How “Central Intelligence” Plays Into Our Toxic Masculinity Problem
How “Central Intelligence” Plays Into Our Toxic Masculinity Problem
The advertisements for the newly-released movie Central Intelligence, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Kevin Hart, don’t say much. But the few words they include speak volumes about our culture. The intellectual rumblings brought about in me by the sight of the poster concretized into one aching question: In what ways do physical size and the societal importance placed on it impact people of every sex, and how on Earth have we not done anything about it yet? Johnson towers above Hart in the ad, arms outstretched in a “V” shape, firing a gun in each hand. Hart, a full head shorter than Johnson, stands in front of Johnson’s chest, clutching a singular gun to his breast and seemingly cowering with fear. Above both of their heads is the film’s tag line: “SAVING THE WORLD TAKES A LITTLE HART AND A BIG JOHNSON.”
Three years ago, I watched Lily Myers’ incredibly powerful performance of her slam poem “Shrinking Women” at the 2013 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational. That same year, I came across Amy Cuddy’s revolutionary 2012 TED Talk, entitled “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are.” The lessons I gleaned from both videos have stuck with me ever since, engrained in my psyche in a subtle yet powerful way. They surface every so often, quietly framing the way I view my interactions with others, myself and my studies—especially in the field of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. “Shrinking Women” focuses on the haunting ways that women are conditioned, often subconsciously, to confine themselves physically, mentally and emotionally. Myers speaks with sadness and rage about the ways in which women in her family have been “shrinking for decades,” taught to limit space they occupied and “grow inward,” while their male counterparts were taught to expand, to grow large with muscle and flesh and thought and laughter. She focuses on the negative impact that this pressure to grow smaller can have—the way it manifests in disordered eating, lack of confidence, and frustration.
Cuddy’s TED Talk focuses on the flip-side of this concept: the ways in which physical expansion and a willingness to take up space can have significant physiological and mental ramifications that can propel us toward, or away from, success. Amy’s research has revealed that by standing tall and extending our limbs, we can actually raise our bodies’ levels of testosterone, a hormone associated with aggression and dominance, while simultaneously lowering our levels of cortisol, the “stress hormone.” She also points out the gendered divide that exists when it comes to who is willing to occupy space: Overwhelmingly, she has found as a professor at Harvard business school that young men are far more willing to speak up, participate in class and raise their hands with confidence than young women. She attributes this difference to the simple fact that “women feel chronically less powerful than men.”
The poster for Central Intelligence unwittingly adds a third dimension to this issue of size: the way that, just as expectations placed on women to be small can be harmful, expectations placed on men to be large—in several senses of the word—are equally toxic. Jackson Katz, a prominent pro-feminist masculinity theorist, argues that as feminism allows women to attain power in professional, educational and social contexts, young men feel increasing pressure to “[prove] their manhood” by maintaining an advantage over women in the realm of physical size and strength. His work examines the way that expectations for men to grow large and reclaim their physical space in society has manifested in media, from the rippling muscles carved into today’s male superhero action figures to the hypermasculine “tough guy” portrayals of rap artists and action movie stars in music videos and film.
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http://msmagazine.com/blog/2016/06/28/no-comment-how-central-intelligence-plays-into-our-toxic-masculinity-problem/
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