Who says Catfish Tomboy isn't a catch?

If you’ve spent any time on X-that-used-to-be-Twitter, you know how it goes. Every couple of weeks, a spark becomes a blaze, and soon what started as the topic of a single post is trending.

Recently, the topic was Catfish Tomboy. Catfish Tomboy has a real name, and it’s Hannah Barron, but I like Catfish Tomboy better. Catfish Tomboy is a 27-year-old woman who lives in Alabama. She has cute drawl and a TikTok account that she uses to document her life in the country and all the country things she does, including wrestling catfish out of the river with her bare hands.

Humility is how we can forestall a future of crippling loneliness.

A video of Catfish Tomboy helping her dad with a construction project raised the ire of X power-user Sameera Khan. To the stomach-turning sight of a healthy young woman talking about the house she's helping build, Khan had this response, which she shared with nearly quarter of a million followers: “American women are literally men.”

That opinion was polarizing, as was doubtless Khan's intent, and it kept her in the spotlight by launching a "debate" on Catfish Tomboy"s virtues and vices as well as the virtues and vices of the rural Southern people she represents.

Khan may have questioned Catfish Tomboy's femininity for clout, but plenty of her followers were more than willing to join in for no apparent gain. Any man attracted to her, one poster claimed, must be gay.

Who is this monstrous creature they find so offputting? Their reaction tells us little about Catfish Tomboy — who is fresh-faced, adorable, family-oriented, and exuding a wholesome, All-American appeal — and much about the landscape in which we are living and in which we seek love.

Courtship in 2024 is broken. Dating apps and social media have only served to exacerbate the chaos left in the wake of the Sexual Revolution. With nothing to guide them but "consent" and "fulfillment," both men and women wreak havoc on each other. Frustration leads to lashing out, usually in ways that only add to the confusion.

We crave traditional sex roles without fully understanding them. For many young men, this results in a narrow focus on the superficial trappings of femininity, as especially as defined in the more brain-broken backwaters of the internet. So it is that they can miss all of Catfish Tomboy's considerable charms.

What's missing here, as in much of online discourse, is humility. Those judging Catfish Tomboy can feel secure that they will not be judged in return. So they are free to hold her and others to whatever arbitrary and exacting standards are currently making the rounds.

Maybe it's just trolling. But how we are online has a way of seeping into our real lives. "High standards" can easily become an excuse to avoid meeting women altogether. How many of these commenters are rejecting something — the love of a pretty tomboy who likes fishing with her dad — they've never had the courage to imagine, let alone pursue?

Humility is how we can forestall a future of crippling loneliness. If humility means anything, it means a willingness to feel that we are not too good to take the love offered to us by decent, if imperfect, others.

This is not to say we ought not to have standards; it is to say that those standards should be connected more to the real world than to the ephemeral opinions of online tastemakers. It is to say too that our standards should be tempered by the knowledge of our own shortcomings and deeply felt gratitude that some decent person would offer their love to us in the first place.

In short, our ideals concerning femininity — and masculinity, for that matter — cannot be reduced to weapons wielded by fragile egos bent on winning the online shame wars. Instead they should guide us in finding good mates and building healthy families. Only when we can come together in this most "trad" of all pursuits will the endless sex wars end.