People can't stop tweeting about their Kavanaugh-style bar fights

CBS News/YouTube Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons ashleyrgold/Twitter Remix by Samantha Grasso

Men can’t stop tweeting about all the bar fights they get into

So some violent, non-communicative men walk into a bar...

 

Samantha Grasso

Internet Culture

Posted on Oct 2, 2018   Updated on May 21, 2021, 5:07 am CDT

So what if Judge Brett Kavanaugh got into a fight with a guy who he thought was the lead singer of UB40 but wasn’t actually the lead singer of UB40, hmm? What of it! After Kavauangh’s rap sheet development—following his vocal appreciation of beer—men across Twitter started sharing their own bar fight stories.

Some have recalled multiple fights in which they’ve punched another man square in the jaw, while others have insisted that they’ve participated in dozens of hand-to-hand combats in which they’ve challenged another man’s honor.

“I don’t know one guy, including myself, who wasn’t in a bar fight,” Newsmax host John Cardillo tweeted. “Not a single one.”

On one hand, these admissions seem to signal that, even if Kavanaugh did get into a bar fight by throwing ice into the face of a man whose identity he mistook, as police reports indicate he did, that was A-OK behavior. Kavanaugh did the warm, red-blooded American thing and defended his dignity against a man he had absolutely no business attempting to fight. It’s manly! It’s tough! It’s brave and strong and all the other descriptors of the stereotypically testosterone-pumping American male! And because I did it, I too am a good man! Listen as I toot my own horn proudly!

In other words, these men are saying it’s OK that Kavanaugh did this, because they themselves did this, and therefore no one should be shamed for being an angry, violent man.

Which is why it’s actually quite gross that men are sharing their own bar fight stories. It’s a mad attempt to display honorably male qualities—as if the world should be impressed by someone’s physical domination over another person. Men who participate in bar fights think their participation is something to be honored, or that it makes them more valuable than men who do not.

It would be ignorant to say something along the lines of, “Real men don’t get into a bar fight,” because that’s just as restrictive of a standard of masculinity, and it completely ignores the reality that these men, just as Kavanaugh, do fight each other at bars. However, it’s this normalization of communicating in violence, and the desperate grab at congratulations, that make these tweets so awful. Those are the normalcies that these tweets are trying to reinforce.

A lot of other men, bar fight-veterans or not, probably see this exhibition of physical strength as a high standard of masculinity, too. But we shouldn’t give out cookies to people for having physically fought someone while inebriated.

Across Twitter, several people shot back at these dumb, macho tweets by questioning the people who shared them. Many people expressed that, no, they are not here for “bar fight Twitter,” and that these posters should probably check themselves on why they’re so eager to share tales of their drunken depravity.

https://twitter.com/fivefifths/status/1047142508524965888

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1047151637599543296

Of course, many others couldn’t help but poke fun at the men who genuinely felt that anyone on the internet wanted to read a word of their own bar fight experiences. Several people published memes imitating these same stories, writing that they get into hundreds of bar fights each year, and are even participating in a bar fight as they tweet this.

However, no one has summarized how over the internet was on tweeted bar fights quite like Darth, who says he has never stepped foot in a bar to begin with.

Maybe all these angry, bar-fighting men should switch to water next time they step foot in a bar.

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*First Published: Oct 2, 2018, 2:36 pm CDT