Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

If you look at the evolution of wrestling since the glam years of the 1980s, obviously, [WWE CEO] Vince McMahon has a lot to answer for. Vince brought the cameras into the arena in a much closer and more calculated way. He brought scriptwriters in in a closer and more calculated way. So wrestling itself began to leave behind its carnival roots and its improvisatory structures and became much more scripted toward the end of the ’80s and certainly into the ’90s. Now, it’s very heavily controlled and contained. It’s mapped for cameras. The live spectacle is much more controlled and contained and aimed toward the cameras.

In that late’ 80s, early ’90s phase, what was interesting was to watch the wrestlers who could work the camera versus those who were just very good at being caught by the cameras and to watch how deft that technology was starting to be in picking up the action and getting us in closer than we used to be.

As a consequence, I think there’s been a naturalization of the wrestler’s persona, especially male wrestlers. We hear about their wives and their children. They have storylines where one of the wrestlers is chasing the other and attacking his wife. This isn’t at all the same as the triangle between Macho Man, Miss Elizabeth, and Hulk Hogan in the 1980s. This is something entirely different because the cameras go into their homes — or what are meant to be their homes.

So performances that have become mobile, from the squared circle into the realm of film and television, is also a movement from a very social presentation of a wrestler’s persona into a very individuated, very personal persona, devoid of a larger social set of identifications.

Now, these guys present themselves almost straight [in the sense of basic and unaffected] to begin with. They’re usually in basic briefs, maybe a pretty robe here or there. But they’re so straight in their presentation as wrestlers. They’re just strong guys. There’s no exaggeration to let go of. They’re presented as regular, working guys. They’ve got muscles, but so do other working guys.

I wonder if their real role model is Arnold Schwarzenegger more than any other wrestler. He made a really good transition into film from his bodybuilding, and he was much more extreme as a bodybuilder. But if you look at Pumping Iron [the documentary that broke Schwarzenegger through to global fame], he was the breakout star in part because he seemed like a real person onscreen, and he worked the screen really well. He had a knack for it.

So these guys seem to have been brought into the game because of some humanist appeal, for lack of a better word. When he’s working, you can see who Dwayne Johnson is. You can see who John Cena is when he’s working. You get one generation beyond them [the group that came up in the ’90s and 2000s], and they’re looking much more like a normal person. The least looking-like-a-person wrestlers right now are Vince McMahon himself and his son Shane.

I do wonder if the camera coming into these guys’ houses, as scripted as it is, has added an element of their ability to be real and vulnerable and play some version of themselves on camera. It’s heightened, but it’s a heightened version of who they are.

The big innovations of the early Vince years were that the cameras would go backstage. You’d have wrestlers racing backstage, punching each other backstage, sometimes racing out into the street. But cameras have become much more mobile, and we carry cameras with us all the time, so people are much more used to staging ourselves that way and seeing ourselves staged that way.

Wrestlers have had to go through an evolution about dialing it back [as cameras have entered the ring more]. They do much more holding still. There’s a much clearer distinction between when they’re showing us a persona and when they’re actually doing the thing live. And a lot of that’s enforced because they go from town to town and have to deliver much the same show, in much the same way, from one city to the next, whether it’s in the United States or overseas.

This whole generation of young wrestlers has lived in a different world than Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Randy Savage came up in. And they’re just different men more generally. Men have changed, and this might just be changing norms of masculinity. They’re still exaggerated from what we would hope to see in everyday life, but not in the same way that they were 20 to 30 years ago.

I don’t know how big of an evolution of masculinity it is, but the shift toward more personal stories in wrestling from the days of Hulk Hogan or whoever feels of a piece with something larger in the culture, to me at least.

In the US, there are competing masculinities, and whatever war is being fought this week or the next, even the war on women’s bodies, those wars are being fought about definitions of masculinity at base and whose ideological stance is going to prevail in terms of masculine performance.

We have assumptions about the 1950s and ’60s and homophobia and masculine dominance and how it was a truly oppressive era. So you have the wrestler Gorgeous George, who’s a villain, fluffing his hair and his robe and doing his fancy thing. The crowd just loved hating him. And yet when he stripped down and started wrestling, yes, he cheated in the end of his matches, but there’s always a period where you could say he was a really good wrestler. At the same time, you’d have Ricky Starr, a ballet dancer from Greenwich Village, prancing around in ballet slippers with little miniature ballet slippers that he would fling into the audience. And they loved him! He was so tiny that he could leap on his opponent’s back and legitimately win.

