There’s a representation crisis in pop culture. You hear that word- “representation”- a lot lately. Usually it’s used to say that there aren’t enough people of color/women/insert-marginalized-group-here being seen in big-budget productions, and by any objective metric, that’s true.
But the way the conversation is going, there isn’t a lot of room to discuss the complete and total failure of pop culture- Hollywood especially- to accurately represent men, and that’s problematic, too. See, men are in every movie. Like, all of them. But the way they are shown to audiences isn’t really who men are. We don’t all carry big guns, or are 7 feet tall looking like bodybuilders, and we don’t all silently endure the abuses of the world with a stoic expression. But since that’s all we see, we expect that’s how men should be, and that’s pretty fucking toxic.
Enter Jonathan McIntosh. His YouTube series Pop Culture Detective Agency lays these issues out in an academic but easy to understand way that will make you go “oh wow, that’s actually super fucked up.” In my opinion, his work is some of the most important media-critiquing that’s currently being published.
A couple days ago, Mcintosh dropped a new video on the Shawshank Redemption and the ways it succeeds in its representation of men, and if you’re one of those people who cares about people, I highly recommend you give it a watch.