Tootsie (1982)

and What He Learned in a Dress

An impossible actor who puts on a dress to get a job, and finds out what the women on the set put up with. What it teaches about "the right type," the friend who names what your partner is doing, blame moved back where it belongs, a confidence used against you, and the woman who told him whose hurt it was.

Tootsie (1982). Directed by Sydney Pollack, screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal. Dustin Hoffman as Michael Dorsey and Dorothy Michaels, Jessica Lange as Julie Nichols, Teri Garr as Sandy Lester, Dabney Coleman as Ron Carlisle, Charles Durning as Les, and Bill Murray as Jeff.

“I was a better man with you, as a woman... than I ever was with a woman, as a man.”

Michael Dorsey, at the end.

This page belongs to Plot Twist. It is a refusal seen, like Coming to America, partly from the man’s side: a difficult, out-of-work actor who puts on a dress to get a part, and finds out what the women around him put up with every day. It is a comedy, and a very good one. It also has a man at its center who lies to two women for most of the film, and this page keeps both of those in view.

Like every entry on the Plot Twist page, it reads a story for the pattern it teaches, and makes no claim about anyone’s diagnosis. Nobody here is a monster. There is a director who treats women as props, a co-star who won’t take no for an answer, and a hero who learns, slowly and at other people’s expense, to be better.

The Story

Michael Dorsey is a talented New York actor nobody will hire, because he’s a perfectionist and impossible to work with. His friend and acting student Sandy auditions for a part on a daytime soap, a hospital administrator, and doesn’t get it. Michael, desperate, disguises himself as a woman, “Dorothy Michaels,” auditions, and wins the role. He needs the money to stage his roommate Jeff’s play, with himself and Sandy in it.

As Dorothy, Michael plays the administrator as a woman who won’t be pushed around, ad-libbing when the script doesn’t go far enough. The character becomes a national sensation.

When Sandy catches him half-undressed in her bedroom, where he was trying on her clothes for ideas, he covers by saying he wants to sleep with her. They do. Meanwhile, he falls for his co-star Julie, a single mother in an unhealthy relationship with the show’s director, Ron. When Michael, as himself, tries on Julie a line she’d told Dorothy she’d welcome, she throws a drink in his face. Julie ends it with Ron on Dorothy’s advice.

Dorothy has admirers of her own: Julie’s widowed father, Les, who proposes, and an older co-star, John Van Horn, who nearly forces himself on her until Jeff walks in. Sandy, hurt that Michael hasn’t returned her calls, breaks up with him when he admits he loves someone else.

When the show wants to extend Dorothy’s contract for a year, Michael unmasks himself on live television, improvising that the character was really her twin brother. Julie, furious at the lie, punches him and walks off. Weeks later, he gives Les back his ring and they share a beer. He waits for Julie outside the studio. She tells him she misses Dorothy, and he tells her Dorothy is still in him.

Tootsie was the third-highest-grossing film of 1982.

What It Gets Right

A great deal. It shows, plainly and funnily, the ordinary indignities women on a set put up with: being looked over, talked down to, touched without asking, and pushed past no. It lets a woman, however invented, say out loud what the women around her have been swallowing. It gives Julie the choice to leave, and Sandy the last word on how she was treated. And it lets its hero say, at the end, that he had been worse as a man.

What It Teaches

1. “A specific physical type”

Dorothy’s first audition goes badly. The director, Ron, tells her she isn’t right: “I’m trying to make a certain statement and I’m looking for a specific physical type.” Later, at the screen test, someone asks the cameraman to make her look a little more attractive, and he jokes about pulling the camera back as far as Cleveland.

The Decoder’s Card 25, Body Shaming Disguised as Preference, is “Weaponizing ‘preferences’ into criticism.” Many women have heard the polite version, “I’m just looking for something specific,” used to say, not you, and not because of anything you did. Dorothy says what it really is: “some gross caricature of a woman to prove some idiotic point.”

2. “I don’t like the way you patronize her”

Ron is going out with Julie. When he asks Dorothy why she doesn’t like him, she tells him: “I don’t like the way you treat Julie. I don’t like the way you patronize her. I don’t like the way you deceive her. I don’t like the way you lie to her.”

It’s the thing the friend on the outside can see and the woman inside can’t yet. Julie leaves him, on Dorothy’s advice. Many women got out because another woman, or someone they believed was one, said the plain thing.

3. “I shouldn’t have gone to Dr. Brewster’s office so late”

On the soap, Julie’s character blames herself for going to a doctor’s office so late. Dorothy, ad-libbing, turns the scene: the doctor has tried to seduce several nurses, “always claiming to be in the throes of an uncontrollable impulse.”

That’s Card 20, Reversal of Blame, caught on live television. The scene moves the blame back where it belongs. It’s the kind of moment that made Dorothy a national sensation.

4. Using what she told him

Julie tells Dorothy, woman to woman, what kind of approach from a man she’d welcome. So Michael, as himself, walks up to her at a party and tries it. She throws a drink in his face.

The Decoder’s Card 46, Playing the Long Game, describes it, the same pattern this series met in Groundhog Day: learning what someone wants, in confidence, and then using it to get her. Julie didn’t know why it felt wrong. It felt wrong because it was built from something she’d said to a friend.

5. “You’re the one that made me feel this way”

The woman the film treats worst is Sandy. Michael lies to her to cover the dress, sleeps with her, doesn’t return her calls, and finally tells her he loves someone else. She gives him the line he deserves: “There is nothing you can do for me. I just have to feel like this until I don’t feel like this anymore and you’re gonna have to know that you’re the one that made me feel this way.”

It’s the most honest thing anyone says in the film. She doesn’t ask him to fix it. She tells him whose it is.

6. The better man

At the end, Michael tells Julie, “I was a better man with you, as a woman... than I ever was with a woman, as a man.” And then: “I just gotta learn to do it without the dress.”

It’s a lovely line, and a fair one. He learned to listen, to take women’s complaints seriously, to stand up to a man like Ron. He learned it by lying to two women for months. The film forgives him, and Julie walks off with him, talking. Whether she should is her call. The lesson for the rest of us is in the first half of the line: the way he treated women changed when he had to live on their side of it.

Men Who Learned, Side by Side

	Coming to America (1988)	Groundhog Day (1993)	Tootsie (1982)
What he wanted	A woman who could think for herself	Her	A job
What he did to get there	Pretended to be poor	Studied her, day after day	Pretended to be a woman
What changed him	Meeting her	Living the same day until he changed	Being treated like a woman

Three men who got what they wanted by deceiving someone. Only one of them had to find out, first-hand, what it’s like on the other side.

If You Grew Up on This

Many of us watched this with our parents, and laughed at the dress. Nothing on this page asks you to stop laughing. The useful thing is to look at it clearly from where you stand now.

Some questions to sit with:

Have you been told you weren’t “the right type,” and understood what it really meant?
Who was the friend who saw what your partner was doing before you did?
Has anyone used something you said in confidence to get to you?
Have you ever said, “You’re the one that made me feel this way,” and not asked them to fix it?
What would the men in your life have learned, with a day on your side of it?

Michael needed a dress to learn it. Sandy, Julie and the women on that set already knew.

You’re the audience now. You already know.