Jonah Hill is getting a raw deal when it comes to the claims his ex, Sarah Brady, is making about a handful of texts he sent to her. They are not the signs of a controlling misogynist. They are, however, the signs of America’s cultural collapse.

Hill is a successful Hollywood actor who grew up in an affluent LA community, attended leftist schools, and is one of those people who makes a big deal of his Jewish identity but, so far as I know, doesn’t celebrate Jewish values. Politically, he’s a Democrat.

Sarah Brady is a professional leftist and social media “influencer,” along with being a surfer, photographer, anthropologist, and law student. She started dating Hill in August 2021, breaking up with him at some point in 2022.

Last week, Brady published a series of text messages she received from Hill at the beginning of their relationship. Because an actor’s text messages are big news in 2023, Newsweek helpfully transcribed them in their entirety. They have led to accusations across the media that Hill is a controlling, abusive misogynist. (E.g., here and here.) I don’t agree.

Image: Jonah Hill and Sarah Brady (cropped). YouTube screen grab.

The texted conversations are long and boring for anyone not directly involved in the relationship. What’s pretty clear, though, is that Brady behaved in ways that Hill found disrespectful and dismissive, and Hill asked her not to.

What really got people’s goat was that Hill, a good Democrat, objected to the fact that Brady displayed her derriere “in a thong,” flaunted her sexuality, kept telling him how her therapist thought he was a bad guy, hung around with former boyfriends, and had unstable female friends. Accepting both of their texts at face value, what you see is exactly why male/female relationships are so troubled today.

Hill summed up what he expected in a relationship:

Plain and simple: If you need: surfing with men, boundaryless inappropriate friendships with men, to model, to post pictures of yourself in a bathing suit, to post sexual pictures, friendships with women who are in unstable places and from your wild recent past beyond getting a lunch or coffee or something respectful. I am not the right partner for you. If these things bring you to a place of happiness I support it and there will be no hard feelings. These are my boundaries for romantic partnership. My boundaries with you based on the ways these actions have hurt our trust.

In other words, if we’re in a monogamous relationship, don’t spill your sexual self all over the place (photos, other men), and stop hanging out with unstable women, with the subtext being that those same women are killing Brady’s relationship with Hill.

I think that text is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. The norm used to be that, in a monogamous relationship (preferably a married one), people reserved their sexual selves for their partner (preferably a spouse). In other words, society expected that a relationship would be based on trust and respect. You didn’t have to spell it out.

These expectations made for strong relationships and strong families. For men, it mattered a great deal because they’d be expected to support the children of the relationship and, unless they’d explicitly accepted a stepchild or adopted child, they didn’t want to labor for another man’s children.

In 2023, though, Hill is blasted as a narcissistic, controlling, gaslighting woman-hater for stating what were, until not long ago, normative cultural expectations for a stable and loving relationship. Of course, Hill is part of the community that destroyed the norms (i.e., Hollywood leftists), but it doesn’t make his expectations and the derision heaped upon them any less sad.

And then there is the women’s role in this. It’s not just that Brady was apparently being emotionally promiscuous (and, maybe, physically, but I don’t know); it’s also that her friendships were “with women who are in unstable places…” What’s unspoken there is that Brady’s friends, like her therapist, were constantly undermining Hill.

Before feminism and social deconstruction occurred, men and women were recognized as being different (Vive La Différence!), which was one of the thrills of a relationship. That didn’t mean that they got a free pass for sharing only the worst side of their sex (e.g., male aggression or female emotionalism). Instead, it meant there was a lovely yin-yang that saw people complementing each other.

Now, though, the sexes hate each other because they’ve been trained to do so. This is especially true for women, who are constantly reminded that men are toxic: They’re predatory and controlling, engaging in “mansplaining” and “manspreading.” The less stable women are, the more they’re caught up in “male toxicity” as the reason for their failure to have a loving relationship. “Friends” like that spread their misanthropy to those of their female friends who’ve been tactless enough to have a good relationship with a man.

So, while I don’t see myself ever liking Jonah Hill, I feel sorry for him. And that’s true even though he’s a victim of the leftist culture he supports.