The difference between pretending and being
by Effie Deans:
I think I must have watched Tootsie (1982) when it came out, but I don’t think I’d watched it since. I was astonished by the change that has taken place since then. It’s a film about an actor (Dustin Hoffman) who cannot get a job, so he decides to pretend to be a woman and becomes a great success and feminist icon.
Everybody smokes indoors. Men flirt with women, kiss them without asking permission or signing a consent form. Everyone in in the film is white. There are no gay characters, but homosexuality is mildly mocked. There are no disabled characters and no ethnic minorities at all apart from in the background. There is no political correctness whatsoever, but this isn’t the strangest thing. When Dustin Hoffman dresses convincingly as a woman, no one suggests that he might indeed be a woman.
This was a mainstream popular movie from thirty something years ago, but it couldn’t be made today. It includes so many micro-aggressions that a snowflake would immediately become a snow drift and then melt in fury. It might as well be a film about the middle ages.
There is a long history of men dressing up as women in the theatre and on film too. Why isn’t it called womanface today?
I don’t think anyone much objected to Laurence Olivier playing Othello in 1965, because he was trying to be convincing. So too Alec Guinness could play an Indian character in 1984 without a murmur. But at some point, this was forbidden.
Now we have the situation where David Copperfield can be an Indian, but if a white person was in the cast of A suitable boy there would be outrage. This is usually called equality.
But why is it still fine for a man to pretend to be a woman? If I wore a wig and put makeup on my face and hands to pretend to be black this would be condemned. But what’s the difference?
If white people are not allowed to pretend to be black people by blackening their faces, why are men allowed to pretend to be women by wearing wigs and dresses?
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
