Art and Activism According to Justin Baldoni

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 19, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 19, 2024 |

It Ends With Us is based on a book written by Gen Z’s favorite TikTok author, Colleen Hoover. The story follows protagonist Lily through her abusive relationship with her husband Ryle. Lily eventually leaves her abuser, hence the title. The cycle of domestic violence ends with them/her. Blake Lively produced and starred as Lily, and Justin Baldoni directed and starred as Ryle.

Controversy over a supposed “feud” between Lively and Baldoni broke out when eagle-eyed TikTokers (in this situation, all roads lead back to TikTok) noticed that Lively, Hoover, and most of the other actors involved in the film unfollowed Baldoni on social media. They then noticed that Baldoni was absent from all of the press appearances and media coverage of the film, or he was doing them by himself, and that everyone ignored him at the red carpet premiere and dodged questions about him. Lively is now being criticized for ignoring the domestic violence plot of the film in her promotions, while Baldoni has been talking about nothing but.

Before the premiere of It Ends With Us and its ensuing drama, I had never heard of Justin Baldoni. In fact, I hadn’t heard about Baldoni’s and Lively’s alleged beef until a fellow Pajiba writer informed me of it as something I might want to look into and cover. In that same conversation, another colleague mentioned Baldoni’s memoir Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity. I saw the title and winced, and then googled him and felt a familiar chill run down my spine.

As a cis-gendered straight woman, my experiences with masculinity, in general, are biased. Therefore, my experiences with the very internet-era concept of positive masculinity are as well. I’ve dated men who use the phrase and talk openly about it as something they aspire to, and these men have invariably been the ones who expect the most traditional gender-normative behavior of me; who feel threatened by my independence and express skepticism at my feminist political beliefs. And so, when I hear phrases like “positive masculinity,” I hear gender essentialism, and I get the ick. It has always been my belief that if you dig deep enough on this stuff, it usually comes up creepy.

That was exactly what I found when I went down the Justin Baldoni rabbit hole. It started in 2017 at the TEDWomen conference when he gave a TED talk titled “Why I’m done trying to be ‘man enough,’” in which he explained his philosophy about masculinity, essentially challenging men with the question, “Are you brave enough to be vulnerable?” Baldoni correctly believes that traditional conceptions of masculinity are toxic and stifling, that men should be allowed to express their feelings and show weakness, and that doing so would only strengthen their relationships with women. It’s a heteronormative interpretation and one that he expands on in his memoir. In both, he tells men that “the glass ceiling exists because we put it there,” but stops short of calling for any real policy change. In fact, he assures his readers, “I am not pushing any partisan belief system or agenda here. As a registered Independent, I don’t subscribe to any political ideology, and though I absolutely vote and participate in elections, I don’t talk publicly about who I am voting for.”

To position oneself as pro-change philosophically while failing to acknowledge the need for structural change falls short of activism, but Baldoni clearly thinks of himself as an activist—he now has a podcast and internet community based on his beliefs—and it is within that activism that I think the conflict between him and Lively lies. Baldoni has spoken about how challenging it was to play a character like Ryle, how he looked to Lively and the other women on set to direct scenes depicting violence, and why he wanted to play Ryle in the first place. I think this clip from May of this year is the most telling:

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“I think that there is a little bit of Ryle in everybody. I wanted to explore that part of myself that maybe had some darkness and some shadow that I think I had been afraid to explore for a long time. I think for a long time I wanted to be a good man and a good person and I kind of ignored that part,” he said, arm-in-arm with Hoover.

This movie and the story it tells are on theme with Baldoni’s exploration of the limits of his own masculinity, but they’re also on-brand with his business of a community of men talking about how to be good men. He has been promoting—dare I say, exploiting?—the domestic violence storyline so hard that I think that’s the only reason anyone noticed Blake Lively wasn’t. Promoting charities and raising awareness for charitable causes is, of course, a good thing. Still, it can’t be denied that there’s self-promotion involved as well, and that he is, on some level, profiting from it, beyond the obvious ways one profits from acting in and directing a Hollywood film.

In awareness of my bias on this subject, I asked some of the men in my life about the situation, and they echoed my above feelings—that it all felt like a celebrity trying to sell them something. The husband of a good friend called this whole thing “celebrity mumbo jumbo.” This man works in healthcare, so he says stuff like this simply doesn’t concern him on a daily basis when he’s dealing with life-or-death scenarios. Furthermore, he said, no celebrity could “sway” him “into thinking or believing” anything. If some of his close guy friends wanted to talk about how to be good men, sure, but he’s inherently skeptical of anyone with a platform. This was reiterated by another friend, a fellow writer, also married. “I don’t really care what an actor has to say about masculinity, I only really listen to psychologists on that matter,” he said, adding, “I’ve got too much other shit going on to care about positive masculinity.” It’s worth noting that both of these men grew up with either absent or distant fathers, and were raised on some level by single mothers. Both of them admitted to caring more about being a “good person” than a “good man,” something Baldoni also claims to aspire to.

These responses are what I suspected—that the “good” men I know aren’t yearning for a community of good men, or an instructional manual on how to be one. Then I spoke to my sibling, a transgender man who for years worked closely with at-risk youth as a teen librarian and with nonprofit organizations. I assumed he would agree with me and my friends or, if anything, be even more critical of Baldoni and his brand of positive masculinity. But, while he admitted that he has a real job and doesn’t live online like I do so doesn’t really know who any of these people are, he felt differently.

“I have the combined perspective of being a trans-masculine person and also working with high school-aged young men who have clearly internalized some negative masculine stereotypes, and aren’t necessarily going to absorb feminism in a positive way from women and girls,” he said.

“So having positive male/masculine role models does really have an effect on the way young men see themselves and interact with the world and especially girls and women in their lives. They see me as a ‘man’ who has a strange (to them) gender presentation, and then they realize that I’m just another human. So, I don’t think it’s anti-feminist to say that young men need and deserve positive, masculine role models that can embody masculinity in ways that are healthy and also broaden the definition of what masculinity has to mean.”

Very rude of my older sibling to be right. Okay, fine: maybe Baldoni has a point. But then, why the beef with Blake?

The truth can only lay, dear reader, in that tale as old as time: creative differences. Baldoni uses art (and I’m using that word for the sake of argument; I don’t actually think It Ends With Us is art in the capital-A sense) to promote what he sees as his activism while Lively uses it to promote herself and her carefully crafted image, as well as her businesses, which are legion (in this case, hair care). Which one you prefer depends on who you are and how you consume entertainment, but either way, consumption is the point. Both of these people are capitalists first and artists second. If I’m being generous, Lively probably didn’t take kindly to a D-list actor telling her how to promote feminist causes. If I’m being honest, both of these people fall short of the kinds of people I want representing feminist causes.

But without any new information, I’m left with two questions:

1. Who cares?
2. Whatever happened to art for art’s sake?