I find comment sections to be one of our greatest accidental sociological experiments. Give thousands of people anonymity, a celebrity scandal and absolutely no invitation to participate, and suddenly everyone is defending a dissertation. The women were largely doing what women tend to do in moments like these: empathizing, sharing their own experiences, reminding each other not to ignore patterns. One comment in particular read, “You let a man slide once and suddenly he starts ice skating.” Thousands of likes. Because periodt. And then I got to the men… What fascinated me wasn’t simply that some defended Joey. That was honestly to be expected. What interested me most was what they chose to scrutinize: her reaction. Hundreds of comments from men saying essentially the same thing: Why did she make it public? Why embarrass the father of her child? Why put their business online? Why couldn’t she handle this privately? Why did she have to say all of that? Mind you, this is an incredible amount of scrutiny for someone they would readily describe as a “good woman.” Successful, beautiful, classy, lowkey. She checked every box… until now. And somewhere between my rising blood pressure and their increasingly revealing projections, a question dawned on me: How much further along would men be as a collective if they policed one another’s character as enthusiastically as they police women’s reactions to being mistreated?