The point seemed to be in the ’50s and ’60s that just being a man was enough. If you had a penis, that was enough. The only thing that matters is that, at some point, you could beat another guy up, and you could demonstrate that in wrestling in a way that was unlike any other arena. It was a very reassuring portrayal of masculinity. Yes, it was rife with sexism, homophobia, all of that, but at base, its message was: You’re a man, and therefore, we’re all men, and that’s all that matters.

The symbol of a real man is that he shows he can win. He loses often, but he gets back up and he fights again. The only difference is a good man wins by following the rules and defending the community, and a bad man wins by breaking the rules and thumbing his nose at the community. Those were the moral, ethical, ideological paradigms of the period, and they held even through the ’80s.

What makes [wrestling] so fascinating is that it is so representative of and informative to whatever is going on in the dominant culture at any given moment, and the thread that runs through it is one about defining what a real man is and somehow extending that definition to every man.

Yeah, our political battles, especially in the US but everywhere around the world, are so often about what masculinity is. But wrestling and action movies externalize that question in really interesting ways. So how has wrestling evolved along with our idea of what being a man is? Or hasn’t it?

To some degree, what you’re observing in these wrestlers-turned-actors is reflective of the evolving understanding of what a real man is and how a real man is to behave in the real world. But these are not exclusive. It’s not like the representation is on one side and the reality is on the other.

One of the things that was always fascinating to me about wrestlers is how gentle they were with each other. When wrestlers greeted each other back in the day at the gym, they would go, “Hey, man,” and they would slide two fingers [on both sides of the other man’s wrist] and barely touch. And that was how they would touch each other in the ring. You’d barely feel it. Because they have to work together to make the spectacle, wrestlers have to be extraordinarily sensitive to each other’s bodies and spirits in the ring. You can’t throw someone across the ring safely unless the two of you are communicating really well and your bodies are touching in exactly the right way.

I always felt in the wrestlers’ gym that the point of the gentle greeting that I saw was that they were saying to each other, “I can hold it back. I am in control of this. I don’t have to hurt you. But if you push me the wrong way, I will pound you into the pavement.” And I’ve seen that as well. So masculinity [in the wrestling gym] was about having the power but also the restraint and following the rules.

If you’re talking about the guys on Fox News or Donald Trump, they didn’t learn that lesson. What’s appealing about a John Cena or a Dwayne Johnson is that they’ve had that lesson. What’s revolting about these other men is that they didn’t get the memo that first you learn to cooperate, and then you beat someone up.

Donald Trump in 2007 for the Battle of the Billionaires was taught very carefully his stunt with Vince McMahon where he threw him down and pretended to punch him. And then he actually almost hurt Vince McMahon in throwing him down and punching him. He didn’t pull his punches. He wasn’t gentle. He missed the lesson he was given and went for it because he didn’t know the difference between how one is supposed to perform in this context.

When I was teaching a women and trauma course at Columbia over 30 years ago, I used to argue with the women in my class. “Do you simply want to hear what everybody playing by the rules says, or do you want to see what they’re suppressing, what violence, what impulses are really there? Is it better to have those things repressed so that we can all get along and pretend to be civilized? Or should we, once in a while, open up and see what’s really going on here?” It’s no less violent for being oppressed. It’s no less violent for being gentle. It just means that we know how to be acceptable in those performances.

It may be appealing to see these wrestlers-turned-actors being vulnerable and showing us their feeling selves. But I wonder what is not being seen as a result and if that’s still the more meaningful takeaway from these performances.

The new foods I’ve tried are just a smattering of what’s on offer from the dozens and dozens (and dozens) of plant-based startups that have sprung up in recent years, fueled by billions of dollars in venture capital cash. It’s the vegan gold rush, and while all that investment has been great for the companies, I worry about the downside for consumers and the plant-based movement: a glut of mediocre products.

The vegan gold rush is a direct effect of the sheer difficulty of changing hearts and minds — not to mention diets — on meat-eating by trying to appeal to consumers’ stomachs. Nearly all meat, milk, and eggs are produced on factory farms that pose a risk of incubating the next pandemic while polluting the air and water, not to mention condemning animals to a lifetime of misery and subjecting meatpacking workers to hazardous conditions.

