In last week's GQ Style profile, Brad Pitt looks gaunt, almost broken. He’s flinging himself head-first into sand dunes and balling himself up into goateed fetus. He’s not the man you imagine sparking an affair on the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. He's not the man who starred in Troy, with rippling delts that put Helen of Troy's launch of 1,000 ships to shame. He did, however, find himself the man who launched 1,000 think pieces. The Daily Mail called Pitt a "pampered man-baby" who needs to grow up. The Guardian wistfully longed for the days when Pitt was "giving it to Geena Davis on a motel sideboard" in Thelma & Louise. Never mind that most of Pitt's career has been about redefining what it means to be a man. It’s surprising, then, to find such an uproar after Pitt has bared his emotions in GQ Style, acknowledging that he’s in a post-divorce wilderness emotionally and mentally, during the course of a flamboyant photoshoot in the (metaphorically obvious) American wilderness.

Brad Pitt Talks Divorce, Quitting Drinking, and Becoming a Better Man Brad Pitt, in his first interview since his split with Angelina Jolie, opens up about love, loss, and what to do next.

Surely they remember that Brad Pitt has worn a dress before? Just weeks after 1999's Fight Club debuted in theaters, with Pitt starring as the cocky, psychotic alpha male Tyler Durden, he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in a minidress. It was a perfect contrast to Durden, and a reminder that despite the cult of the alpha male that has risen around the film, Fight Club is actually a damnation of toxic masculinity. Pitt's efforts have also extended to his production company Plan B, where he shepherded this year's Oscar winning Moonlight, a film about the exhaustive nature of performative masculinity.

It was sitting in the audience of a 12 Years a Slave Q&A, moderated by director Barry Jenkins at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival, that led Pitt to offer producing Jenkins's film Moonlight, an adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney's In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. A coming-of-age story about a black, gay protagonist in Miami is not the traditional narrative Hollywood pushes about black men, or men in particular. But Pitt used his star power to push forward a film with a message about shrugging off that old, stonewalled masculinity of our grandfathers. In a year where Moonlight received the industry's highest of accolades, Harry Styles's Rolling Stone shoot is praised for not adhering to gender norms, and Kendrick Lamar has grappled with his personal demons and the constraints of respectability politics, a small but loud slice of Internet pundits have chosen to call Pitt's willingness to open up about his emotions an affront to masculinity.

The world has expected men to lead two lives—one that drips with machismo in public, and a stoic private life where we withhold our emotions from the world.

(Sidenote: It's very white-guy-in-his-fifties for Pitt to suddenly discover R&B. But I'll begrudgingly admit that Pitt’s finding his own humanity through the art of black men—McQueen, Jenkins, his newly discovered muse Frank Ocean—who have historically been denied a chance to express their emotions without being forced into society's caricatures of masculinity, is admirable. And cringeworthy as the quote—"R&B comes from great pain, but it's a celebration. To me, it's embracing what's left. It's that African woman being able to laugh much more boisterously than I've ever been able to"—sounds, his producing of McQueen's and Jenkins's shows he's putting his money where his mouth is, unlike other Hollywood stars who speak about diversity without any intent of making positive change themselves.)

As a father who has children to raise in the wake of a divorce, it's healthier for Pitt—for himself, and, yes, for men everywhere, especially those who think Fight Club is merely a meditation on materialism and looking jacked—to set an example of accountability and show how to reckon with one’s past. This Pitt is analyzing himself and his life so he can come out healthy and strong again. That’s hard, tiring work—more so when you're up against angry men and women accusing you of being weak. For almost every generation up to and including ours, the world has expected men to lead two lives—one that drips with machismo in public, and a stoic private life where we withhold our emotions from the world. That's something I've never been able to do during a Disney movie, animated or otherwise, as evidenced by sopping up tears with my popcorn-butter-soaked napkin after seeing Moana.