Sunday's Cool: A Little Bit Crowder. A Little Bit Worse.

Steven Crowder's abusive treatment of his ex-wife isn't normal. But it is common.

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I don’t care much for Steven Crowder. The only joy he’s ever given me is getting punched in the face by a union man. And while I’m not a violent person, he does seem like the kind of guy who might have benefited from getting clocked upside the head a few more times in life. Currently, he’s in the throes of a very ugly divorce, and leaked Ring footage from his home shows that his now-ex-wife Hilary is getting out of an absolutely horrible marriage. 

The footage is from 2021, and shows Crowder cruelly berating and threatening his wife, who was eight-months pregnant with twins at the time. It sounds like she’s trying to take the car somewhere, and he’s screaming at her about violating their “boundaries.” He accuses her of refusing to do “wifely duties,” demands that she become “wife worthy”(?) and then tells her to “fucking watch it” when she correctly tells him that he’s being abusive. He has admitted to telling her “I will fuck you up” shortly after this footage ends.

It’s frankly horrifying to watch, all the more so because Hilary spends the entire three-and-a-half minute video desperately trying to de-escalate, calmly reassuring her husband that she loves him and scrambling to calm him down. He won’t have it. 

So, here is the promise of the patriarchy brought to its logical and thunderingly obvious conclusion: a man trying to prove his manliness by screaming about getting his way while his wife does everything in her power to soothe his ego while staying safe. It’s an utterly depressing intersection of sad, scary and pathetic. 

But what I found really frightening was how many men in the responses to the video were — if not exactly defending Crowder (though plenty were)  — playing the whole thing down. “Every couple fights sometimes.” “We don’t know the full context.” “No marriage is perfect.” 

I’m gonna be really clear right here: Crowder’s behavior in this video is deeply disturbing, and this fight is not normal. It might be common, sadly. But that doesn’t mean it’s normal. There is no marital context that would remotely justify anything Crowder says or does here. If you, as a man, see in Crowder’s behavior some impulses you recognize, it is imperative that you get some help. 

But I think there might be some outside context that could at least hint at how Crowder got to this point. And I think it might be worth exploring some of that context, to understand just why so many men think this is just what marriage is. 

You can make a lot of money on the right by talking about how masculinity is under attack and the left just wants to feminize all men. In fact, that’s a Steven Crowder quote: “The left is obsessed with feminizing men.” You know the argument. Men today are becoming too weak and soft and liberal and gay and nice and woke and don’t know how to fix cars or skin deer anymore. All this has led to a crisis in masculinity, in which men are unmotivated and unhealthy and not living up to their full potential as men. This, to be clear, is not men’s fault. It is a feminist agenda.

 And the best way to fight against this agenda is to be a man. And not just any man. The sort of man who eats meat and likes guns and lifts weights and gets blowjobs and drinks whiskey and grows a beard and all too often has a podcast or a YouTube where he talks to other men about this dumb bullshit. And while most of these things aren’t bad in and of themselves, all of this often comes with a lot of baked in ideas about how men should treat anyone they perceive as weaker — a class of people which includes all women, up to and maybe even most importantly: their wives and girlfriends. 

This phenomenon is largely white and Christian, and you can trace a lot of the Crowders of the world back to pastors like Mark Driscoll (who was a guest on Crowder’s YouTube in 2020). The idea that women should be subservient to men is hardly exclusive to white Christian guys, but white Christianity has baptized it with a sheen of spiritual value. If you buy into this brand of complementarianism, then controlling when your wife can and can’t use the car and berating her for ignoring wifely duties isn’t rank misogyny; it’s being the kind of man God has called you to be. 

Once you’ve internalized this brand of masculinity as ideal, fights like the one we see on Crowder’s Ring camera look normal enough. “Maybe he got a little carried away,” guys might think. “But, then again, he’s just frustrated because Hilary isn’t submitting to his authority.” What was Crowder supposed to do? Just let his wife walk all over him? Like some sort of soy cuck? 

I’m intentionally avoiding the term “toxic masculinity” because it’s one of those phrases like “woke” or “deconstruction” that has soaked up too much cultural baggage to be useful. In any case, no, there’s nothing inherently manly about being a petty bully. But there are a lot of cultural forces nudging men towards being cruel, petty bullies, and rewarding them for doing so. If that’s not toxic, what is?

And I really think it’s hard to overstate just how widespread this brand of masculinity has become; how many very popular online influencers are holding this up as ideal manliness. And then, when they’re rightfully criticized, they just claim that the left hates men and is attacking masculinity. But that’s not why they’re being attacked at all! People don’t hate men. They hate assholes. And the more you try to equate being a man with being an asshole, the more you’re going to feel like any expression of kindness or decency is an attack on your very identity. 

If men were actually displaying the sort of manly virtues they say they value — like courage and justice and clemency — then they wouldn’t be getting attacked like this. But instead, the only “virtue” men seem interested in codifying as inherently “manly” is throwing a temper tantrum at any sleight to your ego.

Where I think people who have rightfully criticized all this have gone wrong is in failing to offer up an alternative vision of masculinity. We’ve gotten so accustomed to “manliness” as being associated with a lot of cultural aesthetics and narcissistic chest-pumping that it takes a lot of imagination to conjure a healthier vision. (This is something I think feminism has always done very well. Not just critiquing the toxic cultural elements that led to unhealthy manifestations of femininity, but elevating a diverse array of inspiring examples of a better way forward.) I’ll be exploring this in some upcoming posts!

But for now, I think it’s important that we acknowledge that there is a crisis in masculinity. That’s something we can all agree on. But I’d suggest the crisis is not part of any outside agenda. It is coming from within, and it’s been caused by a lot of deep wounds that most men have no language for, and some very popular Christian theologies bare a lot of the blame. Men can get defensive about all this if they want, but it is time to recognize that Crowder and his ilk’s vision of manliness is not the cure, it is the disease. And the longer we attempt to address it by lashing out at some imagined other, the more the rot will fester.

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