Despite a majority of Americans telling pollsters they support a societal shift toward plant-based eating, moral pleas have largely gone unrequited: US per capita meat consumption continues to rise, while global meat consumption (excluding fish) jumped from 65 pounds per person in 2000 to 75 pounds in 2019 and is projected to increase significantly in coming decades, especially in low- and middle-income countries.

The new generation of animal-free meat, milk, and eggs has been promoted as a way to shortcut the moral debate by using technology to make plant-based ingredients taste uncannily like animals. If that can happen, the thinking goes, consumers will be more eager to switch over because they won’t feel as though they’re sacrificing their taste buds to their ethics.

It’s much too early to tell if that theory of change is right. It usually takes decades, not years, for a new technology to achieve widespread adoption, and many never do. The same goes for new culinary categories. But for that shift to happen on a wider scale, plant-based foods need to deliver on their gastronomic promise, and the glut of mediocre products that have landed in my mailbox certainly isn’t going to help the sector’s long-term goal, and may very well threaten it.

“If there’s a plethora of really poor products on the market, and people who don’t do their research or haven’t been exposed to [better] products choose one of those as their first foray into plant- based foods, that can certainly create a negative halo around the category,” says Jennifer Bartashus, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.

It’s hard to tease out the effect of sub-par products on the broader plant-based meat sector, but after years of startups capturing the public’s curiosity — and food dollars — there is evidence that the category is starting to plateau.

The plant-based industry’s growing pains

The president of Maple Leaf Foods, a major Canadian food company that entered the plant-based market in 2017, said in a February 2022 earnings call that the refrigerated plant-based meat category experienced explosive growth in 2019 (59 percent) and 2020 (75 percent), but just 1 percent in 2021. His explanation: “Consumers’ needs simply were not met, and they did not repeat purchases.”

Plant-based meat is hurting at the drive-thru too; analysts say sales of McDonald’s McPlant burger, made with Beyond Meat, are lower than anticipated. The single largest Burger King franchise operator in the US said in late 2020 that Impossible Whopper sales had fallen by half from around 30 per store per day compared to when it first launched in August 2019.

It was unrealistic for the explosive growth of the past few years to be sustained, and many players in Big Food are as bullish as ever on plant-based food. For example, Nestlé is quickly launching new products across Europe (hopefully not too quickly, though), while Unilever has pledged to make one-fifth of its ice-cream portfolio dairy-free by 2030.

But to meaningfully displace conventional animal agriculture, the plant-based sector will need to entice disengaged consumers with new and superior offerings; after all, according to one survey, consumers say novelty and curiosity are their primary motivations to give meat from plants a shot. Producers maintaining a much higher bar for taste and texture will be key.

Patience pays (and so does feedback)

One lesson that can be learned from the biggest players in the field is that patience pays. Impossible Foods was in stealth mode for five years developing its burger before it launched, and it’s now available in every Burger King. Eat Just toiled away on its egg product for almost six years and it says it now has 99 percent of the US plant-based egg market (though they have very little competition). Beyond Meat spent several years on its flagship burger before its massive IPO in 2019. The company says it allocates 14.4 percent of its net revenue to R&D.

Today, though, many startups are putting out products just a couple of years after securing funding, and unreasonable expectations from investors could be a cause. “We are seeing more generalists [investors] enter the space and we’re seeing that education is important so they understand what’s happening in order to make the products that they’re backing,” says Laine Clark of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for alternative proteins like plant-based and cell-cultured meats. “When these startups come to market with a product, they’re taking a significant risk that consumers won’t give the brand a second chance if the first experience isn’t pretty darn good.”

But much of the blame can’t be laid at the feet of investors; startup founders, like the rest of us, can be too optimistic in estimating how long something will take to do, says Josh Tetrick, CEO of Eat Just, which makes plant-based eggs and cell-cultured chicken meat. “An entrepreneur truly will believe that they [can launch a product] in 18 months, let’s say, and they’re raising capital to do that, and they made that outside commitment [to investors]. And understandably so, now there’s pressure and expectations to do that.”

One upside of getting a product to market — even if it’s too soon — is that it can light a fire underneath startups to make it better. “When you know something is out there, there is a bit more of a motivation to improve it,” Tetrick says.

And when startups feel they have improved a product, some use it as an opportunity to communicate their iterative approach to consumers. While food companies are constantly reformulating their products, some plant-based startups number each reformulation like a software company would; for example, Beyond Meat is now on version 3.0 of its “beef” burger, while Simulate is on version 2.0 of its “chicken” nugget.

