In the past six months or so since Kim Kardashian began dating comic Pete Davidson after hosting SNL in October 2021, it’s been impossible to miss her ex-husband Kanye West’s public unraveling. It’s been a masterclass in how to not handle a breakup. He’s gone on countless nonsensical social media rants, and even put out a music video for the song “Eazy” in which Davidson, who he calls Skete, is buried alive and decapitated. So far though, despite verbal threats, physical violence has been missing. But it was only a matter of time before some member of the heteronormative patriarchy bopped in to suggest it. Enter Youtube personality turned boxer Jake Paul, who is now offering each man $30 million to participate in a six-round boxing match.
In a Twitter post, Paul claimed to have the $60 million guaranteed, while also offering pay-per-view upside — just to see the two celebrities fight in the ring. My first questions are where TF does all of that money come from? Is boxing really that lucrative? Could boxing save the world? Could we donate that money instead to the refugee situation in Ukraine? Or any of the other things causing doom, gloom, and potential imminent societal collapse in our world? But those questions don’t matter, because we live in the hellish simulation where a pop culture feud takes precedent.
Really though, Paul’s offer is exploitative at best. Ye has long been publicly known to have bipolar disorder, and to ask a man who is very publicly struggling with mental illness to fight the person who he’s clearly triggered by is just gross. It’s counterproductive, and just shows the failings in logic that toxic masculinity can bring. Paul said in his post, “Let’s settle this beef like men, before the children get any more impacted” — suggesting that fighting is the best way to solve a problem, excluding women from the narrative, and somehow reaching the conclusion that a public fight wouldn’t impact West’s children the same way his social media rants are. And it’s clear that a fight in a ring wouldn’t stop Kanye’s behavior outside of it. It’s all on the same low-brow level as the jokes people make about Ye needing to remember to take his meds. It’s wildly dismissive of the realities of mental illness, and a disgusting attempt to capitalize on a sustained pop culture outburst that everyone already wishes would end.
