Channing Tatum covers the latest issue of Vanity Fair. He’s promoting Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the end of the Tampa-Stripper Trilogy. He also chats about P-ssy Island, the movie written and directed by his girlfriend Zoe Kravitz. Channing is still dealing with the aftermath of his divorce from Jenna Dewan and this is sort of his comeback after taking time off plus the pandemic. Like, he was already burned out for years before Covid came around. Channing doesn’t break any big news in this profile but he is really funny and he just has a light touch, wherever he goes and whatever he does. Some highlights from VF:
He can’t do carbs. “My face gets really fat really fast,” he explained. Once, to please his ex-wife, he’d hired a vegan chef who wrapped everything in bread. “I just got fatter and fatter and fatter.”
The stripper world is, in reality, very grim: “That world is not rosy. Some of the worst people I’ve ever met in my entire life were in that realm.”
Feeling burned out professionally & personally years ago: “I was working a lot. I had gotten to work with some of my favorite directors. I had checked boxes that I would never have hoped to dream about. But something just wasn’t quite filling me up. I was sort of kind of just trying not to be bad in movies, instead of being good. And I was kind of going, ‘What’s…’ And it really had nothing to do with my work. It was really about my life.”
His divorce from Jenna Dewan: “We fought for it for a really long time, even though we both sort of knew that we had sort of grown apart. I think we told ourselves a story when we were young, and we just kept telling ourselves that story, no matter how blatantly life was telling us that we were so different. But when you’re actually parents, you really understand differences between the two of you. Because it is screaming at you all day long. How you parent differently, how you look at the world, how you go through the world.”
Divorce sucks: “In the beginning, it was super scary and terrifying,” he says of their initial separation. “Your life just turns on its axis. This whole plan that you had literally just turns into sand and goes through your fingers and you’re just like, ‘Oh, sh-t. What now?’ It was probably exactly what I needed. I don’t think I would’ve ever done the work, I think, on myself in the way that I had to do the work on myself to really try to figure out what next. And really, it just started with my daughter. I just dropped everything and just focused on her. And it was truly the best possible thing that I ever could have done. Because in the alone time that I have with just me and her, we’ve become best friends.”
He never realized this before??! “Only in having a daughter did it start to really scare me how scary the world is for women. You can conceive it when you love someone that is a girl, but it doesn’t land in the same way as having a tiny female human in the world that is so vulnerable and looking at the world through rose-colored glasses.”
Whether he thinks about remarrying: “I don’t know if I’m ever going to get married again… Relationships are hard for me. Even though I am a bit of a monogamist. In business, I have no real fear of anything being destroyed. But heart things, when it comes to people I love, I have a really hard time. I end up trying too hard, you know?”
He’s trying to have more chill: In other words, as the internet observed after Tatum was discovered to be following a number of Kravitz’s fan accounts on Instagram: “I have no chill.” It was innocent, he swears. “I was just seeing what she was up to! Also, I didn’t know anyone would know.” But these days he’s trying to have more chill in general. “So I can actually experience these moments, instead of just trying to change it or something. Or being afraid that it’s not going to work out how I wanted or something.”
Channing has always struck me as a serial monogamist – even years post-divorce, he’s only been connected to two women, and both of them were serious relationships. I think he falls hard and fast and, yeah, maybe he has no chill. That’s so funny about him following Zoe Kravitz fan accounts too, just to keep up with what she was up to. OMG. Anyway, I always kind of thought that Jenna left him more than Channing leaving Jenna. She was just so happy to get out of that marriage and move on – it made me feel kind of sorry for him.
In the piece, he also mentions his friend, the author/commentator Roxane Gay. Gay has been in love with Channing for years, and she often lusted for him on social media. He saw her posts and got in touch, and now they’re planning on working together. He tells VF that Gay has “almost a roughed-out outline of a story that we both love.” He also describes her as “way busier than I am,” so he’s waiting on her schedule to clear up.
