The Softboy Must Die
On Taika Waititi, straight men in gay outfits, and why cis men are not “demolishing masculinity.”
I didn’t begin this week expecting to locate the single tweet that encapsulates all of my issues with contemporary Masculinity Discourse, but here we are, and here it is:
Taika Waititi is the director of several movies, most recently Thor: Love and Thunder. He plays a gay pirate on Our Flag Means Death, which is a great show. Taika Waititi is also — as far as anyone knows — cisgender and heterosexual. He wears funky patterned button-ups. He cast Tessa Thompson as a bisexual superhero. He is rumored to have had a threesome with Tessa Thompson and his girlfriend. He is, nonetheless, a straight guy.
Of course, Waititi is marginalized along other axes. He’s Maori; he’s Jewish. It’s just that, if there’s someone on this planet whose “entire being” “demolishes” “heteronormativity” and “masculinity” (I may not have enough scare quotes to get through this sentence) it stands to reason that this person would be (1) not heterosexual, or (2) not…
