breaking the cycle: gotg2 and the theme of toxic masculinity

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It’s taken me, oh, about a month to organize my thoughts on this and they’re still a mess, but I have all these snippets in my head about how GOTG2 deconstructs toxic masculinity, and hey! you’re gonna get them now

Toxic masculinity is basically the concept that socializing men and boys to be a certain ‘masculine’ way, and criticizing them or ridiculing them when they fail to live up to these (often impossible or even abusive) standards, is ultimately harmful to everyone, men and women alike. Ever wonder why you flinch at dudes yelling “man up!” to their crying young sons instead of comforting them? Yeah, that’s why.

Anyway, regarding GOTG: a lot of this stuff revolves around Yondu and the Yondu-Peter relationship, but also (I totally love this) a large portion of it also revolves around a white, straight, able-bodied man who is quite literally called ‘Ego’. spoilers follow, naturally-

Ego’s legitimately charming, like how a lot of real-life horrible men are. You can see how Meredith Quill would easily fall for someone like him. He’s handsome, he’s charismatic, he calls her his “river lily”-

(oh hey! the funeral flower!)

– but Ego treats women, including Meredith in the end, like shit. He’s only interested in what they can do for him (provide progeny) and the second he starts to feel an actual emotion towards one of them – Meredith – he’s so confused and displeased that he decides the best option is just to kill her. Ego is, well, ego, completely unable to understand how there could possibly be things in the universe that don’t relate to him or are better than him.

But he’s also toxic masculinity taken to its ultimate end: sensitive emotions are Bad, women are weak (this post very correctly points out, Ego credits Peter with giving Gamora her freedom, when it’s something she took for herself!), and violence is the best way of dealing with problems. You should never apologise, never admit you’re wrong, give no quarter to your perceived inferiors, remain in charge, remain dominant. Even when dealing with your own children! That’s what Ego is.

(is it fair to say, he works so well as a villain because he’s things we know and see every day?)

Ego comes so close to luring Peter in with all this, because Peter too has some of these qualities lurking a little bit too near the surface. He can’t remember the names of the women he beds and he’s very quick to resort to violence, most of the time. But Peter’s a good person (and can I say, I really like that the film hammers home again and again that he’s a good person largely because of his mother‘s influence) and his
last words to his father are basically a complete rejection of his values and a declaration that he doesn’t want to be the same sort of man he is. He breaks the cycle, the cycle of male dominion that’s left so many women and children hurt and discarded and dead. And he ends the movie crying and sadly expressing his emotions to his friends, like Ego-type men don’t, and being a good father to Groot.

Speaking of good fathers-

Yondu isn’t one, not really, not til the end, for almost the same reasons that Ego isn’t. Him and his Ravagers are a slightly different flavour of toxic masculinity, the less charming kind, but they’re equally as bad. It’s kinda telling that even though we see female Ravagers elsewhere, there doesn’t seem to be a single one in Yondu’s crew. They’re all Men, violent and posturing and hard, and hey – isn’t Yondu a freaking perfect example of how toxic masculinity messes up men as well? After a lifetime of abuse and slavery he really does want to be a father to Peter, but the pressures of the society he lives in makes that impossible. If he dares show any compassion or tenderness, it’ll be seen as weakness, and another “better” man will kill him and take his place as leader.

(it’s interesting that in the scene in the first film where Yondu is beating Peter up for betraying him, he latches onto Gamora, the only woman in the room, as the thing that’s making Peter “soft”)

But, obviously, that’s no way to live your life and no way to be a parent. Once Yondu’s at his lowest possible point – his crew has mutinied, his friends are dead, his son’s in terrible danger – he finally starts to shake off the thing that’s had him in metaphorical shackles all his life. The only way he can be a good father to Peter is by finally allowing himself to feel things, and to act on those things without fear. One of the reasons his death scene hits so hard is that that’s the only time in both movies that we see him act with gentleness, when he reaches out to caress Peter’s face the same way Meredith tried to reach for Peter’s hand on her deathbed. And another reason is that it comes with an apology, the sort of apology men like Ego can simply never give. Like Peter, Yondu’s able to break the cycle, and though it comes too late for him it’s not too late for his son.

In conclusion, GOTG2, a movie all about family, makes it so clear that toxic masculinity has no place in one. I hope some of the young boys who see the movie walk away with that as a message, too. I think they probably will.