#funnily enough though i do tend to still think that manifests most with kendall though

[pynkhues]

Why do you think Logan was hard on women, as Shiv said? I'm sure a big part of it is good ol' fashioned misogyny combined with him being generally awful to everybody, but do you think it also has to do with losing Helen and Rose so young?

Oh, gosh, this feels like a question I could probably write a million word answer to, but ultimately, yeah, I do think he’s a misogynist and I do think losing his mother and sister at such a crucial age impacted his relationship to women as a whole.

I also don’t think we can't discount the era he was born into as being crucial in shaping his views on women overall.

I think – prior to the current era of politics with the reversal of things like affirmative action and Roe v Wade – it was pretty normal to view progress as a straight line going up. While that’s shifted recently, I think there is still this tendency to view the past as slowly progressing instead of the absolute swings and roundabouts that it was and is, and I think that idea particularly permeates when it comes to women’s rights. Which makes sense, right? In America, women got the right to vote in 1920, Amelia Earhart became the first woman pilot in 1932, women seriously entered the workforce en masse during WWII between 1941 and 1945, Rosa Parks didn’t give up her seat in 1955, the birth control pill was approved in 1960, JFK signed into law the equal pay act in 1963.

That seems, on paper, like a line going up, but that’s not what reality was.

The reality was that after all those things, women faced extreme backlash, and on top of that, there were these dramatic shifts with established gender roles that shook things up! This was reflected, like most things are, in art.

A million years ago in my film theory class at university, I actually wrote an essay about this and noir cinema, which as an entire genre is about male impotence post-WWII and female empowerment and this new sense of the unknowability of women which men felt extremely personally in this era. This is, of course, embodied by the iconic femme fatale character trope which dominated cinema in the late ‘40s through ‘50s, and is understood to be a figure born of male anxiety post-WWII (and man, if she isn’t great), but that anxiety came from the lack of social services to help very damaged men navigate their return to cities that had drastically changed since they’d left them.

That era was also dominated by the creation of suburbia, which was built as a social reward for these traumatised men and a trap for newly liberated women. It was about trying to remind men of what they’d seen their friends die for, while telling women where they belonged.

Logan came of age in the midst of that social identity crisis (he would’ve turned 18 in 1956! At the late peek of noir cinema!), a crisis that would only be compound with the Vietnam War that his brother would enlist in, and the sexual revolution. Logan’s life was peppered with male failure and violence, and the mystery and the loss of women, in his father’s death and his uncle’s abuse, even in his brother never making it to the front lines in Vietnam; in his mother’s abandonment, his sister’s death and his aunt’s implied absence.

He collects tokens of masculinity in medals of wars he never fought, and he romanticises the unknowability of women like Marcia and Rhea and Shiv, because it’s what he was taught. It’s the era he grew up in, and Logan, as we saw time and time again, is a character who never quite learns.

So why is he so hard on women? I mean, he is, but I also think he romanticises them to an extent that robs them of their personhood, which feeds back into the era he came of age in. Women then were capable, but unknowable, which made them threatening and emasculating, which is exactly how Logan treats all the women he encounters. They’re femme fatales to him until he can unpick their stitches and figure them out and re-cast them as supporting characters to his own story. He’s a 1950s guy, living in the 2010s, and unfortunately, I don’t think that’s all that rare in real life even now.