Crews declares ‘masculinity is a cult’
At last week’s ninth annual Women in the World Summit in New York, actor Terry Crews set off a heated discussion when he declared, “Masculinity can be a cult. And when I say ‘cult,’ it’s no different than David Koresh. It’s no different than Jim Jones.”
Crews continued, “This is what happens with men and women . ... As a woman, they talk, but a guy is not looking at you as even all the way human. This is what you have to understand — there is a humanity issue here. (Women are) like, ‘Why don’t you hear me? Why don’t you see my feelings?’ And (men are) like, ‘But you’re not all the way human. You’re here for me, you’re here for my deal.’ It’s real.”
He went on to say that he, too, is “guilty,” comparing the way men view women to the way slave-owners view slaves as “not fully human” due to “a lack of empathy.”
“I believed, simply because I was a man, that I was more valuable than my wife and the other women in my life,” Crews said, sharing stories about when he would go out with his teammates when he played football. “You go to the strip club, and here’s the woman, and the whole thing. And once she starts talking about that she has kids or she starts talking about anything in her life, it’s like, ‘Stop, stop, stop.’ Because (she’s) becoming a human before my eyes. I don’t want you to be a human. I want you to be an object. I want you to be something pretty to look at. But as you talk, you’re making things too real for me.”
This isn’t the first time Crews has tackled the topic of masculinity and misogyny, previously opening a conversation on porn and the objectification of women in 2016 in a series of Facebook videos. He also became one of the first male voices in Hollywood to support the #MeToo movement and share his own experiences with sexual harassment.