I think my husband had a hunch. He's wanted to watch The Fall Guy (2024) for months, and we finally got around to it—and it was excellent! For those late to the party like me, the movie centers around a stuntman, Colt Seaver, played by superstar Ryan Gosling, who does stunts for a Hollywood megastar. The irony didn’t escape me—a megastar playing a stuntman who clearly has his own stuntmen performing incredible stunts in a movie about stunts. You get the picture.
The irony doesn’t stop there. For anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock, Ryan Gosling starred in last year’s hit, Barbie (2023), where his character, Ken, absorbed much of the blame for Barbie’s problems—namely, her objectification and oppression. However, Ken simply wanted Barbie to love him, to which she responded with something like, “You do you, and I’ll do me.” The movie ends with all the Barbies ruling Barbie Land, while the Kens are essentially relegated to lounging on the beach.
To all the Barbie fans out there, I realize I may have missed the mark on some points, and I apologize. In my article, Go Girl!, I explain that I understand Barbie to be a pivotal movie showcasing women’s rights, and I fully support this. After all, I’m a middle-aged woman living in California who’s been attempting to make my way through adulthood for almost 40 years now. I can attest that we, as women, have worked incredibly hard to carve out our well-deserved place in modern culture to earn our seat at the proverbial table. With Kamalove, I believe, with fingers and toes crossed, we just may finally achieve it.
However, it seems to come at the expense of men falling behind—no pun intended.
You can go online and learn all about the movie’s cameos and action-packed Easter eggs, but what I want to share with you goes a little deeper. The Fall Guy beautifully demonstrates how vulnerability gets lost in a society that values success above almost all else—and women are not immune to this trap. Like Barbie, the female lead is played by Emily Blunt, a superstar in her own right, who portrays a camerawoman who becomes a director herself. Yes, the lead woman of the movie within a movie is also the director of that movie.
She initially falls in love with the lead stuntman, Ryan’s character. However, while working he injures himself, only to disappear which understandably breaks her heart. She recovers, but not without a bit of resentment which, to her credit, she channels into her first feature film. But you’ll have to watch the movie to see how these two lovers end up resolving their differences.
While the plot is complex in its simplicity, what caught my attention was a scene where they are reunited only for her to confront him with, "You know, whenever I ask you how you were doing, you always gave me the thumbs up, never sharing how you were really doing!"
This is a complaint I frequently hear from my female psychotherapy clients about their male partners—women often pathologize men for not being able to share their feelings. I understand their frustration. As a mother of sons, a sister of a brother, a daughter of a father, and a wife of a husband, I feel your pain, ladies. I want to connect with the men in my life, but they sometimes seem unwilling—or worse, unable—to open up. Or are they?
Towards the end of the movie, as Ryan's character is about to perform one of the most death-defying stunts—one that isn’t just a stunt in the plot but a real-life challenge—he calls her to profess his love in case he dies and says tearfully, "There’s no room for thumbs down. I mean, I almost always feel thumbs down—my back hurts, my knees ache, my neck is in pain. But in this line of work, you always have to give a thumbs up to be credible."
Here’s my point: As recently as last week, I read about a public call by a woman on Substack for women to gather together to cohere around women-only projects to address the metacrisis. While I understand that there are times we want and even need to come together in gender-only groups, this veiled notion of women needing to band together to do something to oppose patriarchy feels very much like 'last-century feminism' to me.
That said, I must admit there is something inherently special about femaleness that the world could benefit more from namely, the ability to commune. Similarly, there is something inherently valuable about maleness which relates to strength. Both aspects of life are gifts that form the basis of a generative society, and as with any gift, when taken to extremes, they come with limitations.
In this way, women contribute to the world's problems just as much as men. The issue isn’t solely about gender or sex (though, at times, I am fully aware that it is). Rather, the central issue, as I see it, is how we relate to ourselves and to each other. In other words, how we engage in these relationships can make all the difference. I believe it’s time to acknowledge this so that we can take collective responsibility for the gender dynamics in our culture that have contributed to our current predicament, rather than simply pathologizing one sex over the other.
You see, while women have been objectified visually, men have objectified themselves. Guys have taken the hit for a long time—quite literally. They are the ones who play the contact sports we love to watch for entertainment, whether it’s football or rugby, for example. They risk their lives to build our buildings, fix our power and sewage lines, and serve as soldiers in our wars. While we women have tried to find our way into these arenas, men are predominantly the ones who do the work there. And most men do these public acts of service without complaining…because let’s face it, complaining is not sexy—confidence is.
But we all know that men have feelings too. And if we acknowledge that our modern society is structured to repress emotions, then we have to recognize that we women share this burden. So it’s not just thumbs up or thumbs down. It’s both. Appreciating the circumstances in which our responses arise matters…a lot. There are times in life when we need to keep our thumbs up, like when putting out fires or birthing babies. And there are times when a thumbs down is absolutely the thing we need to do, like professing our love to our children and spouse. It’s not just ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and AND either/or.’
This is the kind of relational dynamic I would like to see encouraged—the creation of healthy, reliable ways for all of us—men, women, and, of course, children—to connect, ensuring that our experiences are real, acknowledged, and engaged with. The goal isn't necessarily to elevate ourselves or to win, but to negotiate our needs constructively, so that the outcome is greater than the sum of the individual participant’s views—a resolution neither of us could have reached alone.
I hope to see 21st-century metamodern feminism taking a stand for a process like this—not only for our sake as women but for men’s as well. Because of the crises we face—politically, socially, and ecologically—we must find a way to negotiate with one another both personally and collectively. Embracing our vulnerability is the first step. Learning how to share what we authentically feel is the next. And ironically, the fall guy took a leap of faith to show us how.