It’s clear he has healthy, loving, respectful relationships with women… so how did he never realize, before parenthood, that the world is scary for women??
Cover & IG courtesy of Vanity Fair.
I love that he’s working with Roxane Gay. I remember all the hilariously thirsty stuff she’d post about him. People would get upset about how she was objectifying him. She’d point out that he knows exactly what he’s doing. Besides, she’s married to a woman now. She’s also two inches taller than he is, which speaks to his lack of the usual level of masculine BS. I’d love to be a fly on the wall when they get together.
This is the first I’ve heard about it, but I’m a little baffled as to why she’s posting horny stuff about him when she’s married to a woman. Seems kinda Rosie n’ Tom back in the day?
Well, if they’re both ok with that, good for them, I guess. Channing seems okay so far.
Roxane Gay is openly bisexual, if that’s the question you’re trying to ask
I mean, that’s pretty off reasoning if she’s saying ‘he’s putting it out there so I can objectify him’.
I don’t know, a champion of feminism should understand the ick behind that stance.
Men always just telling on themselves. If you never empathized with women or heard women until fatherhood says more about you than anything.
Seriously. As soon as a man says “when I had a daughter I realized women are treated like crap” it is SO illuminating.
“You can conceive it when you love someone that is a girl, but it doesn’t land in the same way”: This statement may be acceptable for some but not for me. It doesn’t have to “land” in any special way to know the world is misogynist and cruel. And it’s a little unnerving given that his partner is a Black woman.
I always respond to men who pull the “father of daughters” speech: Your daughter is going to be Just Some Bitch to a man. That’s a guarantee. How do I know? I’m a beloved daughter of a great father, and I’ve been “Just some bitch” to many men. Your mother and your sisters were “Just some bitch” to men. Your daughter will be too. When they get offended and angry, my reply is “Think of all the women who have been ‘ Just Some Bitch’ to you. A woman you gawked at in public, made a lewd comment about, or laughed when your friend made some lewd comment, she was someone’s daughter. She had an interior life that was rich and complex. She had hopes and dreams, talents and achievements. But to you, she was Just Some Bitch. As every woman who has ever lived has been, when she crossed the path of a man who refused to see her as anything but an object of desire or scorn, based on how much he’d want to sleep with her.
Great comment Ianne, I totally agree with you, even though I love Channing and understand he means well. But men can be kind and good and still misogynistic at some level. It’s ingrained in them by society from when they’re little.
Stop. This kind of knee jerk take twists what he’s saying, or means. It’s not fair and kind of BS.
He clearly empathized a lot with women and has the least amount of toxic masculinity of any male white celeb, afaik. He’s talking about how having a daughter hit differently.
You can empathize with a situation that’s not your own. You can know about, learn about it, talk/read/listen/sympathize about it granular detail.
But you still might not *KNOW* what it’s like to BE in that skin, be that person.
Isn’t that what we say to white people who claim to empathize and bipoc lives? Isn’t this what Harry was saying about thinking he understood until he married Meghan and realized how differently the world looked, how the world reacted.
You love someone more than you love yourself, with all walls down… Of course you’re going to be more empathetic in a way that you weren’t before.
Don’t put down a good ally.
I don’t think his allyship is being critiqued here as much as the utter ubiquity of the idea that women don’t really matter until they are related to you. That’s what I meant by my Just Some Bitch comment. Calling that out isn’t utter condemnation of him. It’s good that he realized that women have a different lived experience. More men need to not only realize it, but realize the role they have all played in the general dehumanization of women.
For me, if an ally is good, they’ll look at a good-faith criticism without seeing it as a “put down”. That includes me at times too depending. This isn’t me saying Channing needs to read the comment of a stranger on Celebitchy and internalize it, this is just a general response to your last sentence.
