boys’ case, effectively establishing sampling as an art form). Like the Beastie Boys themselves, S, M & A were in the midst of a controversial and dubious ethical culture with misguided values, which they effectively took a stance on with Paul’s Boutique and distancing themselves from Licensed To Ill. The lyrics of “Shadrach” were full of Biblical imagery, both Old and New Testament, and in the midst of American debate over high and low culture, the Beastie Boys seamlessly mixed lyrical allusions to the Bible with that of J.D. Salinger, Charles Dickens, AC/DC, Mad Magazine, and Rambo. They also put together arguably the most artistically accomplished, if not the most iconic, music video of their career: Beastie Boys Shadrach Frank Cantu | MySpace Video The debates in the pop culture world currently surrounding Vampire Weekend, Ronan Tynan, and Matisyahu all can be traced back to the same debates that centered around the Beastie Boys in the late 80s. It is interesting to note that 1986, the year of Licensed to Ill’s release (and the year I was born), was the same year another middle class Jew from New York city was earning unprecedented critical plaudits—Paul Simon’s Afropop masterpiece Graceland, one of the rare albums to win the industry standard Grammy award and topped the critically influential Pazz N Jop poll It is also the most commonly cited influence of Vampire Weekend, headed by Upper West Side native and Columbia University graduate Ezra Koenig. L’dor V’dor.