Are men OK?

While it would be naïve to think we’ve achieved gender equality, you’d at least hope that we’d made some progress over the past few decades. Sure, the gender pay gap hasn’t closed, rates of violence against women and girls are disturbingly high, and women still carry out a disproportionate amount of domestic work, but at least women can wear what they want now, right? Right???

Apparently not! On Friday, surfer Sarah Brady posted a series of screenshots of a text conversation between herself and her ex-boyfriend Jonah Hill on Instagram, accusing him of emotional abuse. In the screenshots shared by Brady, Hill sets out a series of absurd conditions for their relationship, including “surfing with men”, “posting pictures of yourself in a bathing suit”, “[posting] sexual pictures”, and, bizarrely, “friendships with women who are in unstable places”.

Another screenshot shows Brady reassuring Hill and telling him that she’s removed three posts, but not her “best surfing video”. She asks Hill if he’d feel better if the “cover frame was different”, to which Hill replies: “Yes one that isn’t of your ass in a thong.”

“Take some accountability and operate with respect. It’s that simple,” Hill goes on to say, as if delivering a ‘stop posting pics in a swimsuit or I will break up with you’ ultimatum to your girlfriend is a very sane thing to do, actually. “These are my boundaries for romantic partnership.” (This unequivocally abusive string of messages was followed up with a text which read simply: “I am the best boyfriend on earth”.)

Many people have rushed to point out that this is a particularly disturbing example of someone ‘weaponising’ therapy speak; by using a term such as ‘boundaries’, Hill gives his opinions a veneer of level-headedness and rationality, when obviously, in reality, there is nothing remotely normal about having a meltdown because your surfer girlfriend posted a surfing video on Instagram.

Hill isn’t the only man to have outed himself as an apparently raging misogynist in recent weeks. Just last week Darius Jackson, Keke Palmer’s boyfriend, decided to voice his (entirely unwarranted!) opinion on his girlfriend’s outfit while she attended an Usher show in Las Vegas. “It’s the outfit tho .. you a mom,” he wrote, retweeting a video of Usher serenading Palmer with a rendition of ‘There Goes My Baby’.

He could have stopped there, but no – he posted a follow-up tweet which read: “We live in a generation where a man of the family doesn’t want the wife & mother to his kids to showcase booty cheeks to please others & he gets told how much of a hater he is. This is my family & my representation. I have standards & morals to what I believe. I rest my case.” If you’re wondering what prompted Jackson to publicly throw his toys out the pram like this: it was a long-sleeved, ankle-length, sheer black bodysuit Givenchy dress – because God forbid a woman wears mesh after having a baby!!!

It’s enough to make you want to scratch your own eyeballs out – because hadn’t we left this overt, prudish kind of sexism in the past? How are we meant to move the conversation onto more pressing issues when men are still crying over women wearing swimsuits and dresses?

But if there’s any silver lining at all in these stories, it’s that both men have received intense backlash for their actions: thousands of tweets have condemned Hill and pointed to his behaviour as an example of what young women should avoid when dating; similarly, Jackson has been slammed for criticising Keke and he’s since deactivated his Twitter. Ideally, we wouldn’t still be in a position where we have to encounter such brazen misogyny – but at least we’re now at a point where men can’t voice toxic, damaging opinions like these and get away with it.