Hannah Kent looks at actor Jonah Hill’s dating scandal and evaluates if this is representative of a wider problem with communication and misogyny within relationships.

Jonah Hill, 2014 winner of Teen Choice Award for ‘best hissy fit’, has made headlines for several leaked texts between him and his ex-girlfriend. What’s remarkable about these texts is the terminology he uses as he lists off a number of bizarre requests – or what he calls establishing ‘relationship boundaries’. ‘Plain and simple’, his lengthy message begins, ‘if you need: surfing with men, boundaryless inappropriate friendships with men, to model, to post pictures of yourself in a bathing suit, to post sexual pictures…’ (and here, it’s worth noting that the recipient, Sarah Brady, is a surfer who models), and ‘friendships with women who are in unstable places and from your wild recent past … I am not the right partner for you … my boundaries with you [are] based on the ways these actions have hurt our trust’.

One thing to be said about the Superbad star is that he is a big fan of therapy, so much so that he made a one-and-a-half-hour black-and-white documentary about his therapist, Stutz. It seems that in one of Hill’s therapy sessions, during some profound conversation, he decided that his words must be artfully filmed for a mass audience, in the same vein as two friends starting a podcast after a single witty back-and-forth. The film’s beginning is very telling: Jonah drops into an empty chair, as Stutz, from out of frame, humours “entertain me”. It’s not really about Stutz. Hill’s therapy sessions clearly inspired him to establish relationship ‘boundaries’, yet he outwardly reaches his ‘Inner Work’ by way of coercion and misogyny. He uses numerous therapy terms to describe his feelings where one would suffice: insecure.

I do not deny that boundaries are important and personal. But, it feels a little suspect that Jonah, after pursuing Sarah, the surf model, has decided that his own boundaries exclude surf modelling. The madonna-whore-isms that come up like gag reflexes are quite apparent here, and soon break into misogynistic word vomit. In another text, Hill tells Sarah to delete an Instagram picture of her surfing the Californian sea, in swimwear he deems too sexual, reprimanding her for not following the business casual dress code that other respectable surfers wear. The boundaries he talks of here are the equivalent of building your fence in someone else’s garden, because if you intend to control your girlfriend’s behaviour, then this is not a boundary. Hill masks this coercion by talking to his girlfriend with the same professionalism as an HR office worker drafting a misconduct email, warning of an increasingly emotionally constipated culture heralded by the grand revival of the ‘female hysteria vs male reason’ trope.

There is now a popular attitude to communication that is emotionally detached; a kind of apathetic, sanitised veneer, rather than any sign of emotional investment, evidently gives your side all the power. But anyone who’s hit the shrill-voiced, edge-of-tears-but-not-quite part of an argument while facing a brick wall of a person can attest to the humiliation felt by it. It’s a form of rationality that goes about as deep as big words and a poker face, and the rise in therapy speak (psychobabble) has given people the tools to replace empathy with eloquent cold-bloodedness. It’s easier to diagnose someone you don’t like as a narcissist (because we all know that ‘narcissist’ just means ‘bad person’) or dismiss ‘gaslight’ as a slippery term when it’s a legitimate sign of abuse. Nonspecific expert language is the crutch used to keep true feelings at arm’s length; it feels almost pathetic nowadays to admit that you’re really just upset, jealous, or embarrassed, rather than something a little more enigmatic. And with the positive attention given to mental health post-pandemic, it’s also given men like Jonah Hill the perfect excuse to virtuously reprehend the women in their lives.

At some point during the wax and wane of modern feminism, men realised that blatant misogyny was not as acceptable anymore. The ‘sexism bad’ sentiment hit the mainstream, yet misogyny hadn’t gone extinct, so much as it had evolved. Misogynists found more covert ways to practise their politics, seeping into popular culture until their methods became omnipresent and ungraspable. Humans are instinctually empathetic, and we know how to read between the lines, but that’s not what gets in the way of communication, because it’s not about the knowing – but the caring. Hill’s behaviour is an example of weaponised intellectualism, in which through some unemotional, morally untouchable persona, accountability and meeting in the middle lie just out of reach. Therapy psychobabble seems to grant the speaker the power to wave away the feelings of others, and now, moralism has become less about emotional intelligence, care, or compassion, and more so a mastery of the English language. Jonah Hill’s texts should be studied alongside George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Sometimes no one gets to be right. We know when we’ve upset people, but the grass is greener on the moral high ground. The abuse of therapy speak is a sign of a culture that has learnt so many words it’s forgotten how exactly to use them, which doesn’t bode well for honest communication. In a bid to separate oneself from the fools who feel trivial emotions like Anger and Envy and Sadness, intellectualising therapy speak is the shortcut to feeling emotionally superior – and if that’s the case, the therapy must be working. Sometimes, the most therapeutic thing we can do is say what we mean.