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We saw this happen first with the left, which established the mechanism whereby news headlines—which often turned out to be mostly or entirely wrong—were used as instruments for emotional blackmail. People who refused to emote the way posters wanted them to would find their own humanity questioned: SO YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT RACISM? I GUESS YOU HATE WOMEN! YOU WANT TRANS PEOPLE TO COMMIT SUICIDE AND DIE.
As others have noted, this was a particularly female form of politics. But it worked so well that many of the men who initially found it horrifying have decided that if you can’t beat the catfight, you should join it. That’s why you see Theo Von breaking down and crying, holding his head in his hands while he weeps, trembling subtly to make sure you feel his pain. Or why the Collected Tweets of Darryl Cooper, the historian who doesn’t believe in facts, reads like a script from the Mean Girls franchise. Or why everyone who has ever worked for any media outlet is posting videos of weeping kids in Gaza. These days, X is just a bunch of grown men having a string of histrionic outbursts, projecting the sort of ululating emotion that, in an earlier age, would’ve called for a fetching of the smelling salts and a loosening of the corset. If you question the facts underneath their feeling, you are challenging the entire premise of the only thing they have to offer on that platform—which, more often than not, means you’re also challenging the way they make money.
Take, for example, the latest kerfuffle over Joel Berry, a writer for the popular satire site The Babylon Bee, who suggested on X, after stray Israeli ammunition accidentally hit a Catholic church in Gaza, that many among the very small Catholic community living under Hamas strongly support the terror group. “True Christian faith still exists in Gaza, but it’s all underground,” Berry wrote. “Anyone allowed by Hamas to practice openly is allowed to do so only because they aid and support the terror regime.”
It’s a controversial opinion, one that merits discussion and deserves a factual cross-examination. Instead, this is what one popular pundit, the Rev. Ben Johnson, had to say: “Joel Berry’s ‘Christian deaths don’t matter if they aren’t evangelicals’ is the anti-Catholic, anti-Orthodox, prideful faith of the modern day Protestant Pharisee. Closing your heart to the suffering, death, and destruction of the innocent is the faith of the Antichrist.” He was hardly an outlier in sounding like a mental patient suffering a terrible relapse: Most other critics who took Berry to task hardly bothered addressing his claims or refuting them with numbers and figures. Instead, they summoned the most hysterical imagery they could dream up to portray Berry as a monster.
In a scene reminiscent (nearly a carbon copy) of the spring of 2020—when millions took to the internet and the streets to argue that police officers were racist thugs on a continuous murderous spree to kill innocent unarmed Black Americans, even as the data showed the opposite—this week, a new set of hysterics is screaming, say, that very violent settlers burned down an ancient church in Taybeh, all facts to the contrary be damned. If you disagree, you clearly HATE CHRISTIANS AND WANT THEM TO DIE.
In his seminal work, Manhood in the Making, the anthropologist David Gilmore showed that disparate societies that have almost nothing in common and whose cultures vary wildly still maintain an almost universal notion of masculinity; they teach it to young boys by requiring them to demonstrate both their ability to unleash their aggression (in hunting, say, or fighting enemies) and their capacity for stoicism in the face of great danger and pain.
Our therapeutic age seems to have dissolved this timeless tradition, turning men in particular not only into emotional wrecks but also into campy figures who believe that the only way to signal their worth is by having some sort of very public and very emotional meltdown for others to admire. Instead of engaging in battle—of ideas if not of fists—they demand the other side be silenced. Instead of taking pride in remaining rational, calm, and ready, they pursue the theatrics of emotionalism, knowing well that no other currency matters.
Which is good news, really: Like that emotionally manipulative girlfriend you had in college, the new hysterics hold sway only if we let them. They’ve nothing to offer but their howling; laugh them off and tune them out, and they will, eventually, disappear.
When Did Men Become Drama Queens?
