Coming soon: Disrupting Dominion, a Multi-Part Series on Disrupting the Colonial and Toxic Masculine Narratives in the Outdoor Industry
When I wrote Ambient Dominion: How ‘Free Solo’ Points to an Epidemic of Toxic Masculinity in December 2018, I received so many comments from women, queer folks, and nonbinary people who shared my shock, disgust, and isolation at watching “Free Solo.” Sitting in a McMenamins theater in so-called Portland, Oregon, I watched the audience laugh off Alex Honnold’s toxic masculine “warrior complex” as he belittled his then-girlfriend, now wife, Sanni McCandless, and fell comfortably into the trope of the brooding, complicated genius. I didn’t need to publish that article to know that I wasn’t the only one horrified by the normalization of toxic masculinity in the outdoor industry, but it definitely confirmed it.
Since then, we’ve been hosting “Toxic Masculinity in the Outdoor Industry” workshops online about twice a year and created the Terra Realm—an exclusive community for those healing from the impacts of toxic masculinity and seeking to apply an anti-oppressive lens to their environmental justice work and activism. Predictably, I've also heard from cis, white male climbers who insist that "Free Solo" is "just a film.” They join the chorus of men who dismiss any form of oppression they don't want to address or be accountable for as "just a joke" or "no big deal." Predictably, I was labeled an angry "cuntsuckerfish" who "needs to get laid" on Reddit. Well, this so-called angry cuntsuckerfish is back with another scathing critique that will likely end up on Reddit—and the world will keep turning.
So, I know what to expect from this piece. The critiques I’m making here won’t be new to people who understand the deep interweaving of outdoor adventure media with colonial narratives. But for some, especially those comfortable with traditional adventure storytelling, these observations might feel like a stretch. And that’s precisely the point. These critiques are essential for challenging the narratives that have historically dominated these spaces, perpetuating violence, and erasure under the guise of “heroic, grand exploration.”
In this new series I’m calling “Disrupting Dominion,” we’re going to explore these themes in depth. We’ll take a close look at the climbing film “The Devil’s Climb,” where Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold bike across Turtle Island from so-called Colorado to Tongass National Forest to climb “The Devil’s Traverse.” This film, and the resulting candid interviews from Honnold and Caldwell, are a case study in how mainstream adventure media erases Indigenous histories, frames land as “virgin” territory to be conquered, explored, or used for white self-actualization, and centers white male adventurers as heroes of the natural world. This is intentional.
Films like “The Devil’s Climb” and “Free Solo,” use sweeping visuals to create a sense of wide, unending wilderness that feels miles away from “civilization.” But this is a prevailing optical illusion. These landscapes are subject to, and embedded in, the violence of ongoing colonialism. The myth of “uninhabited” landscapes or “untouched” wilderness rewrites history, pushing the systemic oppression Indigenous communities are actively resisting in real time out of frame. In doing so, these narratives cast white people as protagonists in stories where ongoing injustices like Indigenous dispossession and forced removal are relegated to the “background”—tragic, sure, as Honnold and Caldwell reflect several times how seeing the reality was “really depressing” for them and how it put a damper on their trip, but ultimately inconvenient and irrelevant to the white gaze as National Geographic made sure to leave any trace of Indigenous presence out of the film.
A useful metaphor here comes from filmmaking itself: think of the 2000mm ultra-long telephoto lens. When you look through it, the background appears closer than it is. It flattens distance, removing the chasm between foreground and background. In the same way, we need to bring our understanding of European colonialism and the injustices that have happened and are still happening into sharp focus in these landscapes we casually claim as "playgrounds." As Jolie Varela of Indigenous Women Hike pointed out, this attitude is both flippant and disrespectful to the Land's sacredness.
This magnified lens could be a powerful way to confront the injustices we (as in white people) have all but ignored, reframing them as urgent, pressing realities rather than distant echoes. For Indigenous peoples, this isn’t the background—it’s the foreground, and it should be for us white people, too.
What’s so melodramatic and striking about outdoor adventure films like “The Devil’s Climb” is how they use the land as a stage for self-imposed “adversity,” where climbers can pursue self-fulfillment, transformation, or even “enlightenment” or self-actualization. But who gets to participate in this narrative? Who gets to move freely through these lands as a protagonist on an “epic journey,” unburdened by the oppression Indigenous communities face in the very same spaces? The answer to these questions reveals a great deal about how whiteness, toxic masculinity, and colonial mindsets persist in outdoor storytelling.
These adventurers are often portrayed as explorers discovering vast, “unknown land” or “terra incognita.” This trope is as old as colonization itself, and it plays into a particularly harmful narrative of “terra nullius”—the notion of “nobody’s land,” ripe for the taking. White adventurers, largely cis men (but white women are not exempt from these critiques), become the default protagonists of these stories, their personal growth framed as the noble center of the narrative. Indigenous communities, if they appear at all, are often backgrounded, mere context for the climber’s heroics, while the land itself becomes a silent, passive character waiting to be traversed, climbed, conquered.
In truth, however, the land is neither passive nor “virgin.” As Indigenous communities assert, the Land is a living relation, scarred by ongoing histories of dispossession, violence, and resistance that are often carefully and intentionally omitted from these films—an act of historical erasure. They perpetuate the violence of colonialism by silencing Indigenous voices and histories, all while repackaging the Land as something “pure,” “untouched,” and ready for a new generation of (white) heroes.
But adventure media’s impact doesn’t end there. These films reinforce neoliberal environmentalism, where protecting the land is something done for Indigenous communities by the so-called benevolent white patriarch, the outsider who arrives to “save” a landscape or educate the masses on its importance. This deeply harmful framing reinforces colonial hierarchies and misses the point entirely: the Land cannot be “saved” when Indigenous voices, presence, and sovereignty are sidelined or silenced.
A Path Forward
In this series, I’m interested in pushing back on these well-worn narratives. Together, we’ll examine how toxic masculinity and imperialist-white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchal values (as bell hooks called it) shape outdoor media, perpetuating the illusion of “uninhabited” lands, objectifying Indigenous communities, and centering white perspectives. We’ll dissect moments in “The Devil’s Climb,” analyze statements from Caldwell and Honnold, and explore the broader implications of their narrative choices.
We have to view these films critically, holding the industry accountable for perpetuating colonialist and toxic masculine ideals. Outdoor media doesn’t have to play a role in erasure—it could be a powerful vehicle for solidarity, for supporting Indigenous rights and sovereignty, and dismantling the systems of oppression that remain in tact. But first, we must acknowledge where it falls short.
“Disrupting Dominion” will challenge what we’ve accepted as “normal” in these toxic masculine narratives that flood our media through articles, podcasts, and films. By looking through the metaphorical 2000mm lens, we can bring these backgrounded injustices into the foreground. We can advocate for Indigenous perspectives to be the center, where they belong.
Stay tuned for Part 1 of this series, where we’ll dive into the "benevolent patriarch" and unpack how it upholds “terra nullius” narratives under the guise of environmentalism.
(Share with a friend who also wanted to puke watching “Free Solo” and who doesn’t want to bring themselves to pay $11.99 to watch “The Devil’s Tower.” I watched it so you don’t have to. I know. I deserve a purple heart. Sometimes we gotta make sacrifices as feminist killjoys).
