This week we started binging on Masters of Sex, which escaped us during its original airing on Showtime starting with 2013. It was created by a female showrunner, has several female writers and it takes places in the mid 1940s in the US. It is actually a good show but what prevents it from being a great one is its unapologetic portrayal of gender stereotypes.
In the show, every man portrayed is a cardboard character fleshed out of each of the textbook facets of „toxic masculinity“: we have one megalomaniac, one womanizer, several adulterers and a verbally abusive husband, all emotionally repressed and dreading having to spend time with their own children. At its worst, it portrays the megalomaniac breaking down crying and, in a position of power, he prompts his secretary to close her eyes so that she doesn’t witness the shameful act. He literally puts his fingers on the woman’s eyelids and shuts them while he continues crying, and the woman empathetically conforms, i.e. “Let it all out”.
By contrast, every female character is portrayed from the get go as possessing multiple layers of complexity and an acute insight not only into themselves but also into everyone around them. At its worst, the show depicts an older woman dispensing wisdom to a younger woman (reluctant to pursue her male crush too aggressively): “men don’t know what they want, sweetheart, that’s why they have wives to tell them.”
By the end of the first season, some of the male characters gain some insight into their own thoughts and motivations. However, the process is painstakingly slow and it’s only at the hand of uncontrollable external circumstances and precipitated by the female presence in their lives who is there to act like an emotional mirror to the clueless men.
The show is infuriating because it is otherwise professionally well made. Great acting, great direction, dubious character portrayal.
This show is from 2013, before MeToo but riding the still fresh wave of the concept “toxic masculinity” (itself coined in the early 90s as part of the mythopoetic men’s “movement”). The concept was yet to find its place in mainstream culture as it does today. This all prompts me to ask two questions:
Just how early ago have women been viewing men like that, i.e. toxically masculine? Though the term “toxic masculinity” was coined by men with PhDs in the early 90s, those men were prolific writers of self-help books, notoriously targeted at women. Maybe the men authors simply knew what would be very marketable. I’m guessing one reason why the term gained traction so fast was perhaps because it was already on women’s minds long before that.
Are we at the end of the bell curve of the acceptance of the term “toxic masculinity”? It seems to me that the term had its peak during the MeToo movement and its downfall was precipitated by the Gillette campaign. A lot of people, many women included, have armed up against its overuse and I honestly doubt whether the same show would be allowed to air today with its original portrayal of men and women.
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