This past March, Fox News personality Jesse Watters, who first came to fame as the pundit Bill O’Reilly’s ambush interview man, earned considerable mockery when he introduced his “rules for men” on the weekday roundtable show, The Five. Hedging his remarks by suggesting that “they’re just funny, they’re not that serious,” Watters went on to list a few of these apparent non-negotiables, which included not eating soup in public, not crossing your legs, and not drinking from a straw (the reason being, he explained, was because of “the way your lips purse. It’s very effeminate”).
This last one was topical, referring to a video of 2024 Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz drinking a vanilla milkshake from a straw on the campaign trail (which Watters had derided at the time, and which was still apparently on his mind six months later). Referring to Walz, Watters said that “his excuse [for using a straw] was, ‘well, I was drinking a milkshake.’ Again, you shouldn’t be drinking a milkshake. Milkshakes are for kids.” Another rule for men.
The internet, however, quickly pounced on Watters’s apparently fragile sense of masculinity.
“Imagine being this fragile. If a straw threatens your masculinity, maybe the problem isn’t the milkshake,” one user posted on X.
“Can Watters be any more insecure?” another added. “If I want a goddamned milkshake, I’m buying a milkshake.”
“The insecurity LMAO,” a third commented. “Just drink the milkshake, Jesse. Nobody cares.”
Meanwhile, a photo of Watters drinking through a straw surfaced on social media, as did one of President Trump, who is often held up on the right as a paragon of masculinity.
But evidence of his hypocrisy hardly stopped Watters from dreaming up more rules for men in the following months.
On the July 9 edition of The Five, as the co-hosts were discussing a picture shared on Instagram by House Minority Leader Hakim Jefferies (D-NY) that appeared to have been digitally edited, Watters proclaimed that “a man should never Photoshop his picture, ever,” adding that “a man who Photoshops his picture is a woman.”
Later that month, Watters revealed another rule on his own show, Jesse Watters Primetime, after running a clip of Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) laying into some of his Democratic colleagues on the senate floor, and accusing them of being “complicit” in the Trump administration’s attempts to punish blue states. “Rules for men: Control your emotions,” Watters responded. “You never see Trump lose his cool – even when they arrested him and put him on trial.”
This, too, provoked guffaws from social media users, who pointed out that Trump is hardly an ideal example of equanimity, given his propensity to pop off on his platform, Truth Social. As one X user commented, “Trump never loses his cool? @JesseBWatters must’ve missed the all-caps meltdowns, the table-pounding depositions, and the tantrums over toilets. If that’s stoicism, I’m the Queen of England.”
Still, despite the ridicule he received in some quarters of the internet, in posting these rules for men, Watters’s is among a chorus of conservative voices seemingly obsessed with masculinity. And while there isn’t much in his rules that is novel or unique, what distinguishes Watters in this field is his expansive reach: According to data reported by AdWeek, (as of July 2025), The Five is the most-watched program on Fox News – itself the most-watched cable news network – attracting some 3.8 million viewers, with 410,000 in the key demographic. On a network whose viewership skews Republican – and as Pew has reported, a majority of Republican men rate themselves as “highly masculine” – Watters’s proclamations about manhood are likely well-received, particularly when they provide the basis for criticizing liberal elites (and it is by functioning in this capacity that Watters’s particular hypocrisy can be easily ignored).
Given his high level of visibility and the authoritativeness of his dictates, and more specifically, the way in which they attempt to enforce a hierarchy of masculinity, Watters’s rules for men invite analysis in terms of what the sociologist R.W. Connell has called “hegemonic masculinity,” the sociocultural process by which certain ways of being a man become privileged over others, and by which men’s dominant position over women becomes justified.
Indeed, the way in which Watters construes certain practices – like using a straw, or editing images with Photoshop – as “effeminate,” or as something that a woman would do, clearly communicates his presumption of feminine inferiority.
But by articulating rules, a set of behavioral prescriptions that men must be hyper-aware of and follow at all times, Watters also demonstrates the way in which hegemonic forms of masculinity, to earn their dominance, must constantly engage in struggle, must constantly assert a preferred way of being a man over and against other practices that are deemed to be unmanly.
To push further, then, inasmuch as Watters might be responding to a perceived crisis of masculinity – in which, among other things, staring at a screen all day at work “makes you a woman” – his apparent compulsion to police masculinity suggests, as Tim Edwards has argued, that masculinity is in part constituted as crisis, that it is an expression of gender identity that is always unstable, always anxious about its precarity, and always sensitive to feelings of inadequacy, doubt, or lack.
Of course, there are men who would regard perpetual struggle as essential to living a good life, greeting it as an opportunity to constantly improve and harden themselves. But such conditions are fundamentally oppressive, involving a regime of panoptic surveillance and a battle that can’t possibly be won; for indeed, as others have observed, masculinity is rarely fixed once and for all, and regularly requires proving.
Thus, the apparent necessity for certain rules of conduct.
And as Watters unveils new rules over the coming months, he will end up perpetuating the cycle of crisis – identifying new ways in which men need to be self-conscious about their masculinity, and new ways to denigrate that of others – especially those effete lefties.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Andrew J. Salvati is an adjunct assistant professor in the Media and Communications program at Drew University, where he teaches courses on podcasting, media and television studies. His research interests include media and cultural memory, television history, and mediated masculinity. He is currently working on a manuscript entitled Remembering the Last War: World War II as Television Epic, 1949-1953 (University Press of Kansas, forthcoming).
Andrew’s research has appeared in the journals Rethinking History and the Journal of Radio and Audio Media, and the academic blogs SoundingOut! and Critical Studies in Television. Outside of academia, Andrew has had a long career as a television broadcast technician with NBCUniversal. His employer in no way contributed resources or encouragement to write this piece, and his opinions and views are his own.
