Toxic Femininity, Jonah Hill, and a Dying Culture

I’m not a huge fan of the actor Jonah Hill. I thought he was quite good in The Wolf of Wall Street, and I thought he was excellent in Moneyball. But many of his roles seem to be of a type — the fat, somewhat entertaining loser whose attempts at doing something positive fail pathetically, until maybe, depending on the movie, he’ll find some sense of redemption. Hill plays that type pretty well, I guess, but everything I’ve read and heard about him suggests he’s suffered as a member of that archetype.

And yet, despite it, Jonah Hill is a multimillionaire actor with dozens of film credits under his belt, and he’s proven as a box office attraction. It’s very fair to say that Hill has built a very creditable career for himself, and he’s justifiably in high demand where the sexual marketplace is concerned. He’s lost weight and he’s not morbidly obese, and between his career success and his celebrity, it’s fair to call him a high-value man.

And recently, Hill and his girlfriend just celebrated the birth of their first child. He ought to be enjoying an important moment in his life: He’s now a father.

Instead he’s been publicly destroyed because Sarah Brady, a surfing instructor whom Hill dated in 2021 and 2022, dropped a series of screenshots of texts between them onto Instagram just after the word hit of the birth of his child. The text messages, which were private conversations between the two of them, were released with very little context or backstory attached, and in the aftermath Jonah Hill is now being portrayed as “controlling” and “abusive.”

More Than a Woman Scorned

Brady claimed she held off on her assault on Hill’s character until after the child was born because she didn’t want to cause the girlfriend any undue stress while she was pregnant — but now, she needs to know who she’s with so she can make good decisions about her and her baby’s future.

It’s a classic case of “woman scorned,” but there’s more to it than that.

Here’s the text message that has been most discussed:

Plain and simple :

If you need :

-Surfing with men
-Boundaryless inappropriate relationships with men
– to model
– to post pictures of yourself in a bathing suit
– to post sexual pictures
-friendships with women who are in unstable places and from your wild recent past beyond getting a lunch or coffee or something respectful

I am not the right partner for you . If these things bring you to a place of happiness I support it and there will be no hard feelings. These are my boundaries for a romantic partnership.

My boundaries With you based on the ways these actions have hurt our trust .

Women say there are no good men. The truth is there are plenty of good men but many women don’t want to rise to the level of being good women.

Basic respect for yourself and your partner isn’t a tall ask.

Again, there is nothing wrong with Jonah Hill’s leaked text messages. https://t.co/bYRmQmtOLC pic.twitter.com/sBIlgLLOwA

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) July 8, 2023

This is a message from Hill to Brady, and it’s fairly apparent that it comes toward the end of their relationship. Hill has been very open about having gone through therapy; he even made a documentary about his therapist, something a more traditional male would be quite loath to do, to be sure. And that’s obviously where he’s getting the term “boundaries” — which is now something he’s being raked over the coals for, framed as some sort of “abuse” of psych jargon.

Anyone looking at this can tell that what he really means in saying the word is “rules.” Or, more descriptively, what he’ll put up with and what he won’t.

The obvious inference here is that Sarah Brady was fairly promiscuous with the surfer dudes on the Southern California beaches and fancied herself as an aspiring swimsuit model and club rat. It’s pretty clear that this isn’t what Hill was looking for in a significant other, and it’s also clear that he tried to communicate this to her, to no avail.

So it’s an ultimatum — he wants her to act like somebody he’d be comfortable having as the mother of his children, and if she isn’t willing to do that, then they’re wasting each other’s time as a couple, and it’s time to part as friends.

As Jonah Hill Discovered, Society Castigates Strong Men

Nothing about this is unreasonable or untoward. Jonah Hill had other options. There were other women who’d be happy to have him and to live in the frame he was trying to establish with Sarah Brady. He proved that by taking up with one of them right after he and Brady broke up, and now he’s got a kid and, reportedly, a marriage (though it seems that Brady is doing all she can to destroy that before it happens).

