I don’t think about Dustin Hoffman very often, except usually in the framework of his character Tootsie, from the 1982 cross-dressing movie of the same name. In grad school, I actually wrote my master’s thesis on “Tootsie,” sort of: It was called Violence and Desire: The Trans Body On Film, or something like that. (You can get master’s degrees from watching movies — I’m living proof.)
Anyway. Here’s Hoffman in a 2012 interview discussing what it was like to play Tootsie. Hoffman breaks down in tears at the realization that he’d been brainwashed by the media into believing that women who weren’t conventionally attractive had little actual value as people.
“There’s too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed,” he told his wife during filming. It’s a powerful moment of a man realizing how he’s bought into a false value system. I hope it sparks others to consider the same thing. [YouTube]
Original by Julie Gerstein
