Hacker Cinema
Tootsie
1982 · Film · 116 min
Directed by Sydney Pollack
When struggling, out of work actor Michael Dorsey secretly adopts a female alter ego—Dorothy Michaels—in order to land a part in a daytime drama, he unwittingly becomes a feminist icon and ends up in a romantic pickle.
1 positive3 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
In addition to the headline, this bill would also criminalize such popular movies as Hairspray, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Tootsie, for which Dustin Hoffman won a Golden Globe. (And quite obviously a fair bit of music videos and general entertainment industry content would also become illegal.)
>> The bill also includes a section that takes aim at transgender individuals by prohibiting material "that includes a disconnection between biology and gender by an individual of 1 biological sex imitating, depicting, or representing himself or herself to be of the other biological sex."
> Thanks again for continuing this conversation! I'm enjoying it. Also, can you recommend me a book or two to read on this subject? Thanks in advance.
Hey sorry for my late reply, I really didn't mean to waste your time, I just got super busy and spun a bit responding. Honestly I haven't read as much as I'd like to after discovering the internet around 1995, so this is mostly what I've picked up online.
To me, wokeism is fundamentally about stuff we can't unsee. It's like being friends with someone in an abusive relationship, where the other partner takes us aside and tells us that if we knew what they knew about our friend's behavior, we might not want to be friends with them anymore. The more we learn, the more that America's origin story becomes a twisted fable of revisionist history, written by the winners to cover centuries of oppression and violence. These stand out to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_slavery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_(1781_ship)#/media/File:Slaveshipposter.jpg
I went to South Carolina a few years ago and stood on a small plantation cotton field they keep preserved for tours. It was suffocatingly hot, felt like 100% humidity under intense sun, and not even the hottest time of the year. I just imagined people forced to pick cotton all day, every day, their entire lives. It was soul-crushing.
Then the tour guide called the Civil War the Northern War of Aggression and my eyebrows raised. Reality shifted and I suddenly saw the feelings from that time still running strong today.
Maybe I can relate my experience better through pop culture references..
I grew up on movies like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple, Do the Right Thing, Glory, Schindler's List and Amistad, to name a few. I never read Black Like Me and never saw Soul Man. I think I may start with these, regardless of if they aged well, to get an impression of where my head is at now vs then.
This search brought back a memory, that in Short Circuit (one of my all-time favorite movies), I didn't know that Fisher Stevens wore brownface to play Indian engineer Ben Jabituya until maybe the 2000s:
https://ew.com/movies/short-circuit-fisher-stevens-regrets-playing-indian-role/
This just goes to show how ignorant people were (including myself) as recently as a couple of decades ago. I think that the makeup in Soul Man is forgiveable because it's explicit and the subject of the film, much like Dustin Hoffman dressing as a woman in Tootsie. Whereas Short Circuit did it for convenience, without considering that it might be offensive.
I also grew up playing with the toy car with the rebel flag on it from the Dukes of Hazzard, completely oblivious to any racist connotations.
And sexual harrassment was so prevelant that we had never even heard of it until Anita Hill vs Clarance Thomas in 1991 before he was appointed to the Supreme Court. I remember that we were really appalled by that, because it was so obvious that he was guilty of the harrassment, even if that didn't bar him from being appointed. This was just after the Rodney King beating and LA riots, but a few years before the OJ Simpson case if I remember right. Racial tensions were running high, but also there was a feeling that minorities were being kept from positions of power, so there was a lot of cognitive dissonance. There was no Me Too movement and we didn't have a words like cancel culture yet. I didn't feel at the time that he should have been appointed, because he gave me creepster vibes. I think his decisions in the time since have shown that he is very, let's just say tempted by financial favors.
> This is sort of like the concept of "original sin", isn't it? The notion that certain people have a debt that is so big that it is impossible to ever be paid back, and so they must forever remain burdened with the guilt of the sin that their ancestors committed. The scale can never be zeroed. The guilt can never go away. The transgression can never be forgiven, because the effects linger down to our day.
Ya that's a good point, I hadn't considered that. It reminds me of how young people in post-WWI Germany felt that it was impossible to pay back the war debt that their elders faced when they lost the war. So they felt oppressed by who they viewed as Jewish elites in banking, eventually using them as scapegoats and starting WWII against the countries whose loans they were defaulting on.
Which has eerie similarities with the dissilusioned feelings of young men in America today, who due to wealth inequality can't earn the level of income needed to provide for a spouse or family, as they watch women and minorities rise without them. Blaming liberal and Hollywood elites, as well as immigrants, for bruising their egos instead of the real culprit, late-stage capitalist patriarchy.
I think what we're talking about is: how can the rights of individuals be upheld when our debts to previous generations are so high that we'd lose ourselves in an attempt to pay them back?
I guess my only counter to that is, if winners and losers resulted from the inequities of previous generations, leading to the vast wealth inequality we see today, then what would healing look like? Letting it go without making ammends, or going too far with violence as a result, both seem extreme.
