What A 1982 Comedy Teaches Us About Men And Women

The 1980s were a tamer time for movies. Films rated “R” for extreme content, “Die Hard” or “Flashdance,” for example, now seem benign when placed alongside the gorefests or sexually gratuitous scenes that are standard fare on today’s large and small screens. However, the Dustin Hoffman movie “Tootsie,” given a modest “PG” rating on its release in 1982, now feels shockingly boundary-pushing and transgressive when viewed through today’s culturally charged lens. 

The plot centers on brilliant but struggling New York actor Michael Dorsey, who is too much of a perfectionist to be offered work anymore. As his long-suffering agent, played by the film’s director, Sydney Pollack, warns him: “No one will hire you.” Providing moral support to a friend and fellow actor, Sandy, at her audition for the role of an administrator in a daytime TV hospital soap opera, Dorsey realizes he can simultaneously circumvent his difficult reputation and experience, as he puts it: “one of the great acting challenges an actor could have,” by pretending to be a woman and auditioning for the role. Michael duly becomes “Dorothy Michaels,” wins the part of hospital administrator, Emily Kimberly, and proves an instant hit with the viewers, production crew, and cast members alike. So convincing is he as a woman, the showrunner congratulates him as “the first female character who is her own person.” 

Despite his newfound wealth and professional success, Michael soon comes to realize how stressful being a woman can be. As Dorothy Michaels, he gains a terrifying insight into how women are routinely patronized by their male co-workers or simply ignored. The very title of the movie, “Tootsie,” comes from the demeaning term the show’s director uses to address women when he cannot be bothered to remember their names. Casual and sometimes threatening objectifications of women are brought home to Dorsey on numerous occasions. In one particularly fraught evening, the father of an actress he has fallen in love with proposes marriage to him, and upon returning home he is pursued to the point of assault by a male co-star who has stalked him back to his apartment. “This is a nightmare,” he mutters to himself as he tries to get rid of his amorous suitor without blowing his cover. 

Dorsey becomes desperate to leave the soap opera — partly because he cannot handle the exhausting attention “Dorothy” is receiving, and partly because he is falling in love with his beautiful co-star, Julie, who plays a nurse on the show. But his agent tells him he cannot break his contract and confess what he has done. Admitting that all along he was a man pretending to be a woman would be treated by the studio executives as “major fraud.” This declaration alone feels genuinely scandalous to a modern sensibility trained to internalize the mantra “trans women are women” as an unquestionable orthodoxy. The way Dorsey figures out a solution to his predicament — ad-libbing live on camera after a pre-recorded scene has accidentally been wiped — is one of the funniest moments in the whole movie.

And it is as a screwball comedy rather than social commentary that “Tootsie” works best. Not only does the film contain humorous insights into what New York was like in the early 1980s — as, for instance, one character saying it would be cheaper to get mugged than to get a taxi — but the real hero of the film is Dustin Hoffman. The brilliant but impossible Michael Dorsey we see at the beginning of the movie is clearly based on Hoffman himself. By playing off his real-life reputation as a notorious control freak, Hoffman displays remarkable generosity and humility as an actor, disarming the audience from the outset. 

Drawing on what psychologists might laud as the healthy ability to acknowledge one’s own absurdities, Hoffman plays Michael Dorsey absolutely “straight.” There is no knowing wink to the camera that this is really Dustin Hoffman under the wig, and none of the camp a less confident actor might have reached for in his depiction of Dorothy. That earnestness, paired with his evident willingness to mock his own reputation, establishes a safe, playful tone that allows the movie’s satire to grow organically without feeling mean-spirited. It is from this foundation that the film’s comedy of gender errors can flourish. 

None of this is to say the film asks us to excuse the men who patronize or endanger women. The director who can’t be bothered to learn a woman’s name is condescending, not confused. The co-star who follows Dorsey home and won’t leave is not a hapless victim of crossed signals; he is, by any reasonable measure, committing sexual assault. That Michael is genuinely rattled by it, entirely unprovoked as it is, tells you how little he understood before he had to live it, and it’s one of the film’s sharpest jokes at male expense.

Yet the film’s brilliance lies in its recognition that men and women are bound to disappoint each other and that a healthy society must learn to accommodate that awkward reality. While Michael Dorsey witnesses the ugly side of male chauvinism, he also discovers the impossible, romanticized ideals women harbor about the opposite sex. In a brilliantly comedic reality check, Dorsey, back to being a man, uses his inside knowledge to feed Julie, the actress he has fallen in love with, the exact chat-up line that she had earlier confided in him — while thinking he was Dorothy — was her dream for how a man would approach her. Far from sweeping her off her feet, the line freaks her out, and she throws a drink in his face.

It is a hilarious reminder that human beings rarely match the fantasies we project onto them. A mature culture doesn’t respond to this inevitable gap between expectation and reality with outrage. It accepts that romantic and social interactions are a messy business where we must learn to forgive each other’s inevitable shortcomings.

This is a skill a healthy society still needs alongside its capacity to name real wrongdoing because most of daily life isn’t made up of “Tootsie”-grade sexism but of much smaller frictions: the clumsy joke, the misread cue, the tactlessly phrased opinion. For those types of interactions, a functioning, pluralistic society relies on an unwritten social contract: the presumption of good faith, sometimes called the benefit of the doubt. Civil society flourishes not because people stop making mistakes, but because a healthy culture defaults to reading most missteps as foolishness rather than malice.

This presumption of charity is the bedrock of social trust. It acts as a buffer against paranoia and lets people speak, collaborate, and navigate their differences without constant fear of social excommunication. Naturally, bad characters exist; some people are genuinely manipulative or worse. But a society that structures its everyday norms around the worst of its members, rather than its ordinary ones who are all too capable of daily disappointments and calumnies, ends up asking everyone to live in a permanent defensive crouch.

There is a reason everyone who meets Dorothy Michaels falls in love with “her.” Dorothy is patient, unflappable, endlessly wise about other women’s problems and without appetites or wounds of her own, the ideal of a woman precisely because she is a performance, not a person. Michael is talented but insufferably arrogant, capable of friendship and ruthless exploitation in the same afternoon. Julie is warm and funny but dragging the wreckage of a messy love life and a habit of choosing men who treat her badly. Neither of them is anyone’s fantasy. What “Tootsie” understands, and what a culture chasing moral perfection keeps forgetting, is that real intimacy is only available to people who can tolerate the whole, flawed picture of somebody else, essentially the version of them that lets you down and misjudges the moment. Dorothy can be loved by everyone precisely because she is unreal. Loving an actual person is a harder and far more interesting kind of work.

The film’s real gift, then, is not naivety about human nature but proportion in how we respond to it. By letting us laugh at how men and women clumsily relate to each other, the film treats indignity as something survivable, even comic, rather than a mortal wound. It reminds us that a mature response to the disappointments of the opposite sex is neither to pretend them away nor to let them become the only thing that ever happened to you, but to meet them with the resilience to make sure they don’t get the last word. In a world obsessed with phantom standards of perfection, the messy, frustrating reality of genuine human relationships offers a more satisfying reward.

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