Will Smith and the slap to toxic femininity

Will Smith’s violent meltdown at the Oscars has been discussed ad nauseum as the shock and awe of a man snapping literally at the pinnacle of his career is obsessively processed. We can’t help but be engrossed by this event because it touches all of us at the core and raises questions about human nature: who we are individually and as a society. It is why the aftermath saw dizzying theories as to why this came to be. It was an act widely denounced as cowardly and simultaneously defended as brave and chivalrous. Bill Maher called the slap a sign of canceled culture and the “Twitter mob come alive.” Ben Shapiro said it was redolent of microaggression culture in which offensive words necessitate  a violent response. The woke, always happy to find a race angle on anything, said white supremacy had something to do with the matter. 

Or the slap revealed something more insidious happening under the covers. No pun intended. Smith is a man emasculated by his wife, and in the heat of the moment found an opening to reclaim his manliness through an act of rage. This is a story to heed in light of the progressive movement to obliterate the traditional roles of men and women, creating more toxic females and subordinated men. 

“Love will make you do crazy things,” Smith said defensively as he apologized for storming on stage and assaulting Chris Rock for his joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s bald head, a style she’s worn confidently for some time due to alopecia, a disease that results in hair loss. 

Set aside the fact that comedians are expected to be edgy, the joke was actually a compliment. “Jada, I love ya. G.I. Jane 2, can't wait to see it,” he said, referring to Demi Moore, who rocked a bald head in G.I. Jane, a movie about a woman breaking ground as the first female to undergo a training program similar to the US Navy Seals. If you had to be bald, resembling Moore in G.I. Jane would be a high form of flattery. The joke is even more innocuous if you consider that Pinkett Smith has at least publicly accepted her condition with grace and humility. “Now at this point, I can only laugh,” she said in December 2021. “Me and this alopecia are going to be friends … period!”  

Pinkett Smith’s humility was sadly thrown out the window with that slap. Smith, who initially laughed, wouldn’t have snapped if his wife weren’t so vain, he wasn’t so castrated, and they weren’t so influenced by a culture hell bent on destroying the truth.

Progressive view of marriage

The Smiths have been under the spotlight since Pinket Smith admitted to an affair in 2020 with a 29 year old while she was 50. Affairs are unfortunately commonplace. What’s bizarre is for the couple to have an open discussion about this dalliance on Pinkett Smith's Red Table show in which she confessed to her husband that she “just wanted to feel good. It had been so long since I felt good.” He seemed uncomfortable talking about her “transgression,” at which she corrected him by saying she didn’t feel her actions were a “transgression.” She also wanted the world to know that she didn’t need permission from her husband. “One thing I want to clean up… about you giving permission, which is, uh - the only person that can give permission in that particular circumstance is myself.” Watch the clip, if this isn’t loading of the Will Smith time bomb I don’t know what is. 

In this public therapy session, there was no contrition on her part. No remorse nor regret. The world saw that and something didn’t sit right with her lack of repentance. A year later in September 2021, Smith went public again about his marriage, this time in a GQ expose, in which he revealed what many consider to be an open marriage. “Jada never believed in a conventional marriage… And for the large part of our relationship, monogamy was what we chose, not thinking of monogamy as the only relational perfection.” He said the couple wanted to give each other “trust and freedom” so that marriage wouldn’t “be a prison.” Yet he also said he wouldn’t suggest their style of marriage to anyone. “I don’t suggest our road for anybody. I don’t suggest this road for anybody.”

This acknowledgment revealed Smith’s hesitancy to embrace his wife’s nuanced view of marriage and his clear sycophantic acceptance, a posture ripe for shaming and ridicule. Rebel Wilson, who hosted an awards ceremony last month, roasted Smith with this statement: “I thought his best performance over the past year was being OK with all his wife’s boyfriends.” After the slap incident, comedian Ricky Gervais took a stab at Jada and teased, “I would not have made a joke about his wife’s hair. I would have made a joke about her boyfriend.”

Assault on traditional men, husbands

To be the punchline of a wife’s infidelity would enervate any man. When manhood is suppressed it is bound to emerge in unhealthy ways. There’s something else at work though. The slap was visible as though Smith was figuratively slapping the world for demanding men support women and their sexual rights while concurrently mocking him for his compliance. It was as though he was saying, “Is this what you want? This is what happens when men can’t be the men we’re meant to be.” Sadly, he is a victim in the assault against traditional masculinity, which according to the American Psychological Association is a pathology. Marked by “stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression,” the traditional male role and qualities are “psychologically harmful.” 

It is ironic that we demand men to be less men in the US while across the Atlantic in Ukraine, men are being demanded to be men to protect women, children and their country. The very aggression psychologists want to suppress and tame is the very quality that makes men great in a time of crisis. 

Deep down, all women, even the progressive feminists, still want this traditional male. They want men to defend them, see their pain and protect them. 

Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass) celebrated the assault with a tweet: “#Alopecia nation stand up! Thank you #WillSmith. Shout out to all the husbands who defend their wives living with alopecia in the face of daily ignorance & insults.” Singer Nicki Minaj praised Smith for being a husband who saw his wife’s pain. Comedian Tiffany Haddish said: “When I saw a Black man stand up for his wife, that meant so much to me. As a woman who has been unprotected, for someone to say, ‘Keep my wife’s name out your mouth, leave my wife alone,’ that’s what your husband is supposed to do, right? Protect you.”

Yes, protect. But husbandly protection assumes a covenant between a husband and wife: one in which both honor and submit to one another. It’s hard to see what Smith was protecting and honoring at that moment. It felt more like he was defending his own honor more than hers. The marriage was clearly broken in all the traditional sense, just as the roles of women and men, wives and husbands are being destroyed. 

That’s why we’re drawn to Smith’s sucker punch; the bad joke; the toxic wife; the public stage and the rage as a result of emasculation. Strip men of their essence and what you’re left with is confusion, hurt and mental anguish. Smith’s slap was a cry for help and probably wasn’t meant for Rock as much as toxic femininity.