Consumers say taste is the top factor when deciding which meat alternative brand to buy, but “clean labels/recognizable ingredients” comes in second. Bartashus argues that too many startups are shaping products around that second expectation, which could also help explain the mediocrity of the results. “So if the focus is on all-organic, non-GMO, and all-vegan, and it’s got no gluten — you’re in the pursuit of labels that sometimes you lose sight [that] the product itself has to taste good.”

All food companies conduct taste tests, but when I visited Beyond Meat’s headquarters earlier this year, it was apparent just how seriously they take feedback. The company has a room dedicated to gathering it, conducting dozens of sensory tests each week, and third-party off-site taste tests too.

“The room was specifically designed to remove bias — from the paint color on the walls to the light bulbs used in the booths — to ensure that we can get unbiased real-time feedback on our product development work,” a Beyond Meat spokesperson told me over email.

Courtesy of Beyond Meat
Taste-test participants in the sensory room at Beyond Meat headquarters.

If big R&D budgets, rigorous taste-testing, and mega-celebrity partnerships (Beyond Meat just appointed Kim Kardashian as its “chief taste consultant”) aren’t enough to dethrone animal meat from the center of the plate, cell-cultured meat — created by taking a small sample of animal cells and growing them in bioreactors — might win over consumers, at least on taste.

During a recent trip to San Francisco, I tried cell-cultured salmon, chicken, bacon, sausage, burgers, and meatballs. While some were 100 percent cell-cultured — meaning they were biologically almost identical to meat from animals — most included both cell-cultured and plant-based ingredients. But one thing was for certain: All of the products were noticeably meatier — juicier, firmer, and tastier — than their purely plant-based counterparts.

Whether these startups will be able to produce cell-cultured meat at scale at an affordable price point, and get consumers on board with such a novel food product, is an open question. They currently lack US regulatory approval to commercially sell their products, and in Singapore, the one country that has approved a cell-cultured product, Eat Just is selling its chicken nuggets at a loss.

Courtesy of Eat Just

Eat Just’s cell-cultured chicken.

The distance that even the best startups still have to go to make hyperrealistic analogues — despite billions in collective investment — illustrates just how hard it is to make plant-based meat, milk, and eggs that can compare to conventional products. And easy money might be drying up; venture capital firms are tightening their belts in the current economic environment.

We’re in the boom times of the vegan gold rush and, eventually, many startups will go bust. That’s just the nature of Silicon Valley and the business cycle more broadly. If a tech startup goes bust with a bad product, however, it doesn’t sour people on computers and smartphones. But there’s a real risk that if the plant-based industry doesn’t improve its offerings, all that consumers will be left with is a bad taste in their mouths.

“His body of work has the same effect as pouring some water on a sizzling hot sidewalk. In a few minutes, it’s going to disappear,” says critic Angelica Jade Bastién, who works for Vox’s sister site Vulture. “I’ve seen so many of his movies, and I barely, barely remember most. He’s not doing anything interesting physically or with humor. He’s just a block of body that has been sculpted, like some automaton that’s been created in a Hollywood lab.”

The hyper-competence and artificiality of Johnson left plenty of space for an enormous man who would show his softer side. A few dudes stepped into that niche. Vin Diesel became the chief creative mastermind behind the Fast & Furious movies and turned them into maybe the sappiest thing at the multiplex. Similarly, the work of Channing Tatum and Joe Manganiello in the Magic Mike franchise presented two big, beefy boys who only cared about her pleasure.

“These are very buff dudes, and they’re presenting themselves overtly as like, ‘Hey, you can look at me. This is fine. This is for you,’” says writer and critic Jude Doyle. “When men have the humility that allows them to be soft and approachable and funny and when we feel like they’re presenting themselves to us, for our enjoyment, and not just inflicting themselves on the world, there are ways in which that shifts and challenges power.”

Thus, the stage was set for the rise of our current sensitive (but not too sensitive!) big men: Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista, and John Cena. And that means it’s time to talk about the opening credits of HBO Max’s Peacemaker, specifically John Cena’s dancing.

This sequence could have come off as ridiculous. Cena seems uncomfortable, and his moves are stiff and unconvincing, particularly compared to some of his costars. Indeed, Cena wasn’t terribly comfortable! “I don’t dance; it’s something I’m not very comfortable with,” he told Vox sister site Polygon of a different dance number in Peacemaker.

