Opportunism, Madness, Nihilism, & Terror
Jesse Watters is really, really worried about men spontaneously turning into women.
1.
We live in a time not only of tragedy but of madness.
Our present decade has melted into a noetic world of unreason in which neither facts nor rationality itself hold any sway over the levers of power. In government, the very apparatus of scientific knowledge is being disassembled, and outright denials of environmental science, epidemiology, economics (e.g. confusing tariffs and trade deficits) and medicine are the basis of policy. State violence depends not upon the word but upon the whim.
And in our public discourse, sensationalistic, preposterous, and easily debunked claims are now so ubiquitous that traditional media, no longer able to fact-check them, must somehow play a kind of attentional catchup. Instead of quenching these fires, media has to compete with them.
Among the many lunatic provocateurs in this rhetorical circus, Fox News anchor Jesse Watters stands out. This is someone who made his reputation with a racist, puerile video making fun of Chinese people, and who has successfully monetized misinformation, rage, and fear ever since. He spreads misinformation, hyperbole, and hypocrisy with such naturalness, it makes me wonder what he was like as a pre-teen.
This week, Watters upped the ante of his own stupidity, stating on national television that:
When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this. Studies have shown this! And if you’re out working, building robots like [co-host] Harold [Ford], you are around other guys. You’re not around HR ladies and lawyers—and that gives you estrogen.
Here’s the video:
While I’m not offended by this outburst—this lib can’t be owned so easily—I admit that I am fascinated by it. Does Watters actually believe this? Is he pandering? Does anything mean anything? Is it all just for the lulz? This is what I’m interested in.
2.
For months now, Watters has presented a very weird, fragile, threatened, and malleable conception of masculinity. While Watters has denied that transgender people exist, ordinary men can suddenly transition into women by engaging in a variety of activities. Last July, for example, after Kamala Harris was announced as the Democratic nominee for president, Watters said “I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”
Yet even when they don’t spontaneously transgender themselves, men are bound by strict rules. Responding to a clip of Joe Biden eating ice cream, Watters stated “You know my rule about men eating soup in public: I don’t think it’s manly. I think the same thing for ice cream. You should save that for vacation. A grown man, especially the president, should not be licking ice cream in public.” (Several clips of Watters eating ice cream in public subsequently surfaced.)
And now ‘HR ladies’ shed estrogen and just working in front of a screen can turn a man into a woman.
The context, appropriately enough, was Watters’s desperate attempt to defend the Trump tariffs that wiped out an astonishing $10 trillion in value before being abruptly withdrawn. Per Watters—and, not coincidentally, other right-wing voices including Bayta Ungar-Sargon and Milo Yannopoulos—the pain of the tariffs is worth it, because it will restore manufacturing jobs, which are manly, and will thus help address the crises facing American men.
There is, to be sure, a version of this argument that makes sense. American men are disproportionately lost, confused, and angry. Many of the components of their sense of self (and their social superiority) have been lost, and working-with-your-hands jobs are one of those. And the success of heinous Manopshere influencers like Andrew Tate (and Joe Rogan as well) owes a lot to this loss of status.
Then again, many American men are perfectly fine—in particular the ones who don’t attach their sense of self-worth to a narrow conception of masculinity. And it’s highly unlikely that the steel plant will over reopen anyway.
But obviously, this is insane. I admit, I didn’t want to waste time fact-checking Watters’ assertion, so I just googled the “studies” that Watters may have been referring to, and Google’s AI replied thus:
So that’s clear enough.
Still, I asked Midjourney to imagine a science fiction film in which women turn men into women and got this retro gem:
3.
It’s possible that Watters is simply acting out of self-interest. He knows that Fox News has lost audience share to people like Rogan, Tate, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and others who don’t hesitate to spread unfounded conspiracy theories—and, for good measure, monetize this rage by selling supplements to men hoping to man up. In a way, he’s just a knockoff version of them, and not a good knockoff either.
It’s also possible that Watters is, himself, so immersed in the post-factual “upside down” that Naomi Klein wrote about that he cannot tell truth from falsehood. Maybe the “studies” Watters is referring to are actually articles or books that have never been peer-reviewed and lack any empirical evidence — this is always a good ‘tell’ when some RFK-aligned wellness wacko tells you that lavender enemas cure cancer, but only cites something someone said on the internet. This does not actually count as “research.”
