Our New Film “The Man Card” is Featured in Washington Post Front-Page Story

For years, right-wing politicians and pundits have repeatedly criticized the left for playing “the race card” and “the woman card.” Our new film is gaining national attention for turning the tables on them.

 

Our new film The Man Card was highlighted in a front-page Washington Post story over the weekend. The article, “Trump, Biden Wrestle for Masculinity’s Mantle,” examines how Trump and Biden have modeled competing visions of manhood during the coronavirus, and quotes Jackson Katz, the creator of the film, on the need for new and more adaptable definitions of presidential strength and toughness to meet the challenges and changes we face as a nation.

“The culture is changing and becoming in some ways more like Biden,” Katz says in the Post piece. “But Trump still clearly has a large appeal to men who understand the more traditional appeal of aggression, physical strength, the willingness to authorize violence.”

The Man Card, which was co-directed by Peter Hutchison, the acclaimed filmmaker behind the award-winning, sleeper-hit documentary Requiem for the American Dream featuring Noam Chomsky, explores how outmoded ideas about American manhood have combined with the politics of white male backlash to shape presidential contests over the past five decades.

Ranging from Richard Nixon’s tough-talking, law-and-order campaign in 1968 to Donald Trump’s hyper-macho revival of the same fear-based appeals in 2020, The Man Card shows how conservatives have lured white working-class men away from the Democratic Party by branding the Republican Party as the party of real men, attacking Democratic leaders as soft, and promising to restore declining white male power and authority in the face of demographic changes and ongoing struggles for racial, gender, and sexual equality.

The Man Card pays special attention to how right-wing politicians, political operatives, and media commentators have used white-male identity politics to channel the legitimate, class-based grievances of tens of millions of white men into unbridled resentment of women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and so-called “liberal elites.” It also explores how these deeply gendered dynamics have undercut the presidential prospects of women and undermined the nation’s ability to adapt to a changing world.

A co-production of the Media Education Foundation and Eat the Moon Films, The Man Card was directed by Peter Hutchison and Lucas Sabean, and is based on Jackson Katz’s book Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton & the Politics of Presidential Masculinity (Interlink Books, 2016).