Regarding your analogy – I feel like it’s important to say that white people don’t understand the Black or Brown or POC experience so that they can act with greater discretion about what they say and do, because white people will often want to pretend their experiences align with them. Now, gender is a bit different because gender identification is not like racial constructs. But it would sound equally gross to me if anyone said “I didn’t really understand how awful racism really was until I had a Black friend.” There’s having a lived experience and then there is doing some research. Knowledge and empathy don’t always go hand-in-hand.
I have an issue with it also because it fuels those PSA posters that say things like “She’s someone’s wife/mother/sister/daughter/aunt.” I prefer the ones where everything is crossed out so it says “She’s someone.”
But that’s just me.
I have an issue with it also because it fuels those PSA posters that say things like “She’s someone’s wife/mother/sister/daughter/aunt.” I prefer the ones where everything is crossed out so it says “She’s someone.”
THIS. Women do not only exist and matter in some male adjacent universe. And, honestly, men have been turning to mush over their newly born daughters forever AND NOTHING CHANGES.
Love, love, love Roxanne Gay!!!!!
I also love Roxanne Gay, and that they’re working together is so exciting to me!!
I think maybe some of us don’t understand/empathize w the ‘problems’ or ‘circumstances’ of others until we’re foisted into the same/very similar typa situations in life, (maybe)? I hope Channing speaking about this, caring about how scary it can be for women will be a catalyst for other people/men to care also. A gal can hope 🤞
Cool pics
I understand this. My niece just turned two years old, my brother’s first kid. Its then that he fully realized what life is like for a woman, the dangers we face. This man has a sister (me), a mother, female friends, close female relatives and a fiancée. Once his daughter was born, this little tiny baby that was trusted to his care, that he realized how difficult that job was going to be. That every thought he’d had and cat call he’d given…someone else was going to have toward his daughter. He said that realization, especially after the overturn of Roe v Wade (abortion and women’s health care was not on his radar before honestly) scared the crap out of him.
Good.
Ugh. I’m so fed up with men only realising how scary the world is for women once they have wives and daughters. Come on. Read the room.
Didn’t he have a whole mother and wife before he had a daughter? I cannot with these people who are just now seeing how scary the world is for women because it affects them through their child. Gross.
He seems alright. He’s kind of a male Emily Ratajowski, but acceptable Because Male. Made looks and sexuality a large part of his work/art, hot privilege, makes mistakes, is a feminist, sex positive to boot, seems to talk about those things a lot, seeks attention (nothing inherently wrong with that), lives his life, gets maybe 2% of the nastiness. Must be nice.
That answer from men isn’t thrilling, but it seems like it’s going to be a while before relating female suffering to things men and boys may go through is no longer the best way to get people to really look at how women and girls are being treated. It can tell you something about the person you’re dealing with too. Sometimes it really makes a man or boy stop and think. Other times, men get belligerent with you over the fact that you dared to compare some woman or girl they’re abusing to them and that tells you that there’s little hope for progress; it’s all about them.
It seems like for now, it’s necessary to
go back and forth between the two. Sometimes relate it to male pain, other times put your foot down and refuse to do that.
I am SOOOOOO sick of men only realizing how toxic men are when their daughters – whom they only view as extensions of themselves – become threatened by the very toxicity that they once turned a blind eye to (or worse, participated in).
Everyone’s got the ‘life is scary for women’ angle covered so I’m gonna just point out that maybe he gained weight eating bread on a vegan diet because he wasn’t *eating* enough protein and fat (and I’m not talking about drinking a pea protein almond milk smoothie). Fat and protein are what regulate your blood sugar and make you feel full and he’s always been pretty athletic and likely needs a lot of protein. Just sayin – carbs aren’t the devil and aren’t going to ‘make you fat’ (god forbid) as long as you’re eating a balanced diet!! But I guess some people prefer total abstinence.
Frankly this is typical of every man I have ever met. They don’t realize or think about a woman’s point of view unless life forces them to. They just don’t. It doesn’t make them horrible people, but men are definitely less empathetic in general and more self-centered.
What a stupid, asinine thing to say. SMH.