Or maybe Watters trusts those sources because he believes in some conspiracy theory that all the scientists are in cahoots to feminize heterosexual men, and that the only people telling the truth are non-specialists who sell pills.
Of course, it’s also possible that Watters is just trolling here. He may be so nihilistic that words don’t really have meaning anymore. In the video, you can here Jeanine Pirro (hardly an avatar of moderation) laugh out loud at Watters’s idiotic comment, and then point out that Watters, himself, works in front of screens all day. So no one takes him seriously.
And really, nothing means anything. Tariffs are the same as trade deficits. Decades of science on climate, gender, infectious disease are all bogus. Innocent people have no due process rights. Did Watters even come across a ‘study’? Does he care? Maybe he doesn’t care. He just says things for the lulz. In a way I find this explanation more depressing than ascribing his rant to cynical manipulation or believing in nonsense. At least those explanations have some meaning at their core, whether it’s the profit motive or a tin-hat conspiracy theory. But if it’s just nihilism, maybe there is no meaning to anything anymore, and words are just tools to exercise more power. That is sad to contemplate.
But I don’t think that’s quite right either.
4.
Despite himself, there’s a deep truth lying beneath Watters’s weird conception of fragile, malleable masculinity: his audience’s profound anxiety.
Let’s revisit Watters’ fundamental contradiction: on the one hand, nothing can turn a man into a woman (certainly not hormones, social transition, gender confirmation surgery, or one’s own deep and discerning self-knowledge), but on the other hand, everything can, even just staring at screens or voting for a female candidate.
I don’t think this is mere hypocrisy; I think it’s two sides of the same coin. I think the newly permeable boundaries around American masculinity have caused a kind of “trans panic” in which every man is vulnerable to spontaneous de-masculinization. The threats are everywhere: soup, screens, lawyers, books in a library, the letter ‘T.’ If you’re not careful, you’ll end up like one of those men wearing a dress yourself.
Once, there was a commie in your bathroom; now there’s a trannie in your soup.
This is also a trans origin story. In the old days, there were no screens, no female presidential candidates, and no pernicious HR ladies shedding estrogen. Now that there are, look what’s happened: lots of men believe themselves to be women. So that explains it! It’s not that the gender spectrum has existed for all of human history; it’s that technology and changes in gender roles have transmogrified millions of men, deluding them into thinking that they’re women. It’s like Aristophanes but in reverse.
Like the hysterias of the past, from Reefer Madness to McCarthyism to the Satanic Panic, Watters’s depiction of masculinity reads like self-parody. It’s a caricature of fragile straight masculinity, a joke one of my queer friends might tell. Is masculinity really so threatened that a mere ‘HR lady’ can cause the loss on one’s manhood?
Apparently it is. Like Trump, Watters is emotionally correct even as he is factually batshit. Men do feel vulnerable. But instead of unpacking why that’s so, instead of reaffirming traditional masculine traits that don’t depend on patriarchal dominance or the myth of manual labor—instead, that is, of actually helping—Watters and the men he is imitating stoke ever more ludicrous terror.
This isn’t (just) nihilism, opportunism, or madness: it’s terror. Watters is giving voice to a profound fear among American men, at once explaining the phenomenon of transgender women (in Watters’s world, men who are deeply deluded) and warning that you, too, could fall victim to it.
It’s easy to laugh at this nonsense, and I don’t mean to spoil the fun. But these scared men have the guns right now, and they are pointing them at a lot of innocent people: legal residents mistaken for gang members, activists mistaken for ‘antisemites,’ and trans people mistaken for sexual predators. (Indeed, one trans woman just got arrested for peeing in a women’s restroom, despite passing for female so completely that she would surely be booted out of any men’s room.)
To darkly paraphrase Margaret Mead, never doubt that a small group of terrified, angry men can change the world for the worse; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
Thanks for reading. I hope you followed Trump’s advice and bought the dip three hours before he revoked the irrevocable tariffs. I am considering joining Truth Social to not miss any future tips.
My favorite opinion piece of the week, by far, is by the president of Wesleyan University, Michael Roth, who brilliantly called out the insane lies and extreme danger of “anti-antisemitism” in the New York Times this week. Please read it, especially if you’re about to celebrate Passover with folks who have fallen for it.
Speaking of Passover, I did a brief comparison of Stephen Miller’s musings on due process with the values of law, reason, and empathy espoused in the Torah.
And on that note, time to get back to work in the kitchen.