Glen Powell & Sydney Sweeney Can Save America

The way to detect toxic masculinity also provides the way out

Dec 22, 2024

Welcome to the weekend edition of The Experiment, your official hopepunk newsletter. If you’d like to support my work, become a paid subscriber or check out the options below. But even if you don’t, this bugga free. Thanks for reading!

There is a nasty deal going on in the celebrity press that means something real to us all. You probably have heard some noise about this even if you tuned it out, but I’m asking you to tune in.

Long story short, Justin Baldoni, an actor who has cast himself publicly as a “good guy” even to the point of co-hosting a podcast called The Man Enough Podcast and writing for the Good Men Project newsletter, made a movie called It Ends With Us about domestic violence with Blake Lively, whom you are as likely to know from her credits (Gossip Girl, This Town) as from her relationships (BFF Taylor Swift, husband Ryan Reynolds). Here’s what you take from this: In a movie paring Baldoni and Lively, the former may have directed the movie, but the latter had actual power in the industry.

Word leaked out during production and promotion of the movie that she was Hard To Work With. Apparently she didn’t like Baldoni’s final cut, so she paid for a new edit that included a song from her pal Taylor. This did nothing to dispel the impression that she was Hard To Work With, but the studio released her version anyway, and it earned more than $300 million at the box office worldwide. (The reviews weren’t great, though.)

On Friday, Lively sued1 Baldoni for sexual harassment after obtaining reams of evidence, including text messages with his crisis PR team, for sexual harassment. Apparently he behaved badly toward her in many specific ways that drove her lawyers to demand protections for her on set. Instead of apologizing and making her feel comfortable, Baldoni hired people2 to attack her reputation. And this isn’t a he said/she said. This is he said/he did. Lively had the receipts; you can read them here.

What is especially painful about this is that Justin Baldoni was supposed to be one of the good guys. He even won an award from a “program that honors remarkable men who have shown courage and compassion in advocating on behalf of women and girls worldwide.” But if even a supposed ally such as Baldoni was hiding in sheep’s clothing, how are we to tell the good guys from the bad when it comes to how they relate to women?

Here’s how:

Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney attend Columbia Pictures' Anyone But You New York premiere at AMC Lincoln Square Theater...

Do Men Like Women?

On Tuesday, August 27, Elise Hu changed how I think about this when she texted me a link to an edition of essayist Celeste Davis’ Substack, Matriarchal Blessing titled “The men who like women and the men who don’t. Yes we can tell.”

She was sending it because it reminded her of an essay about evolving forms of American manhood I’d just written. She wasn’t sending it in an “I know what you did last summer” kinda way, but still, the headline braced me. Davis’ thesis, which has since fundamentally cracked open how I understand every single man I know—including myself—is that some men like women as whole-ass people and some men don’t, and it’s obvious once you notice.

The penny dropped for Davis when she was reading Anne Helen Petersen’s3 essay, “A Unified Theory of Glen Powell” that included the observation that one reason he is effective as a romantic leading man is that he likes women “He appreciates them. He enjoys their company,” she writes.

“Tom Cruise doesn’t like women. Neither does Miles Teller. Channing Tatum likes women. So does Ryan Gosling. Brad Pitt used to like women but doesn’t anymore. Leonardo Di Caprio only likes them occasionally. Bradley Cooper doesn’t, George Clooney does. Matt Damon doesn’t, Ben Affleck only does in that one scene in the J.Lo documentary. Marlon Brando didn’t, Montgomery Clift did. Paul Newman didn’t onscreen but did IRL. Cary Grant did, John Wayne definitely, definitely didn’t. Will Smith pretends like he doesn’t but I’m not convinced. Mark Wahlberg absolutely does not, but Daniel Day-Lewis does. So does Paul Mescal.”

That’s when my brain broke open, too. We can quibble over a name or two here—Matt Damon, really?—but once you see the difference you can’t unsee it. By observing how these men interact with women onscreen and in the media, we can detect whether they like women.

Then came the obvious reflective question (with the equally obvious answer, duh, women are dope AF) before spooling out a list of every single man I have ever known. Let me tell you, it was harder to sort the fictional kids at Hogwarts than it was to divide the men in my life into those two camps.

“It’s wild right!?” texted Hu.

And then I realized I had lived my whole life until then without knowing any of this. That is where most men are—unaware that they are unenlightened and not seeing what is right in front of their faces. (This is probably why we have to ask where things are in the refrigerator.)

So it made sense to me when younger, conservative men freaked out over pictures of Sydney Sweeney, Powell’s co-star in Anyone But You, leaked online. Apparently some aggressively mediocre men4 thought the bikini-clad Sweeney looked a bit fleshy. “Dear women,” posted some guy who is paying Elon Musk for a blue checkmark. “Stop getting fat.” Glen Powell would never.

Journalist Taylor Lorenz, whose beat is the internet culture, placed the proximate blame on the way young, online men typically see women in “hyper-edited” ways in porn, social media, dating sights and now generative AI “that they have forgotten what an actual flesh and blood woman looks like,” she wrote.5

She’s right, but there’s more to it.

