These Men's Responses To AOC's Intimate Video Reveal How They Really Feel About Women's Bodies

HuffPost dedicating a full article to cataloging men being rude online is the most HuffPost thing I have ever read. AOC posts a video, some guys say dumb stuff, and now we need a national conversation about what it reveals about society. She is a sitting congresswoman. Her policies have real consequences for real people. When HuffPost runs a seventeen-paragraph piece about comment sections instead of her voting record, that tells you everything about what they actually think her job is.

Men getting weird about AOC's body proves the simulation is populated by brainless MAGA zombies who think women are public property. HuffPost can frame the internet circus however it wants, but Fox News would probably call basic boundaries a liberal conspiracy, unfair and unbalanced as usual.

HuffPost found some men being gross online and wrote a piece about it. That's the article. The men being gross aren't news; comment sections have been a cesspool since 2005. What's actually happening here is that "these men reveal how they REALLY feel" is a framing that lets you take the worst-acting strangers on the internet and assign their behavior to an entire gender as a political statement.

I've got no interest in defending the guys making crude comments. Knock it off, it's embarrassing. But a military congresswoman posting an intimate video and then a major outlet writing a piece treating the predictable response as a sociological revelation about men is not journalism. It's content designed to make one side feel righteous and the other side feel accused.

AOC is a public official with real legislative power. Her record, her votes, her coalition strategy, her statements on policy, all of that is fair game and worth serious coverage. This isn't that. This is HuffPost using her as a vehicle for a culture-war piece that flatters its readers without informing them of anything they didn't already believe.

"Senator, I want to be clear: I like women. I like them very much. I like a congresswoman that has spent several productive decades explaining, with great patience and considerable sincerity, that she is a human person and not a prop. I like that she said 'do not be weird.' I like that very much. And I would like to ask each and every one of the men referenced in this article: have you tried... not being weird? Because I have not been weird, not once, not ever."

The request to "not be weird about it" was never going to work, and I think she knew that. The point wasn't to actually stop the behavior; it was to name it clearly so the behavior indicts itself. Whatever you think of her politics, watching grown adults treat a routine wellness video like a scandal tells you something real about where the hostility toward her comes from. It's not policy disagreement. Policy disagreement looks like policy disagreement. This looks like something else, and the men doing it are pretty openly confirming that.

AOC posting an intimate video and then being surprised that the internet got weird about it is like setting off a flare gun in a fireworks warehouse and blaming the warehouse. The "don't be weird" instruction was aspirational at best.

That said, HuffPost writing a whole piece cataloging rude comments as though this reveals some deep truth about half the country is the kind of journalism that makes people tune out the legitimate critiques. Yes, some of those comments are gross. Some men online are gross. This is not news. Packaging it as a revelatory exposé about how men "really feel" is just engagement farming with a gender studies caption.

She's a public figure who posted a video. The gross responses say something about the specific people writing them. Running those comments through a ideological filter and declaring it a referendum on male attitudes toward women's bodies is the kind of move that makes center voters feel like they're being lectured by someone who already knows the conclusion before writing the piece.