I feel that affirmative action and taxing the wealthy are two solid approaches. But I don't feel that either have been tried to a degree nearly approaching reparations. Because if they had, then Congress might be 50% women, we wouldn't have such a large national debt or high poverty rate, etc.
> In the case of the LA fires, and for the additional reasons you've given, I agree, DEI was not to blame and is being used as a scapegoat. I wonder, if the fire chief were instead a straight white male, and if there was no firefighter that "looked like you" but instead, was capable of saving your life, would people still have blamed DEI, or would they instead shift their focus towards the "real problems" that you mentioned? Perhaps if these people weren't in these highly visible positions to begin with, DEI would not have been undermined as it was.
Ya, DEI probably wouldn't have been blamed had the people involved in the response fit prejudiced notions of what they should look like.
It seems that we both agree that DEI wasn't the cause of the fires. But maybe we should ask if putting such priority on DEI is undermining the cause of reaching equality. With so much political manipulation happening these days, it makes for an attractive scapegoat for those wishing to distract us from the real issues.
I don't know the answer, or if DEI should be put on hold temporarily. What I do know is that with controversial issues like gun control, we can find ourselves on hold indefinitely. So I am suspicious of calls to halt DEI when the problem of discrimination in hiring still exists. It feels too opportunistic IMHO.
> preface: I would like to think that everyone on the board has in mind the good of the entire company, and that the men don't just have in mind the considerations of men, and that the woman is not the only advocate for all the women of the company.
> Given the above, what injustice is there? Assuming that everyone earned their seat on the board fairly, without nepotism, sabotage, or shady backroom deals, why do you consider there to be an injustice happening here?
> The only way I can see there being an inherent injustice in a board room like this is if my initial assumptions aren't true, and that the men aren't advocating for the concerns of the women. But that would be to assume the worst of people. That sort of thinking is racist and sexist. That leads to tribal thinking, where people think that people from other demographics are similarly only looking out for "their own group".
Ya good point about the dangers of tribalism, since that is the single greatest threat facing the US today. We've grown so divided and provincial that we can't seem to work together, and that's undermining our credibility in the eyes of the world.
And I agree that people don't just work towards their own best interest, and that assuming they do is putting them in a box.
What concerns me though is that some people only respond to authority, not what society deems common decency. So without a law in place, they will return to discriminatory practices.
Trump just issued an executive order revoking Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, promoting affirmative action in federal contracting:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/23/trump-revoked-equal-employment-opportunity-order/
Even though this move claims to encourage merit-based hiring, it will undoubtedly have the opposite effect. Because authoritarian-minded people will no longer be forced to practice nondescrimination. So they will hire candidates who appear to fit their own projections and stereotypes, causing them to overlook similarly-qualified candidates from other demographics.
When the laws aren't there, companies have a track record of accepting a certain level of human cost if it raises profits. Seatbelt laws, pollution laws, etc reflect the need for those regulations.
Now, we can argue whether the free market would take care of discrimination on its own. But in these times of little or no antitrust enforcement, often workers have few alternative employment options, so are at the mercy of employers. I'm not seeing politicans in favor of deregulation also calling for antitrust enforcement, so they are having their cake and eating it too, making this argument suspect.
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"modest success"
Yes, because Caddyshack, Stripes, and Tootsie were small, modestly successful, movies that only a few people have heard of.
I mean it's not like Ghostbusters was one of the most successful comedy movies of all time.
It's not like Groundhog Day from 1993 was was added to the United States National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" or anything.
No, clearly he just had "modest" success in just those 13 years post-SNL. I mean we'd better not even mention his award winning turns in movies starting the late 90s had we?
Yikes, I take it back - it's not your youth, it's your smug ignorance that's showing.
I'm tempted to just tell you to rent the classic Dustin Hoffman movie Tootsie and watch the first few minutes.
The basic reason why it is polite to give people flat, euphemistic turndowns -- not just at the end of interviews, but in lots of breakup situations, including exit interviews, declining of contracts, and breakups with SOs -- is that you don't want to prolong the agony or send mixed signals. You don't want to appear to be negotiating. You don't want to appear to be trying to cause excessive pain. You certainly don't want to provoke the person to burst into tears, physically attack you, stalk you for weeks, months, or years, or file a lawsuit.
You also don't want to tell a person that they're hopeless and will never succeed in the industry and then wake up to find out that they're Steve Jobs. That happens. It happens all the time. Interviewing is a mistake-prone, statistical process and decisions are based on hunches that cannot be explained, only rationalized, even to oneself.
There is a reason why constructive feedback is so valuable. People won't give it to you up front. I myself am much more direct online than in person -- in person I'm a hopeless softie, until you get me into an engineering situation or otherwise give me hints that you can take it. Not everyone has the emotional stamina to withstand the full force of MIT-style, anonymous-peer-review style power criticism.