The “Misogyny Paradox”

Ironically, until recently Sweeney was celebrated by Incelicans as the ideal woman—blonde-tressed, thin-waisted, big-breasted, and seemingly unchallenging to the First Baptist Church of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” was an actual lede in an essay The National Post really published. (Neither Sweeney nor her breasts had comment.)

Thinking that men should actually like women as—again, I cannot overemphasize this—actual people is a fairly recent development in our society. For a long time, men didn’t even pretend to think women were equal. That wasn’t the point of women at all. They were married off to be a husband’s burden, a thing she compensated for by birthing and raising children and performing all manner of unpaid labor. Women were human beings but not people in any real sense.

This dynamic is what made Pride & Prejudice so revolutionary. In the midst of trying to get all those daughters off the family payroll, a man of rank and means actually deigned to fall in love with a woman because of her “liveliness of mind.” To adapt the story for modern audiences they needed to turn Elizabeth Bennet into a less formidable version of that impressive character. It would be so ordinary for a Darcy to fall in love with an Elizabeth Bennet nowadays that they made him fall for Bridget Jones, a character struggling with insecurities unlike the confident Bennet.

Our country’s lack of acceptance of women as real people has been baked in from jump. Consider that we fought a civil war and emancipated the slaves, giving some Black men in certain places the right to vote—and more than a half century later we let the ladies vote. In my lifetime, women couldn’t have credit cards or bank accounts as unmarried women. I remember as a child watching the TV news cover debates about whether marital rape should be a crime.

Alongside those civil rights developed an entirely new way to imagine marriage as a union between a man and a woman who not only liked having the sex but liked each other. In the beginning of the 20th century, medical textbooks started including the idea of “the heterosexual.” Over time, being heterosexual included emotional as well as sexual attraction, and this idea became increasingly mainstream in American brains, which, admittedly, weren’t doing much else at the time.

But that idea clashed with, let’s say, certain aspects of our culture that makes space for men’s violent hatred of women. What do we call white tank top undershirts? Wife beaters. Also, remember a while back when I wrote about rising maternal mortality rates? Well, I just found out that there is a greater danger to pregnant women than a birth gone wrong. Turns out the most common way pregnant women die is murder. But for real, we should stop calling them wife beaters.

To Jane Ward, Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of California Riverside, this conflict has been with us a long time.

The cultural expectation that men should like women, even as they are socialized into a culture that normalizes men’s hatred of women, constitutes what I call straight culture’s misogyny paradox. …
Other evidence of the misogyny paradox comes from the 18th and 19th centuries... As one example, the historian Hanne Blank offers a telling account of heterosexuality in 18th- and 19th-century England and colonial America, citing the American preacher John Cotton’s concern that so many men “despise and decry [wives] and call them a necessary Evil” and noting that, for several centuries, men who loved women were perceived as “effeminate” or “cunt-struck.”

Switch out those terms for “henpecked” and “pussy-whipped,” and you realize that we’re still dealing with this… well, I’m not going to mince any words and come right out and call it by it’s true name: POPPYCOCK! Straight men, hear me! You know that person you have sex with? Guess what. She’s a woman! I know!!

A remarkable thing about men not liking women is how many women share this view *in certain age groups **and in one political party. These attitudes are largely clustered among young Republican men and women in equal numbers. Democratic young men and women largely disagree with these attitudes, though not all.

Who Do Men Like?

Sydney Sweeney’s bikini-gate reminded Lorenz, the technology writer, of what feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye wrote in The Politics of Reality. The men who don’t like women do hold someone in high esteem: men.

“To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex. Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving.”

If you’ve ever been to a dinner party, you’ve seen this in play. One man, usually with status in the group, will strike up a conversation with another man of comparable status, and they will converse while others watch. And there’s the classic example of a man getting credit in a meeting for repeating what a woman has just said.

If you want a completely off-the-wall example of this dynamic, consider why retired NFL quarterback Cam Netwon went to the strip club. He says it wasn’t to look at the naked ladies but to compete with other men. “If you spend $10k I’m spending $15k,” he said.

Given all that we have learned about Baldoni in the last few days, it seems likely that his Good Man Project, which he did with other men, was done to win the respect of men unsure how to conduct themselves in a #MeToo world. Maybe it helped his career. Maybe he liked the way it made him feel. But when his professed values were put to the test, he failed the basic measure of liking the humanity of his female co-star.

Like Baldoni, we weren’t born this way, exactly. We are acting out hundreds of years of socialization that teaches boys that men are the sources of respect and women are the sources of service and comfort. But it’s equally true that for the last hundred years or so that has been a choice. And choosing to accept and to enjoy the basic humanity of women doesn’t just offer women a way into full citizenship but men a way out of the trap of toxic masculinity.

Because brother, I’ve been there. And I promise you it’s better over here. The Baldoni-Lively conflict would have ended with the unwarranted shaming of the woman if not for the unusual power she had. Glen Powell, America’s newest movie star, provides a healthier, happier, and more accessible model of manhood that benefits everyone. All you gotta do is like women. Try it. A whole bunch of them are cool-ass people.

Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.