After news that Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh had been in a bar fight in 1985, debate erupted about whether that was a red flag — or an American rite of passage.
Ah, yes, the Great American Bar Fight. Peanuts flying through the air, rivers of spilled Bud flowing down the bartop. A sacrosanct tradition that turns boys into men.
Or, as others would put it, a clownish display of toxic masculinity that results in unnecessary injury and ruins everyone’s night.
After news broke that Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, was questioned in 1985 by the police after getting involved in a bar fight, Twitter erupted in a debate over whether the behavior was a masculine rite of passage or a red flag for someone seeking a spot on the country’s highest court.
According to a police report, Judge Kavanaugh, then an undergraduate at Yale, was accused of throwing ice at another man “for some unknown reason” at a bar in New Haven, Conn. Chad Ludington, one of Judge Kavanaugh’s college classmates, said in a statement on Sunday that the altercation had occurred after a UB40 concert, when he and a group of people went to a bar called Demery’s and were drinking pints. The brawl began when the group was staring at a man they thought resembled the lead singer of UB40, irritating him.
The F. B. I. is currently investigating accusations of sexual misconduct against Judge Kavanaugh and related questions about his drinking habits that arose during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation process.
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The social media debate was kicked off by a viral tweet suggesting that getting into drunken brawls is normal behavior for the average American man. It was largely confined to the bubble known as Media Twitter, starting with the tweet by John Cardillo of the conservative site NewsMax, who declared he did not know “one guy, including myself, who wasn’t in a bar fight. Not a single one.”
Some echoed his sentiment or gave detailed advice.
Some rejected the whole idea.
Indeed, many of the replies to Mr. Cardillo were men who said they had never been in a bar fight. He later taunted them, saying he had “ triggered the beta soy crew.”
Notably, he didn’t say that in a bar.
Many others saw a chance for a joke.
We decided to set aside fisticuffs and talk to an expert. James Porco, a former professional wrestler who teaches martial arts, worked as a bouncer for about 14 years in Pittsburgh. Mr. Porco said it is true that alcohol-fueled fights are common in bars and that he had to break up a fight nearly every night as a bouncer.
In the ’80s and ’90s, when Judge Kavanaugh was involved in his own altercation, fighting in bars was practically an “extracurricular activity,” Mr. Porco said.
What causes these fights? Usually, he said, a group of men decide they want to start a fight just so the night will give rise to a wild story they can wistfully remember later.
“You get five, six, seven guys, and the testosterone is just so thick that they decide, ‘We’re going to pick another group tonight and we’ll start a fight,’” he said. “You can tell they love telling the story.”
Mr. Porco, 40, has broken up countless slugfests — all of which he calls “ridiculous” — but admits that he’s been a participant in a handful himself.
“You could see the other side wasn’t interested in talking it out,” he said. “They just wanted to get punched in the face, and I had to be the deliverer of that punch sometimes.”
There are deeper problems at work here, of course. More than one woman tweeted that men who get into bar fights often turn their violence against the people in their lives. Others told of fights triggered by aggression toward a woman in the bar.
“The closest I came to a bar fight was when a drunk man took an interest in a friend, would not leave us alone upon request, and then grabbed me and threw me aside to forcibly kiss my friend,” one woman wrote. “I hit him on the back of the head with my glass. I am still proud of that.”
Indeed, according to a 2013 study on barroom conflicts, which analyzed 860 cases of verbal and physical aggression in Toronto bars, the most common scenario was a male aggressor initiating conflict with a woman .
After hours of Twitter bar fight memories and quips on Tuesday, Brianna Wu, a Democrat running for Congress in Massachusetts, tried to counter the narrative, asking for retweets from men who had never been in a bar fight. Thousands of people took her up on it.
Ms. Wu, an independent video game developer who was the subject of online abuse during Gamergate, said that even in the male-dominated gaming industry, she didn’t know many men who had gotten into bar fights.
The belief that men have to get into a drunken fight in public to prove themselves is absurd, Ms. Wu said.
“It is sad that we have this idea of masculinity,” she said. “I think we need to push back against that.”
