Men, Just Eat the Damn Soup

“I have rules for men. Like you don't eat soup in public. You don't cross your legs. … You shouldn't be drinking a milkshake,” Fox News’ Jesse Watters said on Wednesday night.

By Kylie Cheung  |  March 20, 2025 | 12:30pm
Art: Kylie Cheung LatestPolitics
Men, Just Eat the Damn Soup

No one has more opinions about what other men should do with their bodies and put in their mouths than the very straight, very secure men who are increasingly making a living off giving little rants about masculinity.

On Wednesday night, railing against the supposedly effeminate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), Fox News’ Jesse Watters gave a list of “rules for men,” prefacing this list by declaring that “I know a lot of tough guys.” He then pointed to Greg Guttfeld, of all people, as an example. But I, personally, want to know more about how he befriended all of these big, strong men… perhaps he met them at the famed Pink Pony Club that Chappell Roan sings about???

“I have rules for men. They’re just funny, they’re not that serious,” Watters said. (They are, indeed, quite funny. But you’ll find yourself laughing at rather than with Watters.) “Like, you don’t eat soup in public. You don’t cross your legs. And you don’t drink from a straw… One of the reasons you don’t drink from a straw is because your lips purse. It’s very effeminate. [Walz’s] excuse was ‘I was drinking a milkshake.’ Again, you shouldn’t be drinking a milkshake. Milkshakes are for kids.”

So… I have questions. Perhaps it would be wiser to refuse to give the likes of Jesse Watters and his desperate harassment campaign against a perfectly kind, decent guy like Walz any daylight. But as a curious woman and a journalist no less, I can’t help but probe: Who was the first man Watters attentively watched eat soup (in public), convincing him that men should never, not ever do this??? What was the inciting, traumatic incident that made Watters realize he just isn’t strong enough to bear witness to a man lapping at a bowl of part-solid, part-liquid contents? And who was the man who drank a milkshake—with a straw, no less!—in front of Watters and similarly altered the trajectory of his life?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. In his meticulous and extensive observations of other men, and what they’re licking and the shapes they’re making with their luscious lips, someone had to be the man whose illicit soup-eating and straw-sipping planted these ideas in Watters’ brain, or whatever you call the dark, sad mass in his skull. 

To the men who may be reading this: I’m not here to convince you that eating soup and drinking a milkshake are worthy, masculine pursuits. It’s time to start thinking with your own mind. A lot of men are talking about masculinity being in crisis right now—many of those men, from Andrew Tate to, as of this week, Jonathan Majors, incidentally face extremely concerning allegations (or criminal convictions) of violence against women. But if there’s any “masculinity crisis,” I’d argue it’s the crisis of men doing and believing whatever the hell chuds, sex predators, and anti-social weirdos—like the Tate brothers, or in this case, Watters—tell them. 

Eat soup. Drink a milkshake—hell, drink it with a straw! Be nice to women. Be nice in general. Do pretty much the opposite of whatever the creepy men who are obsessed with other men’s bodies and personal choices tell you to do, really. It’s OK to eat soup—it’s not OK to watch Fox News.

And consider this my parting gift to you:

 
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