Cena’s discomfort is a potent example of what makes these men seem so vulnerable on screen: They have a willingness to seem imperfect, despite their enormous, sculpted bodies. Directors like Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad auteur James Gunn (who has worked with both Bautista and Cena) and Dune’s Denis Villeneuve (who has worked with both Bautista and Momoa) love to use those imperfections against the actors’ assumed on-screen personas. Villeneuve might turn Bautista into a sad robot who just wants to be a farmer or have Momoa play an expert warrior who nevertheless spends several moments before a huge fight staring at a bug crawling around on his hand.

Gunn is deeply invested in forcing you to see his stars’ imperfections. In the second Guardians of the Galaxy film, he slowly but surely shows you the soft underbelly of Bautista’s humongous, destructive warrior Drax the Destroyer. Drax has the requisite tragic backstory (his family was murdered), which is explored in the first film. In the second, Drax opens up even more, becoming friends with the new character Mantis, in a relationship that is as close to a raw, genuine friendship as the Marvel Cinematic Universe allows itself to get. The scenes are touching and even tender, laced with deep melancholy and occasional bursts of self-deprecating laughter.

Within the tightly controlled confines of the MCU, only so much in the way of genuine emotion that’s not undercut with snark is possible. Maybe that’s why Gunn goes even further in Peacemaker. Or maybe it’s just John Cena.

“I knew there was a vulnerability to John Cena that I would be able to help carve out and present to the world,” Gunn told the Hollywood Reporter shortly before Peacemaker debuted. And Peacemaker in particular goes over the top in terms of its attempts to get you to see Cena as more than his physique. He argues with his racist dad. He sincerely befriends the other members of his elite assassin squad. He makes fun of himself with abandon. And he dances, including in his tighty-whities.

The wonders and limitations of big men being vulnerable on screen

Momoa, Bautista, and Cena have very different on-screen energies. For instance, Momoa tends to play big guys who yell a lot, which would seem the opposite of vulnerability, but he’s also quite comfortable with being an object of on-screen desire. Of this trio of brawny stars, he seems most capable of pulling off a genuine love scene. And you can’t be comfortable being desired if you’re not comfortable letting your guard down just a little bit.

What’s more, both Cena and Momoa have been more than willing to show off their off-screen vulnerability in ways that underscore that they’re just enormous dudes who seem fun to hang out with. Momoa did a whole press cycle about how he’s glad to be super sensitive. Cena has arguably spent even more time expressing the idea that his vulnerability and his status as an enormous hunk can live right next door to each other.

“John Cena has done commercials about how the average American is not a white man, [in which he’s] speaking to predominantly other straight white men who would idolize him for his body and his fitness,” Mandelo says. “He talks about softness being important and how men should open up more.”

The degree to which these mountains of man-flesh have made that vulnerability core to their on-screen personas goes beyond what earlier musclemen have made central to who they are. It feels as though it’s in conversation with a larger willingness in our culture to talk about how men need to embrace their emotions.

Is that enough? Maybe not. Vulture’s Bastién threw a bit of cold water on my notion that these performers represent something exciting. Yes, they’re more interesting on-screen performers than Johnson, but … what a low bar! Bastién argues that these stars put on imperfections as an affectation. It doesn’t matter that John Cena can’t dance if his body is completely perfect.

“Leading men’s bodies and their star image exist at the intersection of virile and vulnerable. We’re in a moment where there’s no balance between those two poles. Someone like Timothée Chalamet is vulnerable to the point of being joked about as if he’s the ghost of a Victorian child,” Bastién says. “On the other end of the spectrum, they’re so muscular it feels like it’s in some weird, uncanny valley territory. We’re not really seeing male stars who exist on a more interesting continuum.” Cena, Bautista, Momoa — they’re all the virile subsuming the vulnerable, trying to be everything all at once. And that chokes out anything else.

No matter how vulnerable these actors are on screen, none of that re-sexualizes the muscular man because the idea that an enormous guy could also be hot runs headlong into our cultural homophobia. Mandelo points to K-pop star Wonho as the kind of big, muscular guy that would cause many American brains to short-circuit. Yeah, he’s built, but he’s also in videos like this one, where he’s just rolling around in bed.

“It is not the Superman body that is untouchable and idealized. This is a body that can be naked, that can roll around and get sweaty,” Mandelo says. “I think our discourse around desire has gotten so wonky and hyper-conservative since the ’70s that we have trouble seeing being the object of desire as a positive, particularly for men.”

