Two-time Academy Award winner Sean Penn has made some controversial remarks in an interview with The Independent, saying that in his view, men have become ‘quite feminised.’
“I think that men have, in my view, become quite feminised,” he said. “I have these very strong women in my life who do not take masculinity as a sign of oppression toward them. There are a lot of, I think, cowardly genes that lead to people surrendering their jeans and putting on a skirt.”
Penn made these latest comments when he was asked to reiterate on an earlier interview he gave to iNews in mid-January with the headline “Sean Penn: ‘I’m frustrated with the world’” saying that “I am in the club that believes that men in American culture have become wildly feminised… I don’t think that [in order] to be fair to women, we should become them.”
The 61-year old Hollywood actor, who won an Oscar for Mystic River in 2004 and Milk, five years later, was being interviewed about his new film, Flag Day, which also stars his daughter, Dylan Penn.
His latest comments has the internet blasting calls for him to be cancelled.
Journalist Leonie Cooper wrote an op ed in response to Penn’s latest comments, comparing him to “a pumped-up Jordan Peterson fanboy or an incel in a Saint Laurent leather jacket”, saying that the comments are “…problematic in a whole host of ways, from the suggestion that wearing a skirt is a defining female characteristic – Sean, buddy, I’m literally wearing jeans right now! – to the idea that “surrendering” masculinity equates in any way to cowardliness.”
“With his insistence that men are being bullied by feminism into becoming more like women in some kind of fabulous lady-led coup, what Penn fails to consider is that perhaps a little less butchness in the modern man might actually be a good thing,” Cooper continued.
“The classically male traits of aggression, assertiveness and the failure to pull together a decent coordinating outfit are all things that could do well to be imbued with the supposedly female attributes of empathy, sensitivity and humility. Less flagrant dick-swinging from our global leaders and maybe the world wouldn’t currently be in such a mess.”
Penn’s history of alleged abuse has since surfaced — in 1998, he was charged with domestic assault after allegedly hitting his then wife, pop-legend Madonna, with a baseball bat.
Despite rumours that she’d spent years suffering an abusive relationship with Penn, in 2015, Madonna denied she was struck by her then-husband during their four-year marriage.
In 1987, Penn was sentenced to 60-day in jail after punching an extra while filming the police drama, “Colors.”
In 2010, he attacked a photographer in LA, after which he was forced to undertake 36 hours of anger management from a private therapist to help him avoid future confrontations with the paparazzi who frequently stalk him, according to Los Angeles city attorney, Frank Mateljan.