Anyone arguing that men are somehow the more rational of the sexes has a lot of explaining to do: The energy once reserved for fighting wars or building nations or surging ahead with glorious careers is now spent prancing and preening on mic, on camera, online. The news, the issues, the ideas are just an excuse; what matters is the performance, the opportunity to deliver a perfect star turn of high emotional wattage to the applause of an adoring crowd. War, but make it theater.We saw this happen first with the left, which established the mechanism whereby news headlines—which often turned out to be mostly or entirely wrong—were used as instruments for emotional blackmail. People who refused to emote the way posters wanted them to would find their own humanity questioned: SO YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT RACISM? I GUESS YOU HATE WOMEN! YOU WANT TRANS PEOPLE TO COMMIT SUICIDE AND DIE.
As others have noted, this was a particularly female form of politics. But it worked so well that many of the men who initially found it horrifying have decided that if you can’t beat the catfight, you should join it. That’s why you see Theo Von breaking down and crying, holding his head in his hands while he weeps, trembling subtly to make sure you feel his pain. Or why the Collected Tweets of Darryl Cooper, the historian who doesn’t believe in facts, reads like a script from the Mean Girls franchise. Or why everyone who has ever worked for any media outlet is posting videos of weeping kids in Gaza. These days, X is just a bunch of grown men having a string of histrionic outbursts, projecting the sort of ululating emotion that, in an earlier age, would’ve called for a fetching of the smelling salts and a loosening of the corset. If you question the facts underneath their feeling, you are challenging the entire premise of the only thing they have to offer on that platform—which, more often than not, means you’re also challenging the way they make money.
Take, for example, the latest kerfuffle over Joel Berry, a writer for the popular satire site The Babylon Bee, who suggested on X, after stray Israeli ammunition accidentally hit a Catholic church in Gaza, that many among the very small Catholic community living under Hamas strongly support the terror group. “True Christian faith still exists in Gaza, but it’s all underground,” Berry wrote. “Anyone allowed by Hamas to practice openly is allowed to do so only because they aid and support the terror regime.”
It’s a controversial opinion, one that merits discussion and deserves a factual cross-examination. Instead, this is what one popular pundit, the Rev. Ben Johnson, had to say: “Joel Berry’s ‘Christian deaths don’t matter if they aren’t evangelicals’ is the anti-Catholic, anti-Orthodox, prideful faith of the modern day Protestant Pharisee. Closing your heart to the suffering, death, and destruction of the innocent is the faith of the Antichrist.” He was hardly an outlier in sounding like a mental patient suffering a terrible relapse: Most other critics who took Berry to task hardly bothered addressing his claims or refuting them with numbers and figures. Instead, they summoned the most hysterical imagery they could dream up to portray Berry as a monster.
In a scene reminiscent (nearly a carbon copy) of the spring of 2020—when millions took to the internet and the streets to argue that police officers were racist thugs on a continuous murderous spree to kill innocent unarmed Black Americans, even as the data showed the opposite—this week, a new set of hysterics is screaming, say, that very violent settlers burned down an ancient church in Taybeh, all facts to the contrary be damned. If you disagree, you clearly HATE CHRISTIANS AND WANT THEM TO DIE.
In his seminal work, Manhood in the Making, the anthropologist David Gilmore showed that disparate societies that have almost nothing in common and whose cultures vary wildly still maintain an almost universal notion of masculinity; they teach it to young boys by requiring them to demonstrate both their ability to unleash their aggression (in hunting, say, or fighting enemies) and their capacity for stoicism in the face of great danger and pain.
Our therapeutic age seems to have dissolved this timeless tradition, turning men in particular not only into emotional wrecks but also into campy figures who believe that the only way to signal their worth is by having some sort of very public and very emotional meltdown for others to admire. Instead of engaging in battle—of ideas if not of fists—they demand the other side be silenced. Instead of taking pride in remaining rational, calm, and ready, they pursue the theatrics of emotionalism, knowing well that no other currency matters.
Which is good news, really: Like that emotionally manipulative girlfriend you had in college, the new hysterics hold sway only if we let them. They’ve nothing to offer but their howling; laugh them off and tune them out, and they will, eventually, disappear.