When vulnerability is a weapon

The understandable temptation when thinking about how Peacemaker’s tears are a very, very slight course correction from former, more impervious heroes is to label those tears as somehow vaguely feminist or progressive. “Finally! Someone is saying men can have emotions!” goes the clickbait headline in my mind. As several of the people I talked to suggested, however, overstating the value of such an advance might run the risk of saying that all men have to do to build a better masculinity is be a little more open with their vulnerability. Men’s vulnerability isn’t nothing, but it’s not everything either.

That said: I don’t want to understate the importance either, because contrast John Cena dancing in the Peacemaker credits with whatever this is.

I promise you are not prepared for Tucker’s latest montage pic.twitter.com/8tdvYTW2cn

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) April 16, 2022

Excerpted from Tucker Carlson’s nightly Fox News talk show by Nikki McCann Ramírez, an associate research director at Media Matters for America, the clip is a forthright celebration of testosterone, which Carlson fears is disappearing from American life. The clip depicts manly men flipping over tires and firing guns and irradiating their testicles (like you do). It is, frankly, bonkers. (Mandelo snarked to me that “just about every gay man on the internet was, like, ‘Somehow he accidentally made the intro to a porn.’”)

When you contrast Carlson’s clip with the more sensitive performances and off-screen personas of Bautista, Cena, and Momoa, it’s tempting to read the two cultural movements as being in direct opposition, or at least pulling in wildly different directions. To some degree, that’s true. Carlson’s celebration of testosterone isn’t directly in conversation with a dancin’ John Cena, but they’re definitely two different visions of American masculinity. And Carlson’s vision is one designed to cater to and comfort an audience whose own manhood might feel less immediately potent as they age.

“Fox News’s audience tends to be a little older, and a lot of this masculine testosterone craze is targeted at people who are going through a natural cycle of aging. Their testosterone levels are decreasing. They’re not the virile men they were in their 20s,” says Ramírez. “What Fox does very effectively is conflate a natural progression of life and society as a personal attack by political forces.”

What’s super weird about this is that outside of the mega-buff Joe Rogan (who isn’t a Fox News personality but is deeply involved in the extremely masculine world of UFC), the right- of-center audience Fox News targets doesn’t have a physical form to hold up as “what a man is.” Instead, Carlson’s clip imagines a man who might possibly exist somewhere and will come to save testosterone. Or something.

“What they have are strains and pieces of things that they like, but there’s no whole person for them to project that onto. There’s no figurehead, really, outside of Rogan,” Kristen Warner, an associate professor of journalism and creative media at the University of Alabama, says. “There is no symbol. There is no image to cast your eyes and your fantasies upon. So what they do is just kind of make shit up to approximate something real as best as possible.”

Yet Fox News keeps trying to prop up that imagined man all the same. Every few months, it turns up with another story about how maybe it’s weird when men cry. However, when emotions are expressed for a purpose that the network reads as worthy, then those emotions become okay to express. I probably only need to mention Brett Kavanaugh’s or Kyle Rittenhouse’s tears to make this point, but the network’s entire m.o. involves stoking anger and fear and frustration in its viewers.

“I actually think hegemonic masculinity allows for a lot of emotions,” Mandelo says. “In fact, it may mythologize that men are supposed to be stoic, but in reality, it’s more of an excuse to feel extremes of emotion and make them other people’s problem.”

That’s the thing: On-screen vulnerability is always being used somehow, whether to make a larger political point or just to get you to consider that maybe if John Cena can cry, you can cry too (which is also a larger political point). I don’t know if there’s a lot of value in seeing big, vulnerable dudes, but it’s also not valueless. And that’s why I and so many others I talked to for this article keep coming back to John Cena.

“He pushes farther than what Schwarzenegger and his peers did or thought they wanted to do,” Warner says. “He’s pushing into this place where he’s, like, ‘No, my body isn’t a symbol of all these things that you read it as. I would actually like to re-appropriate what my body signals and what my body stands for.’”

Peacemaker, after all, is a literal tool of the US government, a hard body who was used to do terrible things. Yet the arc of his TV show is about what it might mean to try to break free of that mold, to find a way to be a hero that doesn’t involve simply doing what he’s told. Maybe that’s not revolutionary to someone like me, who spends lots of time thinking about this stuff, but it sure seems like it’s revolutionary to somebody. Maybe, just maybe, it’s chipping away at some very old, very suffocating ideas, one tighty-whitie dance at a time.

Emily St. James is Senior Correspondent for Vox.

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