Podcast: THE TERMINATOR teaches that Masculinity is Guns and Muscles

Two women in black shirts and sunglasses holding a gun.

The Terminator reinvigorated the action genre and gave audiences a fresh story that addressed (and destroyed) the worries of the day. However, the T-800 truly did deliver a message from the future for the boys of the ’80s: real men are powerful weapons with guns both mechanical and muscular. In their podcast “’80s Movies: A Guide to What’s Wrong with Your Parents,” Tara McNamara, Gen X, and Riley Roberts, Gen Z, look back at the James Cameron-Arnold Schwarzenegger classic at how the film influenced ’80s kids and the ways it is, in itself, a time capsule of 1984.