YOU SAY "TOXIC MASCULINITY" AS IF IT'S A BAD THING!

I was about to write a post explaining that the reactions to the news of Brett Kavanaugh's Yale bar fight are breaking across pre-existing political and cultural lines, but Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business just wrote the post for me:

Ive been in dozens of bar fights (ask the guys I grew up with) nearly lost an eye in one and that's just one of the injuries (I have the scarred stitch marks to prove the rest) never been black out drunk but I have had to defend myself, which I am still perfectly capable of doing https://t.co/VQSotGWW5g

— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) October 2, 2018

By tweeting that I had dozens of bar fights as a kid I forced dozens of trolls living in their moms basement to come up w some pretty funny stuff just before their moms hot pockets are served just check my feed

— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) October 2, 2018

my little bar-fight tweet has exposed a new truth about how divided we are as a nation in that unlike conservatives, lefties never get into bar fights

— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) October 2, 2018

Unlike Gasparino, I assume that a fair number of lefty guys have gotten into bar fights, and that plenty of right-wing men haven't. (Stephen Miller? Ted Cruz? You think?) The real question is whether you believe that getting into a bar fight is a sign of failure. As I see it, you should try to avoid bar fights at all times. Maybe you avoid them by being in the kind of shape that makes people not want to mess with you. Maybe you avoid them by keeping your head down and/or drinking in bars where fights are rare. Maybe you don't go out drinking at all. Regardless of your approach to this questions, you should want not to have bar fights. You shouldn't be as proud of having them as Gasparino is.

Gasparino talks about bar fights the way most right-wingers talk about gun violence -- it simply can't be avoided, so if you're a non-soyboy, you know enough to carry a weapon at all times. It doesn't actually bother right-wingers when gun violence occurs, because to them it's like rain -- it's inevitable sooner or later.

That's just sad and uncivilized. If you feel that way, you do nothing to minimize the violence in your world. You're the problem.

And then there's this tweet, a response to Gasparino that he retweeted:

Toxic masculinity is what kicks down doors and takes out Osama Bin Laden, deep in enemy territory, risking life and limb to protect your life and freedom.

— James Friedman (@JamesFriedman73) October 2, 2018

They really can't tell the difference between this and attempting to rape a fifteen-year-old girl. No wonder we can't reason with them.