You say, “Yes, but I don’t care about Jonah Hill’s problems.” And you’re quite right in saying that. But what it says about society has some pretty profound, not-good implications, and it’s important regardless of the target.

First, if you’re Sarah Brady, it is not in your interest to air this dirty laundry in public — woman scorned notwithstanding. She had to know that in general it would not redound to the benefit of her reputation to play the heavy here — but for an attempt to gain her own degree of fame.

As what? The former girlfriend of a mid-to-high-level Hollywood actor who went all Fatal Attraction on him? Why would anyone want that?

Well, in America circa 2023, fame even for that ignominious reason is marketable. People make well into six figures, and perhaps more, for simply being “influencers” on social media. Build a brand, no matter how insipid and valueless, and there will be opportunities to monetize it.

If you think Sarah Brady is petty, small, and of not particularly high value, consider Dylan Mulvaney.

This famous-for-being-famous phenomenon is linked to another just-as-bad, or worse, trend that appears in both culture and politics — the advancement of those who are willing to go to lengths others will not in order to scratch out as much wealth and/or power they can. Look at Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Look at Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and Ilhan Omar. Look at Lindsey Graham and Adam Kinzinger. Fame for fame’s sake and not for the sake of excellence is toxicity defined. It’s destructive beyond measure. It leads to a society being run by incompetents, cretins, and tyrants.

Joseph Stalin was the least impressive of the Bolshevik insiders, but he was the one with the most will to power. He didn’t get power by merit; he got it by ruthlessness. And that’s the same principle playing out in this controversy. What Brady did was torch a man’s reputation for her own notoriety.

It doesn’t matter if Jonah Hill is a good guy. He’s apparently called himself a male feminist, which suggests he’s a weak man. But setting limits to what he’ll tolerate in someone with whom he’ll share his life is at least an attempt at strength. It’s an attempt not at being controlling but at asserting control.

And this is the second large takeaway from his tale of woe. We’re now to believe that demands like those he made of Brady — that she refrain from going clubbing with single girlfriends, partying with other men, posting suggestive pictures of herself, and doing other things a single woman putting herself out there for men would do — are somehow unreasonable.

Here’s the truth: No man with strength of character enough to command respect from a woman would tolerate those things. A woman in a committed relationship with a man who actually has respect for him would not do any of them.

But our culture doesn’t teach women to value and respect the men they’re with. Furthermore, it castigates men as tyrants for attempting to uphold those kinds of standards.

And this is wrong. It is toxic femininity personified, and society will not survive if it hardens into our permanent status quo. All of America will devolve into the matriarchy of our inner cities, where women of loose morals and zero respect for themselves or anyone else dominate what fractions and remnants of families might exist and men are useless and reviled — and conditions or “boundaries,” such as Jonah Hill attempted to impose in his own relationship, are almost unheard of.

On Tuesday, the ninth episode of Tucker Carlson’s Twitter podcast dropped, and it might prove to be the most controversial of them all to date. The episode is a 2.5-hour interview with Andrew Tate, the former kickboxer turned entrepreneur and motivational speaker who has built an empire promoting his brand of traditional masculinity, only to find himself under house arrest in Romania on “human trafficking” charges that don’t seem well-grounded.

Ep. 9 The Andrew Tate interview pic.twitter.com/0KKMzSVmMO

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) July 11, 2023

Everything Tate says in the interview — about how male strength is crucial to preserving a society and our current culture is falling apart under a vigorous campaign to denigrate and shred it — applies to the Jonah Hill story.

Of course, Tate has been attacked, name-called, and now prosecuted (or persecuted, if you prefer). He’s apparently too dangerous for the Machine to have around.

But he’s not alone.

Most of the reaction to the Hill controversy has been supportive of him, showing this mini-tempest to be a failure of the Machine. The old values still seem to have power, though the effort to preserve them clearly has much ground to regain.

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