This is a potent combination: a voice describing patriarchy, while characters from well-known films show how it harms. For me, though, I feel the high quality writing is not getting all the way to my brain as I am also trying to simultaneously pay attention to the moving pictures. So I found it helpful to transcribe part of the video:
All you have to do is turn on the news or go to the movies
and you’ll be inundated with endless stories centering
men. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that women are never
centered under patriarchy, but when they are, it’s often
framed as a woman’s story, rather than a human story.
“The Barbie Movie”, for example, is very specifically a
story about the gendered experience of being a woman in
society. We can contrast that with a movie like
Oppenheimer, which is a story about becoming “death, the
destroyer of worlds.” Yes, this “destroyer of worlds”
happens to be a man, but notice, the story isn’t focused
on the gendered experience of being a man in society. In
fact, all of Christopher Nolan’s films center very
important men, but none are about their gender. They’re
billed as stories representative of the human experience
writ large. Greta Gerwig’s movies, on the other hand, all
center women, and are very explicitly about being a woman
trying to navigate a man’s world.
That’s not a criticism of either director, by the way.
It’s just a stark illustration of what “male-centered”
means. In patriarchy, men are viewed as the default for
“human” and therefore, male experiences are framed as an
exploration of the human condition, while women’s
experiences are, first and foremost, framed as being about
women. Incidentally, this deep-seated cultural expectation
of male centrality helps explain the waves of backlash
against any entertainment that’s made for a general
audience, but doesn’t center men, or masculinity.
Male identification is a little more complicated, but it
is a critical piece of the patriarchal puzzle. It means
that:
Core cultural ideas about what is considered
good, desirable, preferable, or normal are
culturally associated with how we think
about men, manhood, and masculinity.
— Johnson, The Gender Knot
This is why professions that elevate qualities like
toughness, competitiveness, strength, control,
rationality, and invulnerability, are so highly valued and
highly paid in our society. While occupations that revolve
around qualities thought of as feminine, like compassion,
sharing, and care-giving, tend to be systematically
devalued and underfunded.
Those problems with patriarchy above are just some of the reasons I am a feminist. I believe feminism is extremely correct. If you read bell hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody and you disagree, I don’t want to talk to you. I just don’t.