SCAVENGER'S DAUGHTER // director's note

saturday is teen night at the Y.  groups of teenage boys flock in the weight room, laughing, ragging on each other, pushing each other around, and one-upping each other: practicing their nascent manhoods.

it’s both kind of sweet and terrifying. these behaviours don’t quite fit them yet, in the cruel mire of puberty the attitudes fit them like clown shoes.  on the other hand, this is exactly the brand of masculinity that kept me away from the gym for most of my adult life.  i’ve always felt that social masculinity, isolated from women and parental authority, defaults to a feral and anarchic sort of will to power.  

masculinity is in crisis.  the patriarchal ethos of western imperialism is finally facing a substantial challenge.  “toxic masculinity” hasn’t just entered the lexicon, it’s gone viral.  it must be a deeply confusing time to be a straight teenage boy.  where feminism offers infinite possibilities of what femaleness could signify, our moment seems to introduce nothing but prohibitions on what maleness ought to be.  there’s a lot of undoing to be done, and to some it feels like a threat.  “meninists” and incels rally on reddit and 4chan, and proud boys march in broad daylight.  their terms and tactics are military: this isn’t evolution, it’s a siege on dominant culture, and empire, race, territory, gender, and capital have all become battlefields.  in susie’s text, jack finds himself at the epicentre of this crisis—caught between a humanist awakening and programmatic violence, without the tools or vocabulary to reconcile them.   

it’s easy to write off all masculinity as toxic these days, but i wonder what we lose in blanket dismissal.  can we reclaim it from empire and capital and the politics of domination?  i have a nephew now, and a godson, and i wonder what sort of men they’ll be asked to become.  when i look at these kids on teen night i wonder what manhood means to them, and if it’s any different than the imperative i failed at.  in this moment of transformation, what futures for men have we yet to write?