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Soup, the manliest food
A Fox News host’s rules for masculinity were mocked, but one went too far
Idon’t know how to explain Fox News host Jesse Watters to regular people with good hearts and heads screwed on tight, as the saying goes.
I have so many friends and family who are busy with their lives — stressful jobs, family dinners, weekend hikes, movie dates, church choir rehearsals, etc. I don’t bring up Jesse Watters with them because they’d look at me as if I asked if they’d seen Sasquatch.
“Who?” they’d inquire, and I’d have to explain there’s this guy on cable news who says things that are supposed to make a particular group of people — mostly men who wear their sunglasses on their heads like tiaras — feel good about themselves at the expense of others.
His name is Jesse Watters, and he has the confidence of a country club tennis coach and the wit of a dive bar drunk who can handle only beer or wine. He’s rich and famous and has no idea I exist. He annoys me, and I admit that is entirely my problem.
Recently, he said something so outrageous that I gave myself little choice but to angrily type these little internet words you’re reading. This happened last week? Unless I hallucinated it.
So former Democratic Vice Presidential candidate and current Minnesota governor Tim Walz was on California governor Gavin Newsom’s new podcast (hot take: it should be illegal for politicians to have podcasts) and said the GOP and Fox News were obsessed with his masculinity during the campaign. He had examples of this obsession, including Fox News mocking him for having drunk a milkshake with a straw.
This prompted Watters to rattle off a series of rules for men on-air during a popular Fox panel show. Here’s the quote:
“You don’t eat soup in public. You don’t cross your legs, and you don’t drink from a straw. And one of the reasons you don’t drink from a straw is because the way your lips purse. It is very effeminate. And his excuse was, ‘I was drinking a milkshake.’ Again, you shouldn’t be drinking a milkshake. Milkshakes are for kids.”
