Tootsie

            The movie Tootsie is about an actor named Michael who is highly assertive.  He has a hard time getting hired because people don’t like him.  He wants to produce a play but he doesn’t have the money.  When he learns of an opening in a soap opera he decides to apply, even if the part is meant for a woman.  He decides to transform himself into a woman without anyone knowing.  He lives most of each day in the role of a woman.  He’s learned that women have it harder then he’d thought.  In some cases the movie challenged stereotypes and gender roles and in other cases it reinforced them. 

            In the movie, the director was stereotyped as at typical man who thought women were beneath him.  He would continually degrade Dorothy, the character that Michael would dress up as.  He didn’t know why Dorothy didn’t really like him and found it interesting that she challenged his authority.  In these scenes I think it reinforced the stereotypes and gender roles of men.  In one of the final scenes when the director finds out Dorothy is really Michael it seems to set his world right again.  Dorothy had turned his world upside down by blending the roles of genders, but once he knew that Dorothy was really a man he just figured oh, that’s why.  She was really a he. 

            There were also many ways that Michael challenged stereotypes and gender roles of women while he was in the character of Dorothy.   He proved to others that just because you are a woman doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t stand up for yourself.  He didn’t expect for all of this to happen.  He never really gave thought to women being treated differently until he became one.  Once he was being treated differently because he was a woman he still only knew how he would have handled it as a man.  He couldn’t do it differently.  Standing up to the men was just how he was personality wise.  People were shocked at how he was behaving as a woman and this was challenging stereotypes.  People began to see that it wasn’t such a bad thing. 

            It was very interesting how the movie both challenged and reinforced stereotypes.  One minute it was very clear that the men were men and the women were women.  Then the character of Dorothy would come forward to shatter, or challenge those theories.  It clearly showed people are just people and they should all be treated with respect.