The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Dustin Hoffman on What It’s Really Like to Be a Woman

Susan Sontag argued that the male-female polarization is among our culture’s most imprisoning stereotypes. Much has been said about how to be a woman and the problem of “women writers” and even how a woman is not to ride a bicycle, but what does it really mean to be male or female — not to look like a man or a woman, but to go through life as one, to be experienced by oneself and by others as a gendered being? At the heart of the film Tootsie, which premiered on December 17, 1982, was the inquiry of how one specific man’s life would be different if he — his person — had been born a woman. In this absolutely stirring short clip from an AFI interview, Dustin Hoffman explains, while fighting back tears, just how profoundly that seemingly simple question ripped open one of our culture’s greatest, most tragic wounds:

That was never a comedy for me.

Complement with Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman and Ursula K. Le Guin on being a man — the finest, sharpest thing ever written about gender.


Published December 17, 2013

https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/12/17/tootsie-dustin-hoffman-